I can’t seem to find anything in a sidebar or sticky thread that talks about the moderation / rules of the news community. I’m very interested in coming to this community to learn about news, but right now it seems whats being posted tends to be relatively low (lower?) quality.
Examples of common rules
- Use the same titles as the article itself
- No blog spam, link to the source
- Political news, should go to the political community
- No dupes of same topic
As an example, take a look at other news aggregators that focus on news.
My goal here isn’t tell people what to do but its start a conversation on the topic.
we’ll sticky this for a bit and sort of gauge where people are at, then go from there
I don’t know but, Remember to… beehave … you know is like a bee but that does things like the queen orders …
See the philosophy posts that are in the sidebar of the main feed. More specifically, The spirit of the rules.
I don’t disagree with this philosophy. Its more that I believe a few simple rules could go a long way to raising the quality of this community. For example if I walk into a library there is the notion of being nice (quiet, polite, respectful of others) - but I still assume the shelves are well organized.
I have no issue if people disagree, but maybe consider at least a note in the sidebar talking a little about what this community is about?
What about light weight rules like ‘no politics’. Ie, a post like this (https://beehaw.org/post/792997) should go to politics?
Agreed. Also to be clear, my goal isn’t to suppress this information. My goal is just to make sure the article ends up in the right spot so that the audience that is interested can find it. Example, https://beehaw.org/c/politics
In the United States (at least) the whole point of a free press is to keep politicians in check. You can’t separate the news from politics.
I disagree with that definition of news. Keeping politicians accountable is certainly one of the functions of the press, but there are a lot of possible news items that don’t refer to politicians. “Winter storms hit [location]” is news, but not related to politicians unless it talks about steps local politicians are taking to prevent storm damage (which is not necessary for a good article). Or “Physicists find [particle they were looking for].” That one could be in Science rather than here, but it is definitely news, and I personally think it’s hard to shoehorn politics into a discussion of particle physics without losing track of what actually happened. Very few politicians involve themselves in that kind of research (though, to be fair, it might be news if they did).
Whether it’s possible to have a purely apolitical news forum is a different question, and I am sure it’s possible to put a political spin on almost anything if you want, but I just don’t think it’s true that news must be political to be news.
“Politics” as a categorization is - like art - subjective and open to interpretation. It’s a rule that can result only in abuse.
Avoiding dupes is, I think, an important one. We’ve had multiple instances on Beehaw of the same story showing up more than once. If you try to post a duplicate link, Lemmy will let you know (by showing the previous copies to you as crossposts). It’s harder to make sure you’re not posting the second or third story from a different source on the same topic. Perhaps we can just encourage people to search before posting.
I’d like the rules to at least ask people to add an image description in their original post. https://beehaw.org/post/686974 would be good to link to here.
And given the nature of many posts in the news, I think it would be good for this community to remind people to be(e) nice in their discussions.
I would say that if it’s the same exact copy/link it’s one thing. Or doing something like HackerNews where you remove a post but put a pinned/top level comment explaining its a dupe, locking the post and here’s the source/original post and comments to keep discussion from being fragmented.
But there are times that different coverage of the same story can carry different insights and details. Which can be useful to gain a more complete picture.
But there are times that different coverage of the same story can carry different insights and details. Which can be useful to gain a more complete picture.
we try to strike a balance but i will note that so far this has mostly gone the way of “flooding the front page with several minimally distinct copies of the same story”
Of course. And I think it’s worth stating you all do a good job there. Just wanted to point out there are times where the initial reports are lacking in detail or outright incorrect in the rush to be first to press. So some way of linking later threads/posts that aren’t minimally distinct, can really bring the quality up.
I know the mod tools are lacking so there’s also the “you gotta work with what you can” too
Sure, no argument there. There’s a choice to be made between “post the second story as a comment to the first one” and “post the second story a a separate topic”. I’m in favor of the first approach to keep discussion in one spot, but it’s not something I feel super-strongly about.
