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’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.
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.