this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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World News

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New Year, New Mod Drama (self.world)
submitted 10 months ago by jordanlund to c/world
36 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Sorry to throw this on everyone in the group, but there has been another mod shakeup and it feels fair to address it publicly.

MightBe has been removed as mod from both World News and Politics.

I also unpinned and removed their rule change posts.

The too long; didn't read is they were pretty hostile in messages to both myself and little cow, and when asked to join back channel discussions in chat, refused, and instead made unilateral decisions without group discussion.

Moderating a group like this needs to be a collaborative experience, no single voice should be establishing rules without some form of common agreement.

They not only refused to engage in that collaboration, but did so in a manner not fitting for being the new person on the team.

And it is a team. I tend to make more public posts than others, because I value the transparency over privacy, but when I do so, it's a result of a nice private chat among the group.

For now, their rule changes have been removed from both Politics and World News. Back to the stated way of doing business:

World News is for all News OUTSIDE the United States, that's what the normal "News" is for.

Politics is for US Politics - Somehow I doubt that's going to be an issue in 2024.

There ARE things the mod team is discussing, and any rule changes will be made as a group effort, and (hopefully!) for the better health of the group and ALL of our participants!

Happy New Year!

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[–] HowRu68 43 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

All the best sorting the mods out!

World News is for all News OUTSIDE the United States, that's what the normal "News" is for

The division you make between domestic and worldnews is US centric. US newssites and journals follow this same logic. So, US citizens read their domestic news and everything that is not US, is considered worldnews . I get that.

The problem is that what sometimes is domestic to US, is sometimes worldnews for the rest of the world. This means some domestic US news is considered worldnews in other non US newspapers.

I don't care especially about domestic US News, but when it's considered major news by Non Us newsagents, it's usually important for the world as a whole.

Please, consider this element as well.

[–] jordanlund 29 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Oh, absolutely, but at the same time we don't want World News flooded with internal US news about Biden being attacked for supporting Israel, that kind of thing.

Something like the US attacking Yemen? That seems fitting for World News, News, AND Politics.

Biden getting yelled at on a campaign stop because of Israel? Sorry, not World News, keep it in Politics.

One post I removed from World News HURT because it was a good story, an important story, and it hurt my heart to remove it. The impact climate change had on the spread of disease and how a warmer climate makes the wee beasties spread easier.

Problem was, the entire article was focused on the spread of disease on the US East coast. No international angle AT ALL. And I LOOKED... "Come on! Give me a reason to keep it! Talk about Nova Scotia, SOMETHING!"

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

One post I removed from World News HURT because it was a good story, an important story, and it hurt my heart to remove it. The impact climate change had on the spread of disease and how a warmer climate makes the wee beasties spread easier.

Just because the article doesn't explicitly talk about the international angle doesn't mean there isn't one that can be implicitly understood by the majority of readers.

[–] jordanlund 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Reverse the logic though... if it were an article talking about climate change spreading disease in South America, that would be removed from the US Centric sites as well.

The idea is to give global stories room to breathe without the "Um, actually, in the United States see..."

We also don't want to blur the lines between News/World News/Politics - otherwise why even have separate groups?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Reverse the logic though... if it were an article talking about climate change spreading disease in South America, that would be removed from the US Centric sites as well.

I would agree with that? IMO, any article talking about climate change anywhere would fall under world news due to the implications.

Regardless, I accept this is just one of those gray areas that somebody has to ultimately make a judgement call about

[–] HowRu68 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Tnx, good enough for me!

I get that you need a clearcut line, on the other hand you are the MODS, so you could use your discretion wisely and sparingly, when you feel the need.

When it hurts to remove a post, becasue of the rules, that should ring a bell, and imo you should follow your "nose" instead of the rules. Rules are only "guidelines" after all.

