News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
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I'm sorry if I come across as preachy in the below post, but I wanted to try and explain to you where the critique is coming from. And also that it's not personal or any widespread resentment.
I (and many others) get what a thankless and also necessary job moderating is. It's not easy to do it well, it's frustrating, it's thankless and without it the community would be dead. But being a moderator and sticking out your neck brings you exposure and you are guaranteed to meet more asshats than you ever thought existed. But the users are not one homogenous group, it's not because one user has flung abuse at moderators, that all users are now suddenly resentful of moderators.
The person you are replying to, put a good bit of time in listing what comments were most up voted, which are probably the comments that found most support amongst the users in that thread. In the same way that we should not be dismissive of what you do or say, you shouldn't be dismissive of what others do or say (or up vote). Mutual respect and all that.
Self reflection is also important, it's important to realize and accept that it is possible to be wrong about something. Doing a mea culpa and moving on is far easier in the long term than doubling down and digging a deeper hole, yet it's a lot rarer because it hurts our ego in the short term.
Their final point about a problem with handling feedback rings true to me:
You (not you personally, but the team that did that feedback thread) have apparently treated up- and down votes on a thread as a poll and a popular mandate for action, but up- and down votes are not a poll and most (probably most) people don't use them as such.
Up- and down votes on comments are useful for finding which remarks resonated with or turned away other users. They are not a poll either, and most upvoted are not automatically most correct at all, but they give you a chance to read the room.
You (now you personally) have thrown shade on the people that up voted comments against the bot, by insinuating that those people might have been bots themselves and that therefore their opinions are irrelevant. Yes it's possible that there are some users using alts, but all those users? Not very likely.
The best feedback I saw in that thread was not in the up or down votes, it was in the comments themselves. There were some very compelling arguments as to why using a biased site to display bias, was a bad idea. Those comments also had quite a bit of upvotes, so the way I read the room, that was a popular sentiment.
The person you are replying to made a few arguments and one scathing critique which they probably hoped that you would improve on in the future. Imo a polite disagreement with your previous statements. You respond by being dismissive of his arguments and acting like it's a personal attack. They were sticking to facts, you're making it about you as a person. I really don't think that was their intent.
Yes, it is personal. The fact that one mod almost resigned over this means that whether or not people intended for it to be, the criticism was in some cases very personal. And we have evidence that some (never said "all") voting was manipulated, which makes our job more difficult because there's no way to tell how many of those comments were upvoted because many people agreed with them, versus a few people agreeing with them so intensely that they were willing to break the rules to prove their point. At the end of the day, people gave feedback, we reviewed it, and the bot is gone. We didn't ask for it to be created, had no role in coding it, didn't ask for it to be rolled out, didn't turn it on, couldn't change it, couldn't turn it off, and gave the admins time to try their experiment while we determined whether or not it made sense for the community. It wasn't our bot.
We're here in a thread discussing the next incarnation of the bot which presumably will be coded by a mod and under your control?
That's not what open source means (by the way, that was yet another user feedback suggestion that we are working to implement).
A bot may be coded by a mod, under your control, and open source. They are not mutually exclusive characteristics.
Maybe. Nothing has been developed yet, so everything is very much up in the air.