I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc.
I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.
Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.
You need both. LLMs can, I think, do the bulk of removing posts that break community guidelines, but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines. Most would also like to have a human to escalate a dispute to.
Google is famous for having almost solely automated support, at it absolutely sucks at doing almost anything. AI only moderation would go the same way.
> but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines
The comments above you are suggesting that global guidelines are unnecessary. Instead, they suggest you don't need moderation at all when LLMs now give us the technology to filter out the stuff individual users don't want to see based own their own personal policies. I am sure you can come up with reasons to dispute that, but "you need moderators to do the thing you say is no longer necessary" doesn't add to the discussion.
The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.
Same here. The power-tripping of mods ruins reddit. Most don't care about the community as much as they care about exercising their absolute power over users.
And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considered "brigading" by reddit if the coordination happens off-site (at least not in a way that'd lead to any enforcement action).
It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.
I still haven't been able to figure out how to make an account without it being immediately shadowbanned or normalbanned. Tried again the other day, it was something in between where logged-out users could see it was banned but I couldn't.
You need to ditch and replace all your devices and acquire a new phone number. I'm serious. Virtually all large websites these days employ a lot of fingerprinting and persistence technologies.
And yes, ditch them. Even well over a decade ago, Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts. You must be extremely careful of never using any device that was associated with your old accounts on the same network as the devices associated with your new account. And that includes devices only seen by association.
It happens to all new accounts. It's known that new account are shadowbanned almost everywhere until they are 30 days old and farmed some karma on a very small set of subreddits that don't shadowban new accounts. It's shocking they ever get any new users, really; as far as a non-technical new user knows, nobody ever reads their comments for some reason.
It's full of bot slop pushing political propaganda, it's possible those bot farms have monetary agreements with Reddit to allow them to create accounts.
My boss uses Reddit some. I'm banned. At the shop, we use the same IP address (and we do not use ipv6 there).
I tried to log in with a ~10-year-old account that I'd never commented with. A perfect Beetlejuicing moment had arrived and I just wanted to play the game with a short, snarky comment.
It logged in fine, and then: Insta-ban, just like that. (Maybe I should have used a new browser on a new network that I've never used before, but whatever -- nothing of value was lost here.)
Meanwhile, the boss man's access continued unimpeded; this suggests that it is a rather targeted contagion.
And it seems to follow the systems, not the networks.
(If anyone wants banned, just let me know. I seem to have a well-poisoned system to play with.)
Your concept is certainly is interesting to think about, and I think that is a clever approach with a high cromulence quotient. I like it quite a lot.
But in this world, the result of the approach would have no value to me. At the end of the day, Reddit is terrible. For me from my perspective, it can never be anything other than terrible. Studying its ways cannot redeem it, nor improve my life in any way. Seriously, fuck those guys.
So while I appreciate the suggestion, I must respectfully decline.
(Unless, of course, the result would be useful for others such as yourself. If that is the case then let me know and I may elect to spend some time on it.)
>They banned the_donald (which, yes, was spammy, but it seemed to be organic
I used to frequent /r/t_d when it was created, before the Republican primaries for the 2016 election. I visited every day because I was absolutely astonished at the gigantic marketing effort behind it. I had never seen anything like that before, and haven't since. It probably had a team of dozens or hundreds of Russians behind it, creating memes and shitposting on a payroll. And it obviously was 100% inorganic.
I'm actually ok with reddit banning it and taking sides in political conflict. I just wish they didn't pretend to be unbiased when it's made it a useless site for discussing current reality.
Edit: to be clear, I'm more concerned about how russia was basically banned from the site but worldnews itself seems like the primary fountain of western astroturfing on the internet. No matter your opinion of putin, that is extremely unhealthy for productive discourse. I don't care about american domestic politics.
Who decides what "hate" is though? Does it switch with every administration?
