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).
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)
Agreed. Having an enormous user base isn’t inherently a good thing. We’re used to thinking that it is, though, because most of our experience is with for-profit websites. For them, that’s how success is measured.
It’s great if you’re selling advertising space on your site, or if you want the maximum amount of potential customers for other products or services… but for sites like Beehaw, too much is simply too much. Constant growth isn’t worth the trouble.
The concept people need to adjust to is that we’re interested in quality over quantity. We need enough users to keep the site active and interesting, but beyond that, things just get more complex and harder to moderate.
Absolutely. I feel like the constant competition for growth within capitalism pushes so many toxic ideas on us and this is just one more example. It's all ego over substance and it doesn't help anyone. 15 foot high pickup trucks with 3 feet of bed space. Same thing.