I’m fine with right wingers in my media honestly. I need to see their arguments anyway. I don’t want to be blind to what the far right is talking about.

But with that being said, the NYT has a lot of questionable stories. Beyond just right wing trash that I honestly am cool with.

I’m cancelling too but I’m not convinced on NYT or The guardian yet.

NYT strikes me as horribly inept at technology. Guardian is foreign (granted: UK is barely foreign lol but foreign anyway). I’d like to support an American paper if at all possible.

Guardian is good material though. It’s a top contender for now but I’m still looking for American papers. Surely something in this big country is worth supporting?

I mean, maybe I just support aftermath.site (aka: Kotaku before they quit/were replaced with the new writers). Video game news + politics is kinda what I’m interested in, but Aftermath.site (and Kotaku of old) didn’t even pretend to be neutral or facts based.

I guess the modern Internet means that I need to pick and choose a-la-carte.

Yeah, this is what I’m here to protect. “BestOfLemmy” isn’t a political channel. But it is a manual curation and manual sharing community.

The idea that you like a post and feel like that’s enough to share is what I’d like to encourage. It gets weird with politics because now others are less inclined to post here because of this post however. But if the priority is to encourage posts and sharing here, I cannot delete a topic like this that was posted in good faith.

Its not like I’ll accept all topics of political nature either, but given how close we are to the election it makes sense why you’d be thinking about this right now.

I’m deleting the worst of posts that have degenerated into just two members insulting each other over and over again.

You can see the topic is mostly open for your discussion. Just don’t make your posts devolve into useless bullshit and I’ll keep the posts up.

I know it’s careful balance and it’s basically impossible to get it correct on political topics. But I’ll do my best.

I’m simply being honest here. I’m not going to let 5+ posts of insults just stay around here. But this is also a topic with literally hundreds of comments so I’ll be making mistakes as a moderator.

I’m not passing out bans here, yet anyway. I’m just deleting posts that have gone off the rails (as well as the threads / earlier posts that led to overheated discussion).

There are two rules currently written for “BestOfLemmy”, and they are:

1. Manual Curation – If someone thinks its best-of material, it is allowed here.

2. Newbie to Lemmy perspective – Posts should be beneficial to new Lemmy users. I’ll ban topics on a case-by-case basis that violate this (ex: deep server vs server feuds or other “community vs community drama” topics).

From #1: The poster clearly thinks its worth sharing, so it deserves a topic. That’s sufficient. For #2: it is a very political season (with only days remaining before the USA’s voting days), so I think most people looking into Lemmy here would forgive us for a politically charged topic like this.

I evaluate that this topic was posted in good faith, and that newbies would accept such a topic here. So that’s why it stays.

From a “BestOf” perspective: my main problem with the post is that it links to a picture of the post, rather than the original topic and the original discussion that created this particular post. I might make a rule against image-posts (ie: do not make unnecessary screenshots. Prefer to link to various topics and other discussions on Lemmy. Screenshots are counterproductive to the greater Lemmy community).

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Then the next Billionaire with a massive ego and huge budget comes out and makes another one.

Or we get Jack Dorsey making a new company for a 3rd time.

My post above is 376 characters, which would have required three tweets under the original 140 character limit.

Mastodon, for better or worse, has captured a bunch of people who are hooked on the original super-short posting style, which I feel is a form of Newspeak / 1984-style dumbing down of language and discussion that removed nuance. Yes, Mastodon has removed the limit and we have better abilities to discuss today, but that doesn’t change the years of training (erm… untraining?) we need to do to de-program people off of this toxic style.

Especially when Mastodon is trying to cater to people who are used to tweets.

Your post could fit on Mastodon

EDIT: and second, Mastodon doesn’t have the toxic-FOMO effect that hooks people into Twitter (or Threads, or Bluesky).

People post not because short sentences are good. They post and doom-scroll because they don’t want to feel left out of something. Mastodon is healthier for you, but also less intoxicating / less pushy. Its somewhat doomed to failure, as the very point of these short posts / short-engagement stuff is basically crowd manipulation, FOMO and algorithmic manipulation.

Without that kind of manipulation, we won’t get the kinds of engagement on Mastodon (or Lemmy for that matter).

Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.

Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It’s become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.

Mastodon tries to be healthier but I’m not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.

After discussing that event before, the rule I settled up on is ‘Valid for a newbie to Lemmy’.

Newbies shouldn’t be exposed to the nuances to server vs server infighting IMO. But this post while there’s an element of it here… Has enough other benefits that I think it can stay.

This isn’t a post I’d put up here, but it doesn’t seem to be so server-vs-server focused to trigger my worries for a newbie reader. A newbie probably would see hexbear and not really know the full context (as the post really doesn’t focus on Hexbear aside from in passing).

The other post was so egregious it crossed the line for me. But this one is fine and can stay up.

It’s not the server vs server part that I’m against. What I am against is the anti-newbie kind of drama that’d turn people away from Lemmy. If newbies are coming here feeling like Lemmy is full of people yelling at each other or making fun of each other’s communities, that’s a bad thing that I’m worried about.

But this post: I can see where your concerns are. But from the ‘Is a newbie going to be disgusted by this’ ruling I made before? I don’t think so. So that’s why this post can stay.

Yes thank you for posting about this. I’ll read though this discussion and make a decision soon.

I thought Patrick Boyle was a rap specialist music major?

Except Trump’s famous “They’re eating cats and dogs” line came from JD Vance. The craziest part of the debate wasn’t even Trump’s to fully own. JD Vance quite possibly is worse than Trump in regards to likability.

So if Trump drops out, who the fuck in the Republican field replaces him? Ron Desantis?

That Abdul situation completely surprised me. I can’t believe how bad a flub that was.

That’s what I’ll be meming moving forward. Not only did Trump admit to working with the Taliban, he made up fake people while doing so.

This needs to get memed and shared everyfucking where.

This is it people. We need to meme this debate. Otherwise, the fucking Republicans will forget this shit.

Thank fucking God that Kamala knew she had to be the first person to bring up Fentanyl in the debate. It was a bit round-about, but she got there and made sure to make the first strike early.

Its not quite a policy platform, but it counts. She’s recognized the importance of appearances on this very, very important matter.

Whether you agree with me or not, I think I can trust Kamala on it. I figured I should get back to you after I saw that moment in the debate early.

That’s not even a program and it certainly isn’t a link to the DNC platform either.

We don’t need catchy names.

Yes you do. This is fucking politics. Which is 99% about appearances. If you don’t look like you’re doing something, the sheep don’t notice.

You have the fucking stupid mindset that loses elections.