Free speech, including "hate speech" should be allowed, as long as it doesn't violate the law (calls to violence, etc)
The particular problem is said speech quite often leads to calls of violence. And when a few people get banned for that you get dog whistles, sentences that are encoded calls for violence. Eventually the new slang is recognized for being violent and then it looks like the site has allowed calls of violence for months.
A short version of this is, if you let a nazi come to your bar, you have a nazi bar.
Calls for violence are free speech. Calls for "imminent" violence that serve to coordinate it have been decided not to be.
When you claim that calls for violence are not freedom of speech, it's a slippery slope that leads you to absurdities like speech that could "lead" to calls of violence are not freedom of speech, or that secret codes that could be interpreted as speech that would lead to calls to violence are not freedom of speech, or that violent-sounding slang that is eventually recognized as being encoded speech that would lead to calls of violence isn't freedom of speech, or that people who own bars who host people who use violent-sounding slang that is related to secret codes for speech that could lead to calls for violence are nazis.
And since nazis deserve to be violently suppressed...
I agree that free speech is free speech, the private org that runs the platform has a veto, the assumption that these platforms are the equivilant of stepping into the street to stand on a box is a not realistic.
Even HN is only quasi-free speech, there are rules that will get one censored.
If you love freedom, there are mailing lists and other platforms but they arnt as high on dopamine and the audience gets a little bit more sketch.
Even the US never had free speech—there was always stuff you could/can say to get you gagged by the courts or thrown in prison. Your freedoms always stop at impacting other people.
Somehow we jut gave business owners more freedoms than we gave everyone else....
I guess I don't have a problem with a social media site blocking speech, we don't have to use them, if they are too draconian, nobody will.
But IRL it gets harder if ISPs get involved. I'm more interested in democratized platforms with privacy baked in, if you want free speech you might have to at least give the orgs you depend on for access plausible deniability
"Free speech" means you have freedom from retribution from the government. It doesn't mean your fellow citizens need to stand there and listen to your shit, nor does it mean you are entitled to any sort of platform or megaphone. It means you can scream on the side of the road into the ether and you won't be arrested for it.
> "Free speech" means you have freedom from retribution from the government.
No, it doesn't. The concept of "free speech" isn't limited to prior restraint, you're mistaking it for the dominant precedent in judicial interpretations of the the 1st Amendment of the US constitution.
> It doesn't mean your fellow citizens need to stand there and listen to your shit,
Nobody asked you, or claimed this.
> nor does it mean you are entitled to any sort of platform or megaphone.
You should look up common carrier previsions. If we had to depend on your interpretation of law or morality, they'd be able to shut off your electricity for speech violations.
> It means you can scream on the side of the road into the ether and you won't be arrested for it.
If that's all it meant, it would be dumb and useless. What's more, it doesn't mean that, you can be arrested for screaming on the side of the road.
I agree on all counts. But the Donald was banned for mostly on topic posts. Reddit is a private business and they can do what they want, but there's consequences to their actions too. reddit has become an echo chamber now.
It's either some personal unquenched thirst for power or he thought that new digg will be as popular as these ~20 years ago, and that he'll be able to control content submitted and get paid for "promoting" it.
I've seen something similar over the last ~17 years: a bunch of same terminally online accounts uploading content from our local media outlets on country-related subs and local digg-like sites - both active and long defunct for 10 years now. Some of those users even appeared on mastodon and bsky.
The social link aggregators were created for people to share their favorite links, places from the Internet so others could see these and have fun, expand their knowledge and so on. For me it was the cherry on top of the web2.0 period where everything was fresh, beta and innocent. That lasted for a while up until other people, entities figured out that such sites can be used to promote their content, insert ads. The next stage was and remains till today opinion control by "curating" the content and/or reactions in discussions - still done by humans but more prevalent presence of convincing bots.
Reddit itself lost its impartial and independent status a while ago. Big subs related to media franchises or big corporations are heavily controlled to the point it's impossible to submit content that's critical. It's all happy world seen by pink glasses, or as some say toxic positivity.
