Hi there.
A short introduction: This is an alt account. I’m a moderator here who has been unhappy with the state of news/political discussions here for a long time. The admins have kindly given me the opportunity to see if we can make some improvement the community here.
We will be doing some major revision of the rules left by the previous moderators and will use discussions in this thread as feedback on the direction we should take our community.
This will be an open discussion on the state of our community, the rules and our moderation practices. Feel free to give your inputs.
My goal is to foster thoughtful discussion in our community, and not let this place be a replica of r/politics.
First order of business, immediate rule change.
On [email protected], effectively immediately, we will no longer restrict political discussion to the politics of the United States of America. Discussion regarding of the state of politics from around the world is now welcome.
I will leave this pinned for 1-2 weeks for our team to take feedback and make our proposals then.
I think the challenge is going to be separating World News from Politics. Articles will need to have some kind of political angle to be appropriate here.
So, for example, my submission of Daihatsu getting caught faking safety reports for 30 years, World News, nothing about that is political.
Putin supporter falling out a window? (AGAIN?) I could see that being in one or the other or both.
I also hope this doesn’t turn into “this is about WORLD politics. Why are you talking about America?”
Or vice versa, it will take time for people to get used to seeing non-US politics.
Due to naming ambiguity, we might need to require country tags as well.
News about a Georgia election… well, WHICH GEORGIA? ;)
I agree, but I also think we’re going to have people complaining that there are too many people posting about American politics. We’ll see. Maybe the tag thing would be a good idea. I also don’t think, as a U.S. resident, that a community for U.S. politics would be a bad idea. I don’t know how many people would use it at this point though.
It really depends on the balance of posts. It’s possible I would migrate to something more US focused but I’d have to see whether I’m unhappy with the ratio after the change. I don’t want to keep myself ignorant of the rest of the world, but if I can’t comment on a majority of posts because I know nothing about that country then it’s not really a community I fit into.
But I recognize that’s a me problem and not a y’all problem.
News should be news, I would like this community to focus on political discussions, editorials, and commentaries from a variety of viewpoints, if that makes sense.
And to be frank, I don’t think topics like “Trump smells bad” is good political discussion, which is what I would aim to avoid.
LOL - Brace yourself! 2024 is going to be a RIDE! ;)
I made an alt for this specific reason, among others.
What about discussion of his mental instability as it relates to fitness for office? Because I’ve heard, from people who worked with him, that his smell is caused by stimulant addiction related incontinence. Which would make it an issue of mental instability rather than hygiene.
Sorry, lemm.ee was not federating correct until now.
I think it is OK to discuss in this context, however, given that the evidence is really circumstantial at best, it could be hard to keep it on this track of discussion without muchbsupporting evidence to back it up.
I hear you. I’ve seen a lot of this type of discussion around Trump go more into outright shaming and old man smell territory without addressing the actual causes, which, as you said, is all anecdotal evidence.
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Don’t apologize for the Trump smells posts. And I’m being very serious here, just because WE want the political news to be serious or relevant doesn’t mean that it is. We currently have a lot of very childish and middle school rhetoric happening in today’s political climate and ignoring it is equivalent to sticking our fingers in our ears and screaming “la la la… this isn’t happening…la la la”. We can’t discredit this sort of without harming our overall understanding of what’s happening. Do I wish we weren’t having a discussion about the odor of a major political figure and instead talking about how we’re going fix problems like housing prices, wealth disparity, climate change, etc? Hell yes! Be here we are.
Now about the proposed rule change, I don’t think importing world politics into c/politics is such a great idea, especially right now. c/politics is just implied to be US politics. I would love to hear about other struggles or relevant world oriented political news, just in another Lemmy community. For example what’s going on in Ukraine and Israel are VERY important on the world stage but I’d like to currently keep the impending doom segmented at least for my own mental health. We could rename c/politics to c/us-politics and create c/world-politics (assuming that’s technically possible). I’m not going to leave this community regardless of the decision but it wouldn’t be my favorite decision either.
Just my 2¢
I appreciate your posts. :)
Thank you!
Good to talk to you again. You are one of my favorite accounts on Lemmy.
