Speak up now: What should our community guidelines be?
Hello everyone! If you have not yet seen it, @ernest has handed over moderation to @Drusas@Entropywins @ Frog-Brawler (the tag system consistently messes up the link to FB's username lol) and myself here in !politics.
First order of business is for you all to weigh in on the community guidelines that you would like to see here. As the mod team, we will weigh all suggestions and then add them to the side bar as magazine/community rules. I'm going to give about 48 hours for users to see this thread and add a comment or discuss.
Please know that the goal is not to create an echo chamber here in !politics, but we want to ensure that there is not an encroachment of rage bait and toxicity. It brings down the quality of the magazine and it discourages community engagement.
For the time being, the mod tools are pretty sparse, so I want to manage expectations about the scope of moderation we're able to do right now. For now, our touch will be light. Expect increased functionality as time progresses, though. We have 3 weeks of reports on file, so please know we see them. Give us some time to establish how to handle those before you start to see any movement.
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.
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.
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 think we may need to stipulate and employ the use of badges (similar to submission flair from reddit) so that users can use kbin QoL userscripts to filter out content they don't want.
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.