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 '.
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.
Seems like a whitelisting/ blacklisting system should be fairly straight foward to implement.
Yes, but like the mbfc fiasco probably just don’t want to have to deal with it. Or more likely don’t want to have to explain why some are on a particular list.
Maybe I dont understand the context well enough.
Basically Jordan has always been his way or the highway no matter the context when people pointing out flaws in his logic.
Ex, people happy amp links banned, but unhappy because he only did that because it was causing issues with mbfc bot.
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.