Are the mods thinking transforming this community into something like “ask politics”-type format?
Article submissions are still very much welcome here, but I would like to expand this place so that we have more discussion among the community on political topics. So, a bit of both.
I do want to foster a culture of thoughtful discussion here, and that needs to originate from our power submitter such as yourself. If you put in effort in your submission, then the comment section will be encouraged to make effort as well.
I don’t think a weekly highlighting would be necessary, because I think we should all read more and be more informed on politics before we comment. Still thinking about what we should do here.
Thanks for the recognition and appreciate your thoughts.
Let me clarify about the weekly highlighting suggestion. A post from the mods along the lines of “What was the top comment you read this week?” and people can link them in the comments. That’s just an example of something to acknowledge commenters who put time and effort into their responses. Politics is dirty and usually pretty negative, so if there’s somebody wading through the crap to provide some clarity and discussion, we should focus on that positivity. Maybe that’s a bit idealistic, but just a thought.
Modding is tough work, so thanks for doing it.
2024, being an election year, is going to throw whatever we PLAN to do into complete chaos. LOL. Between the primaries, the general, and all the Trump shenanigans, it’s going to be a super busy year.
Likely each primary and caucus will need it’s own megathread, and, yeah, I might have a calendar all set up to remind me when they are happening. ;) Ditto for the Trump trial dates, then the eventual general election.
Agreed, I fully expect chaos this coming year. Certainly have your work cut out for you!
I’d love to see the removal, or culling of op-ed pieces. It’s not news.
Given the removal of the US only restriction here, I am hoping that we can use [email protected] as a place that allows for analysis and op-eds, and keep [email protected] as the place that does not allow op-eds and focus solely on world news.
Right, but removing the US only restriction leaves no community that allows validated news only. Nowadays, op-eds are about as close to dis-informative fake news as one can get. It’d be nice to have a Reuters’esque-based non-biased news source here.
I disagree strongly. The arguments and rhetoric that politicians and pundits throw at each other is a huge part of the political process in a democracy with liberal speech rights.
Besides that, basically every political movement starts out as opinion. Like, “Hey, I don’t think the king has divine rights and he ought to be forced to listen to us a bit,” isn’t an objective fact, it’s an opinion. A great opinion if you ask me and one I would fight for in 19th century Europe or whatever, but I can’t give you any tangible measurable thing that conclusively proves that that’s the way it ought to be. I just have a really strongly felt opinion about it.
News communities shouldn’t have any op-ed pages, but politics pages are exactly where those kinds of articles belong imo.
I’m happy to see the rule change to be world-inclusive now. I do hope there is a way to tag/flair posts to show geography, though, or it’ll end up having people assume US-first.
I’m probably going to move to another politics community then. I thought they took the old site’s politics and made it less antagonistic here. I don’t like that the admins of lemmy world are involved either. You seem like you want to do well, but I have real concerns now. I might start one on sh.itjust.works and keep the energy that was here.
When it comes to Moderator drama, I would RATHER the site Admins make the call than the other moderators.
If you don’t then the optics are bad. Say I took the initiative and bounced Yobucks and appointed MightBe, the end result, to you guys, would look like I staged a coup and inserted my own cronies to the modlist (which is something that happened more than once on reddit.)
Being able to step aside, reach out to the Admins and go “Hey, I think we have a problem…” is a huge improvement.
There is some meta drama with the admins that’s going on that isn’t obvious. I agree with you in normal circumstances.
Oh, I’m sure there’s all sorts of stuff going on that’s not obvious. So long as it STAYS that way, I’m OK with it. :) Just like we mods have our own channel of communications, so do the Admins.
But the stuff the Admins do that is public, like discussing defederation from other instances, stuff like that? Well within their rights as Admins.
But nobody is telling us as mods “hey, we need you to delete content x” unless it’s a clear violation of lemmy.world policy, like when we had to crack down on copy/pasting full articles in violation of copyright.
Oh, I’m sure there’s all sorts of stuff going on that’s not obvious. So long as it STAYS that way, I’m OK with it. :)
I can see why you wouldn’t want to know. But as a user, I want to be able to not have to check if things are deleted or modified for no reason. Good luck for next year, it’s going to get crazy I’m sure.
