Sorry to throw this on everyone in the group, but there has been another mod shakeup and it feels fair to address it publicly.
MightBe has been removed as mod from both World News and Politics.
I also unpinned and removed their rule change posts.
The too long; didn’t read is they were pretty hostile in messages to both myself and little cow, and when asked to join back channel discussions in chat, refused, and instead made unilateral decisions without group discussion.
Moderating a group like this needs to be a collaborative experience, no single voice should be establishing rules without some form of common agreement.
They not only refused to engage in that collaboration, but did so in a manner not fitting for being the new person on the team.
And it is a team. I tend to make more public posts than others, because I value the transparency over privacy, but when I do so, it’s a result of a nice private chat among the group.
For now, their rule changes have been removed from both Politics and World News. Back to the stated way of doing business:
World News is for all News OUTSIDE the United States, that’s what the normal “News” is for.
Politics is for US Politics - Somehow I doubt that’s going to be an issue in 2024.
There ARE things the mod team is discussing, and any rule changes will be made as a group effort, and (hopefully!) for the better health of the group and ALL of our participants!
Happy New Year!
All the best sorting the mods out!
World News is for all News OUTSIDE the United States, that’s what the normal “News” is for
The division you make between domestic and worldnews is US centric. US newssites and journals follow this same logic. So, US citizens read their domestic news and everything that is not US, is considered worldnews . I get that.
The problem is that what sometimes is domestic to US, is sometimes worldnews for the rest of the world. This means some domestic US news is considered worldnews in other non US newspapers.
I don’t care especially about domestic US News, but when it’s considered major news by Non Us newsagents, it’s usually important for the world as a whole.
Please, consider this element as well.
Oh, absolutely, but at the same time we don’t want World News flooded with internal US news about Biden being attacked for supporting Israel, that kind of thing.
Something like the US attacking Yemen? That seems fitting for World News, News, AND Politics.
Biden getting yelled at on a campaign stop because of Israel? Sorry, not World News, keep it in Politics.
One post I removed from World News HURT because it was a good story, an important story, and it hurt my heart to remove it. The impact climate change had on the spread of disease and how a warmer climate makes the wee beasties spread easier.
Problem was, the entire article was focused on the spread of disease on the US East coast. No international angle AT ALL. And I LOOKED… “Come on! Give me a reason to keep it! Talk about Nova Scotia, SOMETHING!”
Tnx, good enough for me!
I get that you need a clearcut line, on the other hand you are the MODS, so you could use your discretion wisely and sparingly, when you feel the need.
When it hurts to remove a post, becasue of the rules, that should ring a bell, and imo you should follow your “nose” instead of the rules. Rules are only “guidelines” after all.
When it doesn’t hurt, that’s easy. Anyone can do that! :) It’s when there’s friction between your personal interests and the best interests of the site, and you have to set aside your personal interests… yeah. If it didn’t hurt sometimes, you wouldn’t be human. :)
Maybe they could allow links to stories about the US which are from foreign news outlets. E.g. US bombing in yemen:
Oh, like I say, the US intervening in a foreign country DEFINITELY rises to the level of World News, but just because it’s on a non-US site doesn’t make it “World”.
For example:
“Biden defends Inflation Reduction Act, dares critics to name a failure in anniversary speech”
Yeah, I don’t care which news agency reports that, not World News, and World News doesn’t need to be cluttered up with stories like this.
On top of that, Hindustan Times is a known problematic site as well. Questionable source, low credibility.
Huh, turns out this stuff is pretty complicated. Should have known 😛
Politics is for US Politics
So we use USPolitics for the world politics, then? Is that how it works?
World News works for news and politics. I just posted up the story on the election in Taiwan.
TBH, I haven’t looked for a World Politics. We might have to create one if politics starts dominating World News.
I actually made one a few months ago it is linked in the https://lemmy.world/c/politics and https://lemmy.world/c/world sidebar: https://lemmy.world/c/globalpolitics
No more anonymous alt mod accounts please.
