Hello everyone! If you have not yet seen it, @ernest has handed over moderation to @Drusas @Entropywins @ Frog-Brawler (the tag system consistently messes up the link to FB’s username lol) and myself here in !politics.
First order of business is for you all to weigh in on the community guidelines that you would like to see here. As the mod team, we will weigh all suggestions and then add them to the side bar as magazine/community rules. I’m going to give about 48 hours for users to see this thread and add a comment or discuss.
Please know that the goal is not to create an echo chamber here in !politics, but we want to ensure that there is not an encroachment of rage bait and toxicity. It brings down the quality of the magazine and it discourages community engagement.
For the time being, the mod tools are pretty sparse, so I want to manage expectations about the scope of moderation we’re able to do right now. For now, our touch will be light. Expect increased functionality as time progresses, though. We have 3 weeks of reports on file, so please know we see them. Give us some time to establish how to handle those before you start to see any movement.
Any chance we can require a secondary comment be posted with article in text form? Lots of these sites are paywalled and I can’t see the articles. There was usually some kind soul or tldr bot to post the article in the comments on /r/politics.
Good idea
Maybe my threshold for shit is higher than normal, but my hope is that comments won’t be removed but will be allowed to be downvoted into oblivion. At least when it comes to what could be considered a “political opinion.” Of course there is a subjective line somewhere where a statement crosses from “political” to just “hate.” But if a post is political, my hope would be that it gets to stand and be upvoted or downvoted, no matter how shit it might be.
A bad hot take is different than trolling activity. What I’ve seen the most of is an ineffective version of the Motte and Bailey fallacy. What I’ve seen is summarized as:
Troll: Very strong rage bait content/comment
Community user: Reasonably pissed response that this position is horseshit
Troll: Calls for civility even though they originally were like, proposing to genocide trans people, which is inhumaneThis isn’t a situation to foster. Let this kind of scum in and then they bring friends. Like roaches.
Sure. There is a subjective line where they cross from “political position that is almost certainly bad and wrong” to “bait”. Feel free to remove the bait, leave the bad takes.
What probably matters most is that the rules you establish needs to clearly state that there is a subjective line and that the user’s have to accept that fact. There is no clear rule you can write and be objective.
Yeah, I don’t think the goal can ever be pure, emotionless neutrality from a mod team.
The line may be subjective, but I want it to be transparent. Some rules may be arbitrary, but applied consistently and are sourced from the community who wants to live with them.
To start, I would like to link this graphic to the community guidelines to illustrate where the cutoff is between heated debate and inappropriate bickering.
If it were up to be, I’d draw the line at Contradiction, if you’re trying to cultivate a serious magazine for thinkers.
What’s the line you’d draw if I’m trying to cultivate a clown college magazine for trolls? Hehehe (saaaarcasm)
The line would be the same, but going in the opposite direction. :)
I’m with a lot of people here on opinion pieces. Those are often not even based on facts and rarely provide any actual valuable discussion. So those should be either monitored more closely to only let serious substantial opinions through, or simply barred from appearing here.
Other discussions in this thread have highlighted reputable sources of content. This can include NYT opinions and news, but would never permit content from OANN.
I hope this addresses the concern about opinion/editorial content.
It does, thanks. I have nothing against reputable sources. Just wanted to chime in about filtering/moderating that type of content in general.
I think we may need to stipulate and employ the use of badges (similar to submission flair from reddit) so that users can use kbin QoL userscripts to filter out content they don’t want.
I would like to see more discussion around handling misinformation. The lines between misinformation, trolling, and someone being genuinely incorrect (which is still misinformation) can be blurry.
However, I personally believe that spreading misinformation is more dangerous than regular trolling. Of course, it can require research to determine whether or not something is mis/disinformation. Obviously this is a complicated subject and other social media platforms haven’t even figured it out yet.
Thanks for bringing this up!
Do you think community engagement should be a response to misinformation or moderation be the response? I’ve already seen some trolls be answered with a flurry of factual links debunking misinformation claims, and it was glorious.
