YouTube is the poster child for enshittification, it’s not a valid example for anything else.

If generations are using YouTube as a primary news source, we’re all in deep, deep trouble!

As a moderator, it’s not on me to develop a better system. I enforce the rules set by Admins and the people who created the communities.

In the communities I personally created, the rules are different.

Whoosh.

The OWNER has been disclosed, it’s the source of FUNDING being obscured. But considering who owns it, the Qatari connection absolutely makes sense:

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/09814915

"1 officer / 0 resignations

BESSASSO, Jamal Awn Jamal

Correspondence address7th Floor, 1 Sussex Place, Hammersmith, London, England, W6 9EA

Role ActiveDirectorDate of birthDecember 1969Appointed on8 October 2015

NationalityDutchCountry of residenceUnited Kingdom

Identity verification due21 October 2026"

So who is Jamal Awn Jamal Bessasso? Well…

Former director of planning and human resources for Al Jazeera in… wait for it… Qatar.

Al Jazeera, as good as they are, has a notable blind spot with Qatar due to THEIR funding, most folks recognize that, so it makes sense MEE would be the same.

This doesn’t mean either source is necessarily out of line when reporting non-Qatari interests, but definitely grain of salt worthy otherwise.

I remove posts that break the rules, “truth” doesn’t enter into it.

If I allowed the rule breaking posts I personally agreed with and removed only ones I disagreed with that would make me the evil mod people accuse me of being.

Sucks when a good story gets spiked, but if you can’t source it outside of Youtube, Twitter, or Substack is that really a good story? 🤔

We do remove other bullshit too, for example Tass, yes, they have editorial standards… from the Kremlin!

We’re probably going to start having a similar stand on CBS until Bari Weiss is inevitably removed.

That’s the nature of managing a community like this.

At the same time, the signal to noise ratio on video links, social media, and blogs is way, way too low to consider.

Are there good sources? Sure, a minority, but just because PBS has a Twitter account doesn’t mean we’re going to open that particular floodgate.

We can’t even say “blue checks only” since Musk fucked all THAT up.

So no. No video, no social media, no blogs. Don’t like it? Start your own community. Enjoy the spam.

For me, it’s all manual, I don’t have the ability to apply bots to the feed, you’d have to talk to the Admins about that, above my paygrade, which is “$0.00”. LOL.

Probably not far, we’re volunteers and don’t have time to read EVERY link posted. We respond to reports and, if we happen to catch something obviously infringing in our browsing we remove that too.

If you see a link in the feed that breaks the rules, report it and we’ll resolve it. I remove “stub” articles all the time that only exist to point to a video.

But if I’m looking at the feed and the source is “Youtube.com” or some other video site, that gets yanked with a quickness.

For the Dropsite news thing, that has come up before, and yes, we block substack for the same reasons above.

But like Twitter and Facebook, yes, there are legitimate news agencies that use those platforms, as there are on Substack. But opening the door to those platforms again introduces bias in moderation.

“You removed my shitty Twitter link but allowed this other one!!! WHYYYYYYY!!!”

We aren’t engaging in that. So no, no social media, no blogs, no videos.

The problem with video isn’t that it’s not a legitimate source for news, the problem is that ANYONE can put a video online.

Youtube does not do any sort of vetting or validation of content, and when you consider the volume of traffic they get, that is NOT surprising.

Same thing for social media like Facebook and Twitter.

Same thing for blog sites.

Any asshole can post up a Tweet or a Youtube or a blog.

This is why communities like World and Politics require links to news articles that have some form of editorial oversight.

Here’s a video link I removed yesterday:

https://youtu.be/lqR6NjEz2JY

So who is “Sibel Edmonds” and what is “newsbud.com”?

Well… newsbud.com is a batshit right-wing conspiracy site, along the lines of Infowars. Even if they had an actual news site still going, which they don’t, they would be removed for being a bunch of tinfoil hat nutjobs and not actual news.

FORTUNATELY, the rule forbidding video content means that I, as a moderator, don’t have to do a deep dive in conspiracy bullshit to remove a post. Videos are not allowed. Full stop. They do not pass the bar.

If we allowed video, moderators would have to review each and every one picking winners and losers and the result would be some mods removing videos they didn’t like and keeping the videos they did like…

Which is exactly the kind of bad moderation you rail against.

The unbiased, fair approach is to say “No Videos”.

Or, as when someone approached me about the Kennedy Center livestream and asked me in a PM “Hey, how do I post the livestream video?”

I told them to find a recent article on the topic, link to that, and then put the livestream link in the body of the post.

Which they did, and that was a good thing because there was nothing to see on the livestream until 1:30 AM Pacific / 4:30 AM Eastern, and then they put up tarps so nobody could see anyone taking the Trump sign down.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/61723313

As a top level post, that content would have been a 110% fail. So it’s a good thing they linked to an article with actual information and not just a video.

The same process can be used for video of legitimate interviews or debates, link to an actual news source discussing the candidates or issues involved, put the video link in the body or as a top level comment.