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:
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- 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.
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- Sources should be as unbiased and reliable as possible Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion.
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- No bots, spam or self-promotion Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
I will indeed rephrase the first rule, good suggestion!
If you have a whitelist, you don’t need a blacklist, so I don’t fully understand what you mean with that. The problem with having a whitelist is that I think it’s to much work to curate each news source, and could be seen as restricting if not enough are whitelisted. That’s why we’ll probably go for a blacklist.
Yea, the bot already has some problems with that. But we’ll first ask questions, then delete, so no worries there.
Good suggestion, I’ll discuss it with the other moderators.
That catch all rule is already included in the instance rules, so that’s not really needed.
Thank you for the suggestions (:
I think a blocklist of common sources of biased and sensationalized / misinformation sources would be the best option. It would definitely be a ton of work to whitelist every good source, and you especially want to encourage smaller trusted industry-specific sources (think like pv magazine), there are a lot of those small high quality sources that are geared towards industry professionals. With a short blocklist you could probably cover a significant portion of the loudest biased sources of misinformation.
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I think regardless of whether we have a white list, black-list or both there will be sources that fall in the grey. Here’s an example. Imagine a school shooting in XYZ Community. Perhaps the local community newspaper provides a very detailed and credible article - the site is small enough it is unlikely to be on either a white list or a black list but it could still be a good contribution to the site. I providing examples of sources that are broadly accepted or not accepted is useful, but at the end of the day I think much of it falls to moderator discretion.
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