We’re considering opening up an alternative to a large subreddit (~2M users) here on kbin and this is a bit of a sticking point for us. Even if only a small number of people move over it’s going to be annoying to go back to super primitive mod tools.

I think it makes a good example for why I liked the idea that the main post copies the headline 1:1, and any opinions of the OP can always be expressed and discussed in the comments. Instead of many top-level comments being about an editorialized headline by the OP, they’d be about the posted article.

Very much agreed. There’s a good reason why /r/politics opted ultimately to stick with the headlines for topic titles. Let people draw their own conclusions from reading the actual link rather than trying to color their opinions with some lurid ‘summary’ with a zinger at the end.

As much as a foundational understanding of statistics would go a long way towards making the average citizen substantially better-informed, stuff like this sometimes makes my shoulders sag in despair. Even if you know the basics, the corrections, weighting, and methodologies used to try and tease the/a ‘truth’ out of a sample are often so arcane that it feels as though you know nothing at all, and are right back to square zero: do I trust these results at all, or no?

What a mess. I really don’t want to believe that a slim majority of Americans want us to go the Nixon route, but it’s hard to tell where my suspicion of the methods used begins to blend into bias…

Sometimes the enemy of my enemy…

My take is that stuff like this counts on traffic being a flash in the pan. At first, it’s funny and novel, but as time wears on the hope may be that people top engaging with funny sexy Oliver photo #93848. Hypothetically this would cause a drop in traffic and engagement, but still leave the mod team strictly in compliance with reddit’s demands.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

/u/spez is truly a font of strange and wonderful phrases that don’t mean at all what he intends them to.