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!
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I just want to pipe in and and say thank you for caring about diversity. Lots of discourse here about how that’s hostile to white people. In my opinion purposefully misinterpreting “unfortunate” to mean “white people not welcome” is a perfect representation of why WHY diversity matters.
Because as a POC it’s clear to me that there are valid reasons why a white-dominated community can be… Uncomfortable. Like the very comments here that push back and pretend that race isn’t a issue and that POC are racist ones for caring about it. Not bothering at all to understand where it’s coming from and why it matters.
Edit: I didn’t write this at first but I can’t bite my tongue anymore. White people who get hositle over this have suffered from main character syndrome for way too long. You feel unwelcome because some online community simply wants more diversity? Why is it that in your mind one more POC means one less white person? Speaks more about your world view than anything else.
I’ve felt unwelcome my entire life because people resent my intrusion into their white bubbles. The whole point of Beehaw is that it’s inclusive. I’m a snowflake who wants her safe space.
In my opinion purposefully misinterpreting “unfortunate” to mean “white people not welcome” is a perfect representation of why WHY diversity matters.
it’s a good indicator we are going to continue to ask that question on the survey forever, for what that’s worth. very clearly a “the beatings will continue until morale improves” question because oh god, some of the responses here
I’m so glad that the mods aren’t getting steamrolled into submission. I was having a bad mental health day today and some of these comments really bothered me. Immediately my reddit-trained mind was like, oh, you dumbass snowflake. Touch grass.
But then I was like, fuck, the whole reason I’m on Beehaw is because it’s supposed to be different here. Thanks for continuously affirming my belief in it 👍
To be clear, we’re also aware that repeatedly being exposed to this kind of conversation can be demoralizing as well. I watched this happen on another website where the just asking questions crew would show up in every goddamn thread about every identity that wasn’t ciswhitemale. I remember a specific thread asking for women to talk about what’s hard for them, which was both dominated by male voices before any women showed up and then when women actually talked about the problems they experienced (and deeply couched their language, I might add), they were met with an endless line of men insisting “that’s not me”.
So to be absolutely clear, we value your voice and we don’t want to lose the community we’ve built here either. If this is ever frustrating to see, please vent about it. I can’t promise I’ll be perfect, but I’m trying my best to avoid tone policing (I’ve already screwed this up a few times, and I apologize deeply to anyone I scared away), especially on issues which directly effect or marginalize your experience. I think it helps a lot to have such a diverse set of responses, because often people are unaware how deeply frustrating and exhausting fragility and managing other’s emotional state can be, especially when you are on the receiving end of marginalization.
The most refreshing thing here has been to be able to respond and be backed up in my response.
Personally the most demoralizing thing about having the conversation taken over is often not being able to respond/take it back. At first I was afraid to say that this is just one more example of white people main character syndrome, because I was like, ugh, I’m going to get a bunch of comments of how I’m the actual racist one for generalizing all white people.
The justaskingquestions crowd makes me feel crazy for getting upset, and then villanizes me for being the upset one. But obviously I’d get more upset than them, they’re the ones erasing me.
So normally I just slink away from these places, whether it’s online, or my (supportive) boyfriend’s shitty white family, or my uni alum groups, or my workplace. And that’s the most demoralizing part, that they can say whatever they want and I have no recourse other than to leave.
So it means a lot to me that I don’t have to leave here. That I can say my piece and have it backed up by the mods, not bullied & downvoted into submission.
I genuinely support people asking in good faith. Some white people just don’t understand and they want to. But by the 2nd or 3rd response it’s very clear which are in good faith and which are simply camouflaging their intolerance. So thank you for shutting the latter down.
Thank you for writing this!
As a straight white male it’s a bit hard to feel your words carry any weight in discussions like this.
I’m here trying to be an ally to ant decent human being who might feel they need one! <3
My only feedback is the words choices here were, unfortunate. It comes across as the author found undesired demographics which felt not inclusive.
In my opinion this is not being nice.