There are still niche places where moderation is limited but as I said last time, from my own experiences: such subs were targeted by bad actors who by submitting forbidden content tried to impose lockouts so later they could take these in their control.
hn isn't free of some of these issues either. while discussions still remain on good levels (tho degradation to reddit levels already happens), there's no control over content: there are accounts who do nothing but upload links every few minutes, hours.
I'm not sure if it's possible to have link aggregators or multi-thematic forums that could be free of such... issues. The similar problem with establishing "real estates" happened on lemmy when some part of userbase decided to abandon reddit due to controversial changes.
An outstanding summary of the most important trends on the web, yes, it's being turned into a one-way propaganda-pushing machine much like the mass media before it. AI and bot-farms made that transformation cheap and ubiquitous, the profit motive, aka bribery, takes care of the rest.
I don't think it's an unsolvable problem although new legislation is continuously being considered in order to make the solution harder. Still, not impossible.
A well moderated forum (like HN) is great. I don't have time for the signal-to-noise ratio of X.
IMHO Reddit would be better if it had AI moderators that strictly follow a sub's policies. Users could read the policies upfront before deciding whether to join. new subs could start with some neutral default policy, and users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes.
If the policies are public, there's a lot more transparency. eg my city of millions of people has a subreddit. The head mod bans people for criticizing a certain dog breed. This "policy" is pretty opaque, but if the AI enforced subreddit rules say "thou shalt not mention the dog's breed when commenting on articles about someone being mauled to death", more people would be familiar with the rule (and perhaps there would be more organized discussion).
I was on a subreddit for a while that voted on rules and had a rotating dictator to facilitate them. It worked decently well, although it never got to the point where the sub was brigaded. This was also pre-LLM so moderation was still a big time sink and the sub eventually fizzled out
Honestly the most cohesive experience I've found online are forums with strict, sometimes overly strong, moderation where it's allowed to also complain about the mods openly. They can have the power but at least let me bitch when they fuck up.
On Google+, it was possible to individually block specific profiles.
This meant that the blocker wouldn't see the blockee's posts and the blockee wouldn't see the blockers, which is pretty much expected behaviour.
But on third-party threads, if a blocker/blockee were both commenting, others could see their comments but they'd be mutually invisible. As the platform matured and the number of such blocks increased, this reached a point where that platform behaviour became common enough that it was frequently commented on. If the thread host isn't sufficiently diligent in their own moderation (effectively each post author is moderator of that thread), it's also possible for such discussions to devolve quickly.
I guess Usenet would be another case where individual killfiles were often applied.
This isn't quite the same as your proposal, but it does raise the challenge that if there are multiple moderation regimes occurring, there is no canonical view of a discussion, leading both the potential confusion over what has or hasn't been said, and potential derailment (or similar behaviours) if a sufficiently disruptive participant is not universally blocked. The canonical flamefest after all is often just two profiles / participants responding endlessly.
Diaspora* is similar to G+, except that on third-party threads the blocks don't work, so that if A blocks B but C does not block B, then A and B will see one anothers' comments on C's posts / threads. This ... can be frustrating.
Oh, and the post-author-as-moderator model also somewhat resembles what you'd suggested, in that you could choose to participate on a particular profile's posts given that profile's moderation practices. I found that there were several people who did an excellent job of this, and who were quite affective, in effect, salon hosts, which was how I saw the G+ moderation model over time. This differs from what you suggest in that every participant on those threads had the same moderation experience, but it was possible to choose moderation practices based on which profiles' threads you chose to participate on. And I'd definitely avoid poorly-moderated hosts.
I think the difference between what I'm suggesting and all of these is that by selecting a mod, you're selecting a auto-updating block list. Behavior would tend toward consistency as good mods would be popular and there is nothing keeping a mad mod around over than momentum.
There have been such blocklists circulating for some time on other platforms, notably Twitter. Those could become problematic where they were adopted without review, and/or those who were listed lashed out all the harder against those they thought had promulgated the lists.