I’m not in a position to say what the Admins can or cannot do because I’m not an Admin. :)
What I CAN say, as an IT professional, when you have APIs and bots and tools of all sorts, the only real limit is “how much time and effort are you willing to throw at it?”
It’s a little disheartening to hear, tbh. I’ve always thought of all of the instances as hobbyists just doing their thing, but we don’t really know. I do know now that the LW admins can be trolls, I don’t know if Ruud is one of them or doesn’t have the time to check on them though.
Oh would you shut the ever living fuck up?
You are whining relentlessly about the admins and saying they’re doing shit that isnt obvious and accusing them of whatever else.
Where’s your proof? Oh yeah. You don’t have any. Wouldn’t be surprised if you’re YoBucks alt at this point.
I would like to address your concerns. The audience here is very much US centric, so that even with the current rule change, I don’t expect the content and culture here to drastically change overnight. In fact, I would still very much expect US politics to be fairly dominant here in the near future.
And rest assured, we would not want the antagonism here to increase either.
That’s good to hear. I’m more concerned about how much Lemmy World admins are involved, I left lemmy world for a reason.
And what concern would that be? We can not be involved at all? I think we are pretty hands-off. We took action when a moderator broke the site rules.
I mean, your tone is kind of on display right here. From the other thread, you took a mod away which is completely understood. Here, the mod posting this is saying you’re working together. My actual, real concern is that you guys are curating or planning to curate what you want shown like the old place used to do. It’s not a known thing, it’s a concern and you guys don’t do anything to alleviate it.
And what concern would that be? We can not be involved at all? I think we are pretty hands-off. We took action when a moderator broke the site rules.
Again, we’re hands-off. We do have a discord server where all moderators have access to and were every > 2.5k users community has their own channel. We only get involved when we are asked or when site rules are broken.
I personally had issues with YoBuck’s takes since very early on but we never stepped in because he wasn’t breaking any of the site rules. Until today.
What are your plans about stepping in in the future? When my comments were disappearing and no one deleted their comments, one of your admins was pretty aggressive and also seems to have been lying about what can and can’t happen on the admin side. I don’t have trust in you guys right now and as I said, your first comment’s tone was pretty shitty here as well. I would prefer not to start up the shitjustworks politics community, but as you can tell, I’m ready to go if I have to. TBF, it probably wouldn’t be a threat to you or the others anyway. But why do you guys care so much about being the biggest or only one to go to? It’s odd. The defensiveness and aggressiveness don’t fit and aren’t necessary.
one of your admins was pretty aggressive and also seems to have been lying about what can and can’t happen on the admin side
I’ve looked through that thread on your LW account and I don’t see any aggressiveness? Rooki was doing his best to help you and clear things up: https://lemmy.world/comment/5946853
Lemmy software is buggy man.
I would prefer not to start up the shitjustworks politics community, but as you can tell, I’m ready to go if I have to
Ok?
Disappearing comments is what started this whole drama in the first place. Someone disagreed with Yobucks, had their comment removed, then reached out to me in a PM going “Hey, why was my comment removed?”
I told them the truth, I wasn’t involved, but I’d look into it.
Found the comment was removed, but looking at the modlog, nobody had reported it, which was odd. Generally we don’t just remove comments unless someone reports them.
Then I looked at the message chain, saw the problematic comments by the other mod and put 2+2 together and hit up the admins going “Hey, I think this one is out of my league…”
This is why groups of this size have multiple moderators. If you feel you’re being treated unfairly, reach out to someone else. If you feel the entire mod team is dumping on you, a) there might be a reason for that, but also b) that’s where the Admin team comes in.
I haven’t seen the reddit style problem of an entire mod team being out of control. I hope we NEVER reach that point.
IMHO, curation is something that happens on smaller communities, before they reach critical mass and can survive on their own two feet.
I mentioned this in the World News thread where we established a new rule limiting how many posts per day a single person could make after one person dominated the front page with 19 posts at once.
I feel like I’m dominating the conversation if I submit more than 3 posts at once, and it’s not in my best interest, or the interest of the community, to dominate the conversation.