I am a minority in some parts of the graph and a majority in others. Reading this left my feeling I wasn’t welcome here which I have felt ever day before reading this post.
I understand, I’m a white cis man and I used to feel this way sometimes when reading things like this, but my perspective has since changed.
The way I see it, Beehaw is actively trying to be an inclusive space, as opposed to a lot of other online spaces which really aren’t so inclusive.
My expectation would be that, naturally, POC, women, and lgbtq+ people would hang out more in inclusive spaces than non-inclusive ones, while non-minorities may be evenly spread of even favor non-inclusive spaces. Therefore, I would expect demographics of inclusive spaces to have an overall significantly smaller percentage of non-minorities.
However, some of these numbers look relatively close to national demographics (at-least based on those I see on Wikipedia for the US), and may even have a smaller percentage of minorities than national average. I don’t know much about statistics and I’m not a mathematician, there’s probably all sorts of factors going into why those numbers are the way they are. Still, instinctively, those numbers look unfortunate to me, since they don’t reflect my expectations of a successfully inclusive community.
I hope nobody feels left out.
Thing is, beehaw is pretty loud about being a safe space the neurodivergent and or folks with different gender identities and sexualities. That stuff is race agnostic and those people will likely fall in line with national percentages for race.
Given that most of folks are from the US, which is about 75% white, and another big chunk is from nations that are 80-90% white, I can’t say that I’m surprised buy the numbers. If anything, given the users from Canada, western Europe, and Australia, Beehaw is probably a hair more racially diverse than the general population.
Which part specifically made you feel not welcome?
The part where he says it’s “mostly white people which is unfortunate” was an odd thing to say.
Doesn’t make white people feel very welcome I’d imagine.
The part where he says it’s “mostly white people which is unfortunate” was an odd thing to say.
Doesn’t make white people feel very welcome I’d imagine.
What is ‘white’ exactly and why is it unfortunate?
Where I am from, we don’t make these distinctions on the color of a person. That and the fact that unless we are quantifying somehow the ‘shade’ of the skin color it’s impossible to make any serious category.
I’ve always thought that the way americans divide people by color is really dumb and very antiquated, even bordering immorality.
I wouldn’t bring that for future statistics. I don’t understand why race is important in a medium where we can’t see each others.
What is ‘white’ exactly and why is it unfortunate?
‘White’ is an artificially constructed privileged racial caste predicated on and necessitating anti-Black violence.
It is a legal and social ingroup whose borders expand and contract as needed to preserve itself.
Its over representation is “unfortunate” in so far as any lack of diversity-of-experience will make for a less rich community for all involved, but specifically having membership skew towards the more privileged members of a hierarchy can damage that community by having it tend toward obviousness of how its own privileges and position in society can affect its worldview.
A member from the community might, for example, say they “don’t see race” and not understand how that position itself upholds white supremacy.
They might suggest racism can be solved by not talking about race and get no pushback from a community whose members by-and-large have no experience of being subject to racial discrimination themselves.Generally, there are things we all don’t know we don’t know and the more similar those around us are to us, the more overlap there is likely to be in those things.
A diverse community is less likely to be oblivious to its own lack of knowledge.
I’m white, and I just took that to mean they’d like to see more diversity. As in, it’s not unfortunate that members are white so much as unfortunate they haven’t attracted more diverse representation (if I’m right, I do think it could have been worded better).
And to be clear, in contexts like this, no one is dividing people “by color,” but by experience. While race may be largely imaginary biologically, it has been and continues to be a major variable related to a person’s economics, education, housing, etc. due to the external factors that do treat race as significant (i.e., as an American, we have historically and systemically discriminated against non-white people in pretty much every facet of civic and social life).
That stuff matters to…a lot of people. But it’s not at the expense of white people–we can all be happy to see diversity in our communities. It’s a net gain for everyone.
Yeah, this whole thing REALLY rubbed me the wrong way. I’m going to get shit for this, but it comes off as really sexist, racist and - as someone who is neurodivergent - kinda condescending.
