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 can feel my comment will not be popular, but I felt like saying this.
I mean, you can only carry niceness so far; there’s always going to be a limit. This example will be extreme, but that’s the whole point: if someone showed up trying to justify a genocide, how easy would it be to remain nice and politely disagree with them? We can all agree that there’s a line, the question is where that line sits.
I feel like a lot of people in this thread are talking about being nice, all whilst ganging up on the admin, being very uncharitable, and not really seeing things from her point of view. As I said earlier, if there was something you were vehemently against and thought was completely and highly immoral, how easy would it be to politely and nicely disagree with someone defending it? And you might not think something is “completely and highly immoral”, but maybe someone else does; they think it’s a line that should not be crossed. Of course it’s going to be hard to politely disagree about something like that.
Some topics are obviously going to be a lot more sensitive, and it’s unrealistic to expect people to be able to remain fully composed. I feel like the “be(e) nice” aspect applies to more everyday things, you know? Conversations about things like video games or TV shows, for example, which even on Reddit would quickly become very toxic. I think it’s unfair to expect people to remain so composed and collected when talking about something as sensitive and controversial as “when are civilian casualties OK?”. If I carry out a conversation like that, I fully expect it might not stay completely emotion free, so to speak.
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree here.
If people can’t stay reasonably polite, they should excuse themselves from the conversation. Once I realized there was no way to steer the conversation back to reasonable polite, I disengaged from it.
I think it’s perfectly fair to expect people to excuse themselves if they are unable to be reasonably polite and operate in good faith.
And to be clear the discussion from my point of view, and I believe others in the thread was not “when are civilian casualties OK”. It’s a trolley problem, and there’s a ton of people on both tracks. Both tracks have civilians and both have soldiers.
The big difference between your genocide example (and I understand you believe it is an extreme example and not a perfect analog) is no one was taking the ‘Harm is OK if position if X’. Both sides wanted to minimize harm done.