SurveyMonkey links: Part 1, Part 2
Edit: apparently Survey Monkey maxes out at 40 responses and I’m not about to pay $100 to raise that cap because I’m broke af. Don’t use Survey Monkey
The survey
- Are you now, or have you ever been, a subscriber of the subreddit r/ChapoTrapHouse?
- How long have you been active on Hexbear/ChapoChat, including time spent lurking or on previous accounts?
- How long did you lurk before making an account?
- How long did you have an account before you posted?
- In a typical week, how many times would you estimate you visit the site?
- When you make a post or comment, is it typically in response to something else on the site or is it usually prompted elsewhere? (For example, some people will create a post to follow up on other posts and some people will make megathread comments which have no relation to other comments)
- Are you more interested in the topics discussed on Hexbear or in the people who are present here?
- These are some of the goals we had in mind when launching the site. Please provide a rating from 1 to 5 of how well you believe the site has accomplished these goals. 1 is the least successful. 5 is the most successful. Feel free to provide commentary after your rating. The goals are, in no particular order:
- Create an online space which would preserve as much social momentum from r/ChapoTrapHouse as possible following the ban of the subreddit
- Ensure the space was welcoming to marginalized voices and identities
- Provide resources which aid in organization efforts
- Foster a culture which allowed for leftist education and discussion
- Allow users to use the site as a positive outlet for their mental health
- Contribute to the open source community generally and to the fediverse specifically
- Encourage privacy of our users by default and create a culture which values basic opsec
- Experiment with what modern social media could look like outside of corporate control
- Minimize sectarianism and make a robust case for left unity
- Make sure the space is a fun and less habit-forming experience than corporate social media
- Please add any additional comments below, including any relevant context about yourself or specific issues you with to discuss:
Please include the prompts with your answers
FAQ
Who are you, BMO?
I was one of the original admins for the site. I was in the dev server prior to launch and was involved with the inner workings of the admin team for the site’s first year.
Why did you put together this survey?
I’m looking to put a tidy little bow on this chapter of my life by doing a post-mortem of it. That means I want to hear from people here; Lurkers, newgang, casuals, and PoWEr pOStErs alike. I want to hear anything, good or bad, from the serious all the way to the inconsequential.
I’m particularly interested in people who haven’t felt well represented by the admin team or by the site’s more active userbase. If you’ve ever had an issue with the site that you haven’t felt able to voice, now’s as good a time as any.
Is this survey coordinated with the admin team?
Nope. If they don’t like me doing it they’ll remove the post and I’ll let it be. If they see any results, it’ll be in the same way y’all do: in a post on the site.
Edit: it appears the post has been featured, but this answer still stands
Can I participate in the survey anonymously/privately?
I’d prefer site DMs from active accounts, but feel free to send me messages from throwaways, comment on the post, or fill out the SurveyMonkey survey
I may share a summary of my findings in a post, but I will not be sharing copies of the surveys and will not be quoting any of them verbatim without asking first.
Edit 1: Added a SurveyMonkey option
Edit 2: I rephrased the questions about the survey because y’all couldn’t help repeating the same joke of answering those questions instead of the survey lol
Lol someone spent 3 minutes and 51 seconds just writing “fuck off” over and over on SurveyMonkey. Internet aggression is so much funnier when you know the exact number of seconds that were wasted on expressing it
Don't tell them about cntl c + V, next time they'll only waste 50 seconds!!11
my answers are too depressing and I don't really want to confront my lack of social outlets right now
No need to answer everything. Or if you just have any unorganized thoughts on the site you’d care to share, feel free to DM me. I definitely feel you lol
As of now I’m mostly just getting Newgang. I’d like to get lurkers and some of people who only visit once a day or two. So sure
i did my part by writing a wall of text about how annoyed i am with the search function on this site :blob-no-thoughts: that's about all i can contribute
I love that it says "no results" then 20 seconds later results pop up with no warning, no loading symbols, etc..
spoiler
Are you now, or have you ever been, a subscriber of the subreddit r/ChapoTrapHouse?
Yah. Joined early in 2016, I think.
How long have you been active on Hexbear/ChapoChat, including time spent lurking or on previous accounts?
Since the start.
How long did you lurk before making an account?
Nope. But I visited /r/ChapoTrapHouse for about a month before actually subscribing it.
How long did you have an account before you posted?
Dozens of minutes.
In a typical week, how many times would you estimate you visit the site?
