I completely understand if others are overwhelmed by my recent activity, my sincerest of apologies. The majority of my new topics are taken from articles mentioned in TheNewOil’s Mastodon, that I thought were especially noteworthy and deserving of discussion. To prevent this, should this forum impose a limit for topics whose articles have been publicized by sources like TheNewOil?
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Yeah the spam is too much, it would be fine if people were actually engaging with and talking about the articles, but they’re not.
Of course lol 
I don’t mean to put down your excitement for privacy. I see you’ve also been engaging in different discussions, which is great since that’s how this community thrives 
I think Jonah mentioned having one article per thread, but maybe there should instead just be a dedicated weekly news thread?
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I think the one article per thread suggestion might lead to even more spam, people could post different articles about the same circumstance and make a bunch of threads.
I think what could be cool would be mutiple weekly threads, each under one topic. Like data breaches, government related news, notable mainstream privacy coverage etc. But organization of weekly threads may suffer if multiple articles are being discussed at the same time. Maybe there could be a “folder” system with news threads not normally viewable from the main privacy questions folder.
Alternatively, maybe there can be a big “bin” that people can submit privacy articles they found to a seperate folder, and then stuff from those articles is only discussed if someone has a specific question about it.
When PG had “This Week In Privacy” I thought that was really cool. Maybe the solution could relate to something like that? Perhaps, every week or so, PG can gather the best of the bin articles into a weekly simple privacy breakdown, like KrebsOnSecurity’s This Week In Security or The Linux Experiment’s This Week in Open Source. What could differentiate this from the Surveillance Report podcast would be that the article format would make this an easier to manage, and in my opinion, a more digestable format. It would be more community oriented, as people submitting news to the bin would be able to contribute suggested summaries and alternative considerations. The biggest drawback I see with this approach would be that it could give KevPham a ton of work.
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We may simply need a rule that a single person can’t post more than 1-2 news articles until:
- Your post(s) have replies; or
- 24 hours have passed.
I have not noticed an issue with under-discussed news in general, but I think it is overwhelming to readers when many posts are submitted at once by the same person.
Thoughts? cc @KevPham
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That works for me! Come to think of it, maybe a similar rule could be applied to posts in general. I haven’t really noticed people, especially non-team members, need to post that much a day. How about 3 posts a day for non-news topics until 24 hours or a reply?
At the same time, there doesn’t seem to be a need for blanket restrictions if there is only one perpetrator, other than prevention from other overzealous, goofballish mavericks to go bonkers.
Still, regarding the proposed overhaul to news posts, I believe an added effect would be that redundacy with sources such as TheNewOil’s Mastodon would be lessened. Basically, my suggestions also attempted to answer the question, “Why bother posting privacy related articles when one could just follow feeds like TheNewOil?”
A massive thanks for your patience Jonah!
I’ll add that the Privacy > News category is intended strictly for news articles which a lot of your posts are not. Blog and social media posts do not belong in the news category.
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This is also a good point. I don’t want to discourage newsworthy blog posts if they are independent, original reporting though, but if they are just blogs referencing other news content it is probably best to find other sources. I didn’t actually look at all the articles in question yet because I am away this weekend, so I’m not sure whether they indeed belong in the news category or not.
Edit: or maybe we do want to discourage that, and only allow posts when they’ve been shared by recognized media outlets to ensure notability. I don’t know, I’ll give it some more thought.
Ideally for discussion, since feeds like TNO don’t have their own discussion platforms. I’m not inherently against posting topics even if they have been covered by similar channels to PG.
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I’m open to that idea. For the sake of avoiding spam of course.
I had expressed interest in a newsletter format before. One idea we have discussed at the beginning of the year was having me take the lead of a potential Ghost newsletter. Issue is, we don’t know how many people will voluntarily register for this instance and whether my time could be better served posting this curated news in the forum itself. Also, I believe @jonah had some difficulties setting Ghost up.
I am against those strict limits. At least there shouldn’t be those kinds of limits for actual news posts from regular news organizations. If you are talking about blog posts, I haven’t seen too much spam. I don’t think heavy posting is spam. If we are talking about eg TheNewOil creating random accounts to spam post, then we could restrict those and force blogs to declare themselves when sharing their articles.
Also, I don’t really see why this restriction is being talked of in the first post. It seems @KevPham that you were “hired” for actually sharing more news on this forum, which is good IMO but then contradicts the above.
Also, threads are a good idea, but on topics. For example, “Trump admin use of Signal” could be just a thread - not separate posts about different aspects of it -, just like there is thread for Chat Control.
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I think that is a good norm and expectation for users. I don’t really think there is a need for an explicit rule like that (unless/until it becomes a recurring problem.
Afaik, there has been only one instance on this forum in the last couple years where overposting from a single user has been a problem, and that person (OP) seems earnest and participating in good faith (and receptive to changing their approach).
Making rules based on one-off situations, seems unnecessary if 99.5% of the time the community is effectively self-regulating.
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A lot of articles from news media are little more than reiterating other publications’ original reporting (and sometimes editorializing or misinterpreting), so I really like to see focus on the original article. If the first paragraph of the article is something like “[other publication] reports …”, we should directly link the original reporting. Perhaps moderators can add a link to the original reporting to the OP if the OP posts secondary reporting?