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 '.
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.
Would you block links to 404media.co? Its very reputable, but its hosted using ghost, a blogging software.
First time I saw it, I thought it was super sus just because of the layout and look and feel, but they don’t share space with blogs the way Substack sites do.
what about citationneeded.news?
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!
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.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/ is their domain that they’ve registered through Squarespace?? Hello?
False equivalence. Substack is more similar to Wordpress than it is to Twitter or Medium.
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.
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.
The links listed don’t lead to other accounts, instead they lead to static pages about Substack’s about page or their privacy policy.
Dropsitenews is operating through their own domain via Squarespace.
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.
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.
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
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?
And that’s exactly why you can fuck off.
You know how newspapers let random people write in and share their stories and perspectives, thats kinda like a blog huh?
Yes, those are called “Opinions / Editorials / Letters to the Editor” et al. Both News and WorldNews have rules against opinion articles as well.
Thats good that you can distinguish between opinion and news, so why do we need to ban substack because there might be an opinion on it?
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?
Oh whoa, this is a really good point.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/drop-site-news-bias-and-credibility/
High credibility, mostly factual.
@jordanlund@lemmy.world ?
Blog, we don’t allow blogs.
IDK what I expected lol…
It is not a blog. I understand you along with the rest of LW mods are incapable of admitting error or saying anything along the lines of “Oh, you’re right, it’s clearly a professional news organization with credentials from the exact agency we have chosen to vet our news organizations, I didn’t realize that, we can allow it going forward.” So I won’t make the futile effort to expect that of you.
If they don’t want to be associated with blogs, they’re free to register a domain and go fully independent.
A domain like dropsitenews.com?
Nope! See bottom of page:
Not that any of this matters, but they did do their own domain registration it looks like, through Squarespace. Check whois. They just have it pointed at Substack right now presumably because they don’t want to invest the resources in a whole web dev or admin team.
But again, it doesn’t matter. The whole issue of “are they associated with blogs” or “who is their DNS registration processed by” is a stupid waste of time to talk about, created only by your inability to admit any error. They are a reliable source (as far as I can tell at least), and only someone casting about for irrelevant reasons to pretend they are not because they’re dug into that position would try to claim otherwise.
Just as general advice, being willing to reverse yourself when new information comes to light makes you more credible. Definitely not less. It increases your authority level, because people will take you seriously because it means you take yourself and your own statements seriously, and shows you want to get them right. Not that you’re just saying whatever and then stubbornly refusing to hear anything different. I think you should try it. Although, of course, it’s up to you.
That takes you to the main substack page. It doesn’t let you add an article to dropsitenews.
Kind of like having a facebook or twitter link doesn’t mean you can add to the website you are viewing.
Dumbass.
Is WordPress a blog?
WordPress is more of an editor than a blog. But because just anyone can set up a Wordpress site, we’e block that too.
Anyone can set up a website. You should block those.
And when they set up bullshit “news” sites, we absolutely do!
Are you calling drop news a bullshit news site?
So you block the New York Times, Time, Bloomberg, Wired, Vogue?
No, because they aren’t hosted on Wordpress. Different deal.
Personally though, if I were making the rules? I would block NYT, Wired, and others because of the paywall bullshit. It’s a wasted click to just get a paywall.
You are making up the rules as you go along so might as well block those too!
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.”
… THEY WERE ASSASSINATED.
The person posting their last story to Znews was not.
See the link in !world@lemmy.world
Hey genius blogs are as reliable as the journalist who wrote them… just like a newspaper…
They CAN be, they also might not be. We aren’t going to pick winners and losers.
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
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!
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 get the spirit of the rule and I also agree in the importance of a degree of editorial over site. But like, something like 60-80% of digital media companies that existed 5 years ago are gone. And substack has grown to fill that void.
Its really, really difficult to make the claim that sub-stack isn’t news at this point, when its where like, the news is actually happening.
It seems to me that a list of pre-approved substacks which either a) undergo editorial review, or b) demonstrate that they follow a certain level of journalistic standard. That same standard could be used to put news sources that don’t meet those requirements could be added to a ban-list.
If its a legacy media enterprise, they are assumed editorial until proven to fail in that regard. If its a substack/ blog, they have to demonstrate they do journalism to a certain level of quality.
