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I blew it.
You rightly hold SoylentNews to a high standard and I let you down when I merged three different political stories into a single story.
Rushing to get out the door to get to work, seeing the story queue running out, having seen the interest in the UK elections in our IRC channel, having heard much on the radio concerning former FBI Director Comey's testimony, seeing a story appear on a likely nomination for that vacated FBI post, and aware of the guideline on only one Politics story per day — I made a hurried decision to merge all three stories together.
The community rightly pointed out the shortcomings in that decision. Rest assured I won't make THAT decision again!
In retrospect, it would have been much better if I released two separate stories — one with the UK Election vote, and another with a merge of the FBI-related stories with, say, a 12-hour spacing between them.
It is a privilege to volunteer for this site, one that I do not take lightly. I let down the community — you deserve better. Trust that I have taken this lesson to heart and will strive to do better going forwards.
--martyb
[n1: There will be a UK election story coming in the next day or so, when more details are available. The majority of the coverage so far is speculation and reports of agreements have been retracted.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @10:37PM (5 children)
I had no idea.
Should we avoid posting political stories?
I submitted the mathamatical modeling of gerrymandering story because the queue was almost dry and put it into Politics instead of just Science, but I didn't know it was going to eat at some quota. Don't we have the nexus so people can avoid Politics if they wish?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 11 2017, @10:56PM (2 children)
This bullshit apology story just ate the Politics quota for today?
If martyb weren't a complete utter disingenuous cunt, he would have put this shit under Meta where it belongs. What a fucking cunt.
(Score: 4, Informative) by n1 on Sunday June 11 2017, @11:02PM (1 child)
I decided to leave it in Politics.
The reason for this is... If you have Politics unchecked in your preferences, then you would not have seen the original story anyway so it's irrelevant to your use of the site. If you're an AC then it doesn't matter either, as you can't set preferences.
I could have put it in both Politics and Meta. I am a cunt, martyb is an honorable gentleman.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 12 2017, @06:33PM
I am a cunt, martyb is an honorable gentleman.
Hmmm...is that a UK cunt, or a US one?
(Score: 2) by n1 on Sunday June 11 2017, @10:56PM
There is no hard limit, but we do try to maintain a focus on technology and science. In my opinion there is such a wide intersection where politics meets science and technology. Your submitted story is a good example of this.
We should have some focus on political stories that actually have some wider relevance and importance, not some super localized or hyper-partisan issue that's going for point scoring. This is all very subjective, but we just don't want a situation where every other story mentions some divisive politician or controversial but marginal policy proposal... When it's important yes, but this is not the place for every utterance from the figureheads of political factions.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday June 11 2017, @11:12PM
Theoretically, although ACs can't turn it off without logging in AFAIK.
It is more of an informal rule than anything. It was also recommended that Politics nexus stories be slotted in between two regularly-spaced stories to prevent a gap for users that turn off the nexus. In general I would recommend submitting science, tech, astronomy, software, techonomics, business, etc. over what could easily be another cancerous political story. However, the gerrymandering story you submitted is one of the better political stories. And many stories that don't get the nexus applied can still have political elements and could easily spark a Politics-sized flamefest.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]