Breaking news: Internet erupts as Hillary Clinton confesses: "I am the mother of an extraterrestrial love child."

[EarlG]

24. My head literally exploded too

...and if we had a rule banning hyperbole, which would be enforced by alerts and Jury, that would mean that both your post and mine would be subject to removal. My guess is that in practice, people are not going to want to be subject to Jury removals for posts that commit the crime of over-enthusiasm.

As far as I know, Raw Story does do its own independent reporting, as well as post syndicated articles and repackaged news content. So I'm not sure it should be completely banned from LBN. Perhaps articles which feature Raw Story's own reporting could be allowed, while reposted news could be disallowed. However this might cause problems for other legit news sources when they repost content from, say, AP or Reuters. HuffPost is unlikely to be blocked from LBN. Crooks & Liars is more of an edge case. It provides original editorials -- and of course, editorials are not permitted in LBN, but as far as I know Crooks & Liars does not come up as an LBN source that often anyway.

With regard to the "recency" of articles in LBN, I don't know. If you want things that are posted on social media to immediately show up in LBN, then that's probably not going to happen. They end up in GD first because if they're just coming directly off of social media then there's going to be a delay before they're vetted by a legit news source. I guess I don't really understand why it's a problem that we have a forum where unfiltered news can be posted speedily but with the understanding that the source could be shaky, and then a different forum where news isn't posted as quickly, but the standard is higher and it needs to be vetted by a legitimate source.

Now, if the argument is that certain sources in LBN aren't legit news sources, that's one thing. But if the argument is that unfiltered social media content should be allowed to be posted directly into LBN, that's a different thing -- surely that would lead to more "fake news" being posted on DU, not less. It would also be duplicative of the GD forum, and if that were the case, then why have an LBN forum at all?

With regard to, "All too often, posts in LBN are retelling things that have been in other DU forums for several days. I see this every day." I have the same experience, but maybe this is a perception issue. I probably spend as at least as much time on DU as you do, but not everybody does. We are definitely likely to see stories get reposted because we're here a lot, but something that was posted on Bluesky a day ago and discussed in GD might not be noticed by someone who shows up the next day and catches the LBN version of the story which was reported by CNN an hour earlier.

The bottom line is that there's no perfect way to do this -- as always, we muddle through. I don't disagree that LBN could perhaps use some tweaking in terms of the quality of sources, but I'm generally happy with the way that LBN operates currently.

Edited to add: So you know, I'm not just writing this and then forgetting about the issue. Personally, I am not a fan of clickbait headlines, especially the ones that appear on many of the videos posted on DU. The reason I tend to write lengthy posts like this, that often sound a bit negative, is because there is a vast gulf between coming up with an idea like "DU should get rid of hyperbole and clickbait," and actually trying to make it happen in a way that can be easily understood by posters, Hosts, and Juries. But I do constantly consider these problems and try to think about ways that they can be mitigated. I'm just not always successful at coming up with solutions.

Edited again to add: To give you an idea of the complexity of the problem, as I edit this post, the OP has 84 recs indicating that the concept of getting rid of click-bait/Raw Story-type headlines is quite popular. However, the thread which seemed to initially spur this OP -- Raw Story's "'Weird': Internet erupts after Karoline Leavitt's apparent admission of pregnancy faux pas" -- currently has 52 recs, indicating that it is also quite popular. The confusing part is that multiple members have recommended both threads.