theriex
commented
5 years ago Just for completeness, it's worth noting the concept of an anti-membic that simply records the URL with a note about why it was unreliable. Somehow the anti-membic would be flagged to not go into the feeds, but still be available to you for your own reference, to avoid accidentally posting it. Ultimately I think this might be more confusing than helpful. It's a goal for membic to "point positive" towards memorable things you want to keep around, ultimately reflecting personally curated links.
A user commented that they were midway through writing a membic off of something they saw on Facebook, then realized that the source was unreliable after a vague recollection and looking into it further. This is an easy mistake to make when a friend posts a link, since you already have trust, even though your friend might be less diligent about evaluating what they read and post (or repost).
The main request here is to provide some help avoiding accidentally writing a membic for a source that you've already looked into and found to be unreliable. Alternately, the same mechanism could also save researching a source you already trust. One approach is to provide sourcing notes in your profile where you could specify a domain (e.g. badsource.com) along with a trust level (e.g. "trusted", "unreliable") and a personal note (e.g. "Checked this out and they are not reliable").
At a base level, when you start to write a membic with a url matching a source you've noted as unreliable, an alert could pop up prompting whether you really want to continue writing the membic. For a trusted source, maybe an indicator next to the URL showing you trust it. Obviously this doesn't help for general sites like youtube.com where the content varies widely, and it might not help much for editorials even for a trusted source, since that can vary widely by author. Even generally reliable sources can post things in editorials that are misguided or misleading. Being able to store these notes will not prevent you from posting something that is you would have rather avoided. The notes would at best be a fallback aid to avoid known mistakes. It's really entirely up to the person writing the membic to judge the link they are posting. The question is whether these kinds of notes would be of enough utility to be useful and easy enough to actually be used.
An alternate approach would be to handle bad sources as part of deleting a membic, but by then the membic feed may have already propagated. Better late than never, but not as good as catching the situation up front.
Another open question to what extent unreliable sources should be propagated throughout the system, so that if others have found a source unreliable you could be prompted about that. But then the system becomes vulnerable to being gamed. Not really liking that, but definitely tempting given the widespread deliberate dissemination of unreliable information. Another wrinkle is that unreliable information gets posted through a variety of sources (deliberately), so there is good likelihood things will make it past whatever notes you've made about sources. There is simply no substitute for good judgement, but personal reliability notes might still be helpful as a first step. Comments welcome.