I think it’s important to discuss the state of the community every now and then - feedback for mod behaviour, what’s going wrong, what’s going right, what news is interesting, what news is boring, what should there be more of, what should there be less of.
Mods feel free to remove this post if it violates rules, but I think it’s an important discussion to have.
It is somewhat opaque how sometimes the rules apply and sometimes they don’t, like news sources on rule 1, and iirc rule 3 in general. Deleting content should have the mod informing the user and the rest community what happened and have a way for the users to manage mistakes, be it either accidental rule breaks by the user or wrongful modding.
This is a good point and we’ll take it under consideration. Unfortunately, sometimes we do have to make a judgement call, but if there are any particular cases you’d like to discuss please mention them here.
Sources like The Guardian, Reuters, Telegraph, CNN, BBC are sometimes allowed and sometimes removed on rule 1.
The latter case is usually evident while lurking and finding a deep long comment thread. Sometimes one user there has deleted messages and there’s another’s rule 3 content comments left. Apparently these cases seem to usually be mutual rule 3 but it looks like they’re treated differently.
I do think we don’t have a clear policy on opinion pieces and that’s absolutely something we should work towards. Right now it’s more of a case-by-case basis.
If you could point to some specific examples that would be great!
I’ll try to see if I catch examples happening
Sometimes those judgement calls have allowed moderation that is at the very least poorly defined in the rules. I posted one comment complaining about a local protest about the current Palestine-Israel conflict that trashed my university’s library and shuttered it for the next few months. I got a delete-ban over that for a “CHUD Opinion”, which is very much not in the rules. And that is far from the first time that I’ve run into unwritten rules that feel like they’re putting a thumb on the scales.