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.

  • Chloyster [she/her]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Part of the reason I wanted to start the weekly “what are you playing” thread on gaming was to try and spawn more discussion not related to news. Although I do think a variety of topics each week is a cool idea I want to look into. I do get what you mean, but, at least on gaming, I have seen some great broad discussion topics be posted.

    I can only speak to gaming but I think every community having discussions like that would be neat

    • Thalestr@beehaw.orgOP
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      1 year ago

      The Gaming community certainly does seem to have some more community engagement going on, which is good. It would be nice to see more of that. There is some gaming news in there, but at least it’s gaming news and, thus, not as bleak and depressing as some of the news in other communities.