It's one of the default things I check when I need a mental break, so like 6-7 times a day. Most of those are very quick, I only actually read a whole long threads like 2-3 times a week.
When you make a post or comment, is it typically in response to something else on the site or is it usually prompted elsewhere? (For example, some people will create a post to follow up on other posts and some people will make megathread comments which have no relation to other comments)
I am a commenter at heart. I only start actual posts here because I know the site needs it.
Are you more interested in the topics discussed on Hexbear or in the people who are present here?
People. Talking about organizing tactics and whatnot once in a while is fun, but mostly I'm here for the "off-topic" stuff about science and video games or whatever, but with a crowd of people who are funny, and aren't a bunch of psychopaths. Did you know that "not being useful to the ruling class is a crime, and the just punishment is death by exposure" is considered a normal opinion in our society? If you don't want to hang out with people who believe that, you've already excluded huge swaths of the internet.
Create an online space which would preserve as much social momentum from r/ChapoTrapHouse as possible following the ban of the subreddit
1 - Nah the momentum died.
Ensure the space was welcoming to marginalized voices and identities
4 - Yeah it's fine. Could be more welcoming to people with common incorrect opinions though. You can't get full marks for inclusivity if it's conditional.
Provide resources which aid in organization efforts
2 - There are nice guides sometimes but none of it is alive.
Foster a culture which allowed for leftist education and discussion
1 - It's way too much "have the correct opinion or get yelled at" and people treat education as "go read these 20 books" more than actually bothering to put in the work.
Allow users to use the site as a positive outlet for their mental health
2 - It seems better now, but I left for like a half year last year, because everything was doomers all the time.
Contribute to the open source community generally and to the fediverse specifically
IDK lol. I looked into contributing but it was a huge pile of weird technologies I'm not familiar with, confusing opsec standards, and unclear direction.
Encourage privacy of our users by default and create a culture which values basic opsec
5 - Probably overdid it and hurt the organizational and social aspects a little? But this was definitely successful.
Experiment with what modern social media could look like outside of corporate control
3 - The difference in what can show up on the front page is remarkable, but I don't think this breaks from corporate norms to anywhere near the extent that is possible. The actual structure of the website is the same as reddit, so it's just as smoothed over palatable to investors. It's missing avatars, user flairs, user-specific CCS, moderators being able to slap images over people's posts. No specific one of those is important, but things in that general feel are what we're missing because everything needs to look safe and serious to investors.
I was active on bulletin boards back before "social media" was a term, and none of those were corporate controlled. And nothing about this site is as fresh and wild as what we had back then.
Minimize sectarianism and make a robust case for left unity
3 - It's very much an ML site. People mostly get chastised for making fun of anarchists, but there's not really any actual grappling with anarchist ideas going on here. Also it's apparently acceptable to make fun of trots?
Make sure the space is a fun and less habit-forming experience than corporate social media
4 - I'm not sure that's a coherent goal? But it doesn't have the absurd pro-engagement antipatterns that keep getting added to everything, so it gets decent marks kind of by default there.
It’s missing avatars, user flairs, user-specific CCS, moderators being able to slap images over people’s posts. No specific one of those is important, but things in that general feel are what we’re missing because everything needs to look safe and serious to investors.
I've also been around since forums and BBS's and stuff. I always found the flairs, avatars, signatures, etc to be really gaudy and complete screen pollution. It was extremely common for a person's signup date and post count displayed right next to their avatar too, which I never liked. It fostered a sense of weird elitism and could be intimidating for new users who just wanted to contribute to a discussion. It certainly was for me. I was also never a fan of a user contributing maybe a few words in a reply but their huge signature and links to all their stuff was still there. Cluttered as heck.
I prefer what we have here, which is recognition of good posters based only on sheer name recognition.
Who are you? /u/Thordros
What are you doing? I am filling out a survey.
Is this coordinated with the admin team? Only our group Halloween costume.
Can I participate anonymously/privately? I refuse. Come fight me.
The survey. Okey dokey.
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I was subscribed to r/cth since around early 2018, but never actually posted there until mid-2019
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Been posting here since day 1
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n/a
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n/a
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multiple times a day, pretty much every day. even on days when I'm busy with something else or don't really feel like coming here, I'll at least check a couple times to see what people are talking about.
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probably about 50/50
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mostly, yeah. Only thing I would change if I could would be to have more discussions of world events not strictly related to socialism/politics. This place is supposed to be a full featured content aggregator after all.
