In my opinion.

It's fine, but it's too common in online communities (including Lemmy) and it discourages people from posting their original thoughts or events that they find important and relevant, since something needs to come from a 'real news source' or an 'online article'.

I can make a website right now and call it "The Daily Pragmatist" or some shit and people won't bat an eye.

Reality also is that many reach conclusions based on titles alone anyhow. I can't see how it would be worse, since the body of the post is always going to be a tad more accessible than opening a new website. And we see how little people want to work to gather their knowledge, on the whole.

I get removing crappy content, but what about when thoughts are backed up with sources and opinions are relevant to overall discussion?

And separately, what's up with aversion to 'non-standard' forms of expression? I would argue that something like the show 'The Rehearsal' by Nathan Fielder, is an equally valid way to deliver real and important news to people. I wouldn't be alone in this sentiment.

Imo this shit is busted and dumb.

Edit: for those that agree in part or in whole, if you have the bandwidth for it, consider making your own community! Lemmy is still relatively small and your local instance might be even more so. It's not impossible to get a community going, and if it fails - oh well!

Most of the ones with article requirements also have rules about source reliability/reputation so your idea about making a new site to post your thoughts and linking to that wouldn't work for long.

It would still gain traction before somebody noticed. And what does that say about the community?

Do they agree with the content of your 'fake' site?
Do they just want to hear something they agree with regardless of the source?

I totally get your point. It's still busted and dumb.

I strongly agree.

I find personal viewpoints way more interesting to read and easier to relate to. And I'd also like to post more of my own, but it doesn't seem to be the 'done thing' for some reason, which is off-putting. I don't know if there is a genuine thought-out reason for this on the part of moderators, or whether it's some kind of unconscious internet tradition 🤷

It's a missed opportunity for connection between people.

I never really thought about this. What are some examples of communities that require an article that you think would be better if they didn't?

/c/technology in lemmy.world

That's one example

Subconsciously engrained way of doing things, I think you've hit the nail on the head!

Huge proportion of people here came from Reddit, and I guess it's easier to do things the way we're comfortable with. But that seems antithetical to the spirit and purpose of Lemmy and the Fediverse

I don't think that it's a problem to have news-only communities. It's easy enough to create communities that do do original content, and if people want that, then they can subscribe to it.

I'm new to piefed, I'm wondering why I don't have a downvote option?

Yeah that's what I meant to express by saying "it's fine".

Moderators are free to moderate as they please, just as I am free to think it's a largely widespread and pervasive problem overall.

Totally a place for 'news-only' communities which enforce certain websites or articles, but my point stands!

I'm not sure because I don't use piefed, but at least on Lemmy you can definitely downvote. Maybe try downvoting from another app or desktop?

Some piefed instances turn it off -- iirc piefed.blahaj.zone does as well. Piefed the software supports it, but maybe rimu turned it off for the default instance? I still can downvote from my instance.

Thank you, I will have a look in settings, it's needed because "Imo this shit is busted and dumb."

As in, you're quoting me because you think my post's content is busted and dumb? Or do you dislike that I said that?

I'm on piefed.social, seemed a logical option, I did find it odd that out of the box they have lemmy.ml and quokk.au blocked, couldn't find out why, feel like I don't know something that others know

I have a lemmy.zip account as well, but it has been hitting errors recently, so I thought I would try piefed

I went into settings, deselected 'federate votes' then looked it up to see what it means... and reselected it, didn't change anything else, didn't find anything that appeared to be to do with downvotes, but now I can downvote, for no apparent reason.

Yes

To be fair, the majority of articles these days are also busted, often deliberately so.

I quite like quokk.au, especially their sports community; I don't really recall why rimu is beefing with them, though I have a vague recollection that I thought it was somewhat overwrought. I don't think you're really missing out being defederated from lemmy.ml though. Most of all, though, I think you should avoid default instances whenever possible.

Gotcha.

Hope you enjoy piefed, I learned about it shortly after joining lemmy.ca, and while I liked the look of it I just haven't had a reason I've seen to make another move.

The comment section is a great place to post your well thought out and sourced opinions. I'd rather read the source up front in the post and then get opinions from strangers in the comments than the other way around.

my lemmy account is only 3 months old, I have no knowledge of the politics/squabbles between the instances, or even a decent understanding oh how it all works, so far it seems to integrate weirdly/awkwardly.

I only have about 30 subscriptions, 1/3 of them are slrpunk, with .ml, and .world making up a large portion of the remainder, that will no doubt change over time.

It bothers me about how news/article-centric Lemmy is in general.

It's definitely the case the fediverse requires a lot of specific, technical knowledge to really grasp, and that the onboarding story for new users is pretty confusing, especially since the most significant decision you make (what instance to host your account on) is the first decision you make, before you even see any content. It's a problem I've been thinking about for many years, and still haven't found a good solution for. Other some bland reassurances that "you'll get the hang of it eventually," all I can say is that every time I talk about instances, it feels like the scene from Mean Girls where Lindsay Lohan's new friends explain the various high school cliques.

Posting news articles is low effort and just perpetuates the propaganda game. I would be supportive of pushing news to their own communities, or even a toggle to hide all common 'news' site links, to help get back to dialogue about topics not defined by a newscycle.

Do they? the sources on most news here are extremely low quality. I can't count the amount of times ive read the article then read the reference material and it completely goes against what the article claims.

