Overseas News

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A place for Australians and friends to share news from the other countries. Like all communities here, we discuss topics from the Australian perspective.

If you're looking for a global /c/worldnews instead, search for the many options on federated instances.

Rules

Follow the aussie.zone rules
We are not a generic World News clone. News must be relevant to Australians and our region. Obvious disregard will earn an warning and then a ban if continued. (If an article isn't from an Oceanian news outlet, and it doesn’t mention Australia, then it’s probably off-topic)
Leave seppocentrism at the door. If you don't know what that means, you're not ready to post here yet.
Avoid editorialising headlines. Opinions go in the comments, not the post.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

lodion@aussie.zone

deadcat@aussie.zone

eureka@aussie.zone

[META] Participation by non-Australians? Should we change this comm's display name? (aussie.zone)

submitted 3 weeks ago by zero_gravitas@aussie.zone to c/worldnews@aussie.zone

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I've noticed a lot of comments (and posts) from non-Australians in here recently. For sake of brevity, when I say 'Australian'/'Aussie' here, I mean anyone who does live or has lived in Australia.

It defeats the whole point of having a separate comm for 'world news from an Australian perspective' if we have high levels of participation (votes/comments/posts) from non-Australians. It becomes just the same as any general world news comm.

I was thinking one measure we could take would be to change the display name of the comm to 'World News for Aussies'. It's succinct, clear, and may discourage participation by non-Australians to some degree.

Another matter is posts by non-Australians. Obviously, if we reduced voting participation by non-Aussies, it's less of an issue if we have posts by non-Aussies - the comm would still largely be 'from an Australian perspective' by virtue of voting selection (although it would still be annoying if, like me, you mainly browse local by 'new').

That said, when 13 of the last 20 posts in the comm are from a user that appears not to be in/from Australia, maybe there's a problem to be addressed. It doesn't help that this poster has a clear and consistent agenda.

I'm obviously not proposing we start checking IDs or anything, but we could at least have a rule for participation only by people who do live or have lived in Australia. Then, if a problem becomes noticeable, the mods can send direct messages or take action where they judge it reasonable.

Interested to hear thoughts from users and mods (@lodion@aussie.zone @deadcat@aussie.zone)

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[–] Nath@aussie.zone 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The communities I set up accounted for this. Eg: the Music community is called "Rage" - a reference that only an Australian would get. So, when someone searches for "Music" communities, they'll never find ours.

It also means that our music community is pretty dead, though. Our TV community "On the Telly" is likewise a ghost town.

I'm not sure what approach is better. Make it easily findable for non-australians ("World News")? Or keep it local, but with references that mean you basically need to already know about the community to participate in it.

As for moderation: let me know if you want to throw your hat in.

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

As for moderation: let me know if you want to throw your hat in.

I can throw my hat in to try and make it more of an aussie-focused comm (there are some easy wins, like missing sidebar, no deletion of clearly irrelevant posts, etc.) although ultimately, I suspect one of the big problems is a generic Lemmy news poster can type "world news" into the community field in the post form and this place shows up the same as the rest, so hopefully adjusting the comm title will help, instead of needing a full id change (e.g. /c/aussieworldnews).

[–] Nath@aussie.zone 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

I hereby dub thee "Eureka - Moderator of the World ~news~!"

I'm open to the idea of renaming the Community. There's no Admin tool to do that, but I expect that a couple of edits to the database will permit it to happen. I feel like we need a flow chart for this: Do we rename the community?
If yes, Rename would be preferred to abandoning it and leaving over a year of posts behind. So I'll want to spin up a test community/rename it in the database before trying that approach on World News.

That's a problem for future Nath - and only if we go ahead and rename the Community.

[–] eureka@aussie.zone 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Moderator of the World, mmm I like the sounda that!

Definitely a future problem – there's no rush and we'd want to find a good one before trying a db change. Federation could be an issue so can't hurt to ask devs before tinkering. Honestly, I think just a title change should be enough. Seems like it works for /c/news