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well, i think in order to answer this question we need to first define what is meant by “echo chamber”, because that’s a somewhat loaded term with no standard or commonly agreed upon definition.
Good point. By echo chamber I mean to say I hope this community doesn’t become a place where liberals get mad at conservatives, (or vice versa) those sentiments are agreed with by others, and it just becomes a big place for hating on conservatives. That also raises the question of how we bring different viewpoints into this community without causing it to become one big cesspool of hate. How do we have civil discussions among different viewpoints.
~I hope this makes sense, I didn’t proofread~
Getting mad at each other is not nice behavior. There are times in which anger is warranted and times in which you can still be nice but hostile (we have a zero tolerance policy for intolerance, if you tell a Nazi to fuck off we aren’t about to step in and tone police and tell you to be nice), but we would encourage you to instead report any comments like this so we can keep intolerant individuals off our platform.
How do we have civil discussions among different viewpoints.
The key here is mostly being nice. Assume good faith. If the person is acting in bad faith, do your best not to engage and just report the person. Past that point it’s all a matter of how good your communication skills are, and this might be a good place to practice them while keeping things nice.
I just worry that there will come a point when beehaw has too many users for that to work. If we had 1/8 of reddit’s users there’s still a good chance it would turn into a violent place. Would beehaw limit growth at a certain point?
No idea! But we don’t want to turn into a violent place. Our only rule is to be(e) nice, and that’s something none of the owners are willing to budge on. If we start running into serious issues with this, we’re open to whatever measures are needed to get this back under control.
That’s the magic of federation: I hope beehaw would consider closing registration when getting to a certain size that makes moderation harder, allowing for another server to be “the new beehaw” and so on to have a galaxy of easily moderated instances that federate together.
Can we call them “hives” to match the bee setting?
This is actually genius imo
Other instances do not necessarily have a bee setting or theme.
Ooh I like that!
What is your definition of being “nice”, actually? This question is hard to answer, i know. What i mean is, demanding from someone who is upset and therefore gets emotional, to switch to “non-violent speech”, is a form of tyranny. My stance on voices that get emotional because of dissatisfaction is that they are in need to get heared more than those who are satisfied anyway. Conflicts are actually a valuable part in my work, as they are so revealing about people, and they provide a lot of energy that can get transformed for the better. People might be in a state where it’s just impossible for them to be “nice”, and demanding it from them would result in them getting yet more aggressive. In that sense, a demand for being “nice” is a demand for masking dissatisfaction, thus becoming a hindrance to resolution.
I can very well be nice and slap someone in the face with a sarcastic irony, without people even realising it. Just don’t want my account to be trapped in a space that tends to consequently give PC tyrants an upper hand. I’m not from USA btw so those typical masking standards are not so much part of my culture. I’m all for being civilised and i think that i am :-) but i’m also understanding of people getting angry because i might understand some of the psychology behind it – and some people might be nice and all but they are still fundamentally being idiots.
The two philosophy posts in the sidebar touch on a lot of this. Have you had a chance to review them?
I sympathize with the need to escalate both speech and action when changes need to happen but are being ignored. This kind of behavior is what lead to the creation of this website as the platform we fled was becoming a centrist and rationalist echo chamber where discussions were growing increasingly hostile towards specific minority groups (mostly women and transgender folks).
Yep i read the first part. That was part in my decision making for sighing up on this server. Now i’m getting around to reading the second part. Thanks for explaining your take on what you call “rationalism” because else that would have left me questioning. Am i right in taking the term “centrist” as political? Would have to educate myself on that.
Don’t focus too much on the labels themselves. I’m using them as shorthand notation to describe a specific kind of mindset. The issues that were happening were essentially people of a privileged group starting discussions about a marginalized group to just ask questions or otherwise create a hostile space towards these minority groups but within the bounds of the rules.
Imagine being a woman, confronted with sexism every day, posting an article about a study which proved this sexism, for the thread to be immediately dominated by men all talking about how that’s definitely not how they act. While it may be true (generous interpretation), it’s rather exhausting for the women who already experience being dismissed like this regularly in their lives and it’s also emotionally draining and doesn’t set up a very nice space for the women.
Ooh … excuse my slight neurodiversity. I guess i’m just not a part anymore of a sickening society. Went to other places on that other platform the short periods i spent there.
