My question is: why should we host a /c/WorldNews at all? What unique value does it have by being “for Aussies”?

I think there’s value in being able to find world news that other Australians find interesting and discuss it with other Australians.

World news often has different implications for different countries, and being able to raise those points (without them being buried under a pile of other comments) and discuss them with other people who share your context is something that I think people find useful.

At the most basic version, that this comm is “News from outside of Australia” does provide value in that it won’t include news stories about Australia. Also, many ‘world news’ comms are defined as ‘news from outside the US’, which Australians probably do want to see and discuss in a world news comm.

So I wouldn’t be in favour of dismantling the comm in any case.

How would that change the posts in the comm?

I actually think it would stop the comm from changing. Until recently the posts and discussion in the comm have been Australia-centric by virtue of most engagement coming from people on this instance. There’s been some examples I’ve noticed lately where that hasn’t been the case, which is what prompted me to write this post.

Is there any reason why international news (not world news) specifically affecting Australia or Australians should be separated from other local comms like /c/news and /c/AustralianPolitics? e.g., news about a conference between officials from Australia and Pacific islands, or incidents involving Australian tourists.

Yeah, I already post that kind of stuff in those places.

Yeah, I didn’t want to name names (even though it was pretty clear), but I agree with everything you’ve outlined here. “Objectification of our community” is a particularly good articulation.

I’m an ocker but this post and comments is coming off pretty rough.

Yeah, I was not wholly comfortable while writing this post - it’s against my instincts to be exclusory. Sometimes, however, exclusory spaces are helpful for certain purposes.

Feels like you’ll want an echo chamber not a place of discussion.

I hope I can reassure you that this is definitely not my intention.

What it boils down to is:

What is [email protected] for? Why does aussie.zone have its own ‘world news’ comm? Why don’t aussie.zone users just subscribe to any other world news comm?

For me, I saw this as having been answered by the sidebar in [email protected] , which lists [email protected] with the text “World News (from an Australian Perspective)”.

I interpreted that as meaning that this comm was intended as a space for Australians (in the broadest sense possible) to post news of interest to themselves, and to discuss it (largely) from an Australian perspective.

In any case, I certainly wouldn’t want there to be any hard-and-fast rules or strict enforcement!

I suggested the simple measure of adding ‘for Aussies’ to the display name as it’s a simple way to note the purpose of the space with the hope that people will just self-regulate with the purpose of the comm in mind.

If someone from another country jumps in the comments to explain some news story for us, that’s great! That’s adding to the purpose of ‘world news for aussies’ by helping an Australian audience understand certain issues abroad.

Regarding submissions, though, I think there could be some use - in terms of achieving the purpose of the comm - in a guideline that submissions should be made by users with some meaningful connection to Australia. Because voting can’t be moderated, but posting can.

As @[email protected] noted in a comment, one specific user is currently just dumping copy-pasted submissions they’ve posted in a dozen other places in this comm without any thought or respect to the purpose of the community, or even that it is a community. I believe the comm would be better without their submissions.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that this user has no meaningful connection with Australia, or even conversational engagement with this instance and comm.

Perhaps, though, that specific issue would be better addressed with a general ‘over-posting’ rule to be enforced with discretion.

Maybe my interpretation of the purpose of this comm is incorrect or not supported by the community. Maybe its purpose is really just as simple as ‘News from outside of Australia’ and as long as that bar is met, people are happy with it.

Personally, though, I think that guiding this comm towards Australia-centric discussion, posting and voting would make it a more unique and valuable forum. I think it already is that to a fair degree, but some of the post-flooding and comment sections lately have been otherwise, which of course is what prompted me to write the original post to begin with.

An electrical wire fell onto a tram during a test of the new Parramatta light rail line two weeks ago.

That is significantly more dramatic than what I was guessing!

Yes? My point was that Fletcher’s unspoken premise is that if we had FPTP, the results would just translate over 1:1 from the primary vote. They wouldn’t.

“If Australia had a first-past-the-post system, none of the six teals who entered the parliament in 2022 would have been elected” he declared. “Of the six, most had a first preference vote which was only in the 30s or even 20s, a long way behind the first-preference vote secured by the Liberal candidate.”

This is an asinine thing to say anyway, because it assumes people would just vote for whoever they preferenced first under our current system. We know people would vote tactically if we had a FPTP system.

The comment I was originally responding to said:

If Trump hadn’t won the election, I would disapprove of this action. But he did and he has promised to weaponize the DOJ, so this is the smart move.

That is what I was responding to.

So your responses, correct or not, are not relevant to my comment or the comment I was responding to.

You said:

So pressure from the trump team derailed the plea deal and and made it impossible for hunter to get a fair trial

If that is what happened, it happened before Trump got elected.

especially under a trump doj.

Hunter has already been convicted, and will be sentenced this month under a Biden DOJ.

a trump appointed judge

Yeah, appointed by Trump in 2018.

killed the plea deal

Yeah, they killed the deal in July.

So again, I can’t see how Trump’s inauguration in January, and any ‘weaponising of the DOJ’ that would occur after that, could have any bearing on Hunter’s conviction earlier this year, and sentencing this month.

Your conclusions aside, I think it’s fair to say people should read not only more than the headline, but more than this article or the statement by Biden.

For those interested, here is one reasonably expansive account: https://web.archive.org/web/20241202032428/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/us/politics/inside-hunter-biden-plea-deal.html

My understanding is that basically nothing 3D printed is food safe because the resulting surface has a bunch of nooks and crannies.

There’s also a video where they don’t appear to be 3D printed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZgCkAVRU_g

You wouldn’t generally do a Kickstarter for anything 3D printed anyway, since the whole point is you can just start making things without tooling costs.

Hunter Biden was convicted and will be sentenced under Biden’s DOJ. I don’t see what Trump’s election has to do with it.

Two ways to show your solidarity:

1. Sign the workers’ petition https://www.megaphone.org.au/petitions/tell-ceo-amanda-bardwell-to-meet-with-warehouse-workers-end-woolworths-unsafe-measurement-system
2. If you can, contribute to the strike fund: https://chuffed.org/project/117264-emergency-bill-and-food-relief-while-workers-strike-for-safety-at-woolworths-warehouses

copied from comment by UWU Facebook account

Yeah, it’s dispiriting how often Israel’s PR releases are simply relayed uncritically.

Maybe an Aus Science community would be good and could include health stuff?

I posted an article to [email protected] a while back (https://aussie.zone/post/14355715) which may have fit better in a science comm (but again, could also have gone in plain ‘news’).

It’s not news

Isn’t it?

Heatwave to rain-bomb with flash and river flooding in one week for NSW. This is fine 🐶🔥

You make a reasonable point. I think there is difference, though, which is the degree to which ‘the customer is the product’ for these platforms, and that’s a key ingredient in Doctorow’s original post:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Sure, advertising is nothing new, but the degree to which these platforms can target content and ads to the individual is qualitatively different to ‘old media’. Emphasis on ‘the customer’, singular, being the product, not ‘the readers/viewers’ as a whole.

‘Platform decay’ is more serious and more descriptive to boot.

The guy’s buying avocado toast for the whole suburb!