Since yesterday, Jordanlund is continuing to remove reporting like that from the reputed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_Site_News (article depicted in the screenshot is https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israeli-spy-yoni-koren-stayed-jeffrey-epstein-apartment-ehud-barak) just for being hosted with substack. He is now moderating World News and Politics at lemmy.world.
Yes, legitimate news sites use Blogging platforms, they also use Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and we don't allow those links either.
goodness, that is not the point. That means these outlets post to their own website while also reposting the thing on twitter. In so many cases, their own website uses substack/wordpress! For example, https://time.com/ is the official website of Time magazine, as in the publisher of Time Person of the Year. It uses WordPress, as you can see by going to https://time.com/wp-admin/.
If he wants to target blogspam, he should be targeting things like The Daily Beast and https://www.utubepublisher.in/, which use none of the technologies he's targeting. This ban on CMS technology is arbitrary and does not prevent poor publishing that simply registers a domain, as anyone may register a domain.
Hardly PTB, though. If that's their rule and they're merely enforcing it. More a discussion whether their rules make any sense. But I'm not defending WorldNews and the mods. Just saying either have rules AND enforce them. Or don't make rules in the first place. Anything else is ridiculous.
The powertrip here is less the application of the rule and more the total unwillingness to adapt the rule. It's being used as a tool against legitimate news from legitimate sources. It could be confirmation bias, but I do not recall seeing widespread enforcement of this particular rule by moderators other than Jordan. If that is erroneous, then it's my mistake, but based on that I believe the inclusion of Substack in that list to be Jordan's pet contribution.
If the other mods feel the same way, perhaps they'll make that known.
The problem with adapting the rules is that the community is not a monoculture. If we adapt a rule for one person, then someone else wants a different change and another person wants another change and you end up in an endless cycle of "But what about MEEEEEEEE! You changed it for THEM!'
The whole point of moderation is that SOMEONE has to have a spine and tell people "No." Unfortunately telling people no is not popular.
I've done a fair bit of IRL and online moderation, this is a slippery slope argument and simply does not happen. Unless your referring to a natural evolution of a community, in which case the rules should serve the community and not the other way around.
While I agree it's important to maintain a core goal/theme and modding is like steering a thankless pirate ship of sodomy, when saying No that No should support what the community needs.
Note/FYI about Jordan. They are a massive asshole anywhere whenever they are questioned. Especially when evidence is shown that they are the one in the wrong, or in times substack is brought up, change until it fits what they want.
Even better is when they can't even follow their own comms rules and are questioned🙃
We're already seeing it happen, the idea is to keep it from getting worse. 😉 The instant you start playing favorites with Substack blogs it will be why x but not y ad infinitum.
So it's either allow all of it, including the garbage and bullshit, or block all of it.
Mods are volunteers, we aren't paid to deal with "but why did you block my site and not theirs?" So we block all of it from certain sources.
I am a mod, like I said.
Do you mean that people complain or that they ask questions? Because "why that blog and not this one" is a reasonable question for a user to ask.
A general rule about quality and misinformation gives you precedent to remove content that doesn't meet your criteria. And, let's face it, world news allows borderline tabloids that routinely publish misinformation so that bar is low.
You're right, being a mod isn't paid. You can stop whenever you want if you don't like answering questions.
You aren't a mod in !world@lemmy.world 😉
I mod other communities and similarly don't have these problems. World is unique due to the size and the heated opinions (notably Gaza and Ukraine).
Did you have an opinion on my comments, or did you just see an easy opening with "you aren't a mod of world?" and take the jab? Never said I was a mod there.
World's size and genre don't have anything to do with my comments, and it's hard to believe users are as bad as you say when you still mod a bunch of big communities. Kind of infantilizing the way you talk about people in the comments, too.
If I'm wrong, I'm down with hearing why.
So, are they complaining, suggesting, or asking for clarity? And, like I said, World already allows poor journalism, so the ban on substack isn't really quality control.
It's very simple, World users break the rules, get modded, and run screaming to PTB.
Citation? This entire thread. It's a unique animal different from others that I mod or you mod.
Again, partly due to the size, but partly due to the heated nature of the content.
People want, really want, to be the first to post something, even if it's a supremely shitty source or outside the bounds of the community. It gets modded and the reaction is "How dare you!"
Yeah, how dare I mod a community, fuck me, right?
Just tonight, I pulled one about Trump wanting to cancel the 2026 elections. Sorry, goes in !news@lemmy.world or !politics@lemmy.world , not World.