[–] jordanlund 5 points 10 months ago

When it doesn't hurt, that's easy. Anyone can do that! :) It's when there's friction between your personal interests and the best interests of the site, and you have to set aside your personal interests... yeah. If it didn't hurt sometimes, you wouldn't be human. :)

[–] eating3645 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Maybe they could allow links to stories about the US which are from foreign news outlets. E.g. US bombing in yemen:

BBC

Al Jazeera

DW

[–] jordanlund 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh, like I say, the US intervening in a foreign country DEFINITELY rises to the level of World News, but just because it's on a non-US site doesn't make it "World".

For example:

https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/biden-defends-inflation-reduction-act-dares-critics-to-name-a-failure-in-anniversary-speech-101692280260327.html

"Biden defends Inflation Reduction Act, dares critics to name a failure in anniversary speech"

Yeah, I don't care which news agency reports that, not World News, and World News doesn't need to be cluttered up with stories like this.

On top of that, Hindustan Times is a known problematic site as well. Questionable source, low credibility.

[–] eating3645 8 points 10 months ago

Huh, turns out this stuff is pretty complicated. Should have known 😛

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I was told to add my voice here, so here's my take on Rule 3:

Please keep the MFBC rule. Without that, this sub would be just a repackaged WorldNews@lemmy[dot]ml which is a cesspool where terrible sources and propaganda run crazy. I've admin-blocked that community on my instance months ago because of the poor sourcing.

You can't "both sides" the truth, and sources that habitually lie, distort the truth, or inject heavy bias should not be given a platform. There are plenty of left-, center, and right-biased sources that are credible, so all angles are possible while maintaining standards for the credibility of submissions. If a particular story is only covered by news outlets that are deemed non credible, there's probably a reason for that.

Even allowing case-by-case submissions from non-credible sources (e.g. they just repackage an AP article) is dangerous as it gives the otherwise non-credible source undeserved legitimacy and only serves to muddy the waters for the other stuff they put out. It also sets a precedent: "Well, you allowed this story from Jim Bob's Reel Truth News so why not this one?"

Edit: This may be the wrong post? I can't find the post Little Cow linked to me, but they said it was pinned (lemmy.world/post/10102462).

[–] jordanlund 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

We're working with the admins to come up with a bot to automate it.

Agreed, garbage sources are garbage sources.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

We're working with the admins to come up with a bot to automate it.

When I was still developing Tesseract UI (RIP), I incorporated MBFC lookups directly in the client and put credibility badges on posts. I didn't see that MFBC had a public or private API, but they do export a MIT licensed subset of their data in JSON format in their official browser extension. I was able to bundle that dataset into Tesseract to perform lookups locally.

If the admins want any help with the bot tool and working with the MBFC data, I'm happy to assist.

[–] HowRu68 -3 points 10 months ago

Agreed, garbage sources are garbage sources.

This.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Politics is for US Politics

So we use USPolitics for the world politics, then? Is that how it works?

[–] jordanlund -2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

World News works for news and politics. I just posted up the story on the election in Taiwan.

TBH, I haven't looked for a World Politics. We might have to create one if politics starts dominating World News.

[–] little_cow 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I actually made one a few months ago it is linked in the https://lemmy.world/c/politics and https://lemmy.world/c/world sidebar: https://lemmy.world/c/globalpolitics

[–] PrettyLights 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

No more anonymous alt mod accounts please.

I still don't understand why there wasn't a single other user on this instance that could have been modded without legal worries. Really felt like a copout to go anonymous and slowly transition the rest of the team to alt accounts as well.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I just added “mod” to the end of my username for my alt account. Obviously that wouldn’t work if my username had a slur in it or something, but it’s a pretty straight forward fix. It allows me to block idiots on my browsing account, offers a helpful separation between things I say as a user vs things I say as a mod, but subscribers to my communities still know who I am so there’s some accountability.

[–] PrettyLights 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not a bad compromise. I hadn't thought about the use case of wanting to block people personally without affecting the community.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah, if you block someone (not ban them) they can still go to a community you moderate and post there - but you won’t see it. Obviously that’s not ideal from a moderator perspective. I tried just using one account and not blocking people, but there are a lot of trolls/arseholes/bots out there and I just don’t want to see their drivel on my feed - even if what they say isn’t technically against the rules, or doesn’t met the criteria to earn them a ban. And you can’t ban accounts just because you don’t like them (or you can, but that’s not good moderating).

