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Beehaw Support @beehaw.org Thalestr @beehaw.org

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.

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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.

    • 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.

      • I observed and participated in that exchange and I also found it to be fairly disheartening, especially since it came from an admin. All I can say is that you should try not to let it weigh you down.

        For the most part, my exchanges on this site have been positive and supportive and I'd like to think that will be the norm in the future.

      • 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.

        • In this case, the person I was replying to was arguing with a site admin. I would be hesitant to report it for that reason alone.

          • To be absolutely clear, please report me and other admins if we step out of line.

            FWIW the thread being discussed was reported, and I observed the conversation. I have mixed feelings on how things played out and I don't think I'm smart enough to figure out a way to navigate such treacherous waters. I'd talk more about how I feel, but I'm also worried about starting another fight in the comments here. Any issue which involves talking about a decision which will result in literal lives being lost regardless of the decision made is one that is going to be fraught with obstacles.

            I don't think there's a way for this discussion to happen healthily on this website. It's like trying to debate the merits of euthanasia for seriously ill people who wish to kill themselves. This just isn't the right venue for a discussion on a nuanced topic that requires experts to weigh in. It's the same reasoning as to why we don't have a mental health community or any professional advice communities.

            Also tagging @HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org to be sure they see this. And if you ever want to direct message me or other admins or ping us on matrix or discord, please feel free to reach out.

            • For the “bee nice” ethos of Beehaw to mean anything, the expectations have to be the same for everyone, regardless of what position of power they might hold. That unfortunately does not seem to be happening in this case. I am pretty certain that if that conversation had been between two regular users, an admin or mod would have stepped in after the first or second exchanges and encouraged them both to disengage because the conversation wasn’t productive, as I’ve seen happen here numerous times. Instead, it dragged on for several comments, getting increasingly personal and vitriolic, and was ultimately not addressed until now in a different thread. It’s hard to see that as anything other than a double standard, and your comment here appealing to the difficulty of the subject, while true, glosses over the fact that the argument on one side immediately escalated to personal attacks which were totally unnecessary to the point being made. Saying “your logic unfortunately could be used to justify much worse things you shouldn’t want to support” is one thing; saying “you would be first in line to defend mass murder” Is quite different, and diametrically opposed to any interpretation of “bee nice” I can imagine. If Beehaw wants users to always assume good faith, having an admin rapidly escalate a disagreement with a user based on an extremely bad faith interpretation of their stated position and ultimately face no consequences is not really conducive to that. While this is a different subject than the OP initially raised, I think it’s important to consider the effect of these kinds of issues on building community here when you have multiple users in this thread expressing that seeing or participating in a discussion with particular individuals has encouraged them to avoid speaking their mind for fear of retribution.

              • What consequences would you like to see here?

                • A "hey, this conversation is not productive/nice/whatever, please disengage" would have been nice after the conversation was reported. Maybe at most deletion of the offending comments. I don't think further consequences at this point are really appropriate, I doubt a normal user would have gotten much more than that, but an apology would be nice.

                  I'd rather just forgive and forget than get a forced apology though. To me it felt more like unchecked emotions taking precedence over logic rather than a bad faith argument. At least, I hope that is the case. I'm all too familiar with the stupid shit people say when they are angry. There are things I've said years ago in the heat of a moment and still look back on with regret. I hope that admin could use it as a learning moment instead of quadrupling down.

                  • I'll try my best to do that next time. This isn't a criticism so much as just something I'd like to point out is that nearly every time I've asked another user to disengage with a moderator or an admin I've been accused of playing sides. That's not to say that I don't still do it, but I really don't know that there's any way to resolve these issues without people ultimately being upset one way or another. It's part of the reason we've outlined why we don't want certain discussions happening on this website at all as it's not the appropriate venue.