I became aware of this when use of the lists and/or the drama that accompanied them leaked into the Fediverse a few years ago.
The Fediverse also effectively works in ways as a "subscribe to moderation policies" network, in that each individual instance has its own moderation policy and blocklist (individuals and instances), which is probably closer to what you've described than any of the other examples I've noted. This ... has some benefits and frustrations as well, particularly as swapping mods isn't as frictionless as your ideal version would be. There's also the "broken threads" dynamic, similar in ways to that seen on G+, though with the Fediverse (a closer analogue to Twitter) there's no top post, and no original-author-as-moderator dynamic, which means that if a particular thread is interrupted by a blocked profile/instance, the thread as a whole tends to fragment. Devs are aware of this and may be looking at other ways of aggregating threads, e.g., by having multiple "refers-to" type headers (see the Mutt email agent's threading model for more on this).
sadly, a nice idea that is painfully naive with how computers are used in reality.
One need only remember how easy it was to take over IRC channels with a few hundred bots to see the endgame of this rationale… it cannot be patched out, it’s inherent to the internet.
That which would make a vote valid; can (and will) be gamed.
It could work depending on how it is set up. Maybe only accounts with n-number of years get 1 single vote, and maybe don't let any random 2-day old account get a vote.
As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator.
In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator.
Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.
Necessary for this is that subforums can't have unique names. If a bad mod can squat all the words like "computers", "programming", "coding", newcomers aren't going to know the best subforum is called "RealProgNoBadMod"
You see this in city-focused subreddits. But the reality is the name is power. New users type in their city and join the original one. The hostile mods suppress mention of the new one. It never manages to get critical mass.
A democratic election requires that the elected be your employee, where you work with him on a regular basis to direct him in his job. That works (ish) in government where people doing the hiring have heavily invested life interests in it succeeding.
Does a subforum offer the same? Once the mod is elected, are you going to sit down with him each day to make sure he is doing the job to your wishes and expectations? I say (ish) in government because it often doesn't even work there, even where people have heavily invested life interests, with a lot (maybe even the vast majority!) of people never getting involved in democracy. A subforum? Who cares?
If there were to be elections, it is unlikely they could be anything other than authoritarianly, with the chosen one becoming the ultimate power.
Crucially, SO's election system needs to be bootstrapped: users aren't eligible to vote until they have a history of participation. The level of participation is fairly trivial, but it provides enough signal to allow a reasonable detection (and elimination) of bot / sock puppet networks without resorting to crude measures like blacklists or "bot tests".
For new sites, this meant that the bulk of moderation was done by employees, followed by employee-appointed temporary moderators. This dramatically reduced abuse, but also reduced the explosion of new sub-communities that sites like Reddit thrived on.
It was pretty decent in the mid and late 00s. The community started turning toxic in the very early 10s and by about 2015 was quite poisonous. The saddest part is that the problem was known and spoken about frequently, but the response to that from staff and/or high-level mods was to just double down and dig in.
For sure, advanced difficult topics were never really their forte', although it was really common to get great book or blog recommendations via comments. For me, the golden combination was a good book on the language/framework/topic I was stuyding, supplemented with specific Q&A from Stack Overflow. I have extremely fond memories learning C++ and Qt that way (although that Qt book was a little rough, but at least there was a Qt book. Nowadays every book just seems too outdated to be helpful).
Internet is way behind on democracy. In general everyone likes democracy until they're in charge, then they realise they're the best person to be in charge and the idiots who vote don't have a clue, and should probably be banned if not beheaded for speaking out of turn.
You'd have to weight votes by some kind of participation metric to solve the problem of very little authentication of the voters
I've always thought than on Reddit (or Digg, or Lemmy or others) common words, brands, names... should be broad "topics" or categories that nobody can claim (first come, first served). You should be able to add a sub/community under a topic, but just like everyone else, and then users interested in said topic could add and exclude different subs to taste.