What is ‘white’ […] Where I am from, we don’t make these distinctions on the color of a person. That and the fact that unless we are quantifying somehow the ‘shade’ of the skin color it’s impossible to make any serious category.
i absolutely promise that your country does, whether you are conscious of that or not. whiteness, in any case, is a social construct (and even if it wasn’t, race and ethnicity are also basically arbitrary) so you’re not going to ever get a singular, satisfactory answer on this. the whole point at a sociological level is that it’s an amorphous, hegemony-based category that transcends political barriers and basically divides the world into “haves” and “have-nots”. it doesn’t make sense because it can’t ever, it’s arbitrary, and it’s not a “serious” category because it’s not really intended to be.
unfortunately, on that basis it’s also the single most important (and unambiguous) descriptor of one’s racial identity in a global context–so we’re kind of locked into using it here because it is actually really important to know what our community looks like, and we don’t literally want to use American census groupings.
I meant that there is no official sanctioned discrimination (but of course there is racism in my country). If I remember correctly, in the US you have documents where you have to write your ethnicity or the color of your skin. This makes me think that there is an active effort by the government to categorize people based on the color of their skin. This for me is immoral.
It also is ridiculous because there is no definition of what ‘white’ is or how much white is white. There must be like thousands of shades of skin colors but no definition of what white is.
And I’m saying this because there also countries you may call white in Europe that are dirt poor and clearly in the have-nots bag so this ‘whites have’ and the rest ‘don’t have’ is a very american way of understanding this.
Again, just hoped for a less americanized point of view.
Where I am from, we don’t make these distinctions on the color of a person.
Not everybody is from wherever you’re from. There’s a chart up there for that, too.
So you don’t care about people from other countries and you want to bring US politics to this site AGAIN like in reddit? Got it.
As expected, mostly white which is unfortunate.
Well, as the graph shows before, it’s also mostly U.S-based. Those are really good diversity numbers if you factor that into mind. Like, way better than expected.
I just checked 2020 US census data (https://data.census.gov/table?g=010XX00US&d=DEC+Demographic+Profile) and that’s unfortunately not true unless I’m reading the data wrong. It says that people who identify as White form around 61.6% of people in the US.
It’s 71.5, as of 2020. Also, if you take into account that most of our users are technical and online, then that number probably increases given the digital divide. Of course, this could all be negated by that very large “prefer not to say” percentage.
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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 [email protected] 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.
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.
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.
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. 🙇🏻♂️🙇🏻♂️🙇🏻♂️
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.
ah, my mistake :)
A los otros 4 weyes de México un cordial saludo 🫡.
Love seeing the results from the survey, and also love the word “beeple.”
Can we get a transcript/archived copy of the survey questions? Not the answers people provided, but just what questions were and the answers available to select from. Also an image transcription of the graphs would be helpful; the text in the images is difficult to read on Jerboa.
I’m curious where the decision to separate nonbinary and genderfluid into different categories came from. In the various queer communities I’m in, genderfluidity is considered to fall under the nonbinary umbrella, so breaking it out as a separate option while not breaking out other nonbinary identities looks a little odd to me.
I would be interested in knowing the trans/cis demographics as well; if, for all we know, Beehaw has equals numbers of trans men to cis men, this survey wouldn’t reveal that or any other notable proportions.
I also want to include myself as another person who found the white/non-white question a bit uncomfortable. If it had asked me about being a person of color or some other phrasing, I wouldn’t have blinked, but there is something unpleasant about being asked where I stand in a racial dichotomy as a biracial person. I don’t know a better way to phrase the question that still captures the intent, though.
Didn’t forget! Here’s a post about it with tables! https://docs.beehaw.org/docs/demographics/
Hello, Sorry to jump into this thread so long after, but I just discovered Beehaw’s wiki and was impressed by its look and reactivity. Do you know what software is uses to run? Is it WikiJS?
It’s actually just Hugo with the Hugo book theme!
Perfect, thanks!
