Greetings World News! A couple of us mods from /c/politics have volunteered for tribute and will be helping out on mod duties from here on out! Nice to meet you!
I’ll keep this short because you didn’t come here to hear me talk (“You’re right!”)
Job 1 is making the sidebar a little cleaner and easier to follow. I don’t want anyone to have any illusion as to why content got removed. It should always be clear and concise and not up for debate.
When it comes to copyrighted material, my opinion is super simple:
- Don’t repost the whole article. Boil it down to the 1 or 2 paragraphs that make the point. That falls under fair use.
https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/
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If you can’t find the 1 or 2 paragraphs that makes the point, MAYBE that’s not the best article to use. 😉 “Brevity is the soul of wit” and all that.
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None of which matters if you use articles that aren’t paygated. If the whole thing is readily available, there’s no reason to copy/paste anything. See if you can find an alternate source.
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If you aren’t sure if something falls under fair use or not, assume it doesn’t. Err on the side of personal liability. “Could someone catch grief over this?” If yes, don’t paste it.
That’s it! Happy World Newsing! Verbing weirds language!
Edit OK, I lied. When posting from the web UI, it will helpfully offer to create an archive link of your choice. Archive links ARE allowed. I have cleared this personally with multiple admins now. If it proves to be a copyright issue, we can simply remove the link.
For some reason, my preferred apps, Boost and Voyager, don’t have that option. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Really quite sad that I was removed without any sort of communication or a chance to respond, I have spent months removing posts and comments that were against the code of conduct. I have responded to criticism regarding the moderation of the community in the past and the way this has occurred has broken my heart about a community i cared about.
I’ll share some recent quotes from messages I’ve sent to other mods and admins:
“Hello I wanted to send a message to say that I am interested in helping more. I really like lemmy.world and want the platform to succeed and want to help.”
“Even if another is chosen for these roles I would be happy to help as a community moderator to help lemmy.world grow and continue to be the best lemmy instance! Thanks for everything you and the admin team do 🙂”
I tend to lean towards transparency in all things, so I’ll just say I have no direct knowledge of what drama may have led to the mod turnover. I just raised my hand when someone asked for volunteers. :)
So I’m here now and I bear no one ill will. Consider this a blank slate from here forward.
I’m a native Oregonian and one of my heroes was Tom McCall who was our governor from 1967 to 1974. While he’s best known for saying “We want you to visit our State of Excitement often. Come again and again. But for heaven’s sake, don’t move here to live. Or if you do have to move in to live, don’t tell any of your neighbors where you are going.”
But he ALSO said "Heroes are not giant statues framed against a red sky, they are people who say “This is my community and it’s my responsibility to make it better.'”
would you be willing to add me back to the team? I did nothing wrong and care about the world news community?
I can’t UNILATERALLY make that decision. Well, I mean, technically I COULD, but it wouldn’t be RESPONSIBLE moderation to do that on my own. Let me just say that I’ll raise the issue and see what turns up. Fair?
I don’t really have much choice but thank you
I spoke with admin and they cleared you for modding duty. Look for my PM. :)
We were not informed the other mods were removed, we were asked to assist. We will be in contact with you on that.
thank you, I don’t really care about top mod and if i made some big mistake to be demoted from that i only wish to know so i can do better. If the admins don’t want me to be a moderator any more i would appreciate knowing what I did wrong for closure. I have been removed from the discord when removed from being a moderator so can only communicate here.
I have little idea what occurred. We are going to square things away, fix the copyright issues and sync things to align with c/news and c/politics so the three communities work in conjunction with similar rules and style.
The admins said their concern was with copyright and timely responses to reports.
I have constantly had timely response to reports they can look at my mod actions or actions on reports for that. The sidebar is currently as I had last changed it, so you can see that posting full articles or using a means to by-pass paywalls are forbidden. I personally have removed posts that violated that rule. As far as I knew the /c/world community was in sync with the us focused c/news and c/politics communities and was never told of anything that was wrong. A large part of why this was so upsetting to me as I had no communication or warning, just I wake up to be removed from moderation and removed from the discord. Thank you for acting as an intermediary.
I agree, it feels like there may have been some personality conflicts here.
