r/politics Fall 2018 Meta Thread - Rule changes for submission titles, article subtitles, rehosted content and more - Politics

r/politics Fall 2018 Meta Thread - Rule changes for submission titles, article subtitles, rehosted content and more
The "What happened in your state last week?" Megathread, Week 47
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants To Replace Columbus Day With Holiday For Election Day
CNN asks for emergency hearing after Trump threatens to revoke Acosta's press pass again
Trump’s Border Stunt Is a Profound Betrayal of Our Military
'If Tattoos Can Be Removed, So Can Ben Carson's Name from Our High School' Asserts Detroit School Board Members
Senate Democrats Sue To Block Matt Whitaker From Serving as Attorney General
White House tells Acosta his press pass will be suspended again when order expires
Donald Trump on How He Makes Decisions: 'I Don’t Think About Them'
Trump’s Lies Are a Virus, and News Organizations Are the Host
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fans Are Loving Her Instagram Live Videos: “I Wish More Politicians Were Real Like This’
Cards Against Humanity buys land along Mexican border to block wall
The United States Is Becoming a Two-Tiered Country With Separate and Unequal Voting Laws
Jim Carrey Says Trump Is a 'Melanoma:' 'These People Are Raping Our System'
I served under 8 commanders in chief. Trump doesn’t grasp the role.
Dem rep on Trump 'Adam Schitt' tweet: 'I feel like I'm back in seventh grade'
New Mexico Democrats seek repeal of state abortion ban
In defeat, Abrams emerges as leading voting-rights advocate
Video: Retired 3-Star General Mark Hertling Slams Donald Trump's 'Jackassery'
Democrats received almost as many midterms votes as Trump in presidential election, results show: 'It's a crazy number'
Ocasio-Cortez Currently Backs Pelosi, ‘Most Progressive Candidate,’ For Speaker
Trump Says Prince Role in Khashoggi Death May Never Be Known
Trump Business to Be Hit by Sharp Scrutiny Under House Democrats
Trump's Old Feud With Smokey Bear Comes Back To Burn Him
Trump tweets about “Adam Schitt” after complaining about decorum
It’s Time for America to Reckon With the Staggering Death Toll of the Post-9/11 Wars
No, Democrats Didn’t Win The Senate. But They Did Better Than It Seems.

r/politics Fall 2018 Meta Thread - Rule changes for submission titles, article subtitles, rehosted content and more

Posted: 19 Nov 2018 07:39 AM PST

Greetings denizens of r/politics. It has been a while since we've posted a meta-thread, and we have a few things to discuss. Please for our collective sanity - yours and ours - read everything within before jumping into the comments.

Rule change - Submissions titles, article subtitles and articles with no headline

In September of 2016, r/politics moved to an 'Exact headline only' rule, after several months of discussion among the moderators, and across meta threads between April to August. In order to make enforcement of the new 'exact headline' rule possible, a bot service was created to match headlines to the articles... which was turned off shortly thereafter due to an unsustainable false positive rate. The mod team discovered that the headline metadata across many sites was simply too inconsitent to enforce with automation effectively - some sites left their organization name in, some had a page title separate from the headline, some had malformed titles or no headline data at all. So we moved to manual enforcement of the rule.

Overall, the mod team believes that the state of r/politics titles is more consistent, and less likely to mislead readers than the previous title rules. But it has remained extremely rigid and strict as a carry-over from when the rule was written to accommodate our bot service - which we never managed to get running the way we had intended. We're often missing additional information and context from the article subhead or subtitle. We're also handicapping websites that use an artistic or short primary headline, in favor of more descriptive subheads. So, starting today we are making the following changes

Subtitles are now allowed in submission titles

The title rule will now be updated as follows:

Submissions must have titles comprised of the exact copied and pasted headline from the article, and may use the subtitle / subhead at your discretion. Do not include the organization name, extraneous quotes, or the article section. Do not add, remove or change words from either the title or subtitle - with the following required changes:

If the headline AND subtitle/subhead together exceed the character limit for reddit titles, you may only use the primary headline.

