I’ve noticed a lot of comments (and posts) from non-Australians in here recently. For sake of brevity, when I say ‘Australian’/‘Aussie’ here, I mean anyone who does live or has lived in Australia.
It defeats the whole point of having a separate comm for ‘world news from an Australian perspective’ if we have high levels of participation (votes/comments/posts) from non-Australians. It becomes just the same as any general world news comm.
I was thinking one measure we could take would be to change the display name of the comm to ‘World News for Aussies’. It’s succinct, clear, and may discourage participation by non-Australians to some degree.
Another matter is posts by non-Australians. Obviously, if we reduced voting participation by non-Aussies, it’s less of an issue if we have posts by non-Aussies - the comm would still largely be ‘from an Australian perspective’ by virtue of voting selection (although it would still be annoying if, like me, you mainly browse local by ‘new’).
That said, when 13 of the last 20 posts in the comm are from a user that appears not to be in/from Australia, maybe there’s a problem to be addressed. It doesn’t help that this poster has a clear and consistent agenda.
I’m obviously not proposing we start checking IDs or anything, but we could at least have a rule for participation only by people who do live or have lived in Australia. Then, if a problem becomes noticeable, the mods can send direct messages or take action where they judge it reasonable.
Interested to hear thoughts from users and mods (@lodion@aussie.zone @deadcat@aussie.zone)
A month ago, the aussie.zone founder said, in reply to a proposal to make an /c/AskLemmy comm here:
And I agree with this perspective, with respect to federation. This is a themed instance based around Aussies and Aussie topics, there are literally hundreds of other instances which can and do pick up general global topics.
My question is: why should we host a /c/WorldNews at all? What unique value does it have by being “for Aussies”? How would that change the posts in the comm?
Is there any reason why international news (not world news) specifically affecting Australia or Australians should be separated from other local comms like /c/news and /c/AustralianPolitics? e.g., news about a conference between officials from Australia and Pacific islands, or incidents involving Australian tourists. It would be good to hear from /c/news and /c/AustralianPolitics users before assuming, but if so, we can simply dismantle this comm and take the relevant parts to /c/news. Easy solution.
I think there’s value in being able to find world news that other Australians find interesting and discuss it with other Australians.
World news often has different implications for different countries, and being able to raise those points (without them being buried under a pile of other comments) and discuss them with other people who share your context is something that I think people find useful.
At the most basic version, that this comm is “News from outside of Australia” does provide value in that it won’t include news stories about Australia. Also, many ‘world news’ comms are defined as ‘news from outside the US’, which Australians probably do want to see and discuss in a world news comm.
So I wouldn’t be in favour of dismantling the comm in any case.
I actually think it would stop the comm from changing. Until recently the posts and discussion in the comm have been Australia-centric by virtue of most engagement coming from people on this instance. There’s been some examples I’ve noticed lately where that hasn’t been the case, which is what prompted me to write this post.
Yeah, I already post that kind of stuff in those places.