So like white list for some blogs/ black list for legacy media.
That sort of whitelisting is going to be beyond what a volunteer team is capable of doing. If there’s another source that does something like that on blog pages, we’d be happy to utilize it, but man, look at the grief we continue getting every time we mention “Yeah MBFC marks it as questionable.”
Coming back to this a day later because I was just reading an article about the killing of a dropsite contributor on dropsite, and I realized, they have editors.
So returning here:
Dropsite has it’s own domain.
It has editors.
But you don’t want to allow it because they rely on substack for the underlying publishing technology?
Yep and they’ve been tripling down on that too.
A wiki run to list valid news sources and why they should be listed, that can have discussions in the talk page, might be helpful to address many of these issues.
I used to help mod the largest Reddit news community back in the day, and it was easy to use the approach you talk about.
Now, I doubt I could. The news industry has really collapsed or been nerfed. There are small sites never heard about before doing heavy lifting and they need to be validated in a way it’s easy to use those guidelines in moderation.
To not do that is to either become increasingly reactionary to sources or get in fights about what is or is not valid.
The rule should be about where it is posted if that is the important part.
All the other sites copied it from drop site news; personally I’m ok with a mirror as long as the content is not altered
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. ;)
But how is it on a blog site? I still don’t understand the last leap of logic in your chain of thought. When confronted, you reiterate that it is a blog, even though you know it is an article from a reputable news organisation, then you say but it’s on a blog site, when it is not, then you loop back. It’s not a blog, not on a blog site, it’s domain is not a blog domain. What makes it a blog exactly?
A blog site is a host of personal opinion. It’s an online diary. Some of it is interesting and useful, most of it is not, none of it is journalism or news.
If a journalist is sharing space with blogs, we aren’t going to allow any of it, because we aren’t going through every fucking author going “is this one valid? What about this guy talking about how their dog just took a dump? How about this guy convinced robots are stealing his luggage?”
Same reason we don’t allow bullshit social media like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc.
There’s too much content to say what’s valid for the community and what’s not.
Does the New York Times have a Twitter account? Sure. Do we allow it? No, because fuck you Twitter. Does the Washington Post have a Facebook account? Sure. Do we allow it? No, because fucking Facebook.
The same goes for Substack, Blogger, Blogsite, etc. We don’t care who is doing the writing. It’s not a valid source.
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.
It is like you can’t read.
More like don’t want to use critical thinking
Let’s be real here, you would have removed it even if it was in a “actual news agency”.
https://lemmy.world/c/world?dataType=Post&sort=New
Tell me, what’s the most recent story and how long ago posted?
I’m starting to suspect that now that FlyingSquid is gone, the wildly nonsensical attacks have started against Jordan, trying to drive him out also. I’m interested in knowing why and who it is that is going to be left on the mod team once this process is completed.
Weird how it has no comments since everyone here is apparently sooooo invested in the story. Fascinating, huh?
It’s so bizarre lol. Everyone’s super invested in whining about the injustice still, and the replacement story you recommended has been up for 3 hours now.
I have made no secret I think that I don’t really agree with your moderation in some aspects, but this whole thing is some weapons-grade bullshit. It’s like watching Goebbels’s big lie in real time, and the weird thing is, it works. I can feel my own brain sort of trying to absorb “lemmy.world is pro-Israel” as a known fact everyone knows, just because the people are so insistent that it’s what’s up and so unwilling to waver from it.
The weird part for me is I know people in Lebanon who were struggling to survive under the previous illegal occupations by Israel, I’ve stated on multiple occasions that Israel has been committing war crimes in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and Golan for DECADES now and if the average American knew 1/2 of the shit they do, we’d be up in arms.
But somehow that makes me a zionist? LOL.
Here’s a personal story… I had a Lebanese roommate for years, had bullet holes in his legs from being shot by the Iraelis when he was a teenager. He was here on refugee status, got his citizenship, I went to his wedding, he came to mine. We’re that close.
One of his brothers is a doctor in Southern Lebanon. Not this illegal occupation, or the one before that, I think it was 2 or 3 illegal occupations ago, it’s hard to keep track…
Anyway… it was a regular occurance that Israeli soldiers would show up at his house in the middle of the night, drag him out at gunpoint, tell him if he resisted he would be killed, haul him off to treat some Palestinian prisoner they couldn’t otherwise be bothered with, then dump him at the side of the road like so much trash when they had no more use for him.
