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These are the old rules on voats /v/news:

  1. Must Be Recent: News should not be older than 30 days at the time of submission. If the article is directly relevant to today, it will be allowed.

  2. Submission Titles: User-editorialized titles are subject to deletion. State only the facts, not opinions or speculation. Do not use ALL-CAPS. If a submission is removed and rule two is cited, re-title the article and post it again.

  3. No Image Posts: Submissions must be articles or videos that depict news.

  4. No Social Media Links: Personal Blog Posts, Wiki Entries, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This includes links to Reddit. Please use /v/meanwhileonreddit.

  5. No Paywalls: The link must be easily accessible, without signing up or spending money. Please use an archive for known paywall sites or include one in the comments section.

  6. No URL Shorteners or Redirects: Link directly to the article. Archive links are allowed.

  7. Please translate non-English articles: Use Google Translate in the link or post the translation in the comments.

Please Be Civil: Arguing is fine as we all have differing opinions, but please respect each other.


Feel free to give input, I will give my own in the comments as well.

These are the old rules on voats /v/news: 1. Must Be Recent: News should not be older than 30 days at the time of submission. If the article is directly relevant to today, it will be allowed. 2. Submission Titles: User-editorialized titles are subject to deletion. State only the facts, not opinions or speculation. Do not use ALL-CAPS. If a submission is removed and rule two is cited, re-title the article and post it again. 3. No Image Posts: Submissions must be articles or videos that depict news. 4. No Social Media Links: Personal Blog Posts, Wiki Entries, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This includes links to Reddit. Please use /v/meanwhileonreddit. 5. No Paywalls: The link must be easily accessible, without signing up or spending money. Please use an archive for known paywall sites or include one in the comments section. 6. No URL Shorteners or Redirects: Link directly to the article. Archive links are allowed. 7. Please translate non-English articles: Use Google Translate in the link or post the translation in the comments. Please Be Civil: Arguing is fine as we all have differing opinions, but please respect each other. ------------------------------------ Feel free to give input, I will give my own in the comments as well.

21 comments

[–] [Deleted] 4 points (+4|-0)

Rule 2 caused about 90% of the problems in /v/news. I would suggest a change from "User-editorialized titles are subject to deletion" to "User-edited titles are subject to deletion".

ie just cut and paste the title from the original article. User-editorialized creates a grey area about what is editorialisation and what isn't which immediately leads to accussations of bias by mods if they enforce the rule.

[–] Violentlight 4 points (+4|-0)

I agree with this. Any rule that put the onus on me to decide as a mod, I fucking hated it. Obviously, everything can't be black and white. But I would love to get it as close as fucking possible.

If someone is copy/pasting an original title that is editorialized. It just shows some of the bias of the article right from the title.

I like the copy/paste original title idea.

[–] THC 3 points (+3|-0) Edited

I think that historical news articles if they are interesting and factual should be allowed. I don't think they would take away or obscure real news stories as those would naturally become hot topics. One could always create a historical news sub, but imho it would be fine by me if there were really good news articles or archives of interesting or informative news in this sub.

[–] Ventus [OP] 6 points (+6|-0)

Thing is these can severely distort the actual news going on. I've seen this on voat a few times where ppl post an article of 2014, users who only skim the titles upvote it en masse (cause its anti muslim). And all of a sudden it seems like it just happened and is actual news to people coming to the sub.

My view is to create a recent Newsfeed where you can pickup recent events. People can find the context in replies and post older articles there to react to current situations.

One could always create a historical news sub, but imho it would be fine by me if there were really good news articles or archives of interesting or informative news in this sub.

I like this idea a lot, sort of an in depth "behind the news" kinda sub with more context offered

[–] THC 5 points (+5|-0)

Yeah, I am familiar with that bullshit, and pointed it out several times over there, but by then the specials had taken it as fact and relevant and moved on. It's probably best that it's kept in a current format.

[–] jidlaph 2 points (+2|-0)

What about a separate sub ("olds"?) that posts news from the past that is relevant to today?

[–] registereduser 1 points (+1|-0)

Also there are times when historical news articles are very much relevant to current events.

It can be very interesting to show contrast or to show history repeating itself.

[–] PMYA 2 points (+2|-0)

Thoughts on rules

  1. Must Be Recent: News should not be older than 30 days at the time of submission. If the article is directly relevant to today, it will be allowed.

@THC and @Ventus had some comments on this. I think we should allow older news articles, but make people write the date of the article in the title if it is more than a month old. There are some instances where old news becomes relevant again, so it doesn't make sense to completely disallow it.

  1. Submission Titles: User-editorialized titles are subject to deletion. State only the facts, not opinions or speculation. Do not use ALL-CAPS. If a submission is removed and rule two is cited, re-title the article and post it again.

Everyone should copy and paste the original article title. This is one thing that Reddit got right and Voat got wrong.

  1. No Image Posts: Submissions must be articles or videos that depict news.

I think this is a good rule. However, in exceptional circumstances (such as someone being in the middle of a "happening" and posting photos of it) images should be allowed. There are a lot of instances of highly upvoted posts being deleted on Reddit because they don't exactly fit into the ruleset, but if we make exceptions like this, it won't happen as often.

