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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Yeah, reply to that week old post. Reddit trained a lot of people to think that if something is more than like an hour old, it’s stale, but that’s not how async communication works, especially on a comparatively small server.
Sure, you might run out of new topics, but that’s not going to change with any of the proposals I’ve seen in this thread.
Maybe posting on a social media board is not fulfilling.
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This is kinda my take, too; after reading OP’s post, I was left wondering how much time they spend on here and what they’re doing outside it.
I know everyone’s ability and opportunity to be engaged with the world is different, so I hope this doesn’t come off as a “touch grass” kinda thing, that’s not how I mean it at all. For people with difficulties communicating or mobility issues, sometimes being online is the best way to engage with the world, and I totally get that. However, I think it’s unwise to put all of our social eggs in one basket; we need multiple platforms for communicating and outlets for expression and connection. What ways are you connecting with people outside Lemmy?
When I’m feeling sad and disconnected, I like to work against it by sowing the kindness and understanding I would like to be reaping. This is pretty common advice - it’s not unusual for someone going through a rough patch to be told to try volunteering for something they care about - and for me, it is almost always Super Effective.
So, maybe posting on a social media board could be fulfilling, if gone into with the attitude of finding a way to contribute instead of trying to find what is needed.
Idk, maybe that doesn’t make sense, I’m not fully caffeinated yet and out of medication and I know I’m not totally with it. But hopefully I’m getting the gist across: posting/commenting would ideally not be your primary (or only) way of connecting with others, posting is usually not satisfying, but empathetic/meaningful commenting can be, and if there’s not already a meaningful reply to something, try making one and see how it feels. It might feel better than you expected to be that first meaningful comment even if nobody ever replies; sometimes heartfelt expression can be its own reward.
This is kinda my take, too; after reading OP’s post, I was left wondering how much time they spend on here and what they’re doing outside it.
I don’t spend much time here at all. I open Beehaw a couple times a day, see nothing that I want to interact with, and close the tab. That was the basis of me creating this post to begin with - that Beehaw is quickly becoming a news feed with no actual meat to interact with.
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 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.
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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