Update 1: Thanks for your patience, IRL got in the way. The responses to this post are quite varied, and that makes me happy that we discussed this instead of me unilaterally just banning posts and narrowing our scope. The discussion also helped us uncover ideas I wouldn’t have realised on my own. Thank you all for being a community, and not just in name.
Due to the way online forums work, multiple replies suggesting they’d be happy with my decision whatever it is, and my previous experiences being too bureaucratic in casual communities, I’ve decided to instead make small adjustments which we can extend (or revert) easily if they don’t work.
- I’ve added a kangaroo emoji to draw attention to the community title and to the fact that this is an Australian-themed place
- I’ve added a new rule: “News posts must include some body text explaining how the article is particularly relevant to the Australian perspective, rather than mere global news.”
- Zagorath has offered to create an automated bot to remind posters of that rule. In the meantime, I’ve added them as a moderator to give us an extra pair of hands - although I want to say I’m already satisfied with the admin team’s help, that was reassuring to see.
A user has pointed out that a recent post about the US military doesn’t appear to follow Rule 1 of this community, and I now notice many other recent posts from various users are also straying further and further away from having direct links to our region.
While one can argue that these posts are significant or insightful to Aussies, and I agree, these stories are general world news, for which there are many other communities on federated instances, and which may overshadow the regional-specific news that is unlikely to interest users outside of our region.
I want to begin a conversation to find out whether this community is in support of our team enforcing the rule more strictly, to keep this community in line with it’s unique purpose.
I also propose that news about international conflicts, such as the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war and Middle-Eastern conflicts, should also be considered as general global news unless the news itself specifically discusses the involvement of Australia or another country in our region. While Australia is continuously participating in these conflicts, and while I believe that’s an important political and economic issue for Australians to grapple with, general updates on conflicts we’re involved in are more suited to other global news communities.
I’m also considering adding more staff to this community to help prevent rule-violating posts staying up for hours or days if existing staff are busy, to avoid normalising general world news here and avoid non-community think tank spam from abusing this community.
I haven’t yet locked or deleted existing posts which may violate this rule, even if I believe some cases are clear violations, because I don’t want to suddenly clamp down on posts on a whim when they were normal to post before.
Tagging fellow community staff: @lodion@aussie.zone and [inactive account?] @deadcat@aussie.zone
Tagging all posters from the past month, as this rule affects new posts: @zero_gravitas@aussie.zone @arbilp3@aussie.zone @Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone @maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone @Eyekaytee@aussie.zone @TheHolm@aussie.zone @bpalmerau@aussie.zone
I’m happy to go with what you decide. I’d just say that if you become too narrow there’ll be less posts than there already are. If there were a rule that anyone who posts in overseas news must give a reason in the post’s text why they think the topic is relevant to Australian society, would this rule work? or be useful?
I think it’s a good thing, I wondered something similar after reading itk’s reply where they gave examples of them showing the link.
Would it work? The more time I spend online, I suspect more and more people just aren’t being taught anymore to read the rules of a community before tapping and typing. But perhaps here is different! And it just means we may need to teach newcomers. It’s a small enough community to test that, and I’ve even seen larger subreddits like /r/historymemes enact a similar “explain your post” rule with reasonable success.
As this community is small the teaching process could be helped if when a new member joins a community, they receive a message from one of the mods welcoming them and reminding them of the rules nicely. It will aid in the sense of belonging which so many people are needing these days.
I just had another thought. You could always rename the community ‘Overseas News Relevant to Oz’. That would encapsulate what you are after and be clear at a glance.
That’s a good idea, do you think “Overseas News for Oz 🦘” is clear enough for the title? It’s less exact, so that it can be shorter.
imo it’s not as clear.
How about “OS news apt for Oz” or " OS news - Oz relevant". If we keep playing, we’ll come up with a couple we like and we could ask the Aussie Zone community to choose their fave. Democracy, I say 😆
I suspect most rule violations are probably committed out of ignorance, rather than malice. Most people probably don’t read the sidebar.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be useful to have a very simple filter. A bot that replies to every post, and asks the user to check if they’re following the rule.
