Hey all! Friendly neighborhood mod here!

I’ve just been added (along with @[email protected] (HEY SQUID!)) to the OTHER World News community, “worldnews”, totally separate from this group “world”.

The reason being, the mods there had effectively retired. Hurts, the lead mod, stepped away and hadn’t been active for MONTHS, and post and comment reports were PILING up, to a point where the Admins asked in our Discord chat going “Hey, what’s going on with worldnews?”

Which left ME confused, because “world” has a friendly name of “World News” and is generally up to date on the report queue unless two users are engaging in:

https://youtu.be/17ocaZb-bGg

Which, (sigh), happens way more often than I’d like, but what are you going to do?

Before they left 5 months ago, Hurts had pinned a question to worldnews asking, basically, “Do we NEED world AND worldnews?” which I think is a valid question.

There are some key differences, world doesn’t accept video links or text pieces, but there’s no rule against that in worldnews, so it’s a little more free-form than world, although both require legitimate news sources.

So for now, consider the discussion OPEN! Keep them both? Close one or the other?

The volume difference is pretty dramatic:

world:

worldnews:

    • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      We don’t need many, we just need a good one. So nuke the smaller one referring to the larger one.

    • zephyreks@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      There’s been rather public infighting on lemmy.world based on the pinned posts on this community.

      A moderator on this community (@MightBe) collected community feedback on a post (https://lemmy.world/post/10102462) because of discontent with how the community was being run. The other moderators were unhappy with that mod, so they removed him, removed the post, and pinned this post instead: https://lemmy.world/post/10656753

      I’m not sure what’s going on in private, but publicly there’s been a lot of drama. It’s also been revealed that some members of the current group of moderators have been rather unprofessional imo. I’m quoting from a previous comment:

      Some mods have also been deleting comments that add context to mod abuse. @naturalgasbad gave me the full DM context for their “bad faith argument” with a moderator (they did not specify which one), which I posted in a comment in the other pinned thread. It’s a rather childish escalation sequence imo. That comment was deleted for “violating Rule 6”, but I have copied it below for the record:

      For the record, naturalgasbad sent me their exchange with the moderator, which stemmed from the moderator in question removing SCMP articles due to “SCMP not meeting reliability guidelines.”

      @moderator:

      Al Jazeera is reliable when they aren’t talking about things that involve Qatar, that seems to be their specific blind spot.

      Kyiv Post and the Telegraph I haven’t specifically looked at, if they get reported I’ll check them out.

      @naturalgasbad:

      Literally by the standards on SCMP you quoted, they’re unreliable.

      @moderator:

      SCMP: Mixed for factual reporting due to poor sourcing.

      Al Jazeera: Mixed for factual reporting due to failed fact checks that were not corrected and misleading extreme editorial bias that favors Qatar.

      You: “bUt ThEyR’e ThE sAmE!!!”

      Poor sourcing is poor sourcing. You picked a shitty news agency. Try to do better next time.

      (for reference, the Daily Telegraph is also “mixed due to poor sourcing” and Kyiv Post is “mixed due to failed fact checks”)

      @naturalgasbad:

      MBFC claims SCMP has poor sourcing based on the suggestion that they’re misrepresenting the US import ban on China (the one “failed fact check” according to them). That’s how MBFC gives the commentary on their ratings. It’s based on a sample-size of one. There’s no long-term commentary provided by MBFC because their entire ratings system and commentary is based on sampling a small number of articles (we don’t know which ones) and going off of what goes wrong within that sample.

      It’s also reflecting the problem of a US-based bias assessment > website: it suggests that ideas within the US Overton window are “correct” will those shared by the Global South are “less correct.”

      From what I can tell, some of the problem is what they assume the basic level of skill is for readers. A few weeks ago, I posted a story about SCMP reporting on a research study published in Science. Members of this community failed to find it, despite being told the subject, authors, where it was published, and when it was published. That’s not poor sourcing, but poor research ability on behalf of the readers.

      @moderator:

      Continuing to argue with a mod who has made their decision will not win you any favors. Keep it up and you’ll get a ban on top of having your shitty links removed, oh, wait, you’ve already been banned for abusing the report feature. I can easily extend that.

      @naturalgasbad

      But again, MBFC’s entire commentary on SCMP’s issues is reliant on this single sentence from a single article. It’s inherently because MBFC relies on a small sample set of each site to determine a rating because they lack the manpower and the educational foundation to provide comprehensive analysis of a news source. Either way, that article was an editorial, not a news report. (In any cases, SCMP is commenting on Chinese reports written in Chinese, which American readers struggle to find because they don’t speak Chinese).

      [The [U.S. import ban] has been taken without evidence being provided.]

      Unlike SCMP’s reporting, Polygraph is unable to source the article this claim can be found in. From the articles I can find that, SCMP is comnenting based on this statement:

      [The ban creates a “rebuttable presumption” that any Xinjiang goods were tainted by the use of forced labour – a “guilty until proven innocent” principle that effectively inverts US customs laws related to forced labour]

      In fact, Ad Fontes’ media bias chart considers SCMP to be “reliable” (reliability score of 41.56 on a 0-64 scale) and “centrist” (bias score of -3.3 on a scale of -42 - 42). This is on par with Al Jazeera (41.65, -6.71) and New York Times (41.92, -7.96) and better than Washington Post (38.08, -8.69). (Ad Fontes also has issues, but your obsession with MBFC in particular is a little odd).

      @moderator:

      7 day ban. Want to go for 30?

      @naturalgasbad:

      I cited Ad Fontes. Feel free to criticize their methodology.

      @moderator:

      30 days. Keep going.

      @naturalgasbad:

      So… Do you not like Ad Fontes’ methodology, then?

      @moderator:

      And permaban. Good luck on your next account.

  • catloaf@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    I would ask the admins if they can kill worldnews and rename world to worldnews. Or merge it in. Worldnews is clearly the more appropriate name.

    I’d also like to keep the posts to news articles from actual sources. Political YouTubers are very low-quality sources for news. (If it’s one of those things like CBS just clipping their live broadcast and putting it under a headline, I don’t like it but I think it’s okay.)

  • OfficerBribe@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    No point in keeping 2 similar communities, especially if they are on same instance.

    Hope we will get post tags one day, that would help with filtering if someone really wants this

    world doesn’t accept video links or text pieces

  • jeffw@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Can you have a community redirect to another on Lemmy? Seems like directing worldnews here would be a good idea

    • tb_@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      That would be pretty cool in this case, but if that became a general feature people might snag up a whole lot of names to all direct them to the same place.

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldOPM
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      11 months ago

      That’s the piece I’m not aware of, we’ll probably need to engage with the Admins on that.

  • Waldhuette@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Not accepting video or text pieces seems someewhat limiting. Sometimes those are quite important News.

    Also I can’t seem to find the world community.

  • ChowJeeBai@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Worldneews sucks balls. I got banned for ‘yellow peril’ after criticizing china’s incursion into the scs. Mods or automod just execute bans without avenue for recourse or discussion. Caused me to block the entire instance. Some of the tankies even followed me here when I tried to open a discussion about it. Let it die and focus moderation efforts on world. Better to have one decent forum than several loosely moderated ones where brigading and cytros can take hold. Good riddance.