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 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.
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.
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.
