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.
As I said in another reply I am sorry for making a half-baked philosophy post. I was not meaning to accuse you or anyone of the behavior I was attempting to talk about in the abstract. I have apologized several times for the behavior and tried my best to help everyone understand that I am looking for feedback because I don't want something like this to happen in the future. Unfortunately I think this is at least partially an issue with threaded replies and how people interact with them.
Yeah, I think Memmy is also not handling the increasingly long threads particularly well—I had to switch to browser because it wouldn’t show this reply, and I think it was jumbling up or not showing some other replies too.
Anyway, I appreciate you hearing the concerns. I don’t think there’s much to be gained from dissecting this particular incident any further, so I’ll just hope that future incidents (which hopefully don’t occur, but stuff happens) are handled in a way that demonstrates this feedback was internalized.