Edit: Even MBFC rates dropsitenews as a reliable source https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/drop-site-news-bias-and-credibility/
MBFC Credibility Rating: HIGH CREDIBILITY
There is no rule about ‘blog sites’ on worldnews. Jordanlund has made this up and proceeds to classify anything he does not like as a 'blog '.
Beyond the publicly known political preference of the mod, I think it’s strange that a community on a social media site built on activitypub would have a blanked policy against the posting of other self-published news sources, irrespective of the authors and journalists and their proven reputation.
That said, my take on lemmy moderation has always been JDS, or ‘just decentralize, stupid’. We’re not reddit, and we don’t want to be like reddit, so we shouldn’t be going out of our way to centralize communities or complain when we don’t like the moderation choices or rules of a community we think ought to be managed differently.
Reading the comments here is a treat.
tl;dr Jordan dude may not be a Zionist, but their refusal to acknowledge a legitimate news source, even though it fields an array of veteran investigative journalists, formerly from The Intercept, just because it uses Substack under the hood, which they equate to WordPress (which is another platform used by big publications) makes them a PTB.
It gets even worse down below.
In order to defend MBFC Jordan starts calling MondoWeiss antisemitic. Jordan quotes Zionist lobby sources to back up his claims, without any evidence of the antisemitism accusations except hearsay. Then refuses to engage when pressed on the issue.
And even go on another anti blm rant
“We only allow reputable news sources! Now excuse me while I repeat a bunch of misinformation about BLM.”
- jordanlund
it’s not misinformation if the mbfc says it is a good source
Bruh its Jordan. Worst mod around. Just par for the course.
What’s a good alternative to Worldnews?
Another Jordan Lund post, another chance to remind everyone that @jordanlund@lemmy.world is a racist and a zionist and will do whatever he can to delete pro-Palestinian posts, or posts that criticize Israel.
We’ve been over this.
Anyone can set up a Substack blog. It’s not a valid source. Same with Blogger, same with Medium.
If it gets posted through a legitmate news source, it’s 100% welcome.
Blog sites aren’t news.
Drop Site is not a simple “substack blog.” It’s a new project created and run by journalists/founders from The Intercept who parted ways because of their mismanagement. Everyone including the journalist who shared this article has extensive experience as a professional journalist and bylines with major publications.
Is Time a blog because it runs on Wordpress?
This is an absolutely braindead lazy take.
The same professional journalists who’ve worked at these big media corporations have used the substack platform to open up sites in droves so they can focus on more niche topics, or just escape the censorship of owners and advertisers.
If you think that legitimate news can only come from a company owned by billionaires, then you’re wrong.
Once they start writing for a reputable source again, we’ll be happy to link to them. We aren’t linking to blog sites.
Again, because we aren’t going to be drawn into the debate of “Why did you allow THAT Blogger site but not MY bullshit blogspam site?”
We aren’t going to manually vet 10,000 blog sites, twitter accounts, facebook pages, reddit posts, Instagrams, etc. etc.
The only FAIR way to do it is what we’re doing now: “No, not a valid source. Find a legitimate source.”
Once they start writing for a reputable source again,
… THEY WERE ASSASSINATED.
Substack is not a blogging platform. You can host a blog using Substack, but not every site built using Substack is a blog.
Dropsitenews is clearly not a blog. That should be immediately evident if you open the website. The about-page also clearly explains how they are an independent news organization with reputable journalists working for it. Even MBFC classifies them as a news organization.
If your argument is “it’s a substack website so it’s a blog, but a completely identical-looking website that’s not built using substack isn’t a blog, so it’s allowed”, then you’re not arguing along the lines of rule 1, you’re arguing along the lines of an unwritten rule that is supposed to help reinforce rule 1. If so, it should be explained in the sidebar. The post as-is does not violate rule 1 in any reasonable interpretation. If you have a different argumentation as to why Dropsitenews is a blog, you should provide it so that people know what to expect from the mod team.
If it’s hosted on a blog hosting site, by definition, it’s a blog. It doesn’t matter if it’s substack, blogger, medium, wordpress, what have you. We don’t send traffic to blogs.
And, again, we don’t differentiate because we aren’t going to be drawn into the argument of “but what about this one, but what about that one…”
NO BLOGS!
The absolute lack of self awareness.
I’m very self aware we do not allow blog sites.
