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 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.