                • I think a good start would be to have that public response from a mod or admin saying “this is not productive, please disengage” to shut down the thread regardless of who is involved. Of course, you all can’t be on 24/7 and that may not always happen immediately, but I would hope that the same standard which would lead someone to do that would apply regardless of the people involved in the disagreement. In another instance I recall of a disagreement between a different mod and a user, the user was told publicly to disengage but the mod was told privately; this resulted in the user thinking they were being singled out, and only once they protested was it said that the mod involved was also told to disengage in a different medium. These kinds of things undermine confidence among users that the same conduct standards are being applied to everyone. If something merits a public call out, then that is what should happen, regardless of the recipient.

                  If that happens and the issue continues to occur repeatedly, then the consequences of that are above my pay grade—you all would at that point have to contend with what it means to have an individual in a position of power who repeatedly behaves in a way which contradicts the expectations of conduct you have of your regular users.

                  • what it means to have an individual in a position of power who repeatedly behaves in a way which contradicts the expectations of conduct you have of your regular users.

                    EDIT: for posterity/transparency reasons I'm not going to remove this, but I'm crossing it out because it didn't land right and is something I clearly need to workshop more and reconsider how to respond.

                    I think perhaps the biggest issue I have is that these kinds of conversations are already happening yet the total amount of times it has happened as a function of the total amount of comments on the website or even interactions with moderators are often blown out of proportion.

                    We have a propensity on the internet (and as humans) to hyperfocus on the negative and often to not do so with adequate reflection. A single instance of behavior which annoys someone or rubs them the wrong way is often the starting point for endless discussion and hypothesizing about what is acceptable and whether someone stepped over the line. It's often an act of grandstanding or virtue signaling that people are unaware that they are doing. In the best of cases it's a philosophical discussion or one aimed at providing clarity around rules and behavior, but even in these cases the harm these conversations can cause in terms of morale and the negative energy directed at the person in question are not taken into consideration.

                    If you need an analogous example, take a look at individuals on the left who have been vilified or canceled over a single misstep. Even in cases of profuse apology and serious steps towards rectifying their behavior, it's practically impossible to discuss these individuals on the internet without someone entering the discussion to grandstand or redirect discussion towards the perceived harm. It's a distraction tactic, one that made discussions about topics like gamer gate practically unapproachable and toxic and shifted the discussion away from it's intent (serious sexism in gaming) and instead towards what was essentially tone policing and questioning whether the motives behind the movement were sound in the first place.

                    While this is a long route to get back to my initial point, I want to point out this propensity because it's something we need to collectively move past as a society and on the internet. There are endless bad actors and we often end up acting very much like bad actors because this exploitation often ends up so mainstream that we internalize their value sets without questioning them. Starting a private conversation with the individual in question, with other moderators, or with admins to understand how they feel about the situation (or bringing this up via other avenues like matrix or discord) may be a better way to address concerns than airing them publicly and potentially starting a witch hunt over a single isolated incident. Even when you suspect there's a pattern (we've identified a whole two times this has happened, both of which I was aware of and one of which I was directly involved in) you need to consider the pros and cons of having this discussion in public and how it might affect the opinions of others.

                    Finally, I'd suggest to yourself and others listening in on this conversation to take a step back and self-evaluate. If there was a scale which rests on an axis that goes from "I absolutely hate this person" to "I love this person" where would you rate the admins and moderators on this website. Why do you have that rating? How much do you know these people? Are you willing to change your opinion? What would change your opinion? Is it fair to rate someone so far down in either direction on the scale based on how much you know and have interacted with them? Think about some people you know in real life, people that you've interacted with a lot, and ask yourself where they sit on that scale and how much information is behind that decision. Have they moved on this scale over time based on how they've acted or things they've said? I think on the internet we have the propensity to polarize people, to flatten them down to one dimensional axes and to make snap judgements about their character and in general to be unwilling to question that judgement or allow that judgement to move. It's often a function of necessity to keep us mentally sane on large websites like twitter and reddit where toxicity are rampant. We need to challenge these behaviors and do our best to avoid them on Beehaw if we wish for this place to end up different.

