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 get you. Feel similarly.
I feel like !chat@beehaw.org is kind of glossed over by a lot of users, which results in the main feed just being links after links.
Don’t really know of a solution, but if we could find a way to encourage more people to submit to that community, there would be more space for regular discussions.
We should also normalize being active in days-old posts. There was a bit of a “no one’s posted in three days, this post is dead” culture on reddit. It was only in hobby subs where discussions continued over a longer time.
The problem, obviously, is that the nature of Lemmy and reddit doesn’t lend itself to promoting older content, so less people will see it, especially if they’re not just browsing the local feed here.
Not an easy problem to solve (and many might not see it as a problem). It’s essentially down to how the users of the instance use it. Nothing can really be done about that, other than perhaps encouraging something like posting a bunch of stuff in the chat community to give it some momentum.
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I think you just described Tildes! It’s not horrible, and they don’t necessarily ban images/photos/links, but it’s largely text posts, or at least text comments.
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I’m frustrated too.
I’m trying to comment on things, and have genuine and engaging conversations. But it feels like if you’re not 100% aligned with the community, there’s free reign to be harassed. We’re supposed to Be(e) Nice, and I was. I was arguing in good faith, I wasn’t trolling, or anything else nefarious. My view was twisted in bad faith, they claimed I would be first in line to defend heinous acts. I corrected them, saying in no uncertain terms that I would not. They could have just apologized when I set the record strait but they just kept coming back lying about my views and continued to slander me. I reported it, nothing was done.
So I’m not really sure what to do. The conduct was inexcusable. A quick and simple ‘sorry for the misunderstanding, glad you don’t support heinous acts’ would have sufficed. But no, because I’m not as far to the left as they were, I’m wrong, every view I have is suspect, and free to be slandered. A few users did come to my defense which was nice.
I don’t know if others are experiencing the same thing. But I know I’m very hesitant to comment on anything that could be controversial.
Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position!
- Monty Python
There is a type of group-think that can emerge when people look for a safe space. In fact, it almost has to happen because part of being safe is staking out topics that cannot be “both-sided”, but the nature of a voting based platform seems to actively amplify the tendency to drown out good faith voices. Discussion is almost based on people having differing views, otherwise there’s nothing to say. I don’t know who’s old enough to remember Metafilter, but it is that type of thing that drove me away from there many years ago.
I don’t have an easy answer to it, however.
I read that conversation, it was really off putting for me how you were treated. I haven’t been able to let go of it since. It definitely impacted how I view the site.
Understand the sentiment and frustration, but do want to express that a user or two is not the whole site. Problematic to be sure and we as admin and mods will continue to try and keep the space nice. As of right now reporting this content with an expression why is very valuable for us. Ignoring it or just reporting with a blank reason is hard to deal with.
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