Hey all! Friendly neighborhood mod here!
I’ve just been added (along with @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world (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:
How do you vet videos, though? Do the mods have to watch each of them in their entirety?
A lot of them that get posted are opinion or aren’t from news sources.
Plus, how is a reader supposed to know where the headline comes from when the link is just to YouTube (etc)?
And on a petty note, lol, I’d much rather read the news than have someone read / spoon-feed it to me.
What’s the difference between a video from a media outlet and a written article by the same outlet ?
The URL in the post for the article will indicate the media outlet.
The URL for the video will usually be YouTube or something else that doesn’t make it immediately apparent where it comes from.
If it’s an official Video they will have a publicly known speaker and official branding. Also official accounts on YouTube or other platforms like Twitter.
Yeah, but you have to click into to even know that.
A lot of people, myself included, just add the info in the headline to our collective knowledge without reading the article or watching the video. I’m not clicking into every video to see who puts it out (a legit source or some whack job casting from their mom’s basement). Having the actual source (via the URL) front and center with the headline goes a long way toward combating misinformation.