Hi there.
A short introduction: This is an alt account. I’m a moderator here who has been unhappy with the state of news/political discussions here for a long time. The admins have kindly given me the opportunity to see if we can make some improvement the community here.
We will be doing some major revision of the rules left by the previous moderators and will use discussions in this thread as feedback on the direction we should take our community.
This will be an open discussion on the state of our community, the rules and our moderation practices. Feel free to give your inputs.
MBFC seems like a good minimum standard. I find it usually comes into play as a rule when someone is posting propaganda or sensationalism from fringe websites.
If a story is not being reported in any better quality source then maybe it’s just not factual and newsworthy?
I would prefer a whitelist rather than a blacklist because there are so many low quality “news” blogs out there. But it still begs the question of who will choose and how they will make the decision. It risks placing a big burden on the mods, a lot of unnecessary bans for arguing with mods about decisions that they maybe shouldn’t be in the position to make.
Why pit the users and mods against each other unnecessarily and risk creating an echo chamber rather than a news aggregator. I trust people here to find and elevate interesting stories that I wouldn’t get from just, say, an RSS feed. I would guess that’s a big reason a lot of people follow.