But man, people will stretch and scream to make their point. Then the reaction is "Well, I don't like your rules, change them." How about "No." Don't like the rules? Go somewhere else. LOL.
This isn't the only platform I've had to moderate a community. I've had far more difficulty in IRL spaces where people can not only complain to my face, but through throwaway accounts and emails. I'm not speaking from a lack of experience.
I can see why the news brings in some heated arguments, especially a community as big as world. Mine are small, yet I see disproportionate drama (and the occasional angry dm) about headlines and my rare mod actions.
I can even relate to the difficulty treading the line with the rule on internal american news.
But again, this reads like you really hate the users. People aren't running and screaming here, especially not in this post — It's someone with a legitimate concern and a reasoned argument, and, with as big a ship as World, people are going to have ideas about how to steer it. Opinions and questions aren't the same as an indignant "how dare you," framing it that way is disingenuous and speaks to how you view the people here. They're not a amorphous blob of hate, some are just folks wanting a honest conversation.
Oh, no, I don't hate the users in general. There are SPECIFIC users I hate, like that one asshole who comes out of nowhere with a new account, posts a dozen times, and deletes their account over and over and over again.
I would say, of the mod actions I take, maybe 1 in 100 becomes a problem? Most people either take it like a grown up and move on with life or actually apologize and do better.
But man, that 1 in 100...
I find it difficult to hate anyone one here. We're all just trying to make sense of the world. I share stories of the small minority with my drama loving friends, so it's a positive in the end.
In this situation, it's an obviously engaged user who genuinely wants to know more. I like people who are passionate about something enough to not only spend energy thinking about it, but think about ways to improve things. Those are valuable users who shouldn't be dissuaded from sharing their ideas.
Speaking of that 1 in 100... PM tonight... Dude had a comment removed for referencing a "final solution", another mod banned them, I get this:
I don't know what you're trying to say here. That people suck on the internet? You do get that we're all in this cursed place together, right?
I'm not gonna pull a "eat because starving kids in Africa" because folks who threaten to burn down someone's house are a bad time for everyone, but I've been getting rape threats since I was on the internet. You get shit for being a mod, half the population gets shit for being women. We all get shit for some reason or another.
That person sucks and that situation sucks but you don't have my sympathy for it.
No, I'm saying that 99/100 times moderation is just administrata, but man, that 1/100 case...
Crazy.
You seem to bring this up every time someone asks about this. It doesn't have to be an endless cycle of whining. It is not difficult to establish some kind of community-curated list of legitimate journalistic substacks that have bona fide journalistic teams and mastheads. It might actually be less work for you to do that instead of having to copy paste the same canned infantilizing response every other week.
It's already an endless cycle of whining. 😉 What I'm saying is we drew the line. As soon as we open that door to "some Substacks but not others" it will be an endless drama of "You're biased!" and "You're a Zionist!" and "Well you're a Nazi!"
No, just... NO. The only fair way to do it is what we've done. No blogs. If you want a community full of crappy blogposts, youtube videos, and low effort shitposting, nothing is stopping anyone from creating one.
I get that. Unfortunately the Threadiverse is designed with almost no option to handle mods who don't listen or push weird agendas. Except one: to vote with our feet. In other words, leave said community. I already did that (a long time ago.) I wish we had more comfortable ways to address it, or let the community members shape their rules. But we sadly don't have that.
I mean the entire design of Lemmy was just Reddit + "implement vote with feet feature". It seems effective and I don't really see what's wrong with it. Listening to the community is supposed to be the admins' job.
And this particular mod has caused more than one mass exodus IIRC. Dot world admin DGAF.
I mean they didn't care when a top level mod (who also wanted to promote flat earth on .world) said that being pro-palestine was antisemitic.
Ohhhh the flat earth stuff was crazy times. lololol
I'm amazed he's still in power after that but seeing as Jordanlund is in power, it's impressive.
There’s really no difference between reddit and Lemmy other than more opportunity for moreauthoritarian censor-heavy mods and admins. The “vote with your feet” didn’t work on Reddit and it doesn’t work here, since 99% of people are just lurkers who go where the majority and “defaults” are.
On Reddit anyone can make a new sub, but it virtually never works now matter how bad the original gets.
i say it does. firstly it aesthetically pleases me that the new subs here don’t have to take on increasingly bizarre names. secondly there’s so many examples of alternative commags here. the most successful one has been 196->onehundredninetysix. and even then you have things like !usa@midwest.social for all the news commags and so on and so forth. everything receives a lot of comments here so it’s really no big deal that you’re not getting hundreds of upvotes
reddit also just hasn’t been fun unlike here