It is strongly suggested that subtitles or subheads should be marked by separating it from the headline using a dash (-), vertical bar (|), semicolon (;) or other appropriate non-attention seeking punctuation character. Any punctuation that could alter the meaning of the title will be treated as rule breaking.

Articles without any headline at all will use a structured title format

In cases where a web page has no headline whatsoever, a structure following the rules below must be used.

In rare cases where you wish to submit a link and the content is acceptable for r/politics, but there is no headline on the page, you must use the following style for the submission title:

Publishing organization, body or group, published date, Title of document or page

Examples of this style in practice:

Department of Justice, 2018-7-13, Case 1:18-cr-00215-ABJ

FiveThirtyEight, 2018-10-19, 2018 Senate Forecast

State of Alabama, 2017-12-12, 2017 Official General Election Results

Rehosted content

Another change we are implementing is a change to our "rehosting" rule. For a long time, we have tried to actively remove articles which were overly reliant on content taken from other sources - block quotes, video clips, transcripts etc. The intent was to steer users to the original source for stories, and as a side effect, increase the story diversity on our front page. However this has long been one of our hardest rules to enforce - it can go hours before being detected, and there are a plethora of grey areas and uncertainties that moderators have encountered while trying to keep enforcement consistent.

After review of 2 months worth of our "front page" removals which totaled 462, 144 of them were for removed for "rehosted content", making up 31% of those removals. It was second only to "Off-Topic" removals which totaled 261. 21 of the "rehosted content" removals made it to #1, so to put it in perspective we pulled (at least for those two months) 10 #1 submissions for rehosting each month.

Our new rule for "Rehosted Content" will read as follows:

No copy-pasted articles

Please do not submit articles or videos that are a direct, complete copy-paste of original reporting. Articles or videos that add another take on a subject, or include different verbiage or context are allowed.

There was a lot of debate about this one. On one hand, it may lead to more similar content on the subreddit or the front page in cases where Megathreads are not applicable. However, we will also be removing less content which will make for a more user-friendly experience as we generally want to remove the least content that we can from users. We want to watch the impact of this change carefully to see how it performs, and would like to get your feedback on how the rule may change your experience reading r/politics.

The two above changes will be the focus of this meta-thread, but we expect there will be a lot of other things to discuss. Below is a brief Q&A, which will link to some top level comments below for longer discussion threads. If you could help us keep the thread organized by discussion area, it would be appreciated.

Q&A

Q: What is the current policy on brand new users to r/politics?

If you were reading carefully, you may have noticed a message in our bot sticky message letting the community know that users with less than 100 karma were being temporarily muted as a trial to see if it resulted in less trolling and malicious behavior. After conducting an analysis, we determined that we weren't happy with the effectiveness of that rule and have since made it much less aggressive. We know there were a couple of users lobbying to try this approach - we found that the rate of false positives was simply too high. In a random sample of collected removals, we found that as many as 70% of removed comments were non-rule breaking, which was far out of line with our intended result. After looking at the results, we are now much more confident that positive karma simply is not a good predicator of good behavior.

That said, we did increase the aggressiveness of our negative karma gate mute rules, which remain in effect as of now. We're still discussing if the false positive rate of removals for those conditions is acceptable. We may have more indepth discussion below.

Q: There are websites on the domain whitelist that I don't think should be there. Why can't we remove them?

A: In August of 2017 we moved from a domain blacklist - which targetted rule breaking domains - to a domain whitelist - that approved generally rule compliant domains. At that time, we were very sensitive to the impact of making this change, and were determined to make certain that the whitelist was not a round-about way of trying to curate our front page, or push submissions in a different ideological direction than what users were interested in submitting. To guide us, we created a 'domain notability' requirement, which would ensure that any domain that was sufficiently influential or remarkable would be permitted.