I still don’t understand why there wasn’t a single other user on this instance that could have been modded without legal worries. Really felt like a copout to go anonymous and slowly transition the rest of the team to alt accounts as well.
I just added “mod” to the end of my username for my alt account. Obviously that wouldn’t work if my username had a slur in it or something, but it’s a pretty straight forward fix. It allows me to block idiots on my browsing account, offers a helpful separation between things I say as a user vs things I say as a mod, but subscribers to my communities still know who I am so there’s some accountability.
Not a bad compromise. I hadn’t thought about the use case of wanting to block people personally without affecting the community.
Yeah, if you block someone (not ban them) they can still go to a community you moderate and post there - but you won’t see it. Obviously that’s not ideal from a moderator perspective. I tried just using one account and not blocking people, but there are a lot of trolls/arseholes/bots out there and I just don’t want to see their drivel on my feed - even if what they say isn’t technically against the rules, or doesn’t met the criteria to earn them a ban. And you can’t ban accounts just because you don’t like them (or you can, but that’s not good moderating).
Also moderator decisions are meant to be made objectively and I find having two accounts helpful to maintain that objectivity. A comment from my mod account is official but a comment from my browsing account only carries the same weight as a comment from any other user. Some iOS apps allow you to distinguish moderator comments from your standard comments. That works great but it doesn’t seem to be the standard across all platforms/apps.
Well, I’m not going to out their “real” account, but lets just say if I told you who it was you’d go “Oooooh, yeah, that makes sense.” Having a moderator taking actions under another well known brand a) wouldn’t have been a good look and b) would have likely drawn legal attention that no volunteer needs.
Totally agree and I have a hunch on who the mod was but that doesn’t really matter to me much. I’m not asking anyone to unmask them.
That said, was there really not a single other candidate available that didn’t “need” to become anonymous?
Well that was the thing, they volunteered and everyone involved, Admins and Mods alike, were like “Wow, yeah, welcome aboard, but about that username…”
Maybe that’s the secret… bring people on who don’t WANT to be mods. :)
I was perfectly happy posting the “You are here” Trump trial updates and got the PM that “Hey, we think you’d be a good mod!” and here I am!
Just a question. News has to be international noteworthy, or any non-US local news are post worthy?
By that I mean that a lot of very region specific news has been posted by what seem to be bots (5-6 news articles posted in less than 1-2 minutes), most of which has no significant impact outside of its very specific area.
On lemmy.ml we try to make sure that we support news from around the world as a matter of principle. News does not have to be internationally noteworthy to be interesting: for example, Norway’s recent decision to dump waste into fjords is not an international incident, but I still think it’s deserving of being shared.
In a way, it affects the environment, which is our shared common heritage. It may not affect the World right now, but may affect it in the future.
All human activity affects the world, and it’s difficult to know what will have long-term impact in the future.
Edit: I, for one, am always excited to see news from other countries. The overreporting on the Anglosphere makes it seem like the Anglosphere is the only part of the world that matters.
Well, I’m not a mod on News, so I can’t speak to that specifically. IN GENERAL, though…
Stuff that’s PURELY regional? Probably not.
Here are two examples local to me:
Portland has a snow storm, 100,000 people without power.
Great story for the Portland community, I wouldn’t post it to News.
Oregon chooses not to remove Trump from the ballots, waiting on the Supreme Court? Yeah, that’s a bigger story:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-oregon-supreme-court-ballot-eligibility/
can you please bring back the old background color?
Sadly, as an app user, I have no idea what the original background color was. I can ask around though!
Yeah that was weird.
Gif
MBFC is bullshit. We have plenty of evidence that most “credible” news papers on there are literally Zionist propaganda outlets. BBC. NYT. WSJ. The list of exposed sites has been insane lately.
If an article clearly shows no journalistic integrity it should be removed. Else the community will filter it by itself.
Also /news posting how Trump is going to “get jailed 100% this time for sure now also he had a new hair transplant” every single day is not news.
