Articles & Happening Meta Discussion

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Articles & Happenings is the third attempt at a news board on the Kiwi Farms. It is a cursed place. Every moderator who has been assigned here has resigned within a year. During 2016, the political crossfire was so bad it spread to different boards and culminated in me banning American news discussion entirely for several months. It has been deleted in its entirety twice. There is no actual discussion here, it's people posting garbage. It leans much further right than the rest of the site and doesn't particularly conduct discussion because dissenting opinions are dogpiled by a thousand memelords posting shit they read on /pol/ without any critical analysis.

The only rules that can be enforced are empirical ones with boolean violation answers. New threads must cite a real source directly and must use the headline of the article as a thread title without any editorializing. Articles must be archived in some way and must link to the original article. Replies that are one word or a reaction images are automatic one-month bans from the board.

I'm creating this now because it seems like this place is here to stay and is one of the largest areas of the entire site. I might as well throw in bare minimum effort to improve it. I don't even try to find mods for here because they will quit, without exception. I've added new prefixes ("Business" and "Crime") just now.

Discuss.


New threads should be made like this.
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witthel said:
With how much Null hates A&H and blames it for the site's decline, I'm honestly surprised that he still hasn't yeeted it for good.
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It'd be like closing /pol/ or Debate and Discussion. All the horrible faggots would bleed out to the rest of the forums and infect it with their strand of HIV in retaliation.
 
Rat Speaker said:
You crying about neg rates in a PM with your "friends" is tho.
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A guy crying for a Trump supporter thread in Community Watch (without knowing that one with 100+ pages existed at the time) after finding out about the Bernie Bro thread is, too.
 
We need to get Ashy back, the hulk hogan guy sucks as a replacement

Getting tard comed said:
Has A+H really led to the site getting less daily unique visitors? I would think the opposite effect would have happened. That would blow my mind tbh.
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I think null said the issue is that A+H is becoming more popular than what the side was intended for, that it will reach the point where its more political discussion than lolcow farming.
 
KingCoelacanth said:
I think null said the issue is that A+H is becoming more popular than what the side was intended for, that it will reach the point where its more political discussion than lolcow farming.
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The other problem, and why Happenings is okay by itself, is that apparently there's some kind of bot that scrapes sites for copies of articles or some shit and reports them for plagiarism to some kind of database. Basically, it led to the Farms being slowly moved down in search rankings, iirc.

I'm not a very smart guy, and it was very technical, but that's the gist of it from what I remember.
 
PESTPOOM said:
isn't KF is unlisted on every search engine anyway?
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You'd have to have Null or someone else who knows what's up with it to explain, but from what I remember it was a difference between being de-indexed artificially and having it happen organically.

It specifically had to do with the fact that in A&H N the whole article is copy-pasted.
 
It's HK-47 said:
Since the sticker talk is getting kind of boring, there's been a trend for awhile in A&H that irks me. For at least as long as I've been helping to moderate the board, it's not unusual to get the occasional report that either boils down to or is quite literally, "lol [source]." I can understand taking a stab at a news source because God knows I fucking laugh at CNN as often as the sun rises, but my policy has always been that I could not give half of a rat's ass where the story comes from, I only care about the content of the story. If the information that the story is presenting is viable, verifiable, and free of overtly partisan bias a la, "The fucking shit libs are trying to X!" or "These racist Nazis are going to X!" that's genuinely all that I care about.

Even then, I think that there's entertainment value in both of those examples because it's fun to watch extremists leap to ideological extremes. VICE articles are absurdly stupid and typically involve trying to convince the reader to literally shove something up their ass, and Ghost / Alex Jones are goddamned national treasures.

There's been an idea floating around in the 'back rooms' once before to draw up a list of "verified sources", but I shot it down because--and apologies to the person who suggested it-- that sounds like the faggiest goddamned thing anyone's ever said since the first caveman asked if he could suck dick. Even when I was personally asked if I could help come up with that sort of list, I don't think it's even possible to do that in the current environment because every source is potentially disreputable. I think that weighing things as a source is no longer possible, and with the ease that people can verify information for themselves these days, no longer necessary.

The focus has generally been on reporting stories that come from Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, Zero Hedge or National File, and while I can easily agree that all of these sources can be inflammatory and have a tendency to exaggerate a story or omit important information in order to push a narrative, this applies to literally every other news source. CNN does this, Washington Post does this, The New York Times, Axios, AP, Guardian, BBC, Slate, Salon, FOX, The Independent, VICE, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, I could produce dozens of examples from every single one of these sources who are committing the exact, same infraction and yet for some reason they're all still considered reputable news sources, I assume, as I have never received nor seen a single complaint when anyone uses any of these as a source.

