I can’t seem to find anything in a sidebar or sticky thread that talks about the moderation / rules of the news community. I’m very interested in coming to this community to learn about news, but right now it seems whats being posted tends to be relatively low (lower?) quality.
Examples of common rules
- Use the same titles as the article itself
- No blog spam, link to the source
- Political news, should go to the political community
- No dupes of same topic
As an example, take a look at other news aggregators that focus on news.
My goal here isn’t tell people what to do but its start a conversation on the topic.
Avoiding dupes is, I think, an important one. We’ve had multiple instances on Beehaw of the same story showing up more than once. If you try to post a duplicate link, Lemmy will let you know (by showing the previous copies to you as crossposts). It’s harder to make sure you’re not posting the second or third story from a different source on the same topic. Perhaps we can just encourage people to search before posting.
I’d like the rules to at least ask people to add an image description in their original post. https://beehaw.org/post/686974 would be good to link to here.
And given the nature of many posts in the news, I think it would be good for this community to remind people to be(e) nice in their discussions.
I would say that if it’s the same exact copy/link it’s one thing. Or doing something like HackerNews where you remove a post but put a pinned/top level comment explaining its a dupe, locking the post and here’s the source/original post and comments to keep discussion from being fragmented.
But there are times that different coverage of the same story can carry different insights and details. Which can be useful to gain a more complete picture.
Sure, no argument there. There’s a choice to be made between “post the second story as a comment to the first one” and “post the second story a a separate topic”. I’m in favor of the first approach to keep discussion in one spot, but it’s not something I feel super-strongly about.
Maybe a time lag would be useful? Something along the lines of: “versions of a story appearing within a week of the first post should be attached to the original as replies, versions a week or more afterwards [that present substantial developments] can start a new thread”? It likely wouldn’t be possible to enforce a substantial development rule, but there can be dramatic changes to the story over time. The Titan submersible business was a different story on the Thursday than it was on the Monday of the same week, for example (which breaks my own rule, of course, but I think it’s an easy example) and there will probably be another story once some more analysis has been done. I agree that it would be better to have fewer threads to get a richer conversation, but I think there are limits to what actually fits in a single thread.
we try to strike a balance but i will note that so far this has mostly gone the way of “flooding the front page with several minimally distinct copies of the same story”
Of course. And I think it’s worth stating you all do a good job there. Just wanted to point out there are times where the initial reports are lacking in detail or outright incorrect in the rush to be first to press. So some way of linking later threads/posts that aren’t minimally distinct, can really bring the quality up.
I know the mod tools are lacking so there’s also the “you gotta work with what you can” too