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

  • RNAi [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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.

      • cosecantphi [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.

        • Kanna [she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          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.

          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

          • cosecantphi [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            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.

            • Kanna [she/her]
              ·
              3 years ago

              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

          • cosecantphi [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            3 years ago

            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.

            • Pirate [none/use name]
              ·
              3 years ago

              I was just saying the same thing lol... I'll try to work with the other libre mods to figure something for c/libre

      • RNAi [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.