We’re currently working on changing the rules of this community, because we feel there are some gaps in the current rules.

This is what we have so far:

    1. Be nice! Don’t personally attack someone else. Racism and bigotry are not tolerated. Don’t use offensive language, swearing is allowed within reason. Trolling is also not allowed, go back to reddit for that.
    1. Sources should be as unbiased and reliable as possible Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion.
    1. No bots, spam or self-promotion Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
    1. 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 is wrong / incorrect, the post will be deleted.
    1. Post should be news Don’t post obvious opinion pieces, very dated news or things that are simply not news. Posts will be removed at the mods discretion.
    1. 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.

We are looking for any feedback you guys might have, including grammer/spell checks (:

If you agree with the rules, they will go in effect in 24 hours.

Thank you!

  • @PriorProject
    10•1 year ago

    Trolling is also not allowed, go back to reddit for that.

    Telling someone to go back to reddit to troll is itself a mild form of trolling and fails to model the behavior the rule calls for. It contributes nothing to the meaning or clarity of the rule and the rule is better without it.

    Sources should be as unbiased and reliable as possible Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion.

    This rule would be improved by listing media source bias/fact-checkers that the mods largely trust, even if they reserve the right to occasionally override public checkers. The ability to pre-screen a source with fair reliability is valuable to posters.

    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 is wrong / incorrect, the post will be deleted.

    Even reliable news sources frequently editorialize their titles at this point. I’d appreciate a carve-out to de-editorialize a clickbait title, but I appreciate that title-matching is much easier to understand/enforce and that people are likely to try to abuse a de-clickbaiting clause to re-clickbait and bias their titles. If a culture where people modified titles to improve titles could be fostered, that would be neat.

    • @ThekingoflordaOPMA
      4•1 year ago

      Point 1 was indeed kinda a joke, but if you feel like that hurts the rule, I will remove it.

      I am working on making some kind of place where we show all banned news sources which then integrates with the bot, but this might take some development time.

      As stated in the rule, we will only remove posts if the title is wrong / incorrect, with that we mean that it misrepresents the article. The autobot can’t sense that you editted the post to make it better, so I just wanted to make clear that the autobot will still message you.

      Thank you for the feedback (:

      • @PriorProject
        7•1 year ago

        Point 1 was indeed kinda a joke, but if you feel like that hurts the rule, I will remove it.

        I feel like you wouldn’t and shouldn’t accept the justification from a commenter that their trolling was a joke. You also wouldn’t consider it an improvement to make a racist joke alongside the rule against racism as a tongue in cheek way of illustrating the rule by counter-example. It simply is the thing the rule purports to disallow, which isn’t a great joke and doesn’t help the rule.

        As stated in the rule, we will only remove posts if the title is wrong / incorrect, with that we mean that it misrepresents the article. The autobot can’t sense that you editted the post to make it better, so I just wanted to make clear that the autobot will still message you.

        I might suggest to extend the rule with something like: While de-clickbaiting and de-editorializing poor upstream titles with replacement factual titles is allowed, when in doubt using the upstream title is always sensible. Having the modbot inform people about title deviations by quoting the rule including the bit about de-editorializing seems reasonable.

        • @orclev
          2•1 year ago

          I’d suggest maybe going a little further on the title rule, something like:

          Titles should accurately reflect the content of the article. Avoid sensationalized, misleading, or editorialized titles. If in doubt the articles own title is acceptable but accuracy is always preferred.