this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Not The Onion

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I made a comment to this effect the other day. Scrolling through this community, out of about the 10 most recent posts, I see one that is borderline oniony and the rest are just straight up news, mostly US politics-related.

Is this OK? Is this what this community is for? I ask because I want to see can't-believe-it's-real headlines, but if this is going to be another doom scroll bad news sub I'm going to leave and look elsewhere. Just curious to hear people's feelings on this before I do.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 10 months ago (1 children)

upvoting because i too want to see more true onion-y posts here even if it means fewer posts overall. the almost onion-y posts tend to not be funny at all, just pure depressing irony, and amass votes in a circle jerk nature, essentially making this another news sub as OP notes.

i get that “truth is stranger than fiction” but that doesn’t mean that the every time the steady progression of the west into fascism is recorded to the media it needs to be posted here. and also it’s excessively us-centric which is both boring for americans and unwelcoming to a global audience.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (3 children)

It may just be that many people posting don't exactly decipher between the true ethos of the community and something their view as, like you said, stranger than fiction. I would say it's more on us, the community, to use the upvote/downvote function to help curate what we view as content within the spirit of the community.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Personally I think the upvote/downvote thing breaks down in a world with an all feed. Many people don't check what community something is coming from, which is why moderation is another important factor.

If other people like how it is now that's fine, it just isn't for me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I agree, I have heard more people mentioning that they use the 'All' feed than any other

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I liked the method some subreddits have where there's always a pinned comment that community members can upvote/downvote for how relevant it is.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

sort of, but i would support the mods if they tried to take action themselves.

the saddest downfall of a community was r/MURDEREDBYWORDS. used to be the funniest shit with the most beautifully crafted comebacks. but then poor moderation let politics start creeping in. the politics was fine and still funny at first. but politics gets engagement, it starts bubbling to the top, and then the quality of content took a nosedive while engagement remained high. now the community is totally derailed to the point that whenever i transitioned from reddit to fedi, i preemptively blocked whatever the parallel sub here was.

hated to see that comedy sub just become “republican bad,” and would hate to see the same happen here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah fair enough. I thought about mentioning the mods curating the content here but didn't for not wanting to tell someone how to run their community, but I think you're right on that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Upvotes and downvotes aren't enough. People from All (and plenty of subscribers) will upvote anything in any community if they like it, it does not matter if it fits the theme.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago

Look, it's not the community's fault that reality is oniony!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You weren't kidding.

Trump falsely claims he never called for Hillary Clinton to be locked up

How is this NotTheOnion-appropriate in any way?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Thanks for bringing this up.

I didn't notice until you pointed it out, because I usually browse my feed as a whole, without checking which community each post comes from. Now that I look at this community alone, I see a bunch of news posts that don't belong here, just you described. No wonder my feed has been so thick with doom lately.

I'll try to pay more attention and report these posts (rule 4 or 2) when I think of it.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

I think 70% of the recent posts seem onion-y or would be if it were claiming any other person except a handful of people who regularly say things that I'd have assumed were the Onion pre-Trump.

The Onion has generally been political, with a bias towards US politics, and Not the Onion is for news... so the posts should generally be political news mixed with some lighthearted nonsense news.

Also, one of the less oniony stories is one I upvoted without realizing where it was posted just because it seemed funny and it was one of the non-political news stories.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If you report ones that are just news they do seem to be taken down though.

A big issue is about half of everything trump says could easily be the onion. Which is likely why there's so many political ones.

One of the states said people don't have the right to vote. That sounds insanely oniony.

There was one about 40% of family homes being owned by corperations. Again that could easily be an exaggerated and ridiculous thing.

So I think there's some personal interpretation.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

This is why probably 2/3rds of what I post on here is politics

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I think that's a fair interpretation though I definitely feel differently. I guess for me not the onion on Reddit was something I looked to for comedy, and so far the Lemmy version has been mostly depressing. That's why I think it may just not be my cup of tea over here anymore.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

Between this community and the actual Onion I get pretty much the gist of current events, yeah. If some topic or other piques my interest from here, I'll chase it down. The Onion and its opposite tend to give me enough of the context I need to figure out what's important enough to pursue vs the vast majority of quasi-satire hitting "normal" news cycles over a given week.

It's like a hyper-curated way to get my news, as if handpicked for me by a space clown. And I like it that way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

It should probably be up to the posters and those voting on the posts instead of one person complaining about their idea of this community's purity not being followed

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I really gotta setup a filter to block all fuckerburg pawns