                    • Permanently Deleted

                      • Apologies, I set off on a half-baked philosophy post here. I want to make it clear that I'm not excusing anyone's behavior. I'm genuinely looking for advice from the community. Now that you have pointed it out, I can see how this might read as apologetic towards bad behavior. I will do my best to avoid philosophizing about issues I see on the internet as a whole when responding to direct violations of conduct/behavior. I got a bit lost in terms of replies, and didn't realize that this response is not attached to the same chain as the response where I acknowledge the harm done and take feedback to heart

                    • 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.

            • I appreciate the comments.

              From my perspective, everyone was having a good chat/debate about the moral issues of cluster munitions, except one person who unable to remain respectful. I called them out but instead of being introspective about it, they doubled down. Other users called them out and they tripled down.

              I think everyone in the thread was operating from the standpoint of ‘do the least harm’, and I think reasonable people can do that and remain respectful. It would be very different if some was taking the ‘kill them all, war crimes are neato’ standpoint, but that’s not the case.

              I think it should be entirely possible to have a respectful conversation on difficult and controversial topics as long as people operate in good faith. To the euthanasia parallel, I think the analog to what happened would be one person believing that euthanasia should be allowed no questions asked, and another person thinking there should be the simplest of non-binding reviews done first. And even though they are nearly identical in opinion, and miles away from the other side of the spectrum, the first blows up at the second because of the slight curtailment on individual freedom.

              Honestly I kinda think a weekly thread about tough moral questions could be really informative and open peoples eyes to new perspectives.

            • Okay, I'll take you up on that and report here since it's relevant to the discussion. The other day I reported someone for calling a celebrity they disliked an "insane dangerous psychopath" because they didn't believe her accusation against Marilyn Manson. You told the user they probably shouldn't do that, but let it slide because you don't know enough about the situation. All you did was embolden that user who went on to say that the celebrity in question is clinically a psychopath, as if they're a doctor able to diagnose something like that, and they picked apart her parenting which is irrelevant to what may or may not have happened between her and Manson decades ago. The whole time providing no sources, because the sources for such claims are gossip rags that can't be trusted. I tried talking sense into the person myself, they called me gross and doubled down that it's valid for them to be throwing diagnoses at strangers.

              They were not engaging in good faith. When someone resorts to aggressive name-calling and severe accusations they're unable to back up with evidence, that is bad faith argument and it needs to be more than tiptoed around as you did. I stopped engaging because the both of you made it clear that it would not be possible for me to have a conversation in good faith without having insults hurled at me.

              Why do the rules only apply to some people, and not others? Why let the name-calling slide when the motto is "bee nice"? Is there a case when it's okay to call someone a "dangerous insane psychopath" and we're not talking about a convicted felon with APD? Is it because she's a celebrity that you're happy to facilitate a space where she's so aggressively slandered? I'm trying to understand here. Even if you needed the facts before making a decision, It's easy to search up that Manson has already been tried and convicted of the sexual assault he committed in public back in 2001, that it was at least the second time he committed such an assault in front of his crowd, and that he has a growing list of accusers that is in the double digits now. There's no possibility that he is innocent in all of it, since at least two cases of sexual assault against nonconsenting individuals were witnessed and one case already convicted.

              I was so put off of this site after seeing your response to this person with an obvious vendetta against Manson's accuser for who knows what reason. If you keep the users who resort to name-calling and unfounded accusations unchecked, you're going to lose engagement from the people who behave themselves. If you're wondering what I'm looking for here in response, a simple "Sorry, I'll do better" will suffice. And then do better. Delete and ban offensive name-calling and obvious slander that damages the credibility of women who speak out against their abusers.

              • I wasn't aware that they continued to go off on you in the comments. The only reason I showed up in the thread was because of a report. Past telling them to calm down I wasn't present in the thread except when they showed up in my inbox. If someone escalates after being told to disengage please report the additional comments or send me a message in my inbox. I apologize for how things played out, I don't want that to be anyone's experience of this website, but this website is also far too large at this point for me to have eyes on everything.

