A friend sent me a spicy enough meme and I thought "heh, they are ready for HexBear". So I almost sent them a link and then I thought "hold on, maybe they are put off by something, let's check"; so made the little mental exercise of trying to discover hexbear for the first time.
Good lord, there's too much terminally online shit, anybody sane would be repelled.
I lied there was no effort post
Ppl have always had differing opinions on what the point of the place was/is. Whether it’s a pipeline or just a place to blow of steam. I used to be more in the former camp but now I think it’s fine if it’s just a shitposting forum, a little save room of the internet relatively free from reactionaries or liberal brain worms.
I think over time it’s kinda morphed more into the latter, and I think actually talking to people in meatspace is a better way to pipeline anyway. In my experience it’s way easier to change people’s minds or at least set them on the road for it irl, online people are just gut reacting to things.
Yeah I agree, I'd love for this site to become the pipeline r/CTH was, but until we have a connection to the rest of the internet, perhaps by federation, there isn't much of a chance that happens. And becoming less niche by moderating away content that is too online will give up a lot of the site culture for really not much gain besides maybe a few more people joining every month.
On the other hand, I am worried about the site just fading out of existence. We used to have about 700 active daily users, but now it seems we've dipped to around 500. We do need to a find a way to at least get marginally more people interested or else we might just die out. Perhaps we should all put more of an active effort into watermarking, spreading the word on lefty friendly websites, and using the hobby oriented comms much more often.
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Is easy for a reddit user to land here and get it, but still really hard from someone not online to get into. Maybe is impossible, and probably for the better, for non-online people to get in here.
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Maybe we should do what reddit does regarding default subs and have the less politically intense and less online comms be the biggest focus of the default page. So instead of coming here and immediately seeing threads about how all outdoor cats must die and how the DPRK is actually cool and good, new users will be more likely to instead see a thread about baking, or sports, or science. It'll all still be leftist in character, but it gives new users a chance to gradually adjust into the site culture.
Of course, there should still be a user option called extremely online mode that turns the default page back into its current configuration.
So first off this is a really funny sentence lmao. My thought is the sub wasn't like that and still attracted people that stumbled onto it. I wonder if hiding the more online takes would really make a difference
I think the subreddit had the advantage of being connected to reddit as a whole and as a result had orders of magnitude more people wandering into it. Those people had other interests besides politics, but they were already on reddit so r/CTH being niche wasn't much of an impediment. Here I believe we'll probably need to cater to more interests than just politics to attract more users.
It's like how a forum about [insert extremely niche hobby here] will attract a small, niche userbase, but a general topic forum with a bit of a focus on that same hobby can basically take in anyone. This is essentially how reddit, a forum that was originally pretty much just tech people, got so big via the subreddit system. I think right now we lean a bit too close to the extremely niche hobby forum side of things considering how our particular brand of leftism on this site isn't too common.
I'm not saying we need to get politics out of our video games and stop talking about twitter, but that we should talk more about our other interests and hobbies so people come here for the non-reactionary userbase and stay for the communities surrounding their interests.
That's much easier said than done of course, with such a small userbase to start with it might be an insurmountable problem. But certainly a little can be done here and there to keep the site from bleeding users faster than it gains them.
Yeah I agree with all that. Revitalizing the hobby comms would be good. I actually was thinking about trying to get a weekly event for the anime comm, so maybe I'll get back to planning that
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I haven't really fleshed that idea out too much besides what I just said, so maybe I'll do that later after putting some more thought to it.
Right now the hobby oriented subs are pretty dead though, so it seems to me a change to the algorithm alone wouldn't help much. It'll probably take some changes to the site as well as a large concerted effort by our already small userbase.
I was just saying the same thing lol... I'll try to work with the other libre mods to figure something for c/libre
No idea.
Yesterday I was browsing some facebook leftist shitposting groups and the memes felt so different from here or reddit, good shitposts, but different thing. Like fb shitposters and reddit shitposters were totally different people. Weird.
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They usually do good, let me grab some.
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