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I consider the day misspent that I am not either charged with a crime,
or arrested for one.
-- "Ratsy" Tourbillon
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 19 2022, @12:13AM (2 children)
If you're an editor, you can see hashes, and know that I'm the same AC you replied to.
You're right, SN staff do receive a lot of nasty comments, particularly from a small subset of users. One of these users is banned but continues to actively disrupt the site as much as possible. I generally agree with his political views but find his behavior abhorrent and believe he deserves his ban. I will say that I am not personally making such comments.
With respect to the Breitbart story, the specific article probably was fine. Bias can be an issue, but the bigger issue with that specific source is its long history of failed fact checks. Janrinok said that the content of that article could be corroborated elsewhere, and I believe him. Generally speaking, Breitbart is a lousy source because of its poor fact check record. Where I disagreed with janrinok's defense of Brietbart was his comparison to other sources. NPR is a highly credible source with a clean fact check record, and doesn't have that much of a left bias. CNN's TV programming is highly biased and has a lousy fact check record. However, news articles on CNN.com do have good fact check records. There's really no comparison between those sources and Breitbart. WSWS might be the best comparison, but it has a better fact check record than Breitbart, at least according to the fact checking I found. The specific article almost certainly wasn't a problem, but it's typically not a trustworthy source. The specific criticism seemed unwarranted to me, but it's generally a bad source. There are sites that rate the credibility of sources, so it's fairly easy to check on this and get a good idea of whether a source is likely to be good. Look up Media Bias/Fact Check and you can find evaluations of a large number of sources.
As for being limited to stories that are in the queue, there is a solution to that. Stories that aren't time-sensitive and might be interesting a few weeks later can be held in the queue. That was done with COVID stories, which were then merged into a single story instead of posting each one individually. That's why the text is there on the submission queue page. Perhaps the Intel vulnerability story would be less newsworthy in 2-3 weeks, but the story about pig organ transplants doesn't have the same time-sensitive nature.
I trust you that janrinok isn't actually ungrateful, but many of his recent comments have come across in a very bad way. I thought about replying to the Breitbart argument, and I read those comments. I didn't want to pile on, and didn't think my comments would be helpful there. I've tried to exercise restraint in my criticism, and I don't take posting such criticism lightly.
I have contributed money to the site, including as recently as a few months ago. I don't remember exactly when I subscribed most recently, but I'm pretty sure that it's counted in the current funding cycle on the front page. If not, it would have been last fall, shortly before the near year. It hasn't been the only time I've given SN money, either. I'm sure there are users who contribute more, but I do the best I can given my financial situation.
But like I said, just as staff members work for free, the community also works for free, and we contribute our time and money as we are able. We do the best we can in terms of subscribing, submitting stories, moderating, and posting worthwhile comments. When someone contributes a story, even if they haven't edited it, and just submit the entire article via IRC, they're genuinely trying to help the site. It might be more work if it's a long block of text, but that user is genuinely trying to make a useful contribution. Perhaps there isn't time to edit it in the short term, but if it's not time-sensitive, it could be held for a time when the queue is low and there's time to edit the story. Most of your community members are doing the best they can, I assure you. If more people had the time available to them to edit their submitted stories carefully or actually become editors or work elsewhere on the staff, I suspect they would have done so.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hubie on Thursday May 19 2022, @02:50AM (1 child)
I appreciate your responding back. With my response I wanted to give people a general idea what goes on with the editing process. Back in the Slashdot days I used to contribute a story on occasion and would have them rejected, so I stopped suggesting any (and in those late 90s early 2000s they weren't hurting for stories). When SN opened for business, I pretty quickly submitted a story and it was very quickly rejected (looking back on it, it was an interesting (to me, at least) topic with a pretty poor lead-in written by me with an implied assumption that people would follow the link and read the story). My initial response was similar to some of the comments I've seen here ("they said they wanted help, so I sent in a submission and it was rejected, so I said forget it"), but after I got over that initial feeling of rejection, my next ten or so submissions were taken. I just wanted to let people know that it happens, and maybe they're right in that there's not a great reason it didn't get picked up, but don't let that discourage submitting. The story topics themselves aren't what's the most interesting part to me and I easily find a lot of these stories on my own. What I like, for instance, is there will be something like one of takyon's hardware/processor release update stories, and I've stopped seriously following hardware quite a while ago so outside of this site I wouldn't have even read the whole headline before I moved on to something else, but here I will click in and end up coming away with three suggested alternatives for the Raspberry Pi I can't buy, and which alternative is best for running a home multimedia setup or something.
I hope my previous comment didn't come off sounding like a complaint that the submitters aren't doing their job. I think we all appreciate the stories ending up in the queue in any form and the editors will do the best job they can on them. I've looked at a story and thought "that'll take a lot of work and I don't have time for that now" only to come back later to find one of the other editors took care of it. I'll just reiterate to any who are interested that all my interactions with the editors, including a lot of training time, has been nothing but class and that they take their roles seriously.
(Score: 1) by Ironrose on Sunday May 22 2022, @06:55AM
hubie might be a keeper. Only thing, do not interact with soylentils. This was TMB's mistake, and now janrinok's. We want transparency, not whining.