article What is (and isn’t) Beehaw

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Beehaw is a social media platform. link

We do want you coming here and sharing links to news articles, websites you find, starting discussions, connecting with others, and in general doing what you see on other social media websites.

We want you to do this while being nice to each other. If you aren’t nice, we’ll remind you to be nice. If you continue to be problematic, we’ll escalate from there, but it will be on a case-by-case basis. If your first reply when we ask you to be nice to each other is to tell us to “fuck off”, we will respond in kind. We also understand that being emotional is a normal part of being a human and that some of us struggle with anger more than others, and we’d like for this to be a community which is open to the idea of reversing actions, such as bans, if you’re willing to talk with the community about why you think it should be reversed. Of note, we simply do not tolerate intolerant behavior. Being explicitly racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or bigoted in any other fashion is not tolerated here.

But how might one determine when it’s okay to be intolerant towards people you believe are being intolerant or who are being intolerant but doing so because they are uneducated or have not spent time deconstructing their own privilege?

Many philosophers have written extensively about this subject, and we simply don’t have time to write an entire manifesto. In simple terms, we are not advocating for tone policing. We believe that being outraged and angry at people who are destroying our society is a good thing to do. When the Supreme Court removes protections for abortion, it’s okay to be outraged and to take action into your own hands - they have done something intolerant. When someone advocates online that you don’t have the right to your own body, it’s okay to tell them to fuck off. In fact, we greatly encourage it. This is being intolerant to the intolerant.

However, when someone online shares an opinion and it feels like they might be intolerant and you jump to the conclusion that they are intolerant and you launch into a tirade at them, this is not nice behavior. You didn’t check if they have the opinion you think they have, and that’s simply not nice to someone which you don’t know.

It gets even more complicated when you consider someone who is sharing an opinion they have which is actively harmful to many individuals in the world, but it’s due to their ignorance. We personally believe that so long as this person is not actively spreading this intolerant viewpoint and is working to become a better person, that it would not be particularly productive to launch into a tirade against them. We understand, however, how someone could be quite rude in response to such intolerance and we agree that this person may desperately need to be educated appropriately. However, there is no way for that discussion to happen on this platform in a productive manner while lobbing insults at each other. We can understand why, at first brush, some might consider this tone policing. This is all to say: we disapprove of the intolerant viewpoint, and we approve of it being corrected, but we also approve of the intolerant person attempting to become a better person.

The only way for a platform which is hoping to exist as an explicitly nice place online to avoid taking sides in a situation like this is to withdraw from the quandary entirely. This kind of nuanced political and philosophical discussion is just simply not meant for Beehaw. We’d like to think that we’re aware and learned enough to avoid ‘debating’ things like phrenology, which are obviously racist, but we’re also smart enough to realize that there are likely some ideas which we’ve internalized or been taught by a colonialist western society which are harmful to other minorities. We want to be able to learn about how everything we were taught was wrong, to be corrected, and that space can only exist when we don’t let people berate each other over ideas they project on others (whether that projection happens to be correct or not).

Beehaw is not Reddit link

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This is not and is not meant to be a Reddit replacement. The original community here has decided to carve out a space for itself because we grew increasingly upset with modern social media. Modern social media has become a breeding ground for hate speech, for trolls, and for bad behavior. We don’t want to recreate that environment. We want to explicitly make a nice little corner of the internet where we can hide from racist, sexist, ableist, colonialist, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of hateful speech. We want a space where people encourage each other, are nice to each other, are supportive and exploratory and playful. We think this can incorporate many wonderful features and aspects that made Reddit and other link aggregator and discussion based communities popular on the internet but it is not meant to be a replacement - we are and want to do something different.

If you’re looking for a straight Reddit replacement you should look elsewhere. If you happen to register on another instance you’re still more than welcome to participate in our communities but we will hold you to the standards we’re looking for, namely that you’re nice when you’re participating here.