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good morning, Beehaw
this morning we have a survey for you, which will run for approximately three days. it contains three questions on site policy (plus an optional explanation field), and two questions about the site's current vibe (plus another optional explanation field).
you can find the survey here.
some caveats to this survey
you likely have some priors for how this "should" work, and i would like you to leave those at the door. to be up front:
- this is not a referendum—it is more like a Wikipedia vote if anything. we're looking for a consensus or a synthesis of the community's opinions with the practical limitations we're working with, not a first-past-the-post winner.
- this is not (currently) a democracy, and you should not expect public results from this. we talked this part over as an admin team and we don't see much value in publicly releasing the results of a survey like this. if we do release the results publicly, we'll be announcing that before it happens.
- the same caveats just mentioned will apply to any surveys like this into the foreseeable future. i'm sure everyone understands that in online spaces it is very easy to manipulate surveys like this; accordingly, it is not a great idea to take them at complete face value until you can audit votes. since we don't have a foolproof, private system for doing that yet, these caveats are necessary to make any kind of vote involving site policy work.
(we do eventually want to create a foolproof enough private system, but this is way on the backburner and i'm guessing most of you prefer having an imperfect way to chime in on the site's direction than none at all until this system is created)
Wherever I find myself questioning the Beehaw restrictions, I browse All on lemmy.world. I can read All here with no real regrets. Anywhere else... Ehhhhhh
When I browse All on Beehaw I see a bunch of topics that I'm not even remotely interested in. I'm sure most of it is interesting to the members of those communities, but it's definitely not how I use Lemmy.
When I go to my "Subscribed" tab on lemmy.world, it's full of great content that isn't available on Beehaw.
Perfectly valid way of doing it. I know a lot of people hate All on Lemmy or Reddit, and I get it. I just like to spend a portion of my time on All to see things that I would never learn about on my own.
I've been learning so much about Australia and NZ that I would never learn otherwise and I enjoy that. I'm in the US, so I'd never see local news from there if I stick to subscriptions. Do I want to learn all sorts of things about that? Not especially, but All lets me see what catches my eye. World just has a little too much to make it efficient, and the vibe in general is just more Reddit. Beehaw comes off more friendshipy to me, which also encourages me to participate in talking about things that I may not be as knowledgeable about.
But that's just what I want for me, everyone else may want something else, but that's why we have options.