In a tiny community that’s growing? There’s no choice. It’s post or die. I have that in two tiny communities that were dead before I took over and I would LOVE for them to stand on their own without my help and just be a mod, but that’s probably months away and does not apply to large communities like Politics and World News.
When I say curate, I’m being very generous. I’m saying delete comments that they don’t agree with or want seen.
I can’t speak for the other mods or admins, but the only comments I find delete worthy are a) reported by other users and b) break communuty or site rules.
First, my time is valuable and I’m not going to scroll through comments looking for stuff to delete, I have better things to do.
Second, when stuff does get reported, waaaayyy too often it’s two users engaged in a slap fight and doing the whole “imma report you!” “no, imma report you first” thing.
If it doesn’t break the rules? I leave it alone. If it does? Maybe everyone needs a time out to cool off.
Moderation is probably 1/2 keeping things on track by deleting obvious spam and abuse and 1/2 telling the kids to settle down and go to their room.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that is an admin disguised as a regular user. I share your concerns and I have already started to look elsewhere. This feels even worse than reddit.
I can assure you that I was not and am not a LW admin.
Why post from an alt account then?
This feels even worse than reddit.
Yep, and that’s really hard to do. I’ve deleted all my comments on politics and have moved away.
I made an account on lemmy.today (US server that doesn’t block instances or accounts) so in a few days I’ll transition to that and delete everything over here.
I still want to block threads, but I’m glad you found one that suits you.
I’d like it if this was a place for nuanced discussion of political issues, not an endless stream of tabloid-level garbage involving politicians. I believe drivel like “Trump Smells” and the later clarification “Like Butts And Armpitts” is childish and need not be here.
I agree, but it’s a hard line to draw when Trump is the likely GOP presidential nominee, and half or more of Republicans in Congress are little knock off versions of him. Take for instance, Trump’s Christmas message directing Biden and liberals to rot in hell, that’s just a garbage story. But it’s the presumptive GOP nominee saying it, so I guess it’s substantive? If you ignore it, you normalize it.
Maybe it’s not news stories that are at fault, it’s just that the US politics itself has reached “tablod-level garbage”. Fuck I’m not looking for to this election year.
I’d agree, but there needs to be a place for political slugfests too. Where can we discuss Trump’s BO, Rudy’s flop sweat and BoBo’s HJs?
[email protected] would be good.
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Is that why the logo is missing?
The previous logo and banner was made by YoBuck, I think he took it with him when he left.
Might want to run a logo contest/banner contest sometimes soon, if you guys are interested.
What a fucking child. Not surprising given he was unilaterally banned from another instance for aggressive homophobia well before he was banned here.
I say run it. His logo was mid at best. I’m sure there’s plenty of people who can offer something better with barely any effort.
It was startrek.website, right? I know about that one.
I have gone out of my way to not interact with him or even be on the same mod team as him, because some of the things he said was legitimately disturbing, and I think he needs serious help. It is my hope that our community can move past him.
With any luck, we’ll start running the contest very soon.
That would be it. There’s a new Trek show that has some gay characters, a lesbian, a non-binary character and a trans character. People got bitter as hell and started attacking the show over those specific characters. And i don’t mean criticising. I mean attacking. Him being the creator of star trek community on lemmy.world was the sole reason I never posted there. Even tried to help him out once and he got self righteous and said he didn’t need my help and I’ve been assuming its because I have the same name as one of those gay characters I mentioned. The one who gets complained about the most.
I’m ass at making logos. The tumblr one and the star trek memes ones I made but that’s taking existing stuff and adding/removing to suit my needs. I’d do a horrendous job. But I’m all the way down to support the contest!
Seriously though, we need a new logo. As dumb as it is, it really makes the community feel more like a community. I’ve thought about this every time I see that bland looking “p” in my sub list, so I’m glad you brought it up!
Starting the contest this weekend might be good.
I see thoughtful, factual comments with double digit negative scores.
I see short, factually incorrect comments highly rewarded for asserting as facts, things that are unlikely and unproven.
I don’t know how this has become the pattern, but it now appears to be a culture problem within many communities - this one being high among them.
