Community thoughts on submitting aggregate stories vs primary sources?
I am curious to hear everyone's thoughts/ideas on submitting aggregate stories vs finding and submitting the primary sources of news/articles/stories/studies/etc.
E.g. Today, Eurogamer published an article about Fortnite driving headset sales up which is basically just a rearrangement of quotes from the original source, an article in Variety. So even though the Variety article is a few days old now, I decided to just submit that instead.
But that situation brings up some interesting questions:
Do we care if the submissions are "hot off the presses", when the newly published aggregate article doesn't add anything substantive to the original, older source material? Should we just post the original source material despite it being dated by the time we stumble upon it, if the subject is interesting enough?
What about aggregate "breaking" news/politics articles that take the more "dry/clinical" original source reporting and "spice it up" with opinions, add additional context or focus on a more "important/interesting" part of the original source's subject matter?
What about science reporting, which is often shoddy, inaccurate and/or outright misleading? If there are no good aggregate sources should we post the shoddy one if the subject is interesting, or should we hunt down the original study from a peer reviewed publication and submit that even if it's locked behind a hard paywall?
Where should we draw the line on these sorts of aggregate articles? How far back to the original source should we go if doing so means potentially locking people out of actually reading it (through paywalls) or even stripping all the useful context out of it (e.g. the first tweet that mentions an event)?
Should we simply combine all the sources, megathread style, and maybe even let users submit new ones to it as they come out? If we do that, how do we maintain any semblance of usefulness to the comments section, especially at scale and for events that are ongoing? IMO, most of Reddit’s megathreads outlive their usefulness after just a few hours because of that and sorting the comment by new doesn’t really help.
IMO, if ~ wants to focus on quality submissions and discussions then these questions are ones we need to carefully consider before any policies or systems regarding them are implemented. So I am curious if anyone here (mods especially) have any experience dealing with these issues, how they did and if anyone has any ideas on how ~ can do it better.
This is something that I'd really like to try to improve by building some new features specifically aimed towards it. Some scattered thoughts:
Strict enforcement
Being extremely strict about the "original source" doesn't always work very well. Hacker News is quite strict about this, and the mods there will edit the links (and titles) of posts to point to what they consider the original fairly often. Sometimes this is the right thing to do, but other times they manage to completely destroy the point of the submission by doing it, and make all of the existing comments seem strange or off-topic.
An example that comes to mind is that Slack recently made a change to their terms making it so that the owner of the Slack team would be able to view users' private chats with each other if they needed to. This was a bit buried in a larger terms update, but someone noticed it and wrote an article specifically focused on this single change and the implications of it. The article was submitted, people were talking about it, and then suddenly the mods changed the link to point to Slack's full terms document, and the title to something like "Slack Terms of Service".
Sure, technically the terms document is the "original source" for the story, but doing that basically ruined the entire purpose of the submission. Anyone coming to the discussion late was also probably very confused, since all of the comments appeared to be focused on one particular tiny section of the document, seemingly without anyone bringing it up in the first place.
"Blogspam"
On the other hand, there's a really major issue in internet "reporting" where a ton of sites only occasionally (or even never) write their own stories, and just post slightly reworded versions of news or articles from other sites. They'll usually credit the original at least, but a lot of the time they don't add any sort of additional info or analysis at all. In cases like this, we should absolutely switch to the original source, probably through editing the link itself where that's reasonable.
This is especially bad in relation to large, detailed stories about popular (or controversial) topics. Some major site will post a long story, and other sites will rush to pull out individual sections (or even single sentences) from it and turn that into their "story". This isn't a particularly considered example, but just since it's handy, let's take that story I posted last night about the Aqualung album art. It's a long article and most people probably won't read bother reading it, so other sites would find a single quote from it like this one:
And post their own article like, "Artist of Iconic Aqualung Album Art Considered it a 'Throwaway Gig'". Then that article gets shared because the title's more sensationalized and they've taken a long, detailed story and reduced it to a soundbite. That's the kind of thing we definitely don't want to encourage, and things like that should be removed or replaced with the original article where possible.
Possibilities
So, what could we do that might improve the situation? As mentioned, I think having link and title editing available to high-trust users would be a big help. This needs to be tracked and accountable though, so it should say what changes were made and who made them (maybe only show who to other high-trust users?)
In addition, I think we can probably do some interesting things with adding "related articles/links". For example, maybe an article about a new science paper is the best thing to post (since it's publicly accessible and probably more approachable), but we could have a link to the original paper or other sources available in the topic's sidebar.
I'd also like to look into a mechanic something like "overall story" where different posts could all be linked back into one sort of "hub" for the overall story. This would have some neat potential so that people could do things like "show me all the posts related to the self-driving Uber crash" or "I'm sick of this Uber self-driving crash story, filter all of those out". This is similar to tagging, but not quite the same.
Maybe a text bar for high trust users to post related content or the original source?
We've dealt with this issue quite a bit in settings the rules for r/science, and it's challenging. We require submissions to be summaries of a recent (last 6 months) peer-reviewed journal article. This immediately gets rid of all of the blogspam from people writing articles about articles about science, and the spam of people linking their blog page with some rambling opinion piece.