It’s a very, very simple rule. Blogger? No. Medium? No. Substack? Also absolutely not.
We treat them no differently than we do social media like Twitter, X, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Do legitimate news sources have accounts there? Absolutely. We don’t allow them either.
If it’s actual news, link to an actual news site, not a blog and not social media.
Don’t like that rule? Tough titty said the kitty when the milk ran dry. Go make your own community and enjoy the flood of blogspam.
Don’t like that rule? Tough titty said the kitty when the milk ran dry. Go make your own community and enjoy the flood of blogspam.
Lol classico power tripping.
Do legitimate news sources have accounts there? Absolutely. We don’t allow them either.
Glad you at least acknowledge that now.
I said that a week ago, do try to keep up.
"No, I’m saying they share a host with bullshit news sites. Until they divest from Substack, they’re off limits with the rest of Substack.
Just like NBC, posting to Twitter gets removed, because we aren’t hosting Twitter bullshit."
Jeez, I compliment your improvement and you’re still tripping. I get that your ruling is arbitrary. Substack, blog. Wordpress.com, not blog. You’re the boss.
Substack is not a blogging platform.
Try again. Substack themselves say they’re a newsletter site. It can host blogs but it is not a blog hosting site.
You’re also not addressing the fact that Dropsitenews is not a blog by any definition of the word “blog”.
Then they’re welcome to pony up for a domain registration and detach themselves from a host that also has un-vetted material.
Look, it’s really simple:
There are legit journalists on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube too… we don’t allow links to those sites EITHER.
This is NO DIFFERENT. We aren’t going through an entire platform, account by account, picking and choosing.
Why would you say that, and then when they have a host, swap back to the argument of what code they used to host it, if you are not blocking this only because of its content?
Then they’re welcome to pony up for a domain registration
https://www.dropsitenews.com/ is their domain that they’ve registered through Squarespace?? Hello?
There are legit journalists on Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube too… we don’t allow links to those sites EITHER.
False equivalence. Substack is more similar to Wordpress than it is to Twitter or Medium.
This is NO DIFFERENT. We aren’t going through an entire platform, account by account, picking and choosing.
But it is different, you’ve just elected to plug your ears regarding any and all evidence to the contrary. You don’t have to “pick and choose accounts”, they have their own domain and no other “accounts” on Substack are accessible through it. It’s completely isolated.
This entire charade could easily be solved using a simple domain whitelist/blacklist method, yet you’ve decided that using that simple solution is too difficult, despite plenty of mod teams using this method due to its transparancy and ease of moderation.
Your argumentation so far has been completely detached from the reality here. You are presenting things as facts that are easily refuted by taking a 1-minute look at the website. If you can’t even manage that, then I can’t help you here.
Again, see bottom of page:
Yes congratulations, you’ve discovered they’re using Substack. This was already addressed and not in dispute? . It doesn’t support your argument, because:
-
Substack is not a blogging platform. It’s more like Wordpress in that it can host blogs, but doesn’t exclusively do so, and this website is clearly not a blog.
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This is the only reference to Substack on the entire website. And this footer isn’t what makes a website a “blog”. I’d wager that if you’d have blocked this footer using uBlock or something you wouldn’t be able to really tell it’s built on Substack.
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The links listed don’t lead to other accounts, instead they lead to static pages about Substack’s about page or their privacy policy.
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Dropsitenews is operating through their own domain via Squarespace.
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Dropsitenews has several independent journalists and editors working for them, and is a news organisation, not a random blog. Their own about page explains this pretty clearly, and other websites (including MBFC) agree with that.
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Their website does not look functionally different from a news website not built on Substack. The only “functional difference” (and I’m really stretching the definition of the word ‘functional’ here) is the footer you’ve linked that mentions Substack.
I have to reiterate here: nobody is asking you to pick-and-choose what Substack “accounts” to allow or not. I actually fully agree with you that doing that would be a bit of an undue burden, similar to not choosing which Twitter accounts to allow. But that’s just simply not how Dropsitenews or Substack work.
Listen, I’m trying to help you here to either clarify the rules or apply them more consistently. You’re getting a lot of flak now because you’re not applying the rule as written, but through an publicly unknown interpretation where anything built using Substack is (frankly inexplicably) also banned. If that’s how you want to moderate, fine, but clarify it in the rules.