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- 2, though I think it's good that this place is different than r/cth. with every struggle session we got rid of some of the reactionary/liberal elements of the subreddit, though sadly we also lost some decent posters.
- n/a, I don't belong to any of the marginalized groups that have had the most "conflict" on this site so I don't feel qualified to answer this
- 2, but I think it's understandable considering the opsec risks
- 3
- 4
- n/a, I was never involved with site development
- 3
- 4
- 2, this place skews very heavily ML, though I don't think that's something the mods/admins are responsible for
- 3, for me this place is fun but no less "habit forming" than more mainstream social media lol
I thought so. None of my answers are particularly revealing or controversial, so I don't mind making it a comment.
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I don't like to talk about Modchat but I think it was a mistake to bring in Reddit vegans. Mod chat was a fucking mess while we were trying to get certain people to stop comparing industrial agro farming to the holocaust. It was enraging. Even if I could make that intellectual leap, what a horrible way to go about getting people to switch.
The fundamental issue was that we gave authority to a group of people who quickly viewed the majority of the site as opposition, including a sizable chunk of admins and mods. In retrospect this was super obvious, but I think we found it akin to some general dirtbag energy or maybe some of the ribbing of cis people during the trans struggle sessions.
In fact, I would trace a lot of our mistakes to a desire to hold on to a certain amount of dirtbag energy. I think it’s paid off in terms of how we now handle wreckers and chuds, but the flip side of that is that we often came off like a dad trying to act cool after a divorce. As in, “we’re not like those Reddit admins. We understand your in-jokes and culture and we’ll let you say death to slave owners in the house.” That accounts for the tone problems we had in early announcements, at least. And then of course it made us blind to what was obvious to a lot of people here: that Chapos were never going to respond well to VCJ’s culture, or at least enough of us wouldn’t that the VCJ mods would perceive it as the whole site.
I dunno, it was was definitely a big part of why I’m not involved anymore. While there were genuine complaints throughout, those complaints were indeed heightened by wreckers like always. So whatever wreckers were doing that heightening shit during that whole incident, it was probably the most successful couple days of agitation that ever happened on here.
we gave authority to a group of people who quickly viewed the majority of the site as opposition
About that, we definitely should be seeking to cultivate our mods from within the community, instead of inviting people we can't fully vet to use their mod powers for the best of the community or the site.
That said, when you are on reddit, anything other than cis het dude bro lulbertarian energy, feels decidedly under siege. You can see this with socialist subreddits, chapotraphouse, SRS, veganism, etc. So you learn to be mocking and a giant fucking asshole back, cause it's about dominance. You gotta out-crazy the asshole talking about "communism means no food" and find a way to shut down the worthless conversation. It feels like a trauma response, on guard and violent at the drop of a pin. When I found chapo and started learning more about socialism, I found :reddit-logo: less and less worthwhile, we got quarantined and I can tell you: it did literally fuck-all. I was already visiting chapotraphouse through the url/bookmark, I had on my phone. Bringing that sort of "we are being besieged by dude bros" energy into hexbear threw the fucking vibe off and it just caused turmoil and roiled the community. The VCJ mods should have taken a different approach but it takes months to stop feeling like you are besieged from 360 degrees. But any hexbear user that feels violently opposed to veganism should definitely examine their beliefs as to what's stopping them from advocating or even switching to some vegetarian-friendly food at least once a week.
I dunno, it was was definitely a big part of why I’m not involved anymore. While there were genuine complaints throughout, those complaints were indeed heightened by wreckers like always. So whatever wreckers were doing that heightening shit during that whole incident, it was probably the most successful couple days of agitation that ever happened on here.
The wonderful thing about having a kid and being in grad school. I basically picked a couple of projects and keep tabs on the mega and keep my head down, I am not as involved as I wished I was, but it has the benefit that I let most of this stuff glide like water off a duck; it also gives a certain outsider perspective. I don't think anyone took my advice, but I do think that, as opposed to every other social media site, creating an account should not immediately grant you posting and commenting power, like you should be encouraged to lurk and read before posting, so you get a sense of the voice in the site.
What was your advice, by the way? I remember liking what you said but it’s pretty lost in the shuffle at this point
Just that new accounts shouldn’t be allowed to post immediately. It would shut down a lot of wreckers and shit.
Oh gotcha. I think we actually did do that but ended up making the limit super lower because it just encouraged people to blend in with new legit lurkers for longer
