December 2017 Meta Thread: What kind of year has it been? - Politics

December 2017 Meta Thread: What kind of year has it been?
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December 2017 Meta Thread: What kind of year has it been?

Posted: 15 Dec 2017 07:00 AM PST

December 2017 Metathread: What kind of year has it been?

Greetings denizens of r/politics. This is our December Metathread, and our final meta discussion thread for the year. A lot has happened this year, and through it all our users were here contributing, discussing and sharing their thoughts. Let's take a look back at what changes we've made, problems we've faced and things we've discussed within r/politics.

January February March April May June July August September October (oops) November

Here's a small list of things that changed internally on r/politics this year:

We moved to a whitelist system for Youtube submissions, and later for all link submissions. The whitelist and guidelines for sources can be found here. We think that these changes have been successful in accomplishing their main goals - reducing spam and making the /new queue more legible for our users. The whitelist started with around 800 domains and has ballooned in size since its introduction to thousands of entries. We will continue to grow and manage the list as time passes.
We started conducting two weekly threads - the 'Saturday Morning Political Cartoon' threads, and the 'In Your State' discussion series. Shout out to our mod u/optimalg for taking those projects on and managing them throughout the year.
We adjusted our rules and settings for new users - creating an age requirement for submissions, removing low karmna comments from new users automatically and creating a much harsher ban enforcement track for new accounts.
To cut down on user harassment, we took the step of auto removing /u/ pings in our community.
With reddit Inc's announcement that they are changing their site guidelines to do away with the so called "90/10" rule, we started allowing official verified source accounts to post in r/politics. As part of this change, we created a new rule which explicitly states that sources and users with a potential conflict of interest must broadcast their employment or affiliation. Punishment for users discovered to be non-compliant with this rule would be banned, and would potentially risk having their domain banned from our community.
We collaborated with an MIT research team on a study into the effects of voting behaviour on user civility. It is our hope that the results of this experiment will published for the community to read early in the coming year.

Here are answers to some of the most common questions and critiques that we've seen this year:

Our most frequently asked questions

Q: Why is ABC source not permitted when I think it should be? Why is XYZ source allowed when I think it shouldn't be?

A: The introduction of the whitelist system for sources was a major improvement to the state of the /new insofar as a reduction in spam and low quality content. The hope was that with a more manageable /new queue, we'd get increased participation in /new and rising from our users, and I think there's some evidence that we were successful in this regard. A problem that we've encountered is that many users take the whitelist as a moderator endorsement of the sources within - it isn't, and there are many sources on the list that I personally have disdain for. Our intent is to allow all on topic sources that we feasibly can and let the community be curated by the community - making the community responsible for what content gets seen and what content doesn't get seen is a fundamental principle of the reddit platform. We aren't editors, we aren't curators - while fairly keeping content on topic and relevant, we want to reduce our interference and potential personal bias as much as we possibly can. On the flip side of this are websites that we have been in order to maintain community standards (no state sponsored propaganda, no personal blogs or blog platforms) or purely for purposes of practicality (no serial rehosters - websites which have a majority of their content duplicated or taken from other places). We're sensitive to the concerns of users on both sides of this issue - people who would like us to be more selective with the sources we allow, and people who would like us to put more responsibility for the curation process back in the hands of users. For the moment, we think we've struck a fair balance between these positions, but we are listening and will continue to evaluate and adapt our policies in the coming year.

Q: Why was my submission removed for 'Re-hosted content'? Why was my submission removed as 'Off topic'?

A: These are two rules that we think are very important to maintain a reasonable standard of quality and fairness for link submissions - they're also some of most difficult rules for us to enforce. The 'Re-hosted content' rule is meant to prevent content from being stolen or re-worked by multiple sources without contributing substantial reporting or analysis. This rule helps reduce unnecessary duplicates of stories that have already been submitted to us, and increases our the quality of reporting that our readers have access to. The 'Off topic' rule is meant to ensure that content stays explicitly relevant to US politics. We completely understand that there may be news stories that have content which has political subtext or political implications but as per our On Topic Statement, we need articles here to be about:

Information and opinions concerning the running of US governments, courts, public services and policy-making.
Private political actions and stories such as demonstrations, lobbying, candidacies and funding and political movements, groups and donors.

Our questions for the community

How do you think we could progress towards an editorial/op-ed flair system? This proposal has stalled due to indecision as to how we would handle sites that do not distinguish between news and editorial content. How do you folks envision an editorial flair mechanism working? What do you think would be the best way to handle sites that do not make a distinction? Realistically, would we be able to implement such a system without receiving an influx of "This is an editorial!!!" reports on things?
Self-post Saturdays - who wants them? Who doesn't? Could we do anything to increase the quality of submissions if we considered re-implementing this program?
Special discussions and themed days - we've been very happy with our 'In your state' series, and with the special event discussion threads that we've hosted. Are there any other regular or one off threads that people have an idea for?
Re-hosting - this is one of our most difficult rules to enforce, but still one that we think is important to have. Does the community have thoughts on how we could be more consistent with this rule? Is there anything we could try doing to specific websites that would help submitters identify re-hosted content on their own?
Close to two years after implementing it, how do people feel about the 'Exact title only' rule? Are there any potential tweaks that we could make that would ensure it works better?

Upcoming AMA schedule and further notes on AMA's

We have hosted a remarkable eighty-five AMAs this year, with at least 3 more to come and possibly more if /u/Qu1nlan elects to book some last-minute. This has been the first full year of our AMA program since it started up in August 2016, and we're incredibly grateful to all of our guests and to you, the community, for making it successful. We have seen such high-profile guests come to us this year as The Washington Post, Ben Shapiro, The Anti-Defamation League, Rick Wilson, and The ACLU. We've also hosted many AMAs with local officials like the mayor of Dallas TX and the manager of the Los Angeles DoT. We have loved hosting congressional candidates, law professors, authors and cartoonists. We love AMAs, we've gotten a lot of very positive feedback on them from you, and we hope to keep them going strong in the future. In the very near future, please look forward to:

12/19 at 2pm EST - Rebecca Klein, author and Huffington post education editor on taxpayer money used to fund problematic practices in private schools.
12/20 at 12pm EST - Vice News reporters Rob Arthur, Taylor Dolven, Keegan Hamilton, Allison McCann, and Carter Sherman on police violence and federal oversight of policing.
12/21 at 2pm EST - Abdul El-Sayed, 2018 Michigan Democratic Gubernatorial candidate, returning for his 2nd AMA.

In closing

It has been a busy, busy year, a lot has happened in the news and on the subreddit. As 2017 comes to a close we look forward to 2018 with optimism and we're thankful to be a part of such a great community. We know we aren't perfect, but we plan to continue doing our best to serve the subreddit and to enact changes that make this a better place for everyone. We would like to sincerely wish everyone a safe, happy, and wonderful holiday season.

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Donald Trump federal judge nominee is asked basic legal questions and can’t answer a single one

Posted: 15 Dec 2017 04:39 AM PST