Hey all! Friendly neighborhood mod here!
I've just been added to this group, "Worldnews", in addition to my existing group "World", along with @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world (HEY SQUID!)
The reason being, the mods here had effectively retired. Hurts, the lead mod, stepped away and hadn't been active for MONTHS, and post and comment reports were PILING up, to a point where the Admins asked in our Discord chat going "Hey, what's going on with worldnews?"
Which left ME confused, because "world" has a friendly name of "World News" and is generally up to date on the report queue unless two users are engaging in:
Which, (sigh), happens way more often than I'd like, but what are you going to do?
Before they left 5 months ago, Hurts had pinned a question asking, basically, "Do we NEED world AND worldnews?" which I think is a valid question.
There are some key differences, world doesn't accept video links or text pieces, but there's no rule against that in worldnews, so it's a little more free-form than world, although both require legitimate news sources.
So for now, consider the discussion OPEN! Keep them both? Close one or the other?
The volume difference is pretty dramatic:
world:
worldnews:
I always assumed the two communities were the result of some mod-drama/schism, if that's not the case, nuking one makes perfect sense to me. Unfortunately the lesser used and formerly mod-abandoned community has the better underlying name, but what can you do.
Yeah, I agree, it's confusing, and the creation of both groups happened before my time so I can't really speak to the motivation behind them.
I'll talk to the admins and see what can and can't be done, but shuttering the smaller one does seem to be for the best.