If the whole thing is readily available, there’s no reason to copy/paste anything
Just a bit of a tangent: readily available unpaywalled content is not the same thing as accessible content. For people with disabilities, the archive links had the helpful side effect of stripping a lot of things that made the content inaccessible to them.
I understand the position you’re taking regarding copyright issues, and the choice of implementation, and I will be following the rules around it. I just didn’t watch people to think it was as simple as “no other reason”.
Good luck generally with moderation efforts though, I appreciate the effort you’re all making.
I wonder too if maybe that’s one of the reasons it offers to generate an Archive link when you submit through the web interface. ADA access is definitely a thing. Regardless, as noted in the addendum, archive links ARE allowed, just don’t copy/paste the whole shootin’ match.
Hmm. Pasting the text content is also good for usability and to hinder site tracking. Users can refer to the subject matter on the app they’re already on instead of jumping to a web view or a browser
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I’ve seen enough bad moderation, I hope I can do better!
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Please explain like I’m living under a rock. I would have to guess what each sentence might mean. What makes you concerned?
Aww… I miss Century Club, although Centennial Club was where it was at. People were just nicer there for some reason. But I didn’t get to either by being a mod, I was never a reddit mod.
I did LEARN from watching bad moderation there, specifically in /r/politics and /r/portland and I’m trying to do things better.
there’s no reason to copy/paste anything
I find it very convenient to read articles without having to leave Lemmy. The reasons for this:
- Here, I’m used to the page layout, fonts and colors. I’m accustomed to it and can instantly tell what the content is and where it is on the page. When visiting a new website, these are uncertainties. Sadly, many websites employ dark design schemes which make it a pain.
- I don’t have to deal with ads, adblock disable requests, cookies, and so on when I don’t visit another website
- It’s easier and faster to stay on Lemmy than to right-click, select to open in new tab, switch to that tab.
For these reasons, I always appreciate when someone pulls the whole article, or even parts of it, into Lemmy. I also believe these reasons are shared by many others, which means it makes a more informed comment section when more of the article is readily available.
From the sound of it, I guess you’re declaring these rules for legal reasons. I can’t change anything about that.
I just wanted to clarify that there are good reasons why many people are happy to avoid opening external sites if possible.
Not necessarily LEGAL reasons, but rather LIABILITY reasons.
“Some people” are getting increasingly bitchy about where and when their content is being used:
https://theintercept.com/2023/09/17/new-york-times-website-internet-archive/
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166101459/internet-archive-lawsuit-books-library-publishers
We’re volunteers and as such just don’t have the time, energy, or money to fight it. So the best we can do is point to policy and moderation.
A perfectly fine reason. Respecting and protecting your limits is an important part of volunteering. Thanks for your service!
A moderating news in these trying times is a tough job. Thank you guys.
Hi, I’m a general rapscallion and trouble maker. It’s good to meet you!
Good trouble I hope! ;)
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2020/07/remembering-john-lewis-the-power-of-good-trouble/
Always! Trouble for a better tomorrow!
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We wouldn’t accept that. If there is a block of text the odds are strong the post will be removed and the op asked to edit it out.
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This looks a bit like https://boringnews.co/newsletters/index.html
At the very least make it clear that archive links should be in the comment type the post, it the link itself so we have a clear reference to the source.
Why does the new icon look like mickey mouse ate a rainbow?
Part of it is riffing on the lemmy.world logo with a globe head because “world”.
First version I saw was all red, which was fine, but the rainbow is a little more inclusive.
As for the mouse-ish look, it’s because of Lemmings. :)
Makes sense. <3
- Banned in Florida
(Huh, so asterisk like for a footnote turns into a bullet point - anyone know how to do a footnote)
* Use the escape character: \
Thanks.
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Why the fuck are you “respecting” something as reprehensible as copyright?
Sounds like this place is well on its way to be another reddit.
Super simple… the people running lemmy.world are volunteers and don’t have the money to withstand a copyright action should one arise. That’s really it. Nobody wants the liability.
Ever had to randomly spend your ‘free’ time on a legal issue about bullshit that you don’t want to spend your time and energy on and have to go up against people who do that bullshit for a living? I have, it blows. This is a risk mitigation measure nobody really enjoys, except the people who pay lawyers to enforce copyright laws.
It’s also a large vulnerability in volunteer-run systems operating in public spaces, unfortunately. I wish I knew of a fix for that.
