1. youtube as source: not every youtube is bad as a source. But so many get away with lenient standards than other text sources. Most of them lack evidence to support their claims, and use a hearsay as the sole source. So i suggest banning youtube as a source completely. Yes it'd prevent vids that provide sufficient evidence. But youtube is source, it doesn't take long before media outlets make news about it. e.g. 1) "Exposing The Solid State Donut Battery. It's Over." from Ziroth, 2) "216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem" from Gamers Nexus, 3) "Statement by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell" from Federal Reserve. These vids gain attention and generated many articles. So the only downside is missing a niche fact whose popularity was so small that no one made an article about it. Compared to the upside, i will say it's worthy. P.S. Hearsay is not necessarily bad as long as the speaker has built the credibility over time. Youtube vids tend to have no enough credibility compared to news outlets.
2. Recent news: There are dedicated communities for news. i simply don't see the need to see news here. Also, recent facts tend to change, or be misleading or simply false. This place, to me, is a place for facts that will remain as facts and after hundred years. I know it's a subjective opinion but i'll venture to say people, including me, come here(and r/todayilearned) because of these unique and interesting facts from decades ago. I'm not saying they should be from Narnia, the point is the posted facts should be facts interesting as hell that a year later you'll still find interesting. News from last month is a hard no but from two years earlier is acceptable imo. the cutoff must be within them. It's up to debate. I'm here to just say we need a cutoff.

example posts for each problem:

1. TIL there's a secure underground tunnel for celebrities to get to the Oscars, https://lemmy.world/post/51657138 youtube as source, hearsay
2. TIL DJT Jr.’s recent wedding was bankrolled entirely by a Russian oligarch https://lemmy.world/post/51917499 literally a news article from this month; TIL that Elon Musk is buying ads on Instagram. He is urging US voters to check their registration status on his website https://lemmy.world/post/51684579 from this month, from substack but first half can be counted as news.

Lastly, i must confess i made this post after reading one particular post that annoyed me: TIL the name for one of Trump's distraction techniques https://lemmy.world/post/52012223. Thing is, it contains essentially zero new info in the title and it was an unacceptable post to me. Now i know that, unlike reddit, post contents are allowed as well as the link, which provided the info. So i have no problem with it. But i think posts should aim to put the main fact in the title so users can save time and move on. Ofc, who am i to force this.

Reddit TIL has the same news issue, which is probably getting mirrored across to here by bots. The elon post was made by a 1w old account with 80+ posts, draw your own conclusions...

It's from r/todayilearned:

No recent sources. Any sources (blog, article, press release, video, etc.) with a publication date more recent than two months are not allowed.

They shortened it from two years to two months iirc

How would your new rules prevent the post you took offense with? It didn't use YouTube as a source, and it wasn't exactly news, either.

Sorry i should've elaborated on that. It just made me think about rule suggestions and during the process i realized that the post was not a problem other than its title being that.

Alright.

Your proposed rules seem fine to me, I'm a bit surprised that 2. wasn't already part of the comm's rules - seems like a no-brainer.

Yes please. YT isn’t a proper source unless it’s literally the source, for example something like TIL Felix baumgartner jumped from space in xxxx and it’s the actual video.

And yeah I’m sick of the news articles too.

There’s a lot of those around here these days.

We are being "saved"...

i agree with the "no news here".

not so sure about youtube as a source. some youtube videos tend to dig up interesting details from history, i.e. history channels about the medieval ages, or physics. sure, quality of sources can be lacking, but i'd still rather see a somewhat-informed take (which is not fully informed) than to not see the thing at all. i can do additional research on my own. and especially, somewhat true takes are typically less bad as long as they don't talk about politics. people make half-true statements in politics all the time, leaving out essential information to build a narrative and mislead the population, but when e.g. i claim that planets orbit around the sun in almost-circles (actually it's ellipses) then it's not as bad, because it doesn't end up hurting some people, and practically speaking, the approximation is good enough in most cases.

i think that 2 years sounds like a good time limit, btw, in general, e.g. about technology that came out and how it works. (e.g. sodium-ion-batteries)

but i also don't want this to devolve into a politics and celebrities community. i'd rather ban politics and celebrity news than set a fixed time limit.

it could also just be the alt account of somebody who was already here before though.

i think that precisely because it was a no-brainer, everybody just assumed that it didn't need to be written down ...