A year and a half later, we're extremely happy with the impact of the whitelist system. It has dramatically reduced the amount of spam and obvious rule breaking content that we have submitted to us. Things that were once incredibly commonplace - advertising spam, Macedonian fake news / click-bait websites, blogs, Youtube promoters etc - are now made instantly irrelevant. This has made r/politics/new much easier to browse, and has let the moderator team focus our efforts elsewhere - on enforcing comment guidelines, removing trolls, removing off topic content etc etc. There are many domains that we receive regular complaints about - their content may be inflammatory, controversial, or spurious. The fact is that we were very actively trying not to target those domains when moving to this system. We want to make user voting - the core mechanic that all of reddit is based around - the primary method of curation on our page. We still feel confident that our approach is sound - but of course we will discuss further below.

Please (for the love of all that is holy) try to remember - inclusion on the whitelist is not an endorsement by the mod team or r/politics, or a reflection of reputability. Is is solely reflective of whether the domain is notable.

Q: I'm unclear or unhappy with the comment rules. What kinds of comments do you remove?

A: You can read all the comment rules here. First and foremost however - please never under any circumstance make any comment which wishes physical harm on anyone for any reason. And I know it's troubling on a couple levels that we have to now specify this:

Quoting people suggesting physical harm as a way to make the same implication is not a neat trick for evading this rule. Do not use direct quotes in order to imply or condone physical harm.
Do not make 'suggestions' for capital executions unless we've entered the sentencing phase for an active trial in which that may be relevant.

Beyond comments that incite, condone or wish harm, we aggressively prune comments that are uncivil towards others, or are intended to troll or flame other users. Comments of this nature could be removed from the thread, and repetitive behaviour of this nature may result in a ban from the subreddit.

We would like your feedback!

Midterms

Midterms are always a very busy time for the subreddit! This year, as you may have noticed, we did something interesting by having individual threads for each state, a stickied thread linking to those threads, and an overarching megathread for general discussion. We would like to know what you did or did not like about the format, what could be improved, what could we do differently?

Themed threads

Our current "themed" threads are scheduled as follows:

Sunday - Satire Sunday

This thread is intended for users to be able to post things that fall under our general "no satire" rule. Clips from satirical shows like SNL, or articles from sites like The Onion.

Monday - What happened in your state?

This thread is intended for users to post political stories of interest in their respective states.

Friday - Fun Friday

This is a thread to just decompress and have fun!

Saturday - Political Cartoon thread

As the name suggests, this is a thread to share political cartoons.

We would like to know, do you enjoy these threads? Do you have suggestions for other interesting threads?

Chat

Reddit recently added a chat feature for communities. Our own community chat has grown to over 13,000 subscribers! Anyone is welcome to join and participate. If you're subscribed to r/politics, it should show up in your recommendations. It will also show up on the sidebar of the redesigned site.

Chat has the same conduct rules as the subreddit.

We've taken on a handful of chat-only moderators to help keep the chat friendly and open. Huge shoutout to the help we've been getting from our chat moderators - along with a large number of incredible new mod team volunteers we've added to our subreddit team.

Since chat is so new, we're still figuring out how it should be run - it is very much a new experiment for us. We'd love to hear your ideas and feedback on how we can make the chat experience useful and fun for our users!

submitted by /u/likeafox
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The "What happened in your state last week?" Megathread, Week 47

Posted: 19 Nov 2018 09:00 AM PST

Welcome to the 'What happened in your state last week' thread, where you can post any local political news stories that you find important in the comments. This is a weekly thread posted every Monday, in order to facilitate more discussion on local issues on /r/politics. Since this is intended to be a thread about local politics, top-level comments that are exclusively about national issues will not be allowed. When commenting, please include the state you're living in, and don't forget to link sources. Also, please actually describe what happened. "I live in X, you know what happened" isn't helpful to users and will be removed.

If someone from your state made a news round-up that you think is insufficient, feel free to comment to that round-up with further news stories. Enjoy discussion, and review our civility guidelines before engaging with others.

submitted by /u/optimalg
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants To Replace Columbus Day With Holiday For Election Day

Posted: 19 Nov 2018 07:30 AM PST