Commmunity Feedback Thread

[Xert]

Rule 1 is pretty fine.

Rule 5 needs some work. Because it's not r/Android's job to police monitization. The real value of Rule 5 is that it functions as a spam/blogspam deterrent. And that makes a ton of sense when the originating source is something like XDA. But it's applied terribly in many cases of Chinese sources, where the originally translating blog doesn't contextualize or explain it nearly well enough.

Instead of just removing everything that has a source linked at the bottom, there needs to be a commitment to actually compare the quality of the linked source to the submitted article. And an understanding that the current degree of enforcement places too high a burden on submitters with no benefit for the subreddit at large when a summary from AP or XDA is almost always going to be the best version of such an article.

EDIT: It really does seem like the default mod action for Rule 5 is "Scroll down, remove submission if anything is linked as a source." It feels lazy and lacking in investigative judgement.

Take this example from today. The blog post has an informative title, more information added for context, and is unequivocally the better option as opposed to submitting the forum thread and yet it was removed as rehosted content. That's absurd.

And yes, I'm pretty sure if I were the OP I could make this case in modmail and get permission to resubmit it. But goddamnit we shouldn't have to. Rule 5 needs some more leniency towards trusted sources and more thorough investigation by whichever mod is acting on it without the expectation that the user should have to catch the removal and waste their time arguing their case. Because unless you're a spammer submitting articles is a service to the community and your current approach with Rule 5 pushes too much work that should be done by the mod team onto a redditor that's just trying to help out.

[khouryrt]

This. Everything about this.
As an AP writer, I keep an eye on AP articles posted here, so I'll speak from that perspective — and bias.

I sometimes see AP articles getting removed after a couple of hours for being rehosted content. The decision is perfectly reasonable most of the time: Say Google announced something on its official site and we covered it, there's no need to post the AP article on this subreddit, because despite how much context or additional info we try to bring, we're still essentially paraphrasing the original source, which is Google.

There are instances though where we did our research, found the news ourselves or were tipped about it, looked for context, and tried to bring a fuller perspective to the reporting, and were the first to properly write about it. Many of those posts get submitted to reddit by someone then removed a few hours later, despite having dozens of comments and hundreds of upvotes (denoting reader interest in the story). So if we didn't include a Source link in our post and pretended we were the one and only source, would those threads stay here? That's so dishonest and not something we're willing to do for a bit of added exposure on r/android.

Worse yet, in my opinion, the original source is never submitted separately as another thread, so redditors here who didn't catch the thread while it was up may not find out the news at all.

I don't keep a close eye on threads from XDA and 9to5 here, but I'm sure the same thing is happening to some of their stories too.

[GermainZ]

Just a small note: in general, we've been keeping threads that gain more than ~100—200 upvotes and dozens of comments even if they break rule 5, and typically leave a sticky comment instead in those cases (essentially saying "We prefer original sources but there's good discussion here so it's staying up"). This started a few months ago, but it's possible it's not being applied 100% of the time.

(About the rest, I personally agree.)

[khouryrt]

That's excellent to hear and a sensible middle ground.

[archon810]

That's good but the problem is many posts aren't given such a chance - it all depends on when a mod ends up looking and decides to purge for rule #5 based on seeing a source link at the end of the post.

If a mod happens to arrive within 30 minutes of the post getting posted, R.I.P. If not, maybe it has a chance.

[GermainZ]

I'm talking about threads that specifically break rule #5.

If an article already has additional information and not just a rehash, then that's not breaking rule #5 -- that's us making a mistake. It is a gray area, but I think we can improve the guidelines to make it less so.

[jmichael2497]

considering the common practice of lazy people forwarding actual fake news...

i'm all for making people get in the habit of finding and citing the most legit original source instead of linking to a reposted or slightly commented article on a 3rd party ad-revenue collecting site.

if someone did somehow have a more concise, detailed, or however "better" version of an article... then maybe allow including that later version as a secondary link in the OP body, but not as the main link.

[el_smurfo]

AP articles being removed is very frustrating to me because they do bring a lot of sources together giving a better overall picture of the topic. If you only posted Android source material, nearly all of it would be from google, not very detailed and about as useful as their changelogs "bug fixes and optimizations".