Still, I have to recommend the tried and tested method of white/blacklisting (or allow/denylisting as it’s often called these days). If someone puts up a new post, check the list with Ctrl-F for the domain of the post. If it’s in the allowlist, allow the post, if it’s in the denylist, remove it. Dead simple, takes seconds to do. If it’s not listed, open the website and make a determination if it should be allowed. If so, add to the allowlist, otherwise add to the denylist and list the reason for denial. Takes a minute or so, maybe a couple minutes at worst. Put all this in a publicly viewable Google doc/sheet/whatever and link it in the sidebar. Total transparancy, dead simple to execute and basically impossible to argue against. If you want to put in even less effort, have posters submit why a domain should be allowlisted (you can put specific requirements there like a link to the MBFC rating or whatever) so you can just review the reasons and either allowlist or denylist the domain.
This still lets you blanket-ban Twitter/Facebook/Medium etc… for the stated reason, but helps avoid these issues where you are inconsistently applying the rules and banning a legitimate news organisation.
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Lol, doesn’t address what they said at all
You bitched that they didn’t register their own domain, the other guy pointed out they did, and you just went back to going “but it’s substack!!!” When they’ve already destroyed your piss ass argument against the platform
Blog sites aren’t news.
Do you mean “aren’t news sites?”
Because not being a news site and not being news are two different things.
I mean, if you want to be pedantic, sure. News is the plural of “New”. :)
But just because it’s new doesn’t make it news.
I want to be pedantic because it is an important distinction.
If the exact same text credited to the same person is posted on a news site and on substack, but you only consider one of them to be a ‘news article’, then the distinction is important.
But thanks for proving you are a PTB by twisting my extremely clear point into absurd word nonsense.
Correct, because blog sites have no accountability. I could set up a Substack blog, that would get removed too, as it should be.
Same for Twitter. “But, but… they have a blue check mark!” yeah, as we all know now, means nothing.
I understood the reasoning from the beginning, but thanks for making it extremely clear that the rules don’t match the enforcement.
The rule is “news articles only”, it’s right there in the side bar. A blog is not a news article.
Terminal liberal brain. PTB.
Enforcing the rules of the community.
"Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
Post news articles only"
I mean, it doesn’t get any more plain than that. But I guess it requires people to actually read the sidebar…
So you’re also removing any post that has an archive link to bypass paywalls?
Put them in the body. I’ll downvote every archive link used the post url because it obfuscates the source.
Archive links are expressly allowed by the admins. That came up when they enacted the rule on copy/pasting whole articles.
I asked specifically because submitting a link through the web UI helpfully offers to generate an archive link.
My argument was, if we disallow archive links, we should remove that from the web UI. Was told it was fine.
So then you should remove this part on rule 2?
Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Or you ignored the part of me asking about paywalls
There are different links that have his last article.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/hossam-shabat-journalist-killed-gaza-last-article
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hossam-shabat-s-last-article/ar-AA1BDeXT
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/outrage-as-israel-kills-another-truthteller/
Dropsite is another Substack blog and would be removed.
MSN might be tricky because they basically steal content with a link forwarder. Looks like, in this case, they’re ripping off ZNetwork:
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/hossam-shabats-last-article/
Znetwork is solid, MSN? Eh, I’d treat it as a link forwarder and remove it.
Jewish Voice For Labor looks good though!
The rule should be about where it is posted if that is the important part.
The rule is explicit: News Articles Only.
Blogs aren’t news articles.
This is an article, by a news org. Highly trusted. With editors, with their own hosting… But they use the tech stack that other blogs use? What if I told you many reputable news sources uses blog tech stacks?
Then it shouldn’t be on a blog site. ;)
Dropsite is another Substack blog and would be removed.
I would say if you are removing dropsite, the rule is missing the forest through the trees. I get the need to have standards.
I think we can all acknowledge that we live on a shifting plane of mediums and media, and really, we are seeing a resurgence of what I would call “blog-type” news sites. This has coincided with an almost complete collapse of where most of these substackers were formerly employed, eg, digital media companies. Digital media’s collapse isn’t new news, and many of these substacks came about as a direct response to digital media companies going under. Many of these stubstacks are the journalism one would have found at those companies.
I guess the point I want to make is that being a legacy media site doesn’t a valid news source make, nor does a news outlet which is effectively a single/ small group of journalists not valid news it make.
