Compiling this data was not as hard as I expected, let’s go through the data and the shiny graphs!
Age of Beeple
Most are above 24! Seems we got an older average age compared to a lot of social media. It would be interesting to see how many came here with experiences from independent forums before Reddit.
Where Beeple reside
This one’s a big graph. Though we can notice most people are from the US. Would be nice to see more countries represented though a big part of it likely has to do with language. (You will need to open the big graph in another tab, it’s too big to show properly.)
Gender identity of Beeple
So, as expected, mostly men. However, less than expected which is nice to see. There should be outreach to at least equalize this.
Sexual orientation of Beeple
This is kinda surprising. It seems we managed to get a lot more LGBTQ+ people than expected considering most of you all come from Reddit - so this is nice to see. This is most likely because of our focus on a safe space.
Whiteness of Beeple
As expected, mostly white which is unfortunate. I think there’s outreach to be done in that regard as well.
Neurodivergence of Beeple
We seem to have a really surprising amount of neurodivergent people! Definitely nice to see.
Beeple with disabilities
I… have no idea how to interpret this data so I’ll just say, shiny graph.
Beeple’s awareness of the Fediverse
Most knew about the fediverse but still a good 20% had not heard about it so glad to see you all managed to find your way here!
How Beeple have been dealing with Beehaw
It seems most people feel relatively confident in their ability to use Beehaw and most people seem to enjoy it. That makes me really happy to see. Feels rewarding, feels good.
Conclusion
I wanna thank everyone for the feedback about the survey and its questions - we’ll do better next time! I’m glad we did this survey because it shows the areas to work on in terms of outreach! Thank you all for your participation!
I think it can certainly be reworded but I’m not really sure how to put it. The core idea is that (at least in North America and Europe), people who are considered “white” have privilege so we want to make sure that we can take that into account.
We also have a !poc@beehaw.org community so at least, it seemed to make sense to me to word it that way to account for that point of view.
I’m not really sure how we can better handle this question - it’s certainly tricky.
I think what you’re trying to say is that the lack of racial diversity is unfortunate, but people are reading it as “unfortunate we have all these white people.”
Probably just change the wording to that effect, or maybe something about how having such a large majority of a community from a single race can cause people from other races/ethnicities to feel left out, etc.
I think you might be replying to the wrong message but I appreciate the suggestion.
“The core idea is that (at least in North America and Europe), people who are considered “white” have privilege”
What countries in Europe are we talking about?
As a POC from a european country I have never felt discriminated based on the color of my pigment and have had the exact same opportunities as the people who would classify as “white”.
I would classify the discrimination in Europe more based on the fact if you are an immigrant and the specific country of origin.
The above is frowned upon much more.
Even then diversity can also be reached to make sure to target more people from different countries who then bring different cultures to a forum if we talk just about Europe.
It is impossible to talk about Europe as 1 entity, there are so many different countries and cultures within Europe, which is diverse in itself.
It is just (hopefully) some food for thought.
Maybe something along the lines of “Do you identify as someone of an ethnic minority?” or “Have you ever experienced discrimination based on skin color or apparent ethnicity?” Not perfect by any means, but some food for thought.
As someone who is from the US, I actually somewhat agree with those who say that asking for race/ethnicity is a very America/Western Europe-centric way of thinking. While I recognize that the vast majority of Beeple are indeed from those areas, it can be alienating for those who come from countries where the concept of “whiteness” either isn’t a deciding factor in discrimination or doesn’t even matter/exist in the first place.
It definitely is a tricky subject to work with. I think the survey was decently sensitive, but while I appreciate the thought behind this post, there probably should have been more care with and input on how it was worded, even if that added input is just having a couple people from outside US/Canada/Western Europe look it over and give opinions.
the problem with suggestions like this is we did think about this, and there is a reason we phrased it this way on the survey. you are kind of presuming we just winged this wording–we did not. you make suggestions for alternatives, but i assume for example you don’t want ethnic Hungarians in Romania or white Afrikaners answering that they’re ethnic minorities for the purpose of what we’re asking here (whether or not they’re white–both groups are very much so). i also assume you also don’t want white people to say they’re oppressed in American society for not being the center of the universe (because many white people do think reverse racism is real, and a real problem). both of those are off the cuff examples of big problems with your proposals—and indeed every alternative we’ve heard so far runs into being far more Anglo- and ethno-centric than what we put here.
Oh no, I was referring to the post itself, not the survey. While I posed ideas for alternative ways of asking the question, I guess I could’ve been more clear that I felt the survey was as good as it could have been given the questions you were wanting to ask; I think what more people were reacting to was the way things were worded in this post, and that’s where I felt more care could have been put, considering OP said he didn’t think about the wording of the post very much. How you report the data is just as important as how you collect it.
I wasn’t trying to step on anyone’s toes, but give a good faith (yet apparently poorly worded) criticism. That said, this dead horse has been beaten enough, so I’ll just end by saying I very heavily respect the stuff y’all are doing and how you’re handling the massive growth of this instance. Thank you for working so hard to create a safe and diverse corner of the internet. 🙇🏻♂️🙇🏻♂️🙇🏻♂️
ah, my mistake :)
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Don’t worry, you’ve been kind every time I’ve seen a message from you and I wouldn’t ascribe someone else’s comments onto another.
We’ve been thinking it over and I think the best way to make that question clearer would be to ‘double down’ on the concept of whiteness as a form of purity. It’s not ideal but it would probably answer the question for people who are questioning - the answer is probably non-white. If we add mixed then it just confuses the results more than it does make the data more actionable.
The other choice we’d have is likely to define ethnicity but that is almost certainly going to be a lot less actionable and hell to pick a condensed list especially from a non-US point of view.
Thank you for your continued support!
I’m south american as well, but from a different country, so perhaps I can help a bit further. Along with colorism, we have a different threshold for “white”, simply because “latino” is a made up ethnicity, it only exists outside Latin America and it means nothing to us.
So you might have got a bunch of answers that the expectation would be “non white” but wasn’t.
by the very nature of the question we have no expectations about how it’s going to be answered so i’m not sure this is actually an issue–and if it is i doubt we can really design around it anyways without manually assigning people the categories “white” or “non-white”
Oh, yeah, I agree, I don’t think that’s a thing that can be easily redesigned (or if it can be done at all), and I don’t even really think it’s a flaw that should be fixed, really. I just wanted to add a bit more of context, it’s something I noticed a lot of people miss this just because never even occurred to them.