Going a step further, the bot could tell the user to downvote the comment if it is following the rule, in which case the bot would delete its own comment. Anything where the OP did not downvote the bot’s comment within, say, an hour, gets removed by the bot. Its message could also (optionally) threaten banning the user if the violation is clear. No automated enforcement of that, but if a human reviews it and finds that not only did it break the rule, but it very obviously did and there’s no excuse for not knowing it, the human could then follow up with a ban.
Would there be any interest in something like that? Either the whole thing or just the first half? I’ve had a little experience developing Lemmy bots before and would be interested to try my hand at it.
I’m interested, I haven’t seen Lemmy helper bots in action yet so I’m curious. Cloudflare might be a problem you’d need to negotiate with the admin.
As you suspect, and I agree, most rule breaking on this site will either be users who’ve skipped over the rules, or have forgotten them when posting quickly. So a simple, nonthreatening reminder should be adequate, without making good-faith users feel uncomfortable. I suggest something like “Thanks for posting. Please review the rules in our sidebar, and then downvote this reply to confirm, otherwise your post may be automatically deleted after an hour. Most importantly, make sure your post body includes an explanation of why this news is relevant to an Australian perspective - you can do this by editing your post if needed.” - it’s snappy, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone who didn’t pay much attention.
I don’t know how necessary this bot will be, but we can make it low-risk of malfunctioning and use it as a low-stakes experiment that other comms can be inspired by, so if you’re itching for a project, then feel welcome!
An hour is a fairly short period of time. 24 hours is probably too long. Something in between those.
If people aren’t intetested in this but you want to try your hand at a bot, I think I could think of something on one of my communities. Maybe a weekly post of National air quality or something on AusEnviro or we could vote on c/rage for a gavourite aus music show that the bot could post each week. Or something else, just spitballin.
The bot would be immediately replying to a post a user has just made. I figure in that context, an hour should be more than enough time for the person who posted it to confirm that they’ve followed the rules.
Honestly, I’d like the seppocentrism rule to be more specific. Unless it’s explicitly related to Australia, I don’t want to see US related news in here at all.
I’ve often used the part of Rule 1 that says ‘If an article isn’t from an Oceanian news outlet’ as a guide. I figured that was in there because if it’s reported by local news outlets then a journalist/editor has considered it of interest to Australians.
While Australia is continuously participating in these conflicts, and while I believe that’s an important political and economic issue for Australians to grapple with, general updates on conflicts we’re involved in are more suited to other global news communities.
I think there’s value in sharing articles that address global events from an Australian perspective, and discussing those events from an Australian perspective.
I’d also say from a more practical standpoint, this community averages less than a post a day. It’s not like we’re being flooded with articles.
I think there’s value in sharing articles that address global events from an Australian perspective, and discussing those events from an Australian perspective.
I completely agree. What I’m on the fence about is whether that article needs to be explicit in that Australian perspective, even if our community can discuss any global event from our perspective. A part of me thinks that the ABC reporting that a powerful world leader on the other side of the globe has died is obviously relevant globally and therefore to Australians, but that a generic ABC article which just announces the event might just lead to generic comments, while an article which explicitly discusses Australia’s relationship with that leader, or Australian reactions to that leader, would provide that Australian perspective.
I’d also say from a more practical. community averages less than a post a day. [snip]
That’s a good point. I may be too enthusiastic with the gavel and risk chilling the community over me being pedantic. And that’s obviously not a good thing.
Yeah, its been a pretty relaxed rule I guess. I’ve always tried to consider it in my posts here, maybe not always successfully though. I’m a bit with Zero_gravitas on this.
But I believe like any market (which is a network ;)) well organised and applied principles determine it’s success. So with that in mind active but not overbearing moderation for the maintenance and ongoing reason of the community is definitely a good thing.
