/c/news is just a honeypot

It's the only news portal in the lemmyverse with strict rules and even stricter rulers. It has a no-nonsense policy, which bothers some users.

The community owner even goes out of his way to liberate the urls so that the articles are always accessible even from text browsers and are not paywalled. There is some serious effort put into it.

Your blocklist theory makes little sense. I have been banned twice, each time for 14 days, after which I am able to return. It is kind of like Pavlov's dogs. "Don't act stupid, or you get banned."

I have not yet tested this because I am currently banned because of pieguy (for acting silly), but I believe one ought to be able to post real articles from reputable sources (NYT is obviously a safe bet) and follow the same structure of posts the owner uses.

The rules could be deduced from the owner's own posts and the reasons for which people are banned.

My takeaway is that it's a serious community and the owner is fed up with all the shenanigans that come with the local culture.

Pick your favourite of the following:

• A game we need to reverse-engineer the rules of
• An absurdist critique of other reddit/lemmy news communities' rule enforcement practices
• A New York Times obsession
• ???

Untill you can find a reason as to what the point of such a blocklist would be, you should assume that there is no hidden reason for it.

Every forum has a unique userbase, a blocklist made for one forum would not work for another.

The same goes for lemmy communities.

This obviously excludes a blocklist of bots, but a general blocklist?

Nah...