I always thought it would be interesting to separate the post-side and the read-side in such a manner. You'd post to #programming, and then the reader would subscribe to #programming/user_xyz to pick up the moderation feed with xyz as the god-mod. This solves the bootstrapping problem where new subs have nothing to read. Unfortunately it's hard to do persistent standards keeping that way. If xyz has a no-memes policy do you ban all posts from everyone who ever posts one to the global tag, or do you individually inspect every post?
>> I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country.
Are you sure? My understanding is that accounts were only allowed to create two communities.
Recently, I got banned from Reddit for sharing my local news summarization website (www.cafelutza.ro) - for the Romanian market. So I figured you know what, I've been trying to bring this product to Reddit in the hopes of having better discourse around the news, but instead I realized, I was looking for smart discourse around a subject, which I haven't been able to find on Reddit or elsewhere, so I created Exppit (https://www.exppit.com) that basically gets experts to debate your topic of choice.
I'll admit it's terrifying to share this here because I don't know how to keep costs under control. For now only myself and my friends have used it.
> that basically gets experts to debate your topic of choice.
The word basically is doing a fucking lot of heavy lifting in that sentence given that it's essentially asking spicy autocomplete to pretend it's multiple (possibly dead) people from $field to discuss the topic amongst themselves.
I mean... I'm pretty sure anyone that gives the front page a read can tell that it's spicy autocomplete. The alternative of having Aristotle chiming in to one's shower thought would be harder to explain.
Well. I created an account called 'cfltz' and started posting summarization of news items that were discussed on the subreddit. I really have an ideological 'war' with how news is presented and I felt like it was really a good product for expanding the discourse.
Then after I got enough Karma, I think 500, after two months (I didn't really post religiously, just things that had my interest) I posted a link to the actual website instead of just a summarization. Within 60 seconds I got banned from the subreddit. I contacted the mods and asked what's up and they told me self-promotion is not allowed. So that was that. I accepted the resolution, deleted the account and got back to my main, which was also banned for one week for 'circumventing bans'.
Honestly... it's probably for the best. I haven't really used the website since then because I realized I was engaging with (surprisingly for someone building AI slop) low level slop.
I just started getting npm errors while developing something; I was like hmm, strange... then I tried to go down to isitdown. That was also down. I was like, oh this must be something local to me (I'm in a remote place visiting my gramps).
Then I go to Hacker News to check. Lo and behold, it's Cloudflare. This is sort of worrying...
Implementers are not babies and managers are not our mothers.
I think the management skill nobody talks about is how managers should realize they are part of a team and their focus should be on whatever the team's goal is, not in finding the perfect way to apologize. As the article says: "Your job is to ship working software that adds real value to users, to help your team grow, and to create an environment where people can do their best work."
I couldn't give a rat's ass if a manager doesn't apologize to me in a way that makes my eyes water, admitting his humanity in the process, if that manager doesn't insist on making the same mistake and getting in my way all the time.
The book referenced is not wrong, but it is too narrow. Repair isn't the core attribute of parenting. It's the core attribute of human relationships. This is generally accepted as common knowledge - it's not about the rupture, it's about the repair.
Good for you if you consider yourself so emotionally detached from work that you can let go of the fact that work relationships are still human relationships. However, you sit comfortably in the minority. Most people carry the human aspect of their work relationships into work. Ignoring that is step 1 of being a really bad manager.
This doesn't mean we don't set appropriate boundaries or avoid giving feedback. It does mean that a great manager navigates the nuances of work relationships and work itself. It also means a great manager will adjust their approach depending on the personal needs of each employee. For instance, if I was your manager and truly believed what you're saying here*, I'd just give you the brass tax feedback and keep everything about the work itself.
