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 get you. Feel similarly.
I feel like !chat@beehaw.org is kind of glossed over by a lot of users, which results in the main feed just being links after links.
Don’t really know of a solution, but if we could find a way to encourage more people to submit to that community, there would be more space for regular discussions.
We should also normalize being active in days-old posts. There was a bit of a “no one’s posted in three days, this post is dead” culture on reddit. It was only in hobby subs where discussions continued over a longer time.
The problem, obviously, is that the nature of Lemmy and reddit doesn’t lend itself to promoting older content, so less people will see it, especially if they’re not just browsing the local feed here.
Not an easy problem to solve (and many might not see it as a problem). It’s essentially down to how the users of the instance use it. Nothing can really be done about that, other than perhaps encouraging something like posting a bunch of stuff in the chat community to give it some momentum.
Yeah, reply to that week old post. Reddit trained a lot of people to think that if something is more than like an hour old, it’s stale, but that’s not how async communication works, especially on a comparatively small server.
Sure, you might run out of new topics, but that’s not going to change with any of the proposals I’ve seen in this thread.
Not just Reddit. Before I found Reddit, “necro-ing” or “necroposting” on a thread, aka posting on an old thread, was frowned upon on most forums I visited. That norm carried through onto Reddit.
Interacting with an old thread on Reddit had the same effect as on the forums that discouraged necroposting. On the forums, it would move a year-old topic right to the top again, as threads tended to be sorted by “which thread was interacted with most recently?” Reddit didn’t sort posts like that. I’m not sure if Lemmy and Kbin have an option to sort posts like that.
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I think you just described Tildes! It’s not horrible, and they don’t necessarily ban images/photos/links, but it’s largely text posts, or at least text comments.
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When I run out of content with the “new” sorting, I switch to “new comments”. This is how we used phpBBs back in the day, remember? Posts could be years old, but still engaged with. I actually think the cascading layout lends itself better to old posts than the chronological layout of BBs, as you don’t have to sift through hundreds of pages of replies and can easily collapse a thread you’re not interested in.