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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I am simply not interested in allowing space for that on this website for a dozen different reasons, but primarily because many issues people like to debate involve necessarily debating the existence of others or their humanity.
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.
