I’m with a lot of people here on opinion pieces. Those are often not even based on facts and rarely provide any actual valuable discussion. So those should be either monitored more closely to only let serious substantial opinions through, or simply barred from appearing here.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Other discussions in this thread have highlighted reputable sources of content. This can include NYT opinions and news, but would never permit content from OANN.
I hope this addresses the concern about opinion/editorial content.
It does, thanks. I have nothing against reputable sources. Just wanted to chime in about filtering/moderating that type of content in general.
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I've found that some sites have much higher quality opinion pieces than others. For example, opinion pieces on Politico and even MSNBC tend to have a lot of factual back information included for the reader. Do we want to allow those sorts of articles?
I say yes provided that reliable/reputable media outlets are the distributor.
We can't cut the pie so fine, though. Like that NYT opinion piece from Justice Roberts was garbage, but still deserves platform here imo
I mentioned this elsewhere, but for an op-ed, the important factor is the author, not the publication. Can we somehow bubble up op-ed authorship and reactor accordingly?
E.g. John Solomon had a good run making it all the way to WSJ and NYT op-eds before being fired.
I would like to see a clear delineation between News articles and Opinion pieces, even if it's just as simple as asking folks to put News: or Opinion: in the thread title.
To add to this, opinion articles should indicate the author. The publisher of an op-ed is mostly irrelevant and I feel like a lot of political pundits get a free pass by hiding behind publication titles.
Yeah, I see your viewpoint on this.
The only reason why I'm still leaning towards the litmus test being on the news sites versus the author is because the legal teams at NYT are not going to permit "freedom of the press" to be the fig leaf covering a very poor piece of writing, even from opinion pieces.
I'm willing to see the counterexamples, but this is based on my experience as a journalist back in the day.
Having said that, I do think that a poor writer could communicate a lot of bad takes and still get printed. The issue really only comes up when a writer makes baseless claims - it now opens the door for lawsuits against the publisher.
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Any chance we can require a secondary comment be posted with article in text form? Lots of these sites are paywalled and I can't see the articles. There was usually some kind soul or tldr bot to post the article in the comments on /r/politics.
Good idea
When I did a bit of moderation elsewhere in the past, my own rule was "no personal attacks." More to the point, "Please attack ideas as vigorously - and even as angrily - as you like. Even if I think you're wrong. But as soon as you cross over into attacking the person you're arguing with, you're done."
I think this would also cover the Nazi problem that @EffectivelyHidden mentions: "Being a Nazi/white supermacist/fascist" is an attack on other people.
It's good to see such a consensus on this matter.
I updated the sidebar with preliminary guidelines last night! 😄
Maybe my threshold for shit is higher than normal, but my hope is that comments won't be removed but will be allowed to be downvoted into oblivion. At least when it comes to what could be considered a "political opinion." Of course there is a subjective line somewhere where a statement crosses from "political" to just "hate." But if a post is political, my hope would be that it gets to stand and be upvoted or downvoted, no matter how shit it might be.
I pretty strongly disagree with that one for this reason.
When it comes to fascists, white supremacists, and their ilk, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.
I'm seeing pretty broad support for not even tolerating even an inch from this camp, so I'm sure this will come out in the moderation rules.
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