Edit: This rule seems to be much more nuanced and requires more thought than we had put in, please continue to discuss below.
It is NOT in effect at this time but highly recommend for regional subreddits at least.
The above rule has been added to the instance and will be enforced instance wide. This rule is very common within most existing communities where news articles are shared and avoids sensationalizing the story or attempts at steering discussion by the user posting the article.
I am not a fan of this being instance wide. It’s so common for linked sites to change headlines. And it removes discretion from the community leaders.
Sure, recommend that communities like !Winnipeg apply the rule, or whatever. But I’d hate to have to apply it in !Geology – I just don’t want to have to police it.
And if you have a bot doing the policing, there’s going to be so many false positives.
Thank you for the feedback. I’ve only generally moderated regional subreddits so I would like to understand what communities and in what situations editorializing the title of the article would be appropriate and/or beneficial. While discussing this rule none of us had a concern with it.
Every decision made is always up for being reassessed after feedback from users, and at least I do and I believe everyone else involved welcomes criticism.
Edit to respond to the edit:
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I’m curious in what situation an article link posted in !Geology would need a editorialized title. Why would it be more appropriate in ! Geology than in !Winnipeg?
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I dislike all forms of bot policing that isn’t then verified by a human. Every bot I’ve seen indeed has way too much false positives.
I would not be opposed to this being a server wide rule in the context of regional communities - it avoids political editorializing, and probably creates a rule uniformity in that context. However, rather than making it site-wide, I’d instead approach those moderators (like myself in Winnipeg), and say: “hey, this is how we’d like the regional communities moderated” and I’ll happily assent and apply those rules fairly, 99% of the time ;)
But for topic oriented communities… The most basic example is to edit the title to remove jargon. Jargon is great if you’re a scientist and already know the jargon, but to appeal more widely, you want to tone that down. And often you need the title to be modified to reflect the direct relevance to the community. Sure, you can make a note in the attached text blurb, but that often lands below the cut, or doesn’t get read.
Another example: !geologycareers, for example, assuming it becomes a landing place for r/geologycareers eventually (I moderate that one on reddit), when someone posts a job opening, they will almost always need to modify the title to include the regional relevance.
In !printSF, if someone is posting a book sale on Amazon and linking to the page directly, the fact that it’s a sale is not part of the title. The title should read something like: “[Canada/US] Book one of Foobar’s Series is discounted to $1.99 right now.” even if directly linking to the book on amazon.
As a more extreme example: In !spacemusic, pretty much all titles are edited to fit the form Track by Artist (or similar) – because that’s the form.
So basically, the more the community is topic oriented rather than regionally oriented, the more the title needs to be “BLUF” – Bottom Line Up Front.
I would probably relocate some of these topic oriented communities to other servers and try to establish them there if this rule was instance wide.
Thanks for the very detailed response.
With this and along with other responses, it’s very clear that this rule isn’t appropriate in a instance wide fashion and should be left up to each community’s discretion to decide if they need it or not, with encouragement from admins in regional communities where editorializing can be a more serious issue.
We will discuss within the team from this feedback and go from there.
Thanks! Holler if you need anything else. I appreciate your efforts to make this place as civilized as possible :)
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This seems like exactly the sort of rule that should be applied at the community level. Instance level rules should be kept as minimal as possible.
Feedback is appreciated thank you.
I don’t mean to be nitpicking but if the rule is zero-tolerance I think we should clear up the edge cases. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way.
- What happens when the original title is misleading or clickbait? Personally I like how HN handles things in this case (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
- How about if you want to ask a question about a news article as the main focus of the post, but also want to include context about the article?
- Or if you’re making the post to discuss a related topic, and include multiple articles?
- On that note, what even counts as a news article? What if I post a link to a reddit thread about a news article?
You’re really making me think here. Thank you!
What happens when the original title is misleading or clickbait? Personally I like how HN handles things in this case
Probably should find another source in that case, but as with other examples brought up, I think a situation like this could be dealt with at moderator discretion.
How about if you want to ask a question about a news article as the main focus of the post, but also want to include context about the article?
Your question should be in the body of the post not the title really but hard to say without a solid example.
Or if you’re making the post to discuss a related topic, and include multiple articles?
Hey an easy question! That would be fine.
On that note, what even counts as a news article? What if I post a link to a reddit thread about a news article?
We don’t speak of that place here do we?
We should treat the titles as email subjects. It should tell you what you need to know and if you want more details then you can click the thread.
If I understand the intent and the discussion so far, it seems that you could stop after “No Editorializing Article Titles.” There are lots of ways to edit a title without editorializing.
The discussion makes me think that the words “editing” and “editorializing” are being treated as interchangeable, so a clarifying sentence or two may be necessary.
