Happy Friday :)
I thought I might get a bit of feedback from everyone here on what the guidelines for posting in the news-related subs should be.
So far, all I’ve put in the sidebar is that things should be text post, or a link to a reputable source. Everyone seems happy for now, which is great. But I’m sure eventually this will become a discussion, so good to get things in the ground ahead of time.
Edit: This post was supposed to go on !ukpolitics, but I got the community wrong. There isn’t anything in the sidebar of !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk right now 🙃
Sources
As my history teacher would drill into me, Primary, Secondary, Reliability, Bias.
These might be a good way to work out which sources we’d like to see here, and what constitutes “reputable”.
Or possibly a flow of which source to prefer (for example, if it’s only posted on some random site, perhaps see if BBC/Sky/Guardian/Reuters/Independent/FT/Telegraph have a similar article before posting)
We could also do a breakdown of which sources are good/bad for what, and why.
This chart gives a fairly good way to classify sources. Apologies, there are a lot of non-uk sources in there.
Type of content
Links to sensible, sourced news sites, obviously a good thing.
Imho, text post discussions with clear titles to start sensible discussions are a good thing to have. Engagement-bait, not so much.
Editorial content, maybe, so long as it’s clear what it is.
Primary sources, where appropriate seem sensible.
Twitter, Mastodon, et al.
Youtube, I’m less keen on. Though thoughts are appreciated.
Link aggregation sites, no.
Follow the links through to their source if you like, and post that.
Titles
Try not to editorialise. If the original title is a little wordy, try to keep in the spirit of the original when editing.
Multiple posts
When news breaks, it’s exciting, and everyone wants to post.
This can mean discussions getting fragmented.
If possible, have a scan of the community first to make sure it’s not already here, and if it is, try to only post when the additional source adds something new.
Honestly, while we’re this size, I’m happy to let the voting system let things rise and fall. This might have to change down the line. Possibly linked to source preference?
I’m assuming that we’ll get similar moderation tools to forums, so we can move discussions to different communities on this instance and/or merge them together.
So, for example, with the Thames Water collapse, you’ve just rename the first post on it to something generic and then merge others into that.
Until then, we’ll just have to expect for things to be a bit messy.