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 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.