                Edit: and to be clear, I'm going to do my best to figure out a system to check back in on threads which are reported to ensure people are behaving, but it hasn't been a part of my usual workflow because there's just so much content on this site that I've been struggling to keep up with it.

            • I appreciate your humility in approaching the challenge. I witnessed the conversation in real time too, and it's certainly true that morality in conflict is a super complicated topic (especially in these specific circumstances), but there is a way to manage that kind of disagreement with civility.

              If I had been in that situation and implied something and/or offended someone in a way I hadn't intended, it would be a simple concession (for my own sake I'd argue a compulsion) to apologize for at least that misunderstanding. I was disappointed and a little uncomfortable with how that conversation played out too.

          • I just read the thread. I find it really unnerving that that conversation happened. It seems to me that the person you were responding to was sealioning and arguing under very bad faith. I can see why you're frustrated, because I am too.

            I feel like this is a trend for this particular admin to act this way, but I don't have anything to back that up unfortunately

          • I can totally appreciate where you're coming from with that concern, and I would probably feel similarly if not the same. What I can tell you is that I have felt heard during mod discussions around flagged posts/comments when I disagree with how something is being interpreted, and I do try to weigh in on those even outside of communities I'm a mod for. What I hope is that if you or another user were to report a comment with a reason such as "this is getting heated with an admin and more eyes might be good before it gets not nice" it would be brought up in the mod chat and discussed and likely have an additional amount of help to resolve the conflict.

            At least, that's my expectation for how it would/should be handled

        • Rather than deal in abstractions, here's the comment thread.

        • spoiler

          sdfsaf

    • Someone linked to the conversation you're describing, and all I can say is "wow". I'm disgusted by the way that admin insisted on attacking a position you didn't take, claiming you DID take that position, and using "well it's the logical next step" as an excuse. I'm in agreement with what another user said: it's difficult not to see Beehaw in a different light after observing an admin behaving like that.

    • 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.

      • Attack the position, not the person is what we used to say in a forum I frequented many years ago. While it sounds simple, it's quite difficult to do in practice, whether you are the one attacking the position or the one receiving the attack on your positions. Still, there were really very few people who could do this correctly. You would notice new members of the forum, getting personally offended when a position they were expressing was attacked, without actually getting attacked as persons themselves. Very few faced such situations properly. Looks like (and it seems it's only getting worse as web netizens increase, and commercial interests facilitate shallow exchanges) people have a really hard time separating respect for the position they hold and respect for them as persons. Also, it's really impossible, there is practically no space for a disagreement to have a productive outcome (even if the difference in viewpoints remains) once personal attacks begin. For that reason I believe we can and we must always respect the person when in disagreement, regardless of how hard it might be.

        In the thread @HumbleFlamingo@beehaw.org mentioned, its obvious, at least the way I see it, that it was not the position that was being attacked.

    • I can feel my comment will not be popular, but I felt like saying this.

      I mean, you can only carry niceness so far; there's always going to be a limit. This example will be extreme, but that's the whole point: if someone showed up trying to justify a genocide, how easy would it be to remain nice and politely disagree with them? We can all agree that there's a line, the question is where that line sits.

      I feel like a lot of people in this thread are talking about being nice, all whilst ganging up on the admin, being very uncharitable, and not really seeing things from her point of view. As I said earlier, if there was something you were vehemently against and thought was completely and highly immoral, how easy would it be to politely and nicely disagree with someone defending it? And you might not think something is "completely and highly immoral", but maybe someone else does; they think it's a line that should not be crossed. Of course it's going to be hard to politely disagree about something like that.

      Some topics are obviously going to be a lot more sensitive, and it's unrealistic to expect people to be able to remain fully composed. I feel like the "be(e) nice" aspect applies to more everyday things, you know? Conversations about things like video games or TV shows, for example, which even on Reddit would quickly become very toxic. I think it's unfair to expect people to remain so composed and collected when talking about something as sensitive and controversial as "when are civilian casualties OK?". If I carry out a conversation like that, I fully expect it might not stay completely emotion free, so to speak.

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