Reddit

I disagree. I think upvotes/downvotes being public contribute overall to a high-trust culture. Mods absolutely can be stupid about it and ban people for single downvotes, but some people really do mass downvote entire communities and/or spin up alternative accounts purely to downvote.

Did you ever happen to check your overall Reddit reputation using 3rd party sites?

I strongly suspect that Reddit runs such an internal service, which brings up some implications. One idea being that borderline users are probably seen as 'no big loss,' while valued contributors have more rope to play with. That's all just speculation of course, but there are plenty of people who've commented along the lines of 'I barely said anything objectionable and yet they permabanned me just like that!'

Not trying to imply that was your deal, but it does make me wonder. Sort of like the old trope of "everyone in prison being innocent." I've never seen someone in these communities actually say 'yeah, they banned me, and I probably deserved it.'

Face it... YouTube is the new media, while old media has been enshitifying itself for the last few decades. Even previously trusted sources like Washington Post and NYT have really gone downhill over the past 5 years.

Shows like Last Night Tonight and some of the other late night TV shows, broadcast important political issues to the general public, those are now in jeopardy because old media doesn't fucking like it when they are called out, or they call out their Dear Leader Trump. And you know what? The best place where those ideas get broadcasted is not on TV... it's YouTube!

Here’s a video link I removed yesterday:

Good for you. You did some research and discovered it's has ties to a batshit crazy website.

FORTUNATELY, the rule forbidding video content means that I, as a moderator, don’t have to do a deep dive in conspiracy bullshit to remove a post. Videos are not allowed. Full stop. They do not pass the bar.

Booo! Fuck your rule. It's a shit rule. Political discourse has shifted to new mediums, and your fucking rules are stuck in the past.

If we allowed video, moderators would have to review each and every one picking winners and losers and the result would be some mods removing videos they didn’t like and keeping the videos they did like…

You mean you have to review and moderate posts? Just like you read and moderate comments? Wow! Holy shit! You're already picking winners and losers. You're just spouting off excuses.

Create a goddamn blacklist or something. You obviously don't accept every single news source in your posts. You already have a blacklist of some sort. Surely you're not allowing news posts from conservativegrandpa.americaneagle.ru or any of the other tinfoil hat nutjobs.

Oh yeah, you just said: "they would be removed for being a bunch of tinfoil hat nutjobs and not actual news." So, you're already filtering. You're already picking winners and losers.

Your rule and reasoning is hypocritical. Embrace new media and take out the shitty rule.

How far into c/pol will I have to dig to find an article where it's actually just an embedded video in an "article", where the entirety of the article is the headline and the embedded video, which is actually a YouTube link?

I appreciate the points about the balance of effort regarding moderation but the point which you aren't engaging with is that media and communication have adapted but the moderation approaches haven't. And that creates a kind of implicit bias which can and does allow for a form of editorial manipulation of content. It bakes it into the structure of the community.

This is why communities like World and Politics require links to news articles that have some form of editorial oversight.

I completely support this and always have, but we exist in a landscape of completely changing conditions. Dropsite news now has a far stronger and more reliable commitment to the truth and to their own editorial policies than CNN. And I think they (dropsite) use a software for publication which you've decided makes them a blog, they get put on the naughty list, whereas several legacy media companies have become outright state propaganda outlets (CNN, fox, anything the Ellisons get their fingers on..). The result of the moderation policy which is effectively that anything built in new media isn't allowed, is that only legacy sources get regarded as "news" , even if they don't even follow their own editorial policies or have rewritten them to be appease a figurehead like Trump

The point is that a platform, or a medium, or the presence of an editorial policy isn't sufficient to decide if something is news or isn't news. For something to be news it actually has to have an editorial policy and engage with that policy. Being legacy media doesn't immediately qualify to that standard and but being new media doesn't preclude it either.

Take the recent hit piece on Platner in the NYT. It would meet the qualifications for c/politics. But it wouldn't meet NYTs own editorial standards of journalism were they to actually enforce them.

I don't want to disregard or ignore the labor of moderation and yes rules need to be sweeping and evenly applied. But it's also clear that the current policy is anachronistic at best. Probably, as a community, message boards like Lemmy need to be thinking more broadly about how community rules are implemented and applied. Something like a red-yellow-green list for disapproved, pending, and 'approved' sources. And we've had that conversation before, about not wanting to maintain an approved list. But it's 2026. It's not out of reach where something could be built into a community where the community it's self could maintain the list via voting.

I'm not bringing this up to badger, but I want to engage the point that the current moderation policies don't effectively select for news content which is factual and consistent without the an editorial standard, but rather for what has traditionally been identified as legacy media based on format, and that more broadly, a format based approach will always suffer this kind of failing.