Had that one in mind myself. I wanted to post a thread when Xcancel/Nitter shut down for good (it was initially announced they would close it due to being sued by Twitter, then they reopened for a few days, and closed again). There was no news articles about it at the time, so there was nothing to link to, even though many users would find it worth knowing about.

In general I suspect that community is undermoderated.

I respectfully disagree.

If you want a place to discuss opinions, that’s what comments sections are for. Or communities dedicated to discussion.

But news communities are generally rooted in facts. For current news, that means sourced, methodological journalism. Discussion stems from facts

I can make a website right now and call it “The Daily Pragmatist” or some shit and people won’t bat an eye.

This is one of the worst issues plaguing Lemmy, IMO. People post stuff from outright tabloids, random Tweet screenshots, and those kind of websites Wikipedia will outright reject as a source. This is a huge problem, but it means that communities should be more rigorous about information hygiene, TBH. They need to be stricter about what is allowed as source.

Reality also is that many reach conclusions based on titles alone anyhow.

I hate this too. But to fight it, I think Lemmy needs to steal the “community correction” thing Twitter does, so people would see community consensus right below the headline.

And I am very serious about this. I will die on this hill.

I’m not saying more discussion spaces shouldn’t exist, that’s great; but news communities should be for news.

Honestly... I have gotten close to deleting my Lemmy account and leaving, because the information hygiene is getting as bad as Reddit here. I did not come to Lemmy to engage in conspiracies and misinformation.

And the community feeling the opposite is not making me feel any better. I’ve seen other Reddit clones do down like this.

That's a perfect real world example

I would've been interested to hear that

I think we actually agree but there might be a partial misunderstanding. There was an example another commenter made of their experience with Xcancel. I think that explains it a bit more clearly.

Edit: this comment

i have no problem with posting news article provided you copy and paste the content or at least summarize what you as the poster thought about it. Like you read and what about it made you want to share it and what insights did you get from it. don't just hand me a leaflet about a place I could visit though. eff that. im here to interact here and don't intend to go to those other places on the internet that I avoid.

I believe piefed, or at least piefed.social suggests that you can move your account between instances? If I glanced at/read that right, and it is that simple, that seems like a good thing.

I used asklemmy once for something and was told to bugger off because that isn't what it is for... even though nothing else appeared to exist to find out wtf is going on

I started with .solrpunk but they had too much downtime, so I set up a new account on .zip but am getting a repeated error which is vague (cannot go to, or reply to certain posts even though they repeatedly still appear to be there, and no blocks appear to be in place)

And then they let people post articles from the daily mail.

Modern journalism is just opinions from strangers.

Yeah exactly this. Not every news site is available in every country. And for the love of God, the fucking people who post paywalled articles...

yeah when I see a link without anything else I feel its not about the subject of the post its about driving traffic. sorry. not interested.

Exactly. If you post a link AND your opinion of it or, what you took from it, that's one thing. You're not fostering conversation posting a paywalled link with no commentary.

Original content is good, but something I see sometimes and really dislike is unsourced screenshots of text, or otherwise something that contains factual claims that do not point you to a way to read more and verify them. Even if it happens to be true, normalizing that increases our susceptibility to misinformation by making it more difficult to detect and call out.

Eh. I still (respectfully) disagree.

I think that’s newsworthy; but it should have linked the dev announcement, or GitHub thread, or wherever the information was sourced from.

If /c/technology won’t allow direct posts from developers, that is indeed a problem for /c/technology, as that’s a first party source for topical news.

But to make my position clear:

• If that poster was intended to post without a source, that should be against the rules. It’s how I would moderate /c/technology.

• There are other communities to post that to.

• Hence, I don’t agree that this issue should be generalized. Communities need to straighten out sourcing rules to be more practical, especially to allow topical first party sources, but I don’t think they should loosen sourcing rules.

If Lemmy/Piefed has discoverability issues for small communities or an under moderation issues, I think those are structural, and we should change how the site works to address them.

Link aggregators and short form text platforms have been displacing forums for decades. Probably because we are more receptive towards being advertised to than being mused / argued to.

God how I wish forums would see a resurgence. Back in the day they were so vibrant and fun!

Fair enough. Let's agree to disagree! 🫲

Totally

To me it just shows lack of care in the topic. So easy to link an article. Not so easy to rub a couple brain cells together, I guess

I feel like if the rules say only articles, then a screenshot of a tweet is breaking the rules. Just sub to different communities if full discourse is what you're interested in. It's out there.

Depends on where you get your articles. I avoid opinion pieces and articles from known offenders.

The arbitrary and subjective restriction of alternative content helps maintain the hegemonic narrative.

That's what requiring articles from the NYTimes, NPR, etc. is really about.

Liberalism 101.

If you want a place to discuss opinions, that’s what comments sections are for.

People who arbitrarily ban content also arbitrarily ban comments and users.

But news communities are generally rooted in facts.

Curated "facts" from hegemonic sources.

This is one of the worst issues plaguing Lemmy, IMO.

Not IMO.

news communities should be for news.

Whose news? There's a deep assumption of objectivity here that is completely wrong.

Most of the ones with article requirements also have rules about source reliability/reputation subjective viewpoint

Most of lemmy.world is completely hegemonic/lib. news, worldnews, etc.

It's a link aggregator at heart, much like Reddit. It's easy content that can trigger discussion.

some lemmy instances disable downvoting, iirc blajha is one.