* And I don't. From my experience most people who take this stance have been conditioned that emotions are bad. We are big emotional bags of meat. The people I've managed with this mindset tend to be the hardest to manage. Eventually something hits their feels, they can't handle it, and the erratic behavior begins. I much prefer people who are forward with their emotions. When something happens they can vocalize it appropriately allowing me to address it. When they have feelings about feedback received, making a mistake, or doing something bad I can easily acknowledge and validate those feelings while maintain the feedback & boundaries.
Or, dont recognize own emotions. It is one of the symptomps of being on the spectrum - although the person have emotiona and their behaviour is affected, they cant name or recognize them.
The language around emotion often obscures the underlying reality that needs to be addressed. Emotions are the physiological manifestations of expectations and desires. (Emotion is etymologically related to motive.)
The person your responding to clearly has a desire to do productive work with minimal roadblocks. In one person the roadblock to that desire/expectation might manifest physiologically as depression, in another person as anger, and in another as detachment. Getting rid of the roadblock is what needs to happen regardless of how the emotion manifests.
This does not mean that emotions are not addressed, but that they are addressed primarily as signifiers of a mismatch between the world and one's underlying desires/expectations, not the thing itself.
Sometimes, the desire/expectation of an individual is counter to the good of the overall system and group of people. In this case, a good manager might start by explaining the larger situation so that an individual can update their desires and expectations through the additional knowledge. Then new thinking/perception shifts the physiological experience of those desires (i.e., emotions).
In other cases, the gap between desires/expectations and reality is too big to bridge, which means emotions cannot be resolved in the current context.
> Good for you if you consider yourself so emotionally detached from work
I am not. I enjoy doing great work and take pride in it.
> that you can let go of the fact that work relationships are still human relationships.
They are. And I get along with some people, and not as great with other people. But the people I get along with I go out usually, outside of work, whereas the ones I don't particularly vibe with are just colleagues.
> For instance, if I was your manager and truly believed what you're saying here*, I'd just give you the brass tax feedback and keep everything about the work itself.
I'm... usually in a pretty good human relationship with my peers, whether code monkeys or managers. So if you chose to keep everything about the work itself, we'd lose a part of our connection. But I wouldn't mind, I'd adapt.
Your last paragraph is a lot to unpack, especially trying to view myself objectively. But I will say that while I consider myself a person that is not afraid of their feelings; if I would come to you to address some aspect of the work to be done ("When something happens they can vocalize it appropriately allowing me to address it.") I wouldn't put a lot of emotional investment into this. This is what happened. I believe this would impact our whatever. Feel free to do with this information as you wish. At the end of the day I'm rowing in the boat as per the captain's indication.
I wonder though why you wouldn't believe that I get my emotional needs met from places outside of my direct contact with my manager. I have a great relationship with my family, with my friends, most of the times with my peers. I'm just not looking for emotional support in a manager and I'd like to think I've never been 'erratic' in the workplace.
I obviously don't know you, so take my last paragraph with a grain of salt. All I can do is relate what you wrote and my interpretation of it with my knowledge and experience.
Although, I don't make comment about whether you're getting your emotional needs met outside of work. I'm glad that you do - a lot of people out there aren't, and they are feeling really lonely.
> I couldn't give a rat's ass if a manager doesn't apologize to me in a way that makes my eyes water, admitting his humanity in the process, if that manager doesn't insist on making the same mistake and getting in my way all the time.
But this is part of the point, while for you that might not matter, your manager cannot assume this. Other people DO care.
One of the ways your manager can mess us is by assuming you don't care about that...
In my stints in managerial roles, I was mostly focused on the work to be done. I haven't gotten bad reviews, on the contrary. So I'm making the mistake of assuming that focus on work to be done is more relevant than focus on how to approach each individual.
Maybe that's why? I know rich people (truly rich, not your upper middle class or rich as in I got a couple mils of net worth), in developed countries (West and Northern Europe) and to be honest your points, apart from being tangled and repetitive just so you can get 5, don't reflect their reality and are just a setup for your last politically charged line.
