this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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science

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dart board;; science bs

rule #1: be kind

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It's the top comment on all the pop science articles. Can it just officially be a rule? You are all much smarter than I, please help compile a list of known websites that publish explicitly low quality articles, with very little science basis to back up said claims, beyond an extremely shoddy study.

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[–] halfdane@piefed.social 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm not that long here, but if it's not feasible to automatically detect the slopper-sites, maybe a rule could be introduced that people can report on?

This way the mod has an easier time identifying the things that are unwanted by the community.

[–] Zoot@reddthat.com 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This was actually the solution I had in mind. Id be happy to report the articles, if there was an actual rule to point to.

[–] MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago

I'd go so far as to blacklist individual sites based on a threshold upvote on the top negative post (can be automated), and give a mechanism to undo it, poll perhaps, if people care enough they'll protect. It will naturally tend to negative, but given 90%(+ these days) of everything is crap -Sturgeon's law - it should work out.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Trying to list them all is a losing proposition.

[–] Zoot@reddthat.com 12 points 2 days ago

A list of the worst offenders would help significantly atleast.

However, I did happen to notice this community only has 1 active mod, and they mod other communities as well, so maybe this one just needs some actual love and care.

[–] rimu@piefed.social -2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

PieFed and Mbin both let you block domains. So if you never want to see any post that links to scienceslop.ai you can block that.

[–] Zoot@reddthat.com 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Awesome! Except we're on lemmy

[–] rimu@piefed.social 0 points 2 days ago

That's a choice you made which can be changed at any time.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 0 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You could file a feature request, or a pull request if you want to get a little deeper into it.

[–] Zoot@reddthat.com 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Or i can just request that the science communities have rules? Like tf yall lol. I don't want a new service, and I don't want a new app. I've noticed a considerable amount of people also wish this was a rule, so can we focus on making this community better before giving up and going somewhere else?

[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

I think you're right, since it's a lot of duplicated work if everyone has to do these filtering tasks for themselves, so blocking isn't an ideal solution here.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

None of this community's mods have been active in the last month. This community is effectively unmoderated so there's no one to set the rules.

If you'd like to moderate it, you could contact the lemmy.world admins and ask to be appointed. I bet a community like this would be almost no work to maintain as it's not news or politics.

[–] Zoot@reddthat.com 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Except the head mod is currently active so I would not be able to simply take it over. Thank you for the suggestions.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

Sorry, there's a bug in PieFed's activity tracking which threw me off.