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

Beehaw Support@beehaw.org – 142 points – 1 years ago

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)

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

Exactly. Don’t let people weaponize free speech against you!

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.

Hive :)

this is not a democracy

Seriously, huge applause for this. Beehaw is already operating 10x more intelligently than most forums I frequent. Y’all clearly know how to deal with bad actors

17 more...

Thanks for not using google.

FYI to whoever flagged me forgetting to uncheck required for the last box: i fixed that, thank you for flagging it

Thanks for putting this together and taking the time and energy to get our feedback.

Wherever I find myself questioning the Beehaw restrictions, I browse All on lemmy.world. I can read All here with no real regrets. Anywhere else... Ehhhhhh

When I browse All on Beehaw I see a bunch of topics that I'm not even remotely interested in. I'm sure most of it is interesting to the members of those communities, but it's definitely not how I use Lemmy.

When I go to my "Subscribed" tab on lemmy.world, it's full of great content that isn't available on Beehaw.

Perfectly valid way of doing it. I know a lot of people hate All on Lemmy or Reddit, and I get it. I just like to spend a portion of my time on All to see things that I would never learn about on my own.

I've been learning so much about Australia and NZ that I would never learn otherwise and I enjoy that. I'm in the US, so I'd never see local news from there if I stick to subscriptions. Do I want to learn all sorts of things about that? Not especially, but All lets me see what catches my eye. World just has a little too much to make it efficient, and the vibe in general is just more Reddit. Beehaw comes off more friendshipy to me, which also encourages me to participate in talking about things that I may not be as knowledgeable about.

But that's just what I want for me, everyone else may want something else, but that's why we have options.

pleased to report we crossed the 200 response threshold earlier; i suspect we'll have a pretty good sample size relative to the overall community when all is said and done

Thanks for all the great work you guys are doing with this instance. This place feels nicer than Reddit.

Submitted. I think this is a great way to give feedback and ideas.

I want to see the results... not because of democracy, but because of curiosity about what others think.

If you want to prevent a scenario of "51% vs 49%" discussions, may I suggest publishing the results with rounded numbers, like "more than 20% think that [whatever]". It would be informative enough as far as I'm concerned.

If you want to prevent a scenario of “51% vs 49%” discussions, may I suggest publishing the results with rounded numbers, like “more than 20% think that [whatever]”.

i think you're unintentionally making a good case for why releasing results isn't useful here in any form: if we have to take active steps to distort or fudge how the data is presented to prevent sectarianism or people feeling like they're in a vast minority then it's just easier (and more productive) for everyone if the data is kept with us.

Hm, maybe.

Personally, I wouldn't mind finding out my views were "less than 10%" as long as it's not a popularity contest/vote, it would actually interest me to find out why others might have a different opinion. My only concern would be data that could be construed as a divisive vote, instead of as a feeling to discuss.

On the other hand, I guess these topics have already been discussed, so maybe it would be redundant.

Thanks for doing this. Love this community.

Done!

I respect your policy above but you may run into declining response rate in the long term without some kind of feedback, as there will be a 'what is the point' feeling. I may be wrong of course (and hope I am!), just something I've seen at work. I completely get your reasoning though.

Answered! Thanks for taking the time to listen to our feedback!

I did my part, and I like this kind of feedback. Keep doing a good job!

The following question:

In your opinion, has Beehaw gotten less enjoyable to use since you joined?

Has some answers that confuse me. The options:

No, the site has not gotten less enjoyable
Have not observed a difference

Sound identical to me. I could see that the former implies its equal or better than before, while the latter states its just equal. But there is another option: "Actually, the site has gotten more enjoyable", which clearly states its better than before.

If an option states no change, and another states improvement, I see no reason why there is an option which implies both.

If an option states no change, and another states improvement, I see no reason why there is an option which implies both.

some people don't have the frame of reference, don't have the confidence, or simply have not paid sufficient attention to state one way or the other whether anything has changed--which is distinct from actually being able to say the site hasn't gotten less enjoyable. both options have been used fairly consistently to mean these, based off of the explanations box.

I see. Thank you for the clarification.