I'm sure with tens of millions of dollars in your hands, you'd wait for that 20 minute doctor's appointment for 3 months, then another 8 for your MRI. Especially when your kid gets sick god forbid.
Have you tried googling "baal son of el"? I have no idea on who Baal is, or El, but the discussion sparked my curiosity and that's all I needed to do in order to answer for myself the question "where are you getting this from?".
I've built a local (for my country) news aggregator that basically clusters news and summarizes them based on multiple sources and gives me the rundown of the most important things, and things that can be found between conflicting sources. It's mostly a pet project for myself as it doesn't seem to have a lot of stickyness without the clickbait.
I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should do it like ground.news where I can see left, center, right". This idea turns me off so much. Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Just give me the information that's there in most sources and it's probably be going to be close to some objective overview of the situation.
> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.
Because at the day information can be political.
>the information that's there in most sources
While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.
> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.
>> Because at the day information can be political.
Umm. Yes. Which is precisely what placing it left / center / right amplifies.
> the information that's there in most sources
>> While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.
Sure, it's another bit of information. I think more important are the facts. Did this actually happen? If so, what happened? The tl;dr of what happened should give me a pretty good idea, without having to become a reporter myself, especially if covered by both sides.
I think this is more of an issue of an union, than the 'argument to moderation' or 'false balance' might appeal to. If I'm left, and report or something and you don't. That's probably high noise. If you're right and report to something I don't. That's probably high noise. If we both report on something, and we report differently on 80% but we have the same 20%. I'd say that 20% is high signal.
What if we cut out the left / center / right ideas and just take as many sources as we can? Then extract what's common between them. Wouldn't that have some sort of higher signal to noise ratio than any single viewpoint?
Of course, I'm willing to accept I'm wrong. From my personal experience so far, I'm much less inclined to extremes than I was since starting to use this system.
Ground.news also gives the information that is present in only one side, which is just as high signal – if not higher – as showing the overlap IMO. They have a feed for “stories with equal coverage” and “stories covered mostly in left-leaning sources” and “stories covered mostly in right-leaning sources.”
I'm seaching for 'equal' on the home page and finding no results, nor for 'feeds'. Could you help me identify those locations? It's always confusing to me when I go to their home page and would appreciate it. I think the equal coverage might be what I'm actually looking for.
Ground news tells you the bias of publications that have published the news item not the slant of the news item itself. It lets you see how much news gets completely ignored by the right and left (the right is way worse) when it isn't favorable to their cause. It's also really interesting to sample both sides and see how wildly the facts get slanted as you get further from center.
I think I understand this feature pretty well. What I'm arguing for is taking the common information between all news sources (without having to place them in left / right / center) is much higher signal to noise.
Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste. It makes me feel dumb for even writing this reply. Alas, these are my thoughts. News should be news. What happened and when. Not some attack vector against a group of people or another.
Given that there are at least as many things happening as there are humans, how do you suggest the people serving as “news sources” avoid editorial judgment when deciding what’s newsworthy and what it means?
Let's say that The Rebel Times has a headline "Member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission boarded and arrested without cause" while the Empire Daily reports that "Leia Organa, part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor, taken into custody". Following your process, the "what" is just that Leia was arrested.
Then, the Rebel Times says "Moisture farmer with magic powers joins fight against Empire", but the Empire Daily has "Moisture farmer joins fight against Empire". the common whats are just that a moisture farmer joined the Rebel Alliance, which is true, but much less consequential than if he had magic powers.
Later, the Rebel Times says "Secret Empire super-weapon destroyed at the Battle of Yavin", and the Empire Daily publishes... nothing because they don't want to admit defeat. There's no common information between these stories (because there is no second story), so looking for common whats would conclude that nothing happened.
