How far into c/pol will I have to dig to find an article where it’s actually just an embedded video in an “article”, where the entirety of the article is the headline and the embedded video, which is actually a YouTube link?
I appreciate the points about the balance of effort regarding moderation but the point which you aren’t engaging with is that media and communication have adapted but the moderation approaches haven’t. And that creates a kind of implicit bias which can and does allow for a form of editorial manipulation of content. It bakes it into the structure of the community.
This is why communities like World and Politics require links to news articles that have some form of editorial oversight.
I completely support this and always have, but we exist in a landscape of completely changing conditions. Dropsite news now has a far stronger and more reliable commitment to the truth and to their own editorial policies than CNN. And I think they (dropsite) use a software for publication which you’ve decided makes them a blog, they get put on the naughty list, whereas several legacy media companies have become outright state propaganda outlets (CNN, fox, anything the Ellisons get their fingers on…). The result of the moderation policy which is effectively that anything built in new media isn’t allowed, is that only legacy sources get regarded as “news” , even if they don’t even follow their own editorial policies or have rewritten them to be appease a figurehead like Trump
The point is that a platform, or a medium, or the presence of an editorial policy isn’t sufficient to decide if something is news or isn’t news. For something to be news it actually has to have an editorial policy and engage with that policy. Being legacy media doesn’t immediately qualify to that standard and but being new media doesn’t preclude it either.
Take the recent hit piece on Platner in the NYT. It would meet the qualifications for c/politics. But it wouldn’t meet NYTs own editorial standards of journalism were they to actually enforce them.
I don’t want to disregard or ignore the labor of moderation and yes rules need to be sweeping and evenly applied. But it’s also clear that the current policy is anachronistic at best. Probably, as a community, message boards like Lemmy need to be thinking more broadly about how community rules are implemented and applied. Something like a red-yellow-green list for disapproved, pending, and ‘approved’ sources. And we’ve had that conversation before, about not wanting to maintain an approved list. But it’s 2026. It’s not out of reach where something could be built into a community where the community it’s self could maintain the list via voting.
I’m not bringing this up to badger, but I want to engage the point that the current moderation policies don’t effectively select for news content which is factual and consistent without the an editorial standard, but rather for what has traditionally been identified as legacy media based on format, and that more broadly, a format based approach will always suffer this kind of failing.
Probably not far, we’re volunteers and don’t have time to read EVERY link posted. We respond to reports and, if we happen to catch something obviously infringing in our browsing we remove that too.
If you see a link in the feed that breaks the rules, report it and we’ll resolve it. I remove “stub” articles all the time that only exist to point to a video.
But if I’m looking at the feed and the source is “Youtube.com” or some other video site, that gets yanked with a quickness.
For the Dropsite news thing, that has come up before, and yes, we block substack for the same reasons above.
But like Twitter and Facebook, yes, there are legitimate news agencies that use those platforms, as there are on Substack. But opening the door to those platforms again introduces bias in moderation.
“You removed my shitty Twitter link but allowed this other one!!! WHYYYYYYY!!!”
We aren’t engaging in that. So no, no social media, no blogs, no videos.
For me, it’s all manual, I don’t have the ability to apply bots to the feed, you’d have to talk to the Admins about that, above my paygrade, which is “$0.00”. LOL.
How far into c/pol will I have to dig to find an article where it’s actually just an embedded video in an “article”, where the entirety of the article is the headline and the embedded video, which is actually a YouTube link?
I appreciate the points about the balance of effort regarding moderation but the point which you aren’t engaging with is that media and communication have adapted but the moderation approaches haven’t. And that creates a kind of implicit bias which can and does allow for a form of editorial manipulation of content. It bakes it into the structure of the community.
I completely support this and always have, but we exist in a landscape of completely changing conditions. Dropsite news now has a far stronger and more reliable commitment to the truth and to their own editorial policies than CNN. And I think they (dropsite) use a software for publication which you’ve decided makes them a blog, they get put on the naughty list, whereas several legacy media companies have become outright state propaganda outlets (CNN, fox, anything the Ellisons get their fingers on…). The result of the moderation policy which is effectively that anything built in new media isn’t allowed, is that only legacy sources get regarded as “news” , even if they don’t even follow their own editorial policies or have rewritten them to be appease a figurehead like Trump
The point is that a platform, or a medium, or the presence of an editorial policy isn’t sufficient to decide if something is news or isn’t news. For something to be news it actually has to have an editorial policy and engage with that policy. Being legacy media doesn’t immediately qualify to that standard and but being new media doesn’t preclude it either.
Take the recent hit piece on Platner in the NYT. It would meet the qualifications for c/politics. But it wouldn’t meet NYTs own editorial standards of journalism were they to actually enforce them.
I don’t want to disregard or ignore the labor of moderation and yes rules need to be sweeping and evenly applied. But it’s also clear that the current policy is anachronistic at best. Probably, as a community, message boards like Lemmy need to be thinking more broadly about how community rules are implemented and applied. Something like a red-yellow-green list for disapproved, pending, and ‘approved’ sources. And we’ve had that conversation before, about not wanting to maintain an approved list. But it’s 2026. It’s not out of reach where something could be built into a community where the community it’s self could maintain the list via voting.
I’m not bringing this up to badger, but I want to engage the point that the current moderation policies don’t effectively select for news content which is factual and consistent without the an editorial standard, but rather for what has traditionally been identified as legacy media based on format, and that more broadly, a format based approach will always suffer this kind of failing.
Probably not far, we’re volunteers and don’t have time to read EVERY link posted. We respond to reports and, if we happen to catch something obviously infringing in our browsing we remove that too.
If you see a link in the feed that breaks the rules, report it and we’ll resolve it. I remove “stub” articles all the time that only exist to point to a video.
But if I’m looking at the feed and the source is “Youtube.com” or some other video site, that gets yanked with a quickness.
For the Dropsite news thing, that has come up before, and yes, we block substack for the same reasons above.
But like Twitter and Facebook, yes, there are legitimate news agencies that use those platforms, as there are on Substack. But opening the door to those platforms again introduces bias in moderation.
“You removed my shitty Twitter link but allowed this other one!!! WHYYYYYYY!!!”
We aren’t engaging in that. So no, no social media, no blogs, no videos.
So right now you manually scrub to enforce the policies? Oof. Brother, we can definitely build some basic moderation bots which could help with that.
For me, it’s all manual, I don’t have the ability to apply bots to the feed, you’d have to talk to the Admins about that, above my paygrade, which is “$0.00”. LOL.