I can’t seem to find anything in a sidebar or sticky thread that talks about the moderation / rules of the news community. I’m very interested in coming to this community to learn about news, but right now it seems whats being posted tends to be relatively low (lower?) quality.
Examples of common rules
- Use the same titles as the article itself
- No blog spam, link to the source
- Political news, should go to the political community
- No dupes of same topic
As an example, take a look at other news aggregators that focus on news.
My goal here isn’t tell people what to do but its start a conversation on the topic.
What about light weight rules like ‘no politics’. Ie, a post like this (https://beehaw.org/post/792997) should go to politics?
In the United States (at least) the whole point of a free press is to keep politicians in check. You can’t separate the news from politics.
I disagree with that definition of news. Keeping politicians accountable is certainly one of the functions of the press, but there are a lot of possible news items that don’t refer to politicians. “Winter storms hit [location]” is news, but not related to politicians unless it talks about steps local politicians are taking to prevent storm damage (which is not necessary for a good article). Or “Physicists find [particle they were looking for].” That one could be in Science rather than here, but it is definitely news, and I personally think it’s hard to shoehorn politics into a discussion of particle physics without losing track of what actually happened. Very few politicians involve themselves in that kind of research (though, to be fair, it might be news if they did).
Whether it’s possible to have a purely apolitical news forum is a different question, and I am sure it’s possible to put a political spin on almost anything if you want, but I just don’t think it’s true that news must be political to be news.
No politics is very subjective. Look at the news from Russia in the last few days. That was highly political, and yet very much news everyone had an interest in. Trump’s ongoing indictment is another political game being played, and yet most want to know about it. It is a difficult one to navigate. Me personally I would say politics that has an effect on the people of a nation is news. Inter-party shenanigans is not news for anyone but those who take an avid interest.
Agreed. Also to be clear, my goal isn’t to suppress this information. My goal is just to make sure the article ends up in the right spot so that the audience that is interested can find it. Example, https://beehaw.org/c/politics
Political news is different from discussions where people take political sides and fall into sparring (at best) or political spin.
“Politics” as a categorization is - like art - subjective and open to interpretation. It’s a rule that can result only in abuse.
Is it subjective, though? Politics is what people do up until someone or a group commits an act of governance, at which point it’s news. Reactions are right back to politics.