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.
My goal is to foster thoughtful discussion in our community, and not let this place be a replica of r/politics.
First order of business, immediate rule change.
On [email protected], effectively immediately, we will no longer restrict political discussion to the politics of the United States of America. Discussion regarding of the state of politics from around the world is now welcome.
I will leave this pinned for 1-2 weeks for our team to take feedback and make our proposals then.
I’d love to see the removal, or culling of op-ed pieces. It’s not news.
Given the removal of the US only restriction here, I am hoping that we can use [email protected] as a place that allows for analysis and op-eds, and keep [email protected] as the place that does not allow op-eds and focus solely on world news.
Right, but removing the US only restriction leaves no community that allows validated news only. Nowadays, op-eds are about as close to dis-informative fake news as one can get. It’d be nice to have a Reuters’esque-based non-biased news source here.
I disagree strongly. The arguments and rhetoric that politicians and pundits throw at each other is a huge part of the political process in a democracy with liberal speech rights.
Besides that, basically every political movement starts out as opinion. Like, “Hey, I don’t think the king has divine rights and he ought to be forced to listen to us a bit,” isn’t an objective fact, it’s an opinion. A great opinion if you ask me and one I would fight for in 19th century Europe or whatever, but I can’t give you any tangible measurable thing that conclusively proves that that’s the way it ought to be. I just have a really strongly felt opinion about it.
News communities shouldn’t have any op-ed pages, but politics pages are exactly where those kinds of articles belong imo.