Hey Beeple and visitors to Beehaw: I think we need to have a discussion about !technology@beehaw.org, community culture, and moderation. First, some of the reasons that I think we need to have this conversation.

  1. Technology got big fast and has stayed Beehaw’s most active community.
  2. Technology gets more reports (about double in the last month by a rough hand count) than the next highest community that I moderate (Politics, and this is during election season in a month that involved a disastrous debate, an assassination attempt on a candidate, and a major party’s presumptive nominee dropping out of the race)
  3. For a long time, I and other mods have felt that Technology at times isn’t living up to the Beehaw ethos. More often than I like I see comments in this community where users are being abusive or insulting toward one another, often without any provocation other than the perception that the other user’s opinion is wrong.

Because of these reasons, we have decided that we may need to be a little more hands-on with our moderation of Technology. Here’s what that might mean:

  1. Mods will be more actively removing comments that are unkind or abusive, that involve personal attacks, or that just have really bad vibes.
    a. We will always try to be fair, but you may not always agree with our moderation decisions. Please try to respect those decisions anyway. We will generally try to moderate in a way that is a) proportional, and b) gradual.
    b. We are more likely to respond to particularly bad behavior from off-instance users with pre-emptive bans. This is not because off-instance users are worse, or less valuable, but simply that we aren’t able to vet users from other instances and don’t interact with them with the same frequency, and other instances may have less strict sign-up policies than Beehaw, making it more difficult to play whack-a-mole.
  2. We will need you to report early and often. The drawbacks of getting reports for something that doesn’t require our intervention are outweighed by the benefits of us being able to get to a situation before it spirals out of control. By all means, if you’re not sure if something has risen to the level of violating our rule, say so in the report reason, but I’d personally rather get reports early than late, when a thread has spiraled into an all out flamewar.
    a. That said, please don’t report people for being wrong, unless they are doing so in a way that is actually dangerous to others. It would be better for you to kindly disagree with them in a nice comment.
    b. Please, feel free to try and de-escalate arguments and remind one another of the humanity of the people behind the usernames. Remember to Be(e) Nice even when disagreeing with one another. Yes, even Windows users.
  3. We will try to be more proactive in stepping in when arguments are happening and trying to remind folks to Be(e) Nice.
    a. This isn’t always possible. Mods are all volunteers with jobs and lives, and things often get out of hand before we are aware of the problem due to the size of the community and mod team.
    b. This isn’t always helpful, but we try to make these kinds of gentle reminders our first resort when we get to things early enough. It’s also usually useful in gauging whether someone is a good fit for Beehaw. If someone responds with abuse to a gentle nudge about their behavior, it’s generally a good indication that they either aren’t aware of or don’t care about the type of community we are trying to maintain.

I know our philosophy posts can be long and sometimes a little meandering (personally that’s why I love them) but do take the time to read them if you haven’t. If you can’t/won’t or just need a reminder, though, I’ll try to distill the parts that I think are most salient to this particular post:

  1. Be(e) nice. By nice, we don’t mean merely being polite, or in the surface-level “oh bless your heart” kind of way; we mean be kind.
  2. Remember the human. The users that you interact with on Beehaw (and most likely other parts of the internet) are people, and people should be treated kindly and in good-faith whenever possible.
  3. Assume good faith. Whenever possible, and until demonstrated otherwise, assume that users don’t have a secret, evil agenda. If you think they might be saying or implying something you think is bad, ask them to clarify (kindly) and give them a chance to explain. Most likely, they’ve communicated themselves poorly, or you’ve misunderstood. After all of that, it’s possible that you may disagree with them still, but we can disagree about Technology and still give one another the respect due to other humans.
  • TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.orgOPM
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    3 months ago

    I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, but please remember:

    1. Be Nice. You might think your cranky comment isn’t a big deal, but when there are dozens of them it can get pretty overwhelming. The dogpile is real.
    2. Technology@Beehaw.org is not a “free speech zone”. I think Beehaw admins have been pretty clear on this, but our overriding concern is community building and creating a corner of the internet where people are good to one another, not creating yet another site where people can say whatever they like regardless of the harm it might cause others. I understand this might clash with what some see as a fundamental philosophy of the fediverse, but we disagree. This isn’t the place to re-litigate those disagreements.
  • elfpie@beehaw.org
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    3 months ago

    I was talking about how we always have this type of discussion frequently with my therapist earlier today. It’s always nice to pause and remind ourselves and those outside of our philosophy. One thing that I’d like to add is we might not be(e) nice sometimes because of personal circumstances. We are having a bad day and a comment will trigger a reaction that would be uncommon or we might be aggressive without provocation.

    In cases we feel the need to hit back, I’d advise postponing the response by at least one hour. Give yourself time to clear your mind and think things over. And if you are the target of users having a bad day, reminding them that they are not be(e)ing nice is the alternative. Asking questions is the best. “Did I offend you?”, “Did I say something wrong?”, “I don’t understand what the issue is.” Even if they keep the aggression, they will point to the specific issue that needs to be worked on, or prove they don’t want to discuss genuinely.

    • TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.orgOPM
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      3 months ago

      I completely agree. Thank you for this comment. This is one of the reasons that in many cases we try first to just talk to users. Lots of folks have bad days, or just have certain issues that they really struggle with staying calm and being kind about.

  • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    I appreciate what BeeHaw brings to the wider community, and particularly appreciate the reminder of the values that power that.

    Thank you.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al
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    3 months ago

    Beehaw was actually my first threadiverse instance. It didn’t become my main, because you all are way too over the top. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean that in a bad way, just that I needed a bit of chaos in my life and this instance is like cotton wool. When I left, it was so that I could partake in football discussions and life outside of this instance took a minute to adjust to. However there was one thing I took away from my experience, it’s that this instance was full of good, compassionate people. So it’s no wonder that despite my two major stints on other instances (shout-out to lemmy.tf and lazysoci.al), I always made sure I was active here. Even with this particular community. If something is super technical, I tend to take it to programming.dev, otherwise I come here because I want to have more humanist discussions about things and how they impact people and I love that. I’m glad to see that you’re all doubling down on that.

    Off-topic, I think you’re doing the beehaw community a disservice by not updating the instance. I know you’re waiting on SubLinks, but who knows when that will be ready, in the meantime, Lemmy has added some very good and very useful things that improve the quality of life of users, admins and moderators.

    • Gaywallet (they/it)@beehaw.org
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      3 months ago

      Thank you for the kind words. Not updating is not a decision we have taken lightly. I can’t speak to the specifics because I’m not tech enough to fully understand them, but I believe part of the reason for updating has to do with that migration off Lemmy - that it changes the way data is stored and organized and because of such the migration process (moving comments, threads, etc. to sublinks) would need to be entirely redesigned.

  • huginn@feddit.it
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    3 months ago

    As an off instance user: great decisions! Strong migration makes for strong communities.