Happy Friday :)
I thought I might get a bit of feedback from everyone here on what the guidelines for posting in the news-related subs should be.
So far, all I’ve put in the sidebar is that things should be text post, or a link to a reputable source. Everyone seems happy for now, which is great. But I’m sure eventually this will become a discussion, so good to get things in the ground ahead of time.
Edit: This post was supposed to go on !ukpolitics, but I got the community wrong. There isn’t anything in the sidebar of [email protected] right now 🙃
Sources
As my history teacher would drill into me, Primary, Secondary, Reliability, Bias.
These might be a good way to work out which sources we’d like to see here, and what constitutes “reputable”.
Or possibly a flow of which source to prefer (for example, if it’s only posted on some random site, perhaps see if BBC/Sky/Guardian/Reuters/Independent/FT/Telegraph have a similar article before posting)
We could also do a breakdown of which sources are good/bad for what, and why.
This chart gives a fairly good way to classify sources. Apologies, there are a lot of non-uk sources in there.
Type of content
Links to sensible, sourced news sites, obviously a good thing.
Imho, text post discussions with clear titles to start sensible discussions are a good thing to have. Engagement-bait, not so much.
Editorial content, maybe, so long as it’s clear what it is.
Primary sources, where appropriate seem sensible.
Twitter, Mastodon, et al.
Youtube, I’m less keen on. Though thoughts are appreciated.
Link aggregation sites, no.
Follow the links through to their source if you like, and post that.
Titles
Try not to editorialise. If the original title is a little wordy, try to keep in the spirit of the original when editing.
Multiple posts
When news breaks, it’s exciting, and everyone wants to post.
This can mean discussions getting fragmented.
If possible, have a scan of the community first to make sure it’s not already here, and if it is, try to only post when the additional source adds something new.
Honestly, while we’re this size, I’m happy to let the voting system let things rise and fall. This might have to change down the line. Possibly linked to source preference?
It’s definitely Friday: I meant to post this in !ukpolitics 🤦
Apologies!
Honestly, it doesn’t not make sense here, and it’s community discussion, so I’ll leave it unless people have objections.
Ah ha - I was wondering as there’s nothing in the sidebar. Glad it wasn’t me!
I might as well take the opportunity to discuss what the remit of this community is?
A lot of posts could probably go in UK News, UK Politics and Casual UK and that often leads to people posting something on the same subject here and in one of the news threads.
I think that’s not unreasonable.
Perhaps this could be a page for big things, and a sidebar that directs regular posts to the correct community?
Getting an ethos for all the news-related subs would be nice, I think. (and maybe gives a niche for someone to run a sensationalist news community for the rest!)
Perhaps this could be a page for big things, and a sidebar that directs regular posts to the correct community?
Works for me. It’ll be a bit messy until we get tools to move posts between communities. Then this community will likely need a bit of monitoring. Until then you have to rely on everyone’s best judgement. Uh oh!
(and maybe gives a niche for someone to run a sensationalist news community for the rest!)
For tabloid gossip and the like:
c/muckracking
For funny or odd news stories:
c/andfinally
I am quite tickled by the latter, so will start it later.
Haha, precisely. While we’re a small community, people are pretty sensible, and you can politely nudge people who make mistakes.
When places get bigger, you need clear rules, or arseholes will camp out in the grey area, and throttle you with loopholes.
I kinda like the idea of an area for less serious/crap news. As it doesn’t shut it out entirely, and lets people discuss it. But also means you’re not having “general election in 10 minutes” compete with “no longer prince does something in america”
“Harry’s troubles, part 86” is clearly something people like talking about and that’s fine if it’s elsewhere and I don’t have to read it.
Multiple posts When news breaks, it’s exciting, and everyone wants to post. This can mean discussions getting fragmented.
One of the things on Reddit that was annoying was the lack of moderator intervention to stop this by making one thread the ‘stickie’ early on and stop the flooding (brain has forgotten the term usually used for it).
Another issue would be not to use paywalled sites, or if they are, to post a link in the text field to one of the sites that will scrape the page such as archive.is
I agree with that.
It’s a tricky one potentially, and if we do it, there will need to be clear rules so that people know what is likely to happen.
For example, how do we pick the one to use? First one in? First one with lots of comments? First one from the list of “good” sources?
And after that, the rules need to be clear, otherwise people might not be happy that their post got locked/taken down.
I’m also keen to avoid “delete them all and mod post”, as that feels very unfair to the community.
Though that might be needed in extreme circumstances (like if an ex-prime minister started prowling westminster with an assult rifle), so maybe should be specified.For example, how do we pick the one to use? First one in? First one with lots of comments? First one from the list of “good” sources?
Either of those is reasonable. I dont think tying it down to one specific criteria is productive. One post gets stickied and used with multiple sources added to it and updated.
The main point is that it stops karma farming by posting/cross posting to as many subs as possible. (not that its happening yet here but when theres a few more exodus waves, that behaviour will start occurring)
Possibly something like:
“If we receive an absolute flood of posts with the same story, we may chose one using a good source to sticky, and remove/lock the rest.”
Which has the bonus of encouraging people to post the best source they can find.
The biggest thing for me is setting expectations for people posting, so things don’t just leap out of the blue.
And possibly a bit of collaboration between the communities to agree on a rough flowchart of where things should go. So if someone has clearly scattergunned, it gets removed from all but one.
For example, how do we pick the one to use?
I’m assuming that we’ll get similar moderation tools to forums, so we can move discussions to different communities on this instance and/or merge them together.
So, for example, with the Thames Water collapse, you’ve just rename the first post on it to something generic and then merge others into that.
Until then, we’ll just have to expect for things to be a bit messy.
All sounds pretty reasonable, though a wiki for that source breakdown would probably be needed, otherwise the sidebar would become very long.
Might be able to start a section over here
I think you’re pretty much on the money as far as sources go (and on the matter of letting things grow organically while it’s still a small community) - something specific about multiple posts though:
When news breaks, it’s exciting, and everyone wants to post. This can mean discussions getting fragmented.
I think @[email protected] or @[email protected] has been in touch with you about long-running megathreads already - in the politics sphere, at least, these do tend to absorb a lot of the “oh god what’s Suella done now” and “but why can’t we election now boohoo” chatter. That in turn tends to mean that little things and breaking news naturally gravitate into them, which helps keeps things tidy.
As an added bonus, as a community grows, they also serve a really useful purpose in letting people form a picture of who the people on the other side of the screen are, and keep the pixels humanised, if you see what I mean - which is particularly important when discussing Serious Business like politics, of course.
So in conclusion, I think you should do megathreads in the politics space; thank you for attending my Thread Talk.
Thread Talk, love it.
Yes, they were in touch a little while ago. I can’t remember if we discussed megathreads! Once things have settled in more, it would definitely be good to talk again.
