gday everyone. In response to the recent meta discussion, I’ve volunteered as a moderator for /c/worldnews.
The main reasons I volunteered is to make this comm less generic and more suited to aussie.zone, as well as reducing the stream of drive-by spam posts.
There are a few ways I aim to achieve this:
- We’ll change the community title. I’ve already picked an example title, Overseas News, although this is temporary for now so critique and suggestions are welcome! I picked this name to keep the basic idea of this comm clear while distinguishing us from generic “World News” clones, and so even a federated Lemmy user searching for world news comms to post to will have a fair chance to see we aren’t just an extra opportunity for attention. (I understand it might be confusing that this is still https://aussie.zone/c/worldnews, but changing the comm’s id is much harder and needs a serious discussion first)
- We’ll create basic rules to codify our expectations. I’ve added some already, and again, feedback is wanted. I’ve tried to keep them direct and lenient, based on the previous meta discussion and prior deletions from the modlog. Once we reach a general consensus, I will apply them to posts from the past few months, to set the stage.
Let me know if you have other ideas. I’ll be pretty hands-off beyond removing blatant agenda spamming from outsiders and global rule violations, since this is a casual and open community and I have a job and hobbies ;)
I like the name.
As for rules, I think something vague like requiring it to have some sort of specific relevance to Australia. Restricting it to anything reported by an Australian news outlet would be an easy rule to adjudicate in an unbiased way. Outside of that it would get trickier.
If you wanted it to be based in the type of content, maybe something like only news that relates to major Australian trading partners or multinational bodies we’re party to, or stories that relate to prominent conflicts we’ve been involved with or with an obvious domestic connection like disasters where our media has reported extensively on Australian citizens who were involved. But that would be very fuzzy and difficult to consistently moderate.
Good thinking. The relevance rule is currently up to my interpretation, which isn’t ideal.
Those are useful suggestions for ways to make it clearer what is relevant. I think relevance is too complex to put into any hard rules without there being exceptions (e.g. Australian outlets also report on global news such as SBS on Californian earthquakes at least three times[1][2][3], USA is one of our major trading partners, some people may believe the Pacific or all of Asia is our region) and so I suspect the best approach is to use those factors as soft guidelines (e.g. “If your article is not from an Australian or Oceanian news outlet, and the article doesn’t mention Australia in it, it’s probably not relevant to this community.”)