I saw the report this morning, saw that you had already permitted the post to stay up and so I stayed out of it. 🙂
I probably would have removed the post otherwise, but I’m not going to overrule a community mod unless there is a bloody good reason for it. This is what you get when your community is called “worldnews”. Though I believe @arbilp3 is actually Australian. So, I’m not sure it would have made a big difference in this case.
This is what you get when your community is called “worldnews”.
Very true. If the comm users decide we do want to narrow our scope, then I’m open to the idea of archiving this community and recreating it as “overseasnews” - it wouldn’t take much effort and migrating to a new comm is easier done sooner than later when it’s grown more.
I’m also considering adding an attention-grabbing Australian emoji to the comm title (“Overseas News 🦘”, "Overseas News 🇦🇺 ", “Overseas News 🪃”) in the hopes it will make visitors finding it from other instances pause and notice that we’re Australian.
I think the Boomerang and Kangaroo emojis makes it unmistakeable. Afterall we don’t want some Kiwi getting lost coming on to the community thinking its NZ!
If we move to a new community and the intent is not to get spammed by non-Australians, then my advice would be to do something similar to the Rage community.
Keep the word ‘news’ out of the community name so it doesn’t turn up when someone searches for all the news communities to spam to.
I’m not much fussed either way, I’m happy to set up a new community and archive this one if that’s what everyone wants. I’m happy to leave it with the status quo.
Personally, I’d probably go with leaving it and urge everyone to be stricter and report stuff that doesn’t belong. I only check the site a couple of times a day, but I gets reports on my phone and usually respond quickly.
Rule 1 and 2 is what i try to follow posting here solely, I avoid posting about America in general and if i have something that’s just worldnews i post it in my own comm
With just one warhead, China sends a reminder of growing military capacity <- Because we are in the asia pacific so this directly impacts us
Left-leaning Americans are driving the U.S. birth decline, new study finds <- I asked in the body: You reckon the same for us? Because:
Fertility rates in Australia and other advanced economies have been declining since the 1960s. People are becoming parents at a later age, having fewer children when they do, and an increasing number of people forgo having children altogether (either by choice or involuntarily
I do wonder if we also have a left/right split on fertility rates, unfortunately didn’t get the commentary I was expecting
Europe swelters as more heat records set to tumble <- I am fully expecting this for us in our upcoming summer
One in six Britons think growth of Muslim population is ‘threat to UK culture’, study finds <- Wonder what ours is >.> 😅
The reality is that Lemmy is 99% American and almost all content/news that is American gets the engagement
It’s not the busiest comm but it’s up to you
Thanks for the examples, and I think it’s great that you chose to relate some of them to Australia in their post body (e.g. “You reckon the same for us?”) to start a discussion, even if it didn’t get the expected conversation.
The reality is that Lemmy is 99% American and almost all content/news that is American gets the engagement
I’d assume it’s lower, but yes. On the other hand, I assume the majority of users active on aussie.zone are Australian, including users registered on other instances but subscribing to our communities, and that people choosing to use aussie.zone want to see more locally-relevant posts, with the option of using communities on other instances for the international content that all the American users promote to the top. Which is a big part of why I assumed this community should provide a counterpoint, being a place where (e.g.) Australia-Fiji relations have a chance at hitting the front page, which would have no chance in a regular World News comm.
But on the other hand, I do think there’s value in having the kinds of posts you’ve listed to draw comparisons and start locally-relevant discussions. And since this comm isn’t very busy, there isn’t much risk of US-centric content dominating any regional-specific posts.
I agree that US strikes on Iran would be world news, and would be perfectly appropriate for a general world news community, but I don’t agree that they are a fit for Overseas News, as an Aussie-focused community (as our sidebar discusses).
I’m aware that the address of this community is /c/worldnews, unfortunately we can’t change that without recreating the entire community, but we have since rebranded to Overseas News to avoid being redundant and provide a useful space for our regional news, as there are many federated World News communities for users to subscribe to.