  1. No Social Media Links: Personal Blog Posts, Wiki Entries, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This includes links to Reddit. Please use /v/meanwhileonreddit.

Keep this rule, but have something similar to rule #3. In the event of a happening, let people post social media links because it is often the only way to figure out what is really going on in a situation that unfolds too fast for media outlets to keep up.

  1. No Paywalls: The link must be easily accessible, without signing up or spending money. Please use an archive for known paywall sites or include one in the comments section.

Yes.

  1. No URL Shorteners or Redirects: Link directly to the article. Archive links are allowed.

Yes.

  1. Please translate non-English articles: Use Google Translate in the link or post the translation in the comments.

Yes.

Please Be Civil: Arguing is fine as we all have differing opinions, but please respect each other.

I would like to keep this on the sidebar. Clearly it did not do wonders on Voat, but it is nice to have it there anyway.

Thoughts on /s/News mods and mods in general

Make sure the people modding the important defaults know how to moderate. It does not matter how much content they submit, and being able to tell when a post is breaking sidebar rules is not everything. A lot of drama and bad modding could have been avoided on Voat and on Reddit if the mods were good at looking at posts on a case by case basis. Clearly there are some posts which definitely should be removed, but sometimes a post will be made that sits in a grey area.

I think we would benefit from finding the middle ground between Reddit and Voat. Reddit moderators remove far too many posts and stick to the rules too much. Voat mods are either non existent or there are basically no rules left on the defaults because a certain "free speech" group took them away.

[–] jidlaph 2 points (+2|-0) Edited

However, in exceptional circumstances (such as someone being in the middle of a "happening" and posting photos of it) images should be allowed.

We could probably create a Happening megathread for that discussion.

I think we would benefit from finding the middle ground between Reddit and Voat. Reddit moderators remove far too many posts and stick to the rules too much. Voat mods are either non existent or there are basically no rules left on the defaults because a certain "free speech" group took them away. I'm concerned that maybe the reddit/voat model of moderation doesn't adequately encourage quality curation, but I can't think of what a more appropriate alternative would look like.

[–] PMYA 1 points (+1|-0)

We could probably create a Happening megathread for that discussion.

I like this. Something like Reddit live would be very helpful for this. Polsaker has actually mentioned making PMs into instant messaging between users, so perhaps something similar to Reddit live could be implemented without too much hassle.

I can't think of an alternative to the current moderation model either. It is the only way to do it on these sites, unless we can come up with some magical AI that sorts through posts and weeds out the spam.

[–] [Deleted] 2 points (+2|-0)

Just an idea - how about a no YouTube rule?

My thinking is that this would be a good way to combat the idiots who spam their youtube channels all over /v/news.

We could have a seperate TVnews sub for people who wanted to post videos?

[–] Ventus [OP] 2 points (+2|-0)

I like this. I saw voat had a liveleak, a youtube blog and an opinion piece without source on the top of /v/news in the last 24 hours.

[–] Ventus [OP] 2 points (+2|-0)

I would change #4 to include official twitter sources. Posts would prefferably need to supply a context or side article in the comments to.

My reasoning:

  • yes twitter is a valid news source

  • Context is needed though to form a complete news story. This is to prevent random tweets spamming (Trump just whiped his ass!! etc etc)

[–] TheRedArmy 3 points (+3|-0)

I concur with this reasoning. While less relevant to news, reliable sports reporters and the like often tweet out things much earlier than an official report will happen.

[–] [Deleted] 2 points (+2|-0)

Although I understand your reasoning again this creates a difficult grey area. If you allow one twitter feed it is a lot more difficult to disallow the barking conspiritard twitter that gets posted next.

[–] Violentlight 3 points (+3|-0)

I don't use twitter. I hate twitter. But it appears that for at least the next 4 years, news from the president of the US is going to be using it to make announcements. So I think twitter has to be allowed as a source of news.

@Ventus

[–] jidlaph 1 points (+1|-0)

Well is the Tweet news or is it just the subject of news? Every Trump tweet that makes the 'news' will be printed verbatim, and we don't a direct feed to generic "Thank you $STATE for helping us #MAGA"-style tweets in /s/News.

I do think it would be entirely appropriate, however, for /s/politics to allow tweets from politicians.

[–] Polsaker 1 points (+1|-0)

Please use /v/meanwhileonreddit

use /v/meanwhileonreddit

/v/meanwhileonreddit

/v/

[–] registereduser 0 points (+1|-1)

User-editorialized titles are subject to deletion.

Retarded.

No Social Media Links:

Questionable. Most 'news' links that adhere to this rule on sites like reddit/voat are nothing more than a handful of comments and a page full of copied twitter posts.

Besides, the platform is not what makes it news or not. It is the content that makes it news or not.

Lastly let's not forget that we now have a president who directly addresses the people via Twitter instead of filtering a bunch of bullshit through fake 'news' agencies like all the other lying ass politicians.

Please use an archive

No.