Hey all! Friendly neighborhood mod here!
I've just been added (along with @[email protected] (HEY SQUID!)) to the OTHER World News community, "worldnews", totally separate from this group "world".
The reason being, the mods there had effectively retired. Hurts, the lead mod, stepped away and hadn't been active for MONTHS, and post and comment reports were PILING up, to a point where the Admins asked in our Discord chat going "Hey, what's going on with worldnews?"
Which left ME confused, because "world" has a friendly name of "World News" and is generally up to date on the report queue unless two users are engaging in:
Which, (sigh), happens way more often than I'd like, but what are you going to do?
Before they left 5 months ago, Hurts had pinned a question to worldnews asking, basically, "Do we NEED world AND worldnews?" which I think is a valid question.
There are some key differences, world doesn't accept video links or text pieces, but there's no rule against that in worldnews, so it's a little more free-form than world, although both require legitimate news sources.
So for now, consider the discussion OPEN! Keep them both? Close one or the other?
The volume difference is pretty dramatic:
world:
worldnews:
Worldneews sucks balls. I got banned for 'yellow peril' after criticizing china's incursion into the scs. Mods or automod just execute bans without avenue for recourse or discussion. Caused me to block the entire instance. Some of the tankies even followed me here when I tried to open a discussion about it. Let it die and focus moderation efforts on world. Better to have one decent forum than several loosely moderated ones where brigading and cytros can take hold. Good riddance.
I had to look up what happened because the problem on worldnews was a LACK of moderation rather than OVER moderation.
Turns out, it was the worldnews on lemmy.ml not lemmy.world, but it also looks like it was just a 3 day ban.
FWIW, what you wrote also looked 100% factual to me:
For those unaware of the territorial disputes in the South China Sea, man, is it complex:
https://www.britannica.com/place/Spratly-Islands
https://www.usip.org/publications/2023/12/rising-tensions-between-china-and-philippines-south-china-sea
https://fsi.gov.ph/philippines-china-relations-beyond-the-territoral-disputes/#:~:text=Philippines%2DChina%20relations%20have%20lately,of%20infrastructures%2C%20and%20incidents%20of
Thanks for the insight. Would you happen to know how reports are handled? I.e. are the posts removed/ users banned pending review by the mods, or did a moderator execute the ban after review? Where should I direct my consternation? An overzealous mod, or a oversensitive user?
I'm from an ASEAN nation,.and aware of the spratly and more recent issues. Afaik, the scs is named such due to its location, but chinas claim is that it was historically their territory, pointing to some obscure document in their archives. From my viewpoint, they are mostly international waters and should be left as such.
Edited to add that yes, it was on lemmy.ml. Your post was in relation to worldnews.lemmy.world? Apologies if that was the case.
Yup, you got banned on lemmy.ml and this is on lemmy.world.
Posts and comments get reported by users and from there go to a moderation queue.
Mods then collectively go through the queue of reports and decide what to do, from ignoring the report, to banning a user.