Please don't wrap your head in tinfoil because I can assure that there's no grand conspiracy in the moderation to try and exclusively omit certain sources over other ones. This is something that's only come up maybe a handful of times, and most all of the moderation team genuinely doesn't give give a shit one way or another as to what happens inside of A&H. These reports are genuinely few-and-far between, but this is just an inconsistency that I've noticed and rather than keep batting it around in the occasional report or in the once-in-a-blue-moon moderation thread, I wanted to push it out into the open and see what the general opinion on this would be.

Assuming that the story isn't from a ridiculously partisan source like an angry Christian's Blog or some unhinged Vegan's TikTok account, (With the exception of whatever random bullshit CatParty finds, because that's just tradition at this point.) is it unreasonable to take each source not as a whole but to examine the individual story, and if it's found lacking, to tear into it in the thread itself in whatever way that the journalist fucked up, or should stories be weighed on the source that they're coming from?

I am clearly biased in the direction of weighing each story individually, but I'm curious to see if there are any genuine arguments to be made for weighing these articles on their source, because for the life of me I can't think of one. Places like CNN and MSNBC and BBC routinely post rage-bait, they cite anonymous sources that frequently turn up to be fictional, they frequently have to retract stories because they got the information so wrong that in some cases they've been sued and lost the lawsuit, so how are they any different than Gateway Pundit or ZeroHedge, other than that the latter two have yet to lose a lawsuit to a child?
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I always thought one of the main purposes of A&N was to post the insaine shit from bad sources. I know I usually post political stuff from boring sources, but I figured catparty posts about "top 10 roots to spice up your pegging" from The Root was more in line with the spirit of the board.

Trying to force all the posts to be from good sources just feels like killing all of the fun and leaving all the stuff for people to get pissed off over.
 
If you look at new content, then 6 of the 10 latest posts tend to be from A+H, so it looks like this board has already taken over the site (although maybe its just this time of night)
 
KingCoelacanth said:
If you look at new content, then 6 of the 10 latest posts tend to be from A+H, so it looks like this board has already taken over the site (although maybe its just this time of night)
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A&H isn't displayed on "new content": you might be referring to the listing ghetto of "New Sperging", which only covers new OT threads.
 
Getting tard comed said:
You shouldn't make a list of verifiable sources since anything you can accuse one source of applies to all the rest. It worse for sources that have been around for awhile as their track record is longer. The only fair, reasonable, or sensible thing to do is to judge the info in the story on a case by case basis. It's also the one that encourages critical thinking which is solely lacking.

This isn't a new or recent thing. I recently watched a movie called Kill The Messenger which was about the journalist who broke the story the CIA shipped in drugs to sell to here to fund the side we wanted to win in the Nicaraguan civil war. At the time the journo worked for a small news paper, nationally speaking, in San Jose. Now what did the rest of the news organizations do with this bombshell of a story? They attacked the journo and tore into the story. They lied about what he said did their best to bury the information. Why? Who knows. But since that time more info has come out corroborating and confirming what he reported on. The media of the time lied and pushed out non factual stories to bury a real story which probably led to the journo's suicide in 2004. The media is and has always been full of shit to some degree and the only fair and balanced thing to do is allow each individual to sift through all of the shit to find whatever kernels of truth exist in whatever shit pile it's in.
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Re the Dark Alliance series, they didn't just do that, they literally murdered the guy. He "committed suicide" after his career was utterly destroyed, even though the accuracy of what he said had been more or less absolutely vindicated by the time he died. This is even if you buy his "suicide" which was itself, unsurprisingly, under pretty suspicious circumstances.

Not everything he said was completely right, and it never can be when you're covering the very carefully hidden covert acts of an intelligence agency that specializes is concealment and deception, but the general gravamen of his coverage, i.e. that the CIA dealt cocaine to fund its ops too black even for its black budget, can be treated imo as more or less established fact.

Gary Webb btw. And yes, I know, lol Intercept.

Manah said:
What's with the scare quotes on "friends"
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Are "Friends" Electric?

Unog said:
The other problem, and why Happenings is okay by itself, is that apparently there's some kind of bot that scrapes sites for copies of articles or some shit and reports them for plagiarism to some kind of database. Basically, it led to the Farms being slowly moved down in search rankings, iirc.
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That's more or less what was happening. Stuff that is seen as just being content aggregation from other sites is ranked low by the bot. It's not so much out of concern for plagiarism as that spammers specifically use this tactic of just glomping up stuff that is full of highly ranked search terms to cheat rankings. This is why some search terms are completely overwhelmed with sites that, if you click them, are basically absolute garbage. In fact it makes doxing really goddamn annoying because for little used terms (such as the real names/phone numbers/deets of your favorite lolcow), almost all search results are garbage and you gotta page through page after page of crap to get to where they wrote up their story of fucking their childhood pet on livejournal in 2002 or whatever.

