Personal Reflections
Over the past few weeks I’ve found myself engaged with Beehaw in a fundamentally different way. The explosive growth necessitated shifted timelines, had me prioritizing replies and moderator actions in a different way and in general greatly shifted what parts of the website I spent most of my time on.
This shift changed my perception of the website. I didn’t have as much time to spend reading the awesome interactions which resolved themselves, where people were nice to each other and to check out the cool discussions going on. I spent a lot of my time answering questions, devoting a bunch of attention to the neediest, the loudest, or simply whomever was just in my inbox. I ended up stepping into a lot of conversations to help try and defuse or deal with difficult people and directing efforts on helping (collaboratively!) to establish a strong moderation ethos. I recently found myself reflecting on this and realizing I was missing out on the very environment we came here to establish and that I need to set better boundaries for myself.
In order to prioritize my own mental health I’m going to establish the following boundaries for myself:
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I am going to spend more of my time on the site browsing and commenting and less moderating and responding to every question that comes my way. If you ping me to ask a question that other people have already asked or can be answered elsewhere I’m probably not going to answer it anymore.
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As much as I want to treat all of you with the respect and kindness you deserve when intervening as a mod or admin, it’s not sustainable at this scale because it quickly becomes all of the time I spend on this site, so I’ve put together a code of conduct below to help guide expectations of how interactions with myself and other moderators might look.
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I really don’t have the time or energy to take suggestions phrased like demands or to entertain anyone talking shit about this place. Instead of suggestions phrased like demands, I’d ask that they are phrased as requests or even better as a plan of action (how are you going to help us accomplish something better, together?). Instead of talking shit, you’re free to highlight the flaws you see (ideally in Beehaw support), so long as you’re also providing suggestions on how to fix things. Venting about this platform just to vent that it doesn’t fit your ideal situation doesn’t do the community any good on this platform. Or any platform we’re federated with, frankly. If you ever feel the need to vent about this platform then do so to your friends, in DMs, on email, by punching a pillow, or by whispering sweet nothings to the wind on top of your roof- venting here just makes the place depressing and toxic and I don’t want to participate in that environment. I want an uplifting, positive space where we enable each other and treat each other with respect.
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It’s upsetting to see how certain individuals react to moderators and admins stepping in to try and keep this place safe for minorities or to ensure that there’s peace. This is tiring to everyone involved and not sustainable. As much as I like the idea of helping each other become better, some people need a lot more help than we can offer and I think some of us don’t have strong enough boundaries on how to engage with that in a healthy manner (I know I’ve got issues with being taken advantage of because I love pleasing others). To that end, we’ve drawn up a draft code of conduct to help people understand some healthy boundaries that need to be specified.
Purpose of the Code of Conduct
The purpose of this code of conduct is not to establish new rules (our only rule is to be nice), but to frame what nice behavior looks like so that stronger boundaries can be both respectful and enforced. I’ve spent a lot of mental and emotional energy educating and diffusing situations on Beehaw in the last few weeks and this is a structure we’re providing to show you how to be respectful of the time of the moderators and admins and how to get the best results out of an interaction with us. If we tell you to disengage and you imply that I’m being a fascist for doing so, we’re no longer going to bother continuing to try to defuse the situation as some of us have been, because you simply aren’t treating us with good faith. As much as I’d like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and to always assume good faith even when they’re angrily replying to me, none of us can do that at the scale we’ve already reached. I’ve seen a lot of people treating me and other moderators with bad faith and I don’t want any of us becoming cold and calloused to our users as a defense mechanism to deal with the abuse.
In case you didn’t notice, this post is also a link to the code of conduct.
You all are definitely doing good in my view but I don’t think it fair that we’d expect you to spend all of your time moderating literally every aspect of this community.
May I suggest that it just be a community rule that if somebody has a request we just say they should put it in Beehaw Support and let the community engage on the topic to discuss the merits.
If we are all fairly like minded on respecting others and the defederating or bans that have occurred it would seem we could self regulate those discussions and catch people up as a community rather than expecting the moderators to handle every engagement.
You’ve been transparent on actions that have been taken and why, I think we can handle propagation of that info ourselves at least.
I had a similar thought that I’m trying to develop. We, as members, should take care of our community too. If you see moderators and admins as individuals with specific responsibilities instead of power, you might realize you can contribute in a different way. Exactly how is what I’m working on right now, but there’s the danger that we’ll start policing each other in the worst way possible if we start focusing in rules and not in how we behave.
I think a big point of all these philosophy posts, is to avoid that. Having principles instead of rules, should hopefully prevent community members from throwing rules at each other.