And especially in the context of the near total collapse of digital media over the previous 4 years, by insisting things be from effectively legacy digital media sources, we’re really winnowing down the options, from even, a year ago. It would seem like editing and fact checking, and abiding by some set of journalistic standards are more important.
The reason we remove all substack blogs is we aren’t going to be drawn into a debate over “Buh, buh, you allowed THEIR link!! Why not miiiiiine!!?!?!?” as I explained in the other PTB thread when this came up.
If it’s a legitimate news source, great! Hats off to you. If it’s not a legitimate news source, it’s getting removed. We don’t care who wrote it.
If the story is ONLY available on bullshit sources and you can’t find it on a reputable news site, you need to step back and ask why rather than yell at the mods.
I know, I’ve been there before… super juicy story broken by… checks notes… “New York Post”, well fuck me, right? Let’s wait a day or so and see if a real paper picks it up.
I’m with you here. News sites will mirror this to confirm its legitimacy, and that should be linked, not the substack.
People don’t like it, but man, I would love it if Lemmy preserves information hygiene as it grows.
Yeah, the mods of both News and Politics went through this with the Luigi manifesto. We just had to remove all of it until an actual news agency vetted it.
News agencies don’t verify shit anymore, one takes the bait and the other ones just parrot it to infinity trying to be the first ones to get to their audience’s clicks
Let’s be real here, you would have removed it even if it was in a “actual news agency”.
Sorry, YDI.
It’s a known rule, it’s been explained, and there are other places to post if you don’t like that rule.
If it was the only C/ for posting things like that, it might not matter much that the rule about substack exists, but there are many places for it.
Edit: also, it’s just a removal, that’s not even close to power tripping by itself; there would have to be other factors to approach that standard.
It is not a rule. Nowhere in the sidebar of the worldnews subreddit does it say that SubStack is not a valid source. Nor does it say anything about “blogs”. It says
Post news articles only
And this is most definitely a news article.
JordanLund is using his moderator powers to selectively decide what is and what is not “news” at his own whims.
You’re falling afoul of a common fallacy: that every rule needs to have every possible iteration of its boundaries spelled out. This is not the case.
To the contrary, it’s counterproductive. The more subclauses added to a rule, the more there are to remember, and the more people think that because something isn’t listed that it’s okay.
But, here’s the thing.
The only mod action taken was to remove the post and tell you that substack isn’t a valid source for that C/.
That’s exactly what a mod is supposed to do. You are still free to post on that community, with sources that are allowed. That’s the exact opposite of power tripping, it’s measured, responsible moderation.
You don’t have to agree that substack is a substandard and questionable source for news. You can freely post things from there on any of multiple lemmy communities. That C/ is not a gatekeeper for news on lemmy at all. Things being barred from there do not prevent them from being seen. So you can’t claim that it’s power tripping my that metric either.
But, I’m going to repeat and rephrase the opening of this comment.
It doesn’t matter how well written, how well spelled out the rules are, someone is always going to disagree with them, think they don’t apply to them, or just try to play rules lawyer with them to get around them. Trying to continually chase new rules, and rules expansions is a sucker’s game, it can never succeed.
That being said, if Jordanlund or any other mod of that Conley community, or any community, wants to try and streamline their rules, I’m always glad to try and help jigger the wording of things. And, that rule probably does need clearer language just to reduce future complaints. It is a bit vague considering that “news articles” is not defined, and the colloquial usage of the term differs from a more formal one.
Worldnews ascribes authority to judge source validity to MBFC (which I disagree with, but let us put that aside).
Dropsite is rated highly credible on MBFC. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/drop-site-news-bias-and-credibility/
None of that matters for the purposes of this community.
The mod action taken was well within the purview of the community and its rules
Nor does it say anything about “blogs”.
It say to only post news articles. Blogs aren’t news articles.
Hossam Shabat reporting about a genocide from Gaza is a “blog”? What lunacy is this argument?
These are not “opinion articles”. Dropsite does some of the most hardcore factual journalism out there.
Calling Dropsite a “blog” means you do not understand what the word “news” even means.
But but but it’s not from CNN or FOX or MSN or some other centralized editorialized platform that can force their own spin on it so therefore it isn’t news!
(/S)
Calling Dropsite a “blog” means you do not understand what the word “news” even means.
You were the one to bring up blogs, mate … but sure, if you say so.
Jordanlund brought up “blogs” as a nonsense reason to ban dropsite.
It’s literally what Jordanlund cited as the reason for removal.
