Beehaw lacks community
Apologies for the clickbaity title or for the messy wording to follow. I’m not great at articulating myself.
I’ve been finding myself posting less and less on Beehaw lately and that my enthusiasm for it is fading, and I have been trying to figure out why I personally have felt this way. Beehaw is, in theory, a great community with a solid foundation built on a good code of conduct and mission statement. This is the place that many of us wanted to find, especially those of us who long for the days of webforums and wanted that sense of community that Reddit never really provided.
I think I have figured out why now. Simply put: The vast majority of content posted to Beehaw is news. Much of that news ranges from mostly negative to downright doomscrolling doomerism. There is very little community engagement or discussion going on, just page after page of news. I don’t follow most news-heavy communities, so if I change my sorting then it will filter out some of it but then the posts I see are days to even weeks old. If I sort by Local - New then it is just page after page of news, most of it with very few or zero comments. And this is with several news-centric communities (like US news) already blocked.
Maybe this is just me or maybe some of you feel the same way, I’m not sure. Or maybe it’s just that this Reddit-styled UI doesn’t lend itself well to other types of engagement; I don’t know. But I was hoping to find more here than just another news aggregator. I was hoping Beehaw would be a more positive, uplifting, inclusive place.
I’ll be frank with you—this is really not as complicated as you are making it out to be, and I can only guess at this point that loyalty is preventing you from seeing this situation objectively.
Nothing you said in this comment is wrong; it just isn’t relevant to this particular situation, and feels like deflection as a result. The issue at hand here is that an admin behaved in a way that contradicts the philosophies this community was supposedly built on, and the firmest response to which you have committed is that you have “mixed feelings” and blame the subject matter in an abstract sense for the unhealthy exchange. Meanwhile, multiple users in this thread—which, mind you, is about broader concerns with the community which many users seem to share—have said the exchange made them uncomfortable. This seems like as clear an instance as any where a moderation-heavy (not said disparagingly; the moderation philosophy, at least when applied faithfully, is part of the reason I’m here) instance like Beehaw would step in, and yet for some reason you seem unwilling to even say that the conduct was objectionable, much less commit to any course of action in response to it.
This community is perhaps best known from the outside for requiring an application to sign up. In that sense, from the very first interaction, this community is built on drawing judgments about people based on small slices of information about them. Everything you’ve said here could verbatim be an argument on behalf of someone whose application you’ve rejected—are you considering their whole person? How much do you really know about them? Are you making disproportionate judgments based on single events or pieces of information? By implementing the application policy, Beehaw implicitly takes the position that the value of maintaining a safe and high quality community is worth the potential risk of jumping to conclusions about someone based on narrow information. And yet, in this situation, we are encouraged to disregard evidence of an individual’s conduct and instead have faith in their better nature because it is unfair to draw conclusions from limited information. I hope you can see the fundamental contradiction. Yes, it is true that a founding member of a community has a different level of investment in a community than someone just signing up for a new account, and taking action against the former is considerably thornier and more costly than just denying the application of the latter. That doesn’t change the fact that taking different actions in the two situations effects a double standard.
I am trying to assume good intent and appreciate the level of thought you put into your response, but I admit that your response here is frankly quite frustrating. We all know the high-minded ideals Beehaw is built on, and for many of us, they’re the reason we’re here. We are calling out a situation in which those ideals don’t seem to have been followed, and now find ourselves somehow accused of not following those ideals ourselves by daring to question or criticize the conduct of an admin. If there is to be a separate class of individuals to which they do not apply, then these principles lose all meaning and simply become a bludgeon to keep regular users in line. I would wager that many of us would not find such a community appealing.
As I said in another reply I am sorry for making a half-baked philosophy post. I was not meaning to accuse you or anyone of the behavior I was attempting to talk about in the abstract. I have apologized several times for the behavior and tried my best to help everyone understand that I am looking for feedback because I don't want something like this to happen in the future. Unfortunately I think this is at least partially an issue with threaded replies and how people interact with them.
Yeah, I think Memmy is also not handling the increasingly long threads particularly well—I had to switch to browser because it wouldn’t show this reply, and I think it was jumbling up or not showing some other replies too.
Anyway, I appreciate you hearing the concerns. I don’t think there’s much to be gained from dissecting this particular incident any further, so I’ll just hope that future incidents (which hopefully don’t occur, but stuff happens) are handled in a way that demonstrates this feedback was internalized.