Rat Speaker said:
You crying about neg rates in a PM with your "friends" is tho.
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Why are rats so mean?
 
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It's HK-47 said:
Since the sticker talk is getting kind of boring, there's been a trend for awhile in A&H that irks me. For at least as long as I've been helping to moderate the board, it's not unusual to get the occasional report that either boils down to or is quite literally, "lol [source]." I can understand taking a stab at a news source because God knows I fucking laugh at CNN as often as the sun rises, but my policy has always been that I could not give half of a rat's ass where the story comes from, I only care about the content of the story. If the information that the story is presenting is viable, verifiable, and free of overtly partisan bias a la, "The fucking shit libs are trying to X!" or "These racist Nazis are going to X!" that's genuinely all that I care about.

Even then, I think that there's entertainment value in both of those examples because it's fun to watch extremists leap to ideological extremes. VICE articles are absurdly stupid and typically involve trying to convince the reader to literally shove something up their ass, and Ghost / Alex Jones are goddamned national treasures.

There's been an idea floating around in the 'back rooms' once before to draw up a list of "verified sources", but I shot it down because--and apologies to the person who suggested it-- that sounds like the faggiest goddamned thing anyone's ever said since the first caveman asked if he could suck dick. Even when I was personally asked if I could help come up with that sort of list, I don't think it's even possible to do that in the current environment because every source is potentially disreputable. I think that weighing things as a source is no longer possible, and with the ease that people can verify information for themselves these days, no longer necessary.

The focus has generally been on reporting stories that come from Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, Zero Hedge or National File, and while I can easily agree that all of these sources can be inflammatory and have a tendency to exaggerate a story or omit important information in order to push a narrative, this applies to literally every other news source. CNN does this, Washington Post does this, The New York Times, Axios, AP, Guardian, BBC, Slate, Salon, FOX, The Independent, VICE, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, I could produce dozens of examples from every single one of these sources who are committing the exact, same infraction and yet for some reason they're all still considered reputable news sources, I assume, as I have never received nor seen a single complaint when anyone uses any of these as a source.

Please don't wrap your head in tinfoil because I can assure that there's no grand conspiracy in the moderation to try and exclusively omit certain sources over other ones. This is something that's only come up maybe a handful of times, and most all of the moderation team genuinely doesn't give give a shit one way or another as to what happens inside of A&H. These reports are genuinely few-and-far between, but this is just an inconsistency that I've noticed and rather than keep batting it around in the occasional report or in the once-in-a-blue-moon moderation thread, I wanted to push it out into the open and see what the general opinion on this would be.

Assuming that the story isn't from a ridiculously partisan source like an angry Christian's Blog or some unhinged Vegan's TikTok account, (With the exception of whatever random bullshit CatParty finds, because that's just tradition at this point.) is it unreasonable to take each source not as a whole but to examine the individual story, and if it's found lacking, to tear into it in the thread itself in whatever way that the journalist fucked up, or should stories be weighed on the source that they're coming from?

I am clearly biased in the direction of weighing each story individually, but I'm curious to see if there are any genuine arguments to be made for weighing these articles on their source, because for the life of me I can't think of one. Places like CNN and MSNBC and BBC routinely post rage-bait, they cite anonymous sources that frequently turn up to be fictional, they frequently have to retract stories because they got the information so wrong that in some cases they've been sued and lost the lawsuit, so how are they any different than Gateway Pundit or ZeroHedge, other than that the latter two have yet to lose a lawsuit to a child?
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Coming up with a list of verified sites is pointless because of the state of journalism today. There is no incentive for journalists to be honest or credible in their articles. There’s varying degrees of bullshit but we’re now in the era of “anonymous sources say...” which time after time gets proven to be bullshit and that’s a favorite tactic used by “newspapers of record” like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

That’s why it’s better to have a free for all and laugh at the latest bit of insanity @CatParty is able to find. Anything more is a waste of time on everybody’s parts. Maybe when journalism becomes credible you can establish a list of credible sources but there’s not a big enough rainbow for that to happen right now.
 
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It's HK-47 said:
Assuming that the story isn't from a ridiculously partisan source like an angry Christian's Blog or some unhinged Vegan's TikTok account
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Wow, that is incredibly unfair to the Christians. They can actually make good food.

But it helps to illustrate your point that any list of so-called poor sources will undoubtedly be bad, so, well done?
 
NeoGAF Lurker said:
That’s why it’s better to have a free for all and laugh at the latest of insanity @CatParty is able to find. Anything more is a waste of time on everybody’s parts. Maybe when journalism becomes credible you can do that but there’s not a big enough rainbow for that to happen.
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Life and the world are silly. Let’s laugh at it in our short time here

 
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