Appreciate you taking your time to be so verbose. :-)
Mods here seem to have some good experience, so my guess is hateful discussions will be removed and the offending users will eventually migrate to other instances more tolerant to their viewpoints, but debates will be left alone. Seen a few good debates with opposing viewpoints so far that have gone well
Yes. I do fear that by putting too much trust in mods it may not end well eventually. I don’t mean to say that any of these mods would do anything wrong but what about in 15 years? We should put systems into place early that keep this platform from redditing (look at me, creating my own verbs!).
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I’m not sure that I have anything in particular in mind, but I do think that it should be something we all think about. If we deem a solution necessary, we could totally come up with something.
One broad idea could be to encourage people with different viewpoints who still discuss them civilly. Help them set a good example.
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I actually did seriously consider doing that but I decided against it. Beehaw has almost everything that a social platform needs and I’d rather help it grow than try to create something new.
Have you had a chance to review the two posts in the sidebar? I’d love to hear your thoughts on where you think there’s room for an echo chamber to grow with the current system of governance and how you’d like to combat it.
I believe in the long term we’ll need to formalize some kind of governance structure with regards to how moderators are chosen by the communities they moderate and a structure to provide feedback and/or potentially remove problematic individuals, but that seems a long time out and may never actually be necessary (I truly believe that in-person communities can self police much better than existing online communities because of the way they are structured). However, there are limitations of the platform that don’t exist for in-person communities (can’t exactly mutiny here) and thus we may need to explore appropriate safeguards.
I read through both of them a couple months ago. No, I don’t see any issue currently but as beehaw grows I fear that issues could arise. It’s better to fix those issues before they arise in my opinion (such as the issue of beehaw becoming an echo chamber). My main fear is still that years down the line some mods might get cocky with their power in the way that reddit has. That’s why I proposed something like sortition in the discord server. Overall though, this is a beautiful community that is going to sail to far horizons on smooth seas.
I think that having more than a handful of mods and the users having a way to remove a troublesome mod would be a couple potential solutions. Reddit has that issue with their mods, if you have a mod causing trouble pretty much the only thing you can do is make a new subreddit. (I suppose that is true here too, you can just move to a new instance but that seems like a drastic solution)
Exactly. At some point (soon) the whole community may need to have a discussion on how to govern this site.
I’ve seen some discussion already starting about that. The general answer I’ve seen is, “if you don’t like the rules or how it is being run, join or create a new instance.” Which like… I understand that is a “benefit” of federated content but that answer to governance leaves a lot to be desired.
Yep. I’d rather stay on a community than improve than jump ship. I’m not saying that beehaw is run poorly currently but I do think as it grows (especially around July 1) we’re going to need to start talking about it. I’m sure the admins don’t want to make their full time job beehaw so a community moderated way about it is a good idea.
I’m sympathetic to criticism of a community that’s locked into its own information space and incapable of accepting anything else.
However, every community is going to have norms (implicit or explicit) about what kind of things are so egregious to say that they are unacceptable.
People who want to say those things are going to condemn that community as an “echo chamber.”
I don’t think there’s any solution to the general problem of “being an echo chamber” that doesn’t result in “becoming the Nazi bar” https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
This is something every community has to work out for themselves, and there are always going to be people who think it’s too much or not enough.
This might be a good place to ask, so how do we report something that needs a mod to look at it? Is it the little flag inside the three dots menu?
Yep!
Thanks! I figured that was it but didn’t want to start pressing buttons on a platform I’m not familiar with!
I’d argue that it already is an echo chamber and there’s nothing that can be done to prevent such things, much like everyone has biases and always will. However, much like biases, they can be reduced where they become problematic.
Exactly, everywhere on the internet is one but minimizing this should be done.
I’d say it always comes down to moderation, how strict the mods are and if they enforce the rules/spirit of the community. I think the decentralization of servers should help with that too, as long as not everyone just joins the few main ones (like we did lol)
In my experience, emphasizing efforts to avoid being an echo chamber tends to lead to slowly becoming a far right echo chamber, as people end up tolerating intolerance until the victims leave for elsewhere and only the intolerant are left.
Hivemindiness and issues are probably inevitable, as anywhere, but I think the lack of a downvote button goes a long way towards mitigating that, to be honest. It limits the degree to which the community can bury or punish a comment just for saying something like “I didn’t like popular game xyz”. And people who would actually deserve that kind of downvote rain should typically probably be booted anyway, per beehaw bee nice rule.