Mistakes happen and people will be wrong, but I see no avenue to correct growing misbeliefs on topics. There would have to be an article or some kind of other pressure to bring things back to facts.
I’m solidly on the left and my post history reflects that. I’m not saying anything fringe in my posts. I’m just applying the classic rules of critical thought seasoned with skepticism.
I’m tired of the down votes. Not for me, but for what they represent for lemmy at large and for this community. A whole lot of Lemmings are being poorly served by the siren’s song of glib half-bites.
Can you help with that?
At present, I’m mostly talking about the “human trafficking” assertion that arrives on migrant bussing threads.
That’s one specific example.
I see thoughtful, factual comments with double digit negative scores.
I see short, factually incorrect comments highly rewarded for asserting as facts, things that are unlikely and unproven
Unfortunately, this is really a community cultural issue inherited from the old site. Karma isn’t a thing here, but I do believe the habits formed from having karma to be the root of many toxic behaviors here.
There is no user scoring system here, if your views are unpopular but reasonable, I don’t see the need to remove it; the opposite is true, if your comment is upvoted but breaks our community rules, then they will be removed.
I am a strong believer in democracy, but I don’t believe in mob rule, so the above is the principle I go by.
I’ve never seen down votes not used to punish people with messages that others disagree with.
I mean, if someone posts a racist angry opinion, Im likely to down vote. Even if this was their carefully considered opinion.
But when people are liberal in their use, it suppresses discourse and creates the echo chambers we say we hate (when other people do it).
I’m not sure lemmy provides mod tools that would help move the needle, but I’m in your corner for changing/expanding the discourse.
I’m here to learn. Sounds like what you’re proposing would help that.
Best of luck and thank you for the reply.
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As far as the specific “no longer restrict political discussion to the politics of the United States of America” rule goes, I think that’s a positive change because in general I think the fewer rules and the more you let organic user behavior dictate the content on the community the better, but I also would not be too upset if this got reversed so long as there’s some other well populated community I can find to post politics around the world type articles.
As far as input goes, one idea I had (and by “I had,” I mean it was something I remember being a thing on reddit years ago and wish someone would bring back) was that it would be cool to allow text posts one day of the week so users could just submit their own original commentary or try to start discussions about things that aren’t getting reported on. That might be way too much work to moderate, but I’d be interested in what people would have to say.
Lastly, I think also having one day a week (or maybe one a month) where meta posts are allowed would be a good thing. The moderation here seems to have improved and be in a good place now, but I think a vital check on bad moderation is individual users having the ability to make their case in front of the whole community about whatever issue, because reports can get buried and a lot of people aren’t going to take the time to review the mod log and see what’s been happening behind the scenes. I think there is some risk that trolls could try to take advantage of a meta post day and stir up bullshit and misinformation, but I feel like this community has developed enough regulars with enough common sense that those sorts of things could be shut down without the mods having to get involved.
To address your points.
I think there should be a good justification for all of our rules. LW isn’t US based, many on the admin team are not even native English speakers, I see no good justification for us to restrict ourselves to US politics only. Of course, people upvote what they want to see here.
I don’t think we will be restricting text posts in the future, I would like to see it being allowed here in general. But changes should be implemented carefully but steadily.
I would like the feedback thread to serve the function of a general meta post on our moderation style. We’re all human, we make mistakes, but acknowledging them and correct them quickly would be our goal.
Ah, sounds like we’re basically doing all my ideas already then (I’ve always been a “make general pronouncements about how the world ought to be first, pay attention to what’s actually happening later” type of person lol). I do think there’s something to be said for allowing users to create new feedback threads/meta posts to ensure their viewpoint doesn’t just disappear into a thread with hundreds of comments most users won’t ever look at, but having one general feedback thread is probably more than enough.
At any rate, thanks for modding. I was a mod for a few years on a medium sized reddit page and it was an absolute nightmare pain in the ass that honestly kinda ruined my mental health by the end (after several months of arguing with a stridently libertarian mod and a bunch of troll users about the need for a “no bigoted comments” rule I just hated every other human on the planet and didn’t want to get out of bed for a while), so thank you for doing a necessary job I have no interest in doing myself.