“Editing the title for clarity and other purposes is fine. Editing the title to express or alter an opinion is not.”
And I agree with what seems to be a popular opinion that leaves actual implementation and enforcement to individual communities and their moderators.
Note: I find “moderation theory,” if such a thing exists, a fascinating topic, but do not yet moderate any community, mostly because it looks like a scary job. I just try to abide by whatever community standards I find and leave communities whose standards stray too far from my own.
We can probably live with it. Aside from some of the corner cases some have highlighted:
- How different is the title from the first paragraph of the content of the post in terms of sensationalisation/steering? They’re both displayed in the feed, one is bolder and bigger but they’re both fairly prominent. I think providing opinion can be essential. Especially if it’s not a news community. If that’s alright in the body, then why not the title?
- There’s another way to deal with this. Let the community up/down vote the posts. Last week someone did some serious title gore on [email protected]. I reposted it with a title I felt was more appropriate and commented with a link to it in the original post. The original post got downvoted and the discussion shifted to the other one. Maybe this could be a self-correcting mechanism. 🤷
I don’t know, I’m just thinking here.
Good input thank you.
Oh just thought of another corner case - sometimes the news article title is garbage and the post title can be used to fix it.
Yeah. I’ve seen some like that, but really at that point I would look for another source, or make it clear that it’s editorialized title.
I think something to consider really with all rules is there’s always wiggle room and edge cases. With every rule, to cover all those edge cases, it would get so convoluted and long that nobody would read it.
Perhaps for the communities that see this kind of rule as appropriate, it should be more so “Avoid editorializing Article Titles”
Yup. Some rules don’t have many corner cases. E.g. no bigotry. The more corner cases there are the fuzzier it gets and the more it drifts towards a recommendation than a hard rule. Some of those corner cases could be filtered by context. Many corner cases might not be relevant in a news community for example. In such a context a rule instead of recommendation might be appropriate.
What’s your thoughts on instance wide recommendation: “Avoid editorializing Article Titles” instead of having it as a rule?
That probably makes sense as a general recommendation.
Since Lemmy titles can be edited, this seems fair. I don’t think posters should be required to update titles to match edited headlines however I believe it should be recommended.
We’re definitely not planning on enforcing this retroactively. I’ve got better things to do with my life than that. 😅
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Want to preface this by saying I’m not trying to attack, I’m just looking for some clarification so I fully understand. I’m going to use two of my posts as an example because I’ve changed titles to make things more clear/relevant to the community.
Post Title: “Emerson the elephant seal has departed from Oak Bay Marina beach”
Original article title: “Roving elephant seal gone from Oak Bay Marina beach”
Post Title: “11 Island breweries (6 from Greater Victoria) pick up medals at 2023 Canadian Brewing Awards”
Original title: “Greater Victoria breweries bring home hardware from national beer awards”
As I understand it, neither of these would be allowed under the new rule, correct?
As the rule was originally stated, yes. This is how I had enforced it and had always been enforced in regional communities I participated in.
However the above examples “do not change the intention/message of the original title” so with more moderator discretion left available, those would probably be ok.
I really like the idea behind “do not change the intention/message of the original title” instead of “the original title must be used”. Gives a little bit of flexibility to the situation.
I tried to combine the best of both works and added the following community rule to /c/Victoria:
Avoid editorializing/sensationalizing news article titles, i.e. do not change the intention/message of the original title.
Sounds good. Agree that mods could use discretion when article title changed by original author.
what if the original article title is already massively “editorialized” and you’re just making it more informative? 🤔 “You WON’T believe what Russia did today!”
That doesn’t sound like an article worth posting tbh
Then we should probably not be linking to that source.
What if the discussion is intended to be about the issues with that source, and the article is being linked as an example?
I have found that on Lemmy, copying the article title in the post header or body is often redundant, as the website preview tells you the actual title anyway.
I don’t mind this rule should it be placed in effect (mods give me a shout if you are enforcing it and I’ll edit titles going forward). But is it a necessity? In my view not really. It is a good idea to discuss strategies to curb disinformation and discussions with leading rhetoric this may or may not be the best tool in the box for this.
Generally my flow with writing a typical article-based Lemmy post is: Article title or one-liner paraphrase of article in the header, more details/summary in the body staying mostly neutral with only a bit of my opinion, and my full opinion on it within a separate comment.
But is it a necessity?
Posts like this one is why regional communities on the dead site had rules like this. So yeah it can be argued that it’s necessary.
Generally my flow with writing a typical article-based Lemmy post is: Article title or one-liner paraphrase of article in the header, more details/summary in the body staying mostly neutral with only a bit of my opinion, and my full opinion on it within a separate comment.
That fits within the intention of the rule in my opinion.