Until the next time…
But I can’t tell that to the folks who are convinced I’m a zionist. Maybe I should put it up on a Substack blog first? 🤔
Yeah. That’s how talking points work. They pick some type of accusation or claim that serves the purpose they want to accomplish, and they just keep hammering. It doesn’t need to be true. It needs to be emotionally resonant in some way, and it needs to just be repeated with a lot of force and conviction behind it, from a lot of different sources. Eventually, it’ll take hold, because the internet is a wild and mostly fact-free place.
I think it’s why they got so excited when this original post got removed, and why they are still here making noise about it. They’re going to milk this for as much as they can, to try to paint as much of the picture as they can while the opportunity is available. I realize I sound like some kind of conspiracy theorist but at this point I’m pretty solidly convinced of it.
Most conspiracy theorists are.
I’m going to give them slightly more credit than you do… I don’t really see it as a conspiracy theory.
YPTB is made up, largely, of angsty kids who are of the opinion “fuck your rules”. They are anarchists who don’t feel communities should have any moderation AT ALL.
They aren’t upset at MY moderation, they chafe at ANY moderation.
It’s generally not personal for them, it’s a reaction to being told by the adult in the room “No, we don’t allow that here.”
9 times out of 10? I just dismiss their complaints with a subtle jerking off motion, which is all they deserve.
Yeah, we’re angsty anarchists for sure. Which is why leftists fight in the streets, while liberals stay in the tweets. You finally said something that wasn’t bullshit!
Ah, the good ole “I’m not racist, I had a roommate who wasn’t white” argument.
Nothing is going to satisfy you, you can just fuck off with your bullshit at this point.
I mean, you not being racist would satisfy me, but if @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat has his buddies in the Illuminati chase you off Lemmy, I wouldn’t cry about it either.
Look, even the shitlibs have conspiracies now too.
Then Hosam was not a journalist but a terrorist. Because he writes for a news organisation which publishes their articles using Substack.
Thank you for censoring a journalist who died to get the word out, using made up rules. You must be very proud of yourself.
It’s not about censoring anyone, it’s removing invalid sources. If they get re-hosted through a legitimate news site like Al Jazeera, fantastic. Go for it.
But we aren’t going to allow the community to be filled with bullshit blog sources.
Dropsitenews, a site ran by two top ex-journalists from TheIntercept, is a “blog site” because it is published on SubStack?
This is clearly gatekeeping so only mainstream media sources are allowed and no independent journalists.
You do not get to decide what is and what is not journalism. You are refusing to provide factual errors in the reporting and instead go for a cheap cop-out.
Yes, as I stated previously, we aren’t engaging in “buh buh you allowed that OTHER link, why not miiiiiine?” Blog sites aren’t allowed, full stop.
You are already banning certain websites and not allowing others at the discretion of a rating system operated by a Zionist. MBFC is rated by Wikipedia as unreliable source. Yet this does not seem to bother your “factuality”.
There are not a thousand independent journalists and news outlets popping up on Substack and people keep posting different ones. There only a handful actual journalists on there not writing opinion articles but doing real reporting.
Again, show me where MBFC says something is Questionable when they are not. This is the second time I’m asking you.
Also this one which really shows how Zionist the MBFC authors are.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/mondoweiss/
Don’t care. Show me where a source they mark “Questionable” is not, in fact, Questionable.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/drop-site-news-bias-and-credibility/
Irrelevant as they are a blog site and we do not allow blog sites.
But you’re continuing to dodge the question, as usual. Your argument is MBFC can’t be relied on. Show me an example of them being unreliable.
Specifically, identify a source they say we should remove that we should actually be keeping. 3rd time asking.
They’re either incredibly biased or they aren’t. If they are incredibly biased you should be able to prove that in short order.
If you CAN’T prove that, and it sure seems like you can’t, then it’s long past time you STFU about MBFC.
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?
Or you ignored the part of me asking about paywalls
This reply is even more entertaining now!
Can’t even read and understand their own rules and assume that everyone else is the problem.
Jfc why am I not surprised