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.
I've had similar feelings towards Lemmy as a whole lately too. Maybe I need to play a bit with my sorting settings but it's starting to feel like the vast majority of posts on all my subscribed communities are linked posts without any extra info added.
Sure the titles themselves might be self explanatory but I'd expect the poster to actually also write something about the link they've posted. What did they think about it, what do they want to discuss about it.
Is just feels.. hollow? When you see link after link with not even an effort towards discussion from the poster.
It's starting to feel like I'm using an RSS reader.
Not sure what too do about it though. Require more text to be written for each link post? That might just end up with some copy pasting I suppose but it might be worth a shot?
That is a good way of phrasing it and that is basically how I've been feeling lately about Beehaw. I know other Instances are going through the same thing, it's just that I am most active on Beehaw so I notice it here more.
On the flip side, I do enjoy that there's a death of the author thing going on, where often the OP can't actually control how the community receives or interprets a post. Giving an amplified voice to the OP makes a ton of sense, but sometimes it's fun to just see a thread take off in directions the OP never anticipated, including/especially discussion threads kicked off with a question.
When I open a post with a link and OP has a written a novel I usually just move on. For me the link is just the seed for organic discussion. If OP has opinions that's for the comments. Depends on the community I guess. I'd offer more personal insight in Music post than a News post.
Yeah I wouldn't need a novel either but just a link and nothing else feels.. boring?
Understandable, but for me it's more... Respectful? I guess? OP's not trying to push influence the organic reaction or waste's anyone time.
Seems to me this is about what link aggregators are for. Is the goal to surface things from the internet or is the goal to discuss and build community? Surely it's both, but different folks will emphasize one over another.
I guess.. i just wish it was more than mostly a link aggregator though.