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.
Politics
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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.
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.
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.