Also moderator decisions are meant to be made objectively and I find having two accounts helpful to maintain that objectivity. A comment from my mod account is official but a comment from my browsing account only carries the same weight as a comment from any other user. Some iOS apps allow you to distinguish moderator comments from your standard comments. That works great but it doesn’t seem to be the standard across all platforms/apps.

[–] jordanlund 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well, I'm not going to out their "real" account, but lets just say if I told you who it was you'd go "Oooooh, yeah, that makes sense." Having a moderator taking actions under another well known brand a) wouldn't have been a good look and b) would have likely drawn legal attention that no volunteer needs.

[–] PrettyLights 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Totally agree and I have a hunch on who the mod was but that doesn't really matter to me much. I'm not asking anyone to unmask them.

That said, was there really not a single other candidate available that didn't "need" to become anonymous?

[–] jordanlund 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Well that was the thing, they volunteered and everyone involved, Admins and Mods alike, were like "Wow, yeah, welcome aboard, but about that username..."

Maybe that's the secret... bring people on who don't WANT to be mods. :)

I was perfectly happy posting the "You are here" Trump trial updates and got the PM that "Hey, we think you'd be a good mod!" and here I am!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

You guys literally couldn't catch a rest, but that's the risk to have randos that couldn't take disagreement AND aren't a team player to join a team. Forming a team is hard.

[–] jordanlund 15 points 10 months ago

That's the weird part, they weren't a rando. I recognize it LOOKED like that because of the alt account, but their main account (despite a username unusable for moderation) was fine. Engaged, reasonable, we all agreed they seemed like a good fit... Then they weren't. (shrug)

[–] Dremor 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Just a question. News has to be international noteworthy, or any non-US local news are post worthy?

By that I mean that a lot of very region specific news has been posted by what seem to be bots (5-6 news articles posted in less than 1-2 minutes), most of which has no significant impact outside of its very specific area.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

On lemmy.ml we try to make sure that we support news from around the world as a matter of principle. News does not have to be internationally noteworthy to be interesting: for example, Norway's recent decision to dump waste into fjords is not an international incident, but I still think it's deserving of being shared.

[–] Dremor 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

In a way, it affects the environment, which is our shared common heritage. It may not affect the World right now, but may affect it in the future.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

All human activity affects the world, and it's difficult to know what will have long-term impact in the future.

Edit: I, for one, am always excited to see news from other countries. The overreporting on the Anglosphere makes it seem like the Anglosphere is the only part of the world that matters.

[–] jordanlund 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well, I'm not a mod on News, so I can't speak to that specifically. IN GENERAL, though...

Stuff that's PURELY regional? Probably not.

Here are two examples local to me:

Portland has a snow storm, 100,000 people without power.

https://www.kgw.com/article/weather/severe-weather/portland-winter-storm-power-outages/283-0537537d-e61c-4213-a96e-2b71f95f5cad

Great story for the Portland community, I wouldn't post it to News.

Oregon chooses not to remove Trump from the ballots, waiting on the Supreme Court? Yeah, that's a bigger story:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-oregon-supreme-court-ballot-eligibility/

[–] i_have_no_enemies 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

can you please bring back the old background color?

[–] jordanlund 1 points 10 months ago

Sadly, as an app user, I have no idea what the original background color was. I can ask around though!

[–] JustZ 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah that was weird.

[–] rei 2 points 10 months ago

Gif

[–] Linkerbaan -4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

MBFC is bullshit. We have plenty of evidence that most "credible" news papers on there are literally Zionist propaganda outlets. BBC. NYT. WSJ. The list of exposed sites has been insane lately.

If an article clearly shows no journalistic integrity it should be removed. Else the community will filter it by itself.

Also /news posting how Trump is going to "get jailed 100% this time for sure now also he had a new hair transplant" every single day is not news.