It’s so hard to say.
Something which is demonstrably factually incorrect, which tends to be more in the scientific domain than the political domain, I’m personally in favor of removing so that the misinformation doesn’t spread. However, I also see a lot of value in allowing it to remain and be corrected, especially when it’s not something that can harm people (e.g., “vaccines will make you autistic and kill you!”). But then, what if it remains and nobody bothers to correct it?
I’m looking right now, as another example, at a comment which is trying to factually state that both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden are pedophiles, with nothing to back this up. I would consider it trolling in that case, but there are definitely going to be instances where it’s harder to distinguish. And of course, there will always be the crazies who believe utter nonsense.
I’d like to know more about the community’s thoughts before we try to tackle that.
This might me hard to implement… but could there be a community driven misinformation bank or facts FAQ managed by the moderators?
E.g. whenever a person repeats a clearly false narrative, instead of us participants going through the effort to describe who was indicted when or why bill XYZ doesn’t actually do Q, we can just refer to a corpus of rebuttals on the topic?
I’m interested in this idea, but I have to ask for community support on this project.
Is this something you’d like to take initiative on? waggles eyebrows convincingly
“Be Civil” is the core value for me.
I also have a question, rather than an answer. Should all posts require the URL of an external article? Or are people allowed to post “topic for discussion” and personal opinion posts? There needs to be a place for that, I’m just not sure whether this is it. So far I haven’t found a good venue for that.
This is an excellent question and is really up to us as a community to establish. The thought had occurred to me that there’s room in our magazine for:
- politics news that is not US-based
- threads that are discussion only about political events
- responding to something clearly editorial (thinking here if a really cogent YouTuber has a video essay about political matters that isn’t rage bait)
It’s just a matter of community members saying what kind of content they want here and us establishing Badges (we can do that as mods, kind of like post flair).
Politics is all about opinion. We all have different opinions on how society should be run. If we only allow fact-based reporting, this magazine might as well just be /m/news. Opinion pieces should definitely be allowed. Maybe limit it to external opinion pieces from established institutions to keep content quality high.
I would like to see a clear delineation between News articles and Opinion pieces, even if it’s just as simple as asking folks to put News: or Opinion: in the thread title.
Yes, we are triangulating around this. Others have signaled a similar take, and I’m on board with it. We may add “badges” which are similar to post flair from reddit.
To add to this, opinion articles should indicate the author. The publisher of an op-ed is mostly irrelevant and I feel like a lot of political pundits get a free pass by hiding behind publication titles.
This is a minor point, but I would also suggest not allowing any threads or posts with all capital headlines.
Easy buy in from me. =)
I’d say the biggest ones for me are:
- Be civil
- Be on topic (that’s probably a thread on its own to define what that should be)
- No editorializing/opinion/commentary in title or post body (save it for the comments)
These are okay, with the exception of giving commentary in the post body. Commentary in the post body might be a good way to tell why you think this could be especially important.
I think that can still be done in a follow up comment.
Some reasons why I suggested the rule:
- It can anchor the whole discussion and responses to OP commentary need to be made at top level. i.e., discussion may become centered around the commentary instead of the article. Especially on potentially polarizing topics.
- If I have a different commentary to give than OP, should I resubmit the article with a different editorial?
- Up/downvotes will be on the quality/merit of the article and not combined with the opinion of the submitter.
- If the commentary doesn’t fit within other rules, then the whole post needs to be removed and the article re-submitted.
- Any commentary can always be done in the comments, so we’re not really taking anything away.
As we collectively discuss this and come to a conclusion that most of us feel a sense of ownership over, I just want to state point blank that I do not want to see duplicate posts with the same link just because two users have opposite viewpoints on the ramifications of the news.
However, I’m fine with one poster giving CNN’s article on a newsworthy event and another user posting the Associated Press’s article of the same event. Those two news sources (among others) will have different perspectives, voices, and information. That lends itself to robust community engagement, to me.