Images are a hard one because it quickly goes to low-quality content, even though there are some cool infographics that supply valuable content. People linking youtube videos of science-like stuff is a controversial area, people get pissed that they can't link their videos! All too often their videos are total crap, even though there are some great ones.
In order to enforce this in a scalable fashion however, we had to build some bots to scan for doi links or links to pages with doi links in them as a way of automatically looking for low-quality posts, we'd need an API to do this.
It would be kind of cool to submit a mega-thread (with multiple sources). I think it would help give posts a lot of credibility and let users pick the external source they trust (or prefer due to aggressive paywalls or whatever).
I submitted the story about the expanse being cancelled yesterday, and I did struggle over which source would be best to post, it would be kind of neat to submit the handful and let people pick their poison.
As for enforcement... I don't think you're going to have much luck there, you'll just be met with criticism for changing the submission, it might be worthy of an bot-style addition to delve the original post(s) from one submitted, or rather to unwrap the original (ideally looking for a date to post along side it, but that's... hard, it's a really hard problem to solve).
Personally, I am fine with criticism and debate about enforcement if it’s constructive... it’s the totally unfounded cries of censorship and making mountains out of molehills that I don’t think we should pay any credence to.
E.g. That Eurogamer article where it’s 100% clear it added nothing substantive to the discussion since 90% of it was just quotes from the original Variety article, if someone submitted it would replacing it with the original source article, even after it got some votes and comments already, really be so bad?
What about freebooters, where their submission gets popular and so the original creator gets no credit or revenue for it? Would replacing a free booted source with the original creators, even after it gained a bit of popularity, be so controversial? Simply removing the freebooted content doesn't work since the re-submission of the original creators source often doesn't garner nearly as much attention the second time around since so many people have seen it already.
As for megathreads, I agree but I also mentioned the problem with them in regard to comment thread usefulness especially at scale and for ongoing events. Do you have any ideas how we can possibly address that issue with them? I am kinda stumped there. My only thought was a sorting method based on adding weight to ongoing discussion within a particular thread so top level comments that had few replies slowly sank and ongoing discussions stayed afloat somehow. But there are problems with that as well since inflammatory statements, arguments and flame wars would potentially be the most active whereas a superb, well sourced comment that addressed every issue adequately and so left no room for debate might slowly disappear.
I dunno, I had mentioned the idea of "Discussion Topics" (originally called them "topic threads") somewhere else, perhaps the politics discussion. I think the better idea would be to encourage starting submissions as a discussion before a "I found something on the internet" link-sharing / reinforce-my-opinion service.
Possibly the submission of a thread would start with the idea of a topic where the focus is on a short foreword section, and tags before links / big text pieces from the OP. The links could be seen as references to reinforce the discussion and could perhaps be curated by members.
Within a topic thread, tags would be key, and allowing the comments to be filtered based on a collection of tags would be a good way to cut through the cruft. Something like this:
https://jsfiddle.net/5pfjcx4L/embedded/result/
This way when trying to navigate the comments in a big aggregate thread we can filter out
rantand focus only on the intersection ofprivacyandcanadaor something to slice through the comment soup you end up with on big threads.I dunno, what do you think?
Edit: Was reading a bit more of the nomenclature @Deimos is using, and updated the wording a bit to avoid confusion. Also given that text topics are very similar, I want to point out that the emphasis would be on the comments, vs the text submission... perhaps we can shape "Text Topics" in this direction.
Edit 37: Holy shit, I can't type straight today...
Yeah, I definitely think the tag system could be better taken advantage of with comments and threads... the boilerplate
noisetrollflamejokeofftopicones are a bit useless other than in very, very basic filtering. Opening them up a bit more or even going fully user submitted might help identify threads worth following and filtering out of ones that aren't. E.g. highlighting comments/threads taggedcivil debateand filtering out ones taggedbickering,rant, etc.I am not so sure on the topical discussion idea unless it was heavily enforced as '100% objective statement', almost like a formal debate proposal for titles and included self-text since it could run into the same problem that @deimos talked about with combined self/link submissions:
If we can somehow avoid those issues I honestly think it's a pretty damn good idea and I love your example! Maybe even including it on the site as a 3rd submission type so you would have
linkself-text&multi-source topicortopical discussion, something like that.Yeah, the foreword was mostly to avoid really complicated titles, but you're right... I wonder if you started the discussion with no foreword, but people of "trusted" status could add / edit the foreword to help illustrate the discussion, maybe only ~200-400 characters and no links/etc.
You see this a lot on /r/askreddit with moderators adding a sticky comment to the top of a thread to help direct the discussion.
Perhaps the input for the topic could have a seperate space for the OP's opinion, and it's automatically posted as a comment to the thread so it's subjected to the same kind of voting / tag filtering as the rest.
I wonder if a moderation queue like stackoverflow has for allowing non-trusted members to suggest tags / remove tags / edit the foreword could be used and those with trust could go through the queue. This way the burden of populating these or approving things doesn't fall entirely to trusted members, they just end up with approval power, allowing new people aspiring to become trusted to contribute in a safer way.
Edit: You know, thinking about it, stackoverflow does have many problems but they're kind of the bastion of self moderation systems. There's probably some interesting lessons good & bad to learn from them.