[CLOSED] a Beehaw survey on some policy and the site's vibeslocked

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Beehaw Support@beehaw.org – 142 points –

good morning, Beehaw

this morning we have a survey for you, which will run for approximately three days. it contains three questions on site policy (plus an optional explanation field), and two questions about the site's current vibe (plus another optional explanation field).

you can find the survey here.

some caveats to this survey

you likely have some priors for how this "should" work, and i would like you to leave those at the door. to be up front:

  • this is not a referendum—it is more like a Wikipedia vote if anything. we're looking for a consensus or a synthesis of the community's opinions with the practical limitations we're working with, not a first-past-the-post winner.
  • this is not (currently) a democracy, and you should not expect public results from this. we talked this part over as an admin team and we don't see much value in publicly releasing the results of a survey like this. if we do release the results publicly, we'll be announcing that before it happens.
  • the same caveats just mentioned will apply to any surveys like this into the foreseeable future. i'm sure everyone understands that in online spaces it is very easy to manipulate surveys like this; accordingly, it is not a great idea to take them at complete face value until you can audit votes. since we don't have a foolproof, private system for doing that yet, these caveats are necessary to make any kind of vote involving site policy work.

(we do eventually want to create a foolproof enough private system, but this is way on the backburner and i'm guessing most of you prefer having an imperfect way to chime in on the site's direction than none at all until this system is created)

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Never be afraid of using the DEFED hammer on those that deserve it. You guys are doing a Fantastic job of keeping this HIVE balanced and free of garbage extremist instances like shit.just.works, Lemmygrad and The general obnixiousness of hexbears.

Thank you for you for giving us such a nice community. Keep up the good work.

I want to emphasize the “on those that deserve it” bit. That’s the part angry commenters will misinterpret or pretend to forget.

Anyway…

I have an account on kbin. It can be interesting to compare a thread when viewed here vs. being viewed there.

Usually, a thread viewed on kbin has more comments - but many of them are crude, stupid, and antagonistic. The same thread viewed on Beehaw has a much more readable comment section, because of thoughtful defederating.

Ideally, we wouldn’t have to defederate from anyone, but I don’t think we’re losing anything of value.

Somebody was ignorantly making fun of Beehaw recently. I responded that I only want civil, mature conversations instead of arguments with trolls. I like the idea of a well-moderated instance that has a general guideline of “be(e) nice”. I want mods to have the flexibility to do their jobs effectively.

“Value” - i feel you’ve hit the point perfectly.

People are possibly perceiving a value loss in defederation, when in reality, letting in (on average) low value comments/content/whatever dilutes the instance’s value.

Oh has sh.itjust.works started exibiting an extremist bias as a collective? Last time I was paying attention to them they were the sort of misguided centrist types whose instance was vulnerable to getting overrun with extremists. Sad to hear it happened, but not really all that surprised

Forums that fashion themselves as centrist are always prime targets for ring wing asshats, sadly.

People gotta learn every internet community that's lasted long term has had strong moderation policies for a reason

Update: The survey provides this answer.

What's wrong with sh.itjust.works? Good faith question, genuinely curious. I don't know much about the instance and in taking a quick peek, I see a lot of poking the hexbear but nothing else immediately sticks out.

Lemmygrad and hexbear I'm familiar with why they're problematic.

It's not that these communities deserve it. It's that the moderation tools tools across instances isn't built out enough for it to be all done within lemmy

Even Hexbear defederated shit.just.works for being a bunch of right wing nazi shit.heads... so yeah they definitely deserved it.

Ah my comment was mainly in regards to lemmy world. I don't know enough of shit.just.works I guess to judge it. I've seen a lot of name calling about instances and frankly I never see any proof. It's just they said, they said. Lemmy is apparently developed by a bunch of tankies. So I have no clue what to truly make if this new social landscape where everyone is some extreme view. I've even seen beehaw being called names because they act quickly to defederate. It makes me miss Reddit where politically I didn't care too much about who I was talking to as long as they didn't mention Trump.