If the process of analysing the news accounted for the fact that the different outlets are interested in presenting different whats, it could conclude that the fact that the Empire Daily published nothing about the third story doesn't mean that it didn't happen. In the second case, if it could account for the Empire wanting to suppress information about the Force, the conclusion would be that Luke joining the Alliance is somewhat more of a big deal than otherwise. Even in the first case, it might realise that the fact that the two sources don't agree about Leia doesn't mean that one side isn't right.
"What" is often a matter of definition and framing, especially if you also want news to include "to what effect" which is not always black-and-white. "Why" is an answer that also must be answered, but will often come through a political lens. News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".
> if you also want news to include "to what effect"
I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be.
> News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".
I have no interest in the "why" and "to what effect". I have an interest into "what" so that I can draw my own conclusions.
Though thank you for your thoughts, it helps me understand the people calling for political sides better.
> I don't. I want to be able to draw my own conclusion as to the effect of what happened might be.
That's fair BUT do you see how this is a decision that a) won't always have a clear line of demarcation and b) reflects an internal mental model of news that likely isn't universal?
For example: let's say someone reads a news article that titled "Trump Won't Rule out Military Intervention in Greenland" (god help us, a real story). Maybe you get all the "what" you need from the headline. I would argue though that omitting contextual information about "Why does he want Greenland?" is irresponsible and bad journalism. Many others might argue that in a duty to inform readers, they should collect statements from people who understand international relations to discuss implications of such a stance.
Another example: insurance rates are rising for coastal properties in Florida. That's the "what", but there is no honest, legitimate exploration of the topic if the journalist doesn't explore "why", because the "why" of this story if also a "what" of the many contributing factors. Since that "what" will necessarily include climate-related topics, it is now considered "political" by many. And in this instance, exploring "what effect" this is likely to have on homeowners, renters, and businesses seems a core element of the phenomenon.
> That's fair BUT do you see how this is a decision that a) won't always have a clear line of demarcation and b) reflects an internal mental model of news that likely isn't universal?
a) I think there's a clear line of demarcation to the "what".
b) I can see how this isn't a universal mental model, I just fail to see why the "why" makes for a better one.
> irresponsible and bad journalism
I honestly don't see how left / center / right fixes this. If there's no consensus between tens / hundreds (and I'm in a small country) sources on the actual thing that lead up to the what, I don't see why that should be included. Else the news would just be (for example, not political affirmation) "Trump Won't Rule out Military Intervention in Greenland[...] as loss of key trans-atlantic partners considered less valuable than securing arctic trade route".
> Another example: insurance rates are rising for coastal properties in Florida. That's the "what", but there is no honest, legitimate exploration of the topic if the journalist doesn't explore "why", because the "why" of this story if also a "what" of the many contributing factors. Since that "what" will necessarily include climate-related topics, it is now considered "political" by many. And in this instance, exploring "what effect" this is likely to have on homeowners, renters, and businesses seems a core element of the phenomenon
Honestly it's the same thing, if 80% of covered news sources point out to a why as climate change, sure. If only the left (or right, or center) ones do and they're not a solid majority. I don't particulary care. I care more about the "what".
Again, this might tie into the mental model more than anything but the whole left / center / right divide seems political and high noise to signal ratio to me.
Fair reply, and reasonable people can disagree. But there is just one thing I wanted to reply to:
>> irresponsible and bad journalism
> I honestly don't see how left / center / right fixes this.
Well, it doesn't. Those are labels we have affixed to things, because those are the lenses through which society sees "debated topics." But those lenses are applied to real things, that are really happening.
That you discount climate change because right-wing publications don't engage with it - despite the overwhelming preponderance of evidence - then you've just made yourself more susceptible to propaganda, not less. The omission of information is just as political as the inclusion of it.
A relative was a high level local political figure. His quip was always “if you want to know what’s important that is going on, look for what isn’t in the newspaper.”
Any issue I’m deeply familiar with that gets reported is almost always missing lots of meaningful information. There isn’t really competition for most news, so there’s no incentive to follow up.
Publishers have biases, and their sources have agendas.
I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.
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