I made a comment to this effect the other day. Scrolling through this community, out of about the 10 most recent posts, I see one that is borderline oniony and the rest are just straight up news, mostly US politics-related.
Is this OK? Is this what this community is for? I ask because I want to see can’t-believe-it’s-real headlines, but if this is going to be another doom scroll bad news sub I’m going to leave and look elsewhere. Just curious to hear people’s feelings on this before I do.
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upvoting because i too want to see more true onion-y posts here even if it means fewer posts overall. the almost onion-y posts tend to not be funny at all, just pure depressing irony, and amass votes in a circle jerk nature, essentially making this another news sub as OP notes.
i get that “truth is stranger than fiction” but that doesn’t mean that the every time the steady progression of the west into fascism is recorded to the media it needs to be posted here. and also it’s excessively us-centric which is both boring for americans and unwelcoming to a global audience.
It may just be that many people posting don’t exactly decipher between the true ethos of the community and something their view as, like you said, stranger than fiction. I would say it’s more on us, the community, to use the upvote/downvote function to help curate what we view as content within the spirit of the community.
Personally I think the upvote/downvote thing breaks down in a world with an all feed. Many people don’t check what community something is coming from, which is why moderation is another important factor.
If other people like how it is now that’s fine, it just isn’t for me.
I liked the method some subreddits have where there’s always a pinned comment that community members can upvote/downvote for how relevant it is.
I agree, I have heard more people mentioning that they use the ‘All’ feed than any other
Upvotes and downvotes aren’t enough. People from All (and plenty of subscribers) will upvote anything in any community if they like it, it does not matter if it fits the theme.
sort of, but i would support the mods if they tried to take action themselves.
the saddest downfall of a community was r/MURDEREDBYWORDS. used to be the funniest shit with the most beautifully crafted comebacks. but then poor moderation let politics start creeping in. the politics was fine and still funny at first. but politics gets engagement, it starts bubbling to the top, and then the quality of content took a nosedive while engagement remained high. now the community is totally derailed to the point that whenever i transitioned from reddit to fedi, i preemptively blocked whatever the parallel sub here was.
hated to see that comedy sub just become “republican bad,” and would hate to see the same happen here.
Yeah fair enough. I thought about mentioning the mods curating the content here but didn’t for not wanting to tell someone how to run their community, but I think you’re right on that.
Look, it’s not the community’s fault that reality is oniony!
Thanks for bringing this up.
I didn’t notice until you pointed it out, because I usually browse my feed as a whole, without checking which community each post comes from. Now that I look at this community alone, I see a bunch of news posts that don’t belong here, just you described. No wonder my feed has been so thick with doom lately.
I’ll try to pay more attention and report these posts (rule 4 or 2) when I think of it.
You weren’t kidding.
Trump falsely claims he never called for Hillary Clinton to be locked up
How is this NotTheOnion-appropriate in any way?
Because everyone remembers he user to lead “lock her up” chants, so claiming otherwise is utterly bizarre, in a 1984 “Oceania had always been at with Eurasia” way.
Looking back the one that stood out for me was “‘Atlas’ movie review: J.Lo battles space robots in new Netflix film”.
Claiming otherwise might be a lie, but that doesn’t make it bizarre.
Lies in politics are not bizarre.
because it’s hilarious!
It might be funny, but it’s in no way unbelievable that Trump did that. Nobody would have mistaken that for an onion news headline, since it’s just a generally known thing that Trump does.
If you report ones that are just news they do seem to be taken down though.
A big issue is about half of everything trump says could easily be the onion. Which is likely why there’s so many political ones.
One of the states said people don’t have the right to vote. That sounds insanely oniony.
There was one about 40% of family homes being owned by corperations. Again that could easily be an exaggerated and ridiculous thing.
So I think there’s some personal interpretation.
This is why probably 2/3rds of what I post on here is politics
A big issue is about half of everything trump says could easily be the onion. Which is likely why there’s so many political ones.
It’s also an election year, in which Trump was tried for shenanigans, which will lead to a lot more news stories than usual where you read the headline and wonder if this is satire or not. Things will return back to a more even stream of content but US politics is especially odd at the moment.
I think that’s a fair interpretation though I definitely feel differently. I guess for me not the onion on Reddit was something I looked to for comedy, and so far the Lemmy version has been mostly depressing. That’s why I think it may just not be my cup of tea over here anymore.
There is at least one bot dragging over NTO from the other place and it does tend to have less political content: !nottheonion@zerobytes.monster I suppose it falls to the users here to post more of what they think fits and report what they feel doesn’t. We can help define the remit of this place if we feel it is going down the wrong track.
It also depends in what you are looking for - there are other weird news communities on Lemmy, I’ve tried to list them in the sidebar at !andfinally@feddit.uk
Thanks for the heads up! Joined.
It’s still a bit of a mix but then it can be subjective but it’s another source of NOT news and we have to curate our own feeds.
Hey, I try to keep a hands-off approach to modding as much as possible, but you’re right, this has indeed gotten out of control.
I’d appreciate it if people would report posts that don’t belong here more, because otherwise I’m not likely to see them until they’ve already gathered a ton of comments, and I’m hesitant to remove posts at that point.
So… Thanks for posting about this.
I appreciate the response! My goal isn’t to throw you or anyone else under the bus either, just trying to gauge whether I misunderstood what the community was for. I know moderation is a lot of work so I appreciate the effort and understand it won’t always be perfect.
I think 70% of the recent posts seem onion-y or would be if it were claiming any other person except a handful of people who regularly say things that I’d have assumed were the Onion pre-Trump.
The Onion has generally been political, with a bias towards US politics, and Not the Onion is for news… so the posts should generally be political news mixed with some lighthearted nonsense news.
Also, one of the less oniony stories is one I upvoted without realizing where it was posted just because it seemed funny and it was one of the non-political news stories.
Between this community and the actual Onion I get pretty much the gist of current events, yeah. If some topic or other piques my interest from here, I’ll chase it down. The Onion and its opposite tend to give me enough of the context I need to figure out what’s important enough to pursue vs the vast majority of quasi-satire hitting “normal” news cycles over a given week.
It’s like a hyper-curated way to get my news, as if handpicked for me by a space clown. And I like it that way.
I really gotta setup a filter to block all fuckerburg pawns
It should probably be up to the posters and those voting on the posts instead of one person complaining about their idea of this community’s purity not being followed
