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
  1. Are you now, or have you ever been, a subscriber of the subreddit r/ChapoTrapHouse?
  2. How long have you been active on Hexbear/ChapoChat, including time spent lurking or on previous accounts?
  3. How long did you lurk before making an account?
  4. How long did you have an account before you posted?
  5. In a typical week, how many times would you estimate you visit the site?
  6. 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)
  7. Are you more interested in the topics discussed on Hexbear or in the people who are present here?
  8. 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
  9. 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

  • Bloodshot [he/him,any]
    ·
    3 years ago
    spoiler
    1. Yes (in spirit; I didn't subscribe but browsed daily)
    2. Week one
    3. I did not
    4. I believe I made a comment in the first day or so
    5. About ten times
    6. I mostly comment, I am not a poster
    7. I am interested in this being a continuation of whatever community existed on the old subreddit

    Create an online space which would preserve as much social momentum from r/ChapoTrapHouse as possible following the ban of the subreddit

    1.5. This website has very little of that momentum and ineffable "spark". There's probably a case-study to be done about this; I think one of the failures was trying to be a replacement for reddit.com rather than being a replacement for the subreddit. It's a complex thing.

    Ensure the space was welcoming to marginalized voices and identities

    I can't really speak to this, but my impression is that it's a much more positively curated space than every other general social media, link aggregation, forum, etc. site.

    Provide resources which aid in organization efforts

    1. /c/tactics hasn't had a post for months. There's no organisational body here, no skeleton upon which to build these tactics. And what are isolated tactics without a strategy? But of course you can't have a strategy because you're not a political body. You can't execute on any of it by posting.

    This was true of the subreddit, of course, but you didn't get a constant sense of anxiety about it. The subreddit was impactful discursively

    Foster a culture which allowed for leftist education and discussion

    2. There is discussion and elucidation to a degree, but mostly falls foul of the same things I've listed above.

    Allow users to use the site as a positive outlet for their mental health

    I'm not sure how to rate this, but it's my observation that having a site that is a lot more personal means that stuff that, on other sites, would be "online bullshit" now causes people a lot of stress. Having that level of investment but without the ability to form meaningful interpersonal connections with individuals, or to have any kind of material support, can be very deleterious.

    Contribute to the open source community generally and to the fediverse specifically

    I don't interact with the "fediverse". I'd say 4. for making efforts to work in the open and (I believe) upstream some changes.

    Encourage privacy of our users by default and create a culture which values basic opsec

    One of the things that irks me about the culture here is the instance on so-called "opsec" but without a clearly defined threat model, without a clearly defined "operation". Encouraging privacy hygiene is good, but it's done in a way that doesn't really help you understand why you might make a decision, one way or the other, about what information to share.

    Experiment with what modern social media could look like outside of corporate control

    3. It looks mostly like reddit. With a different admin structure.

    Minimize sectarianism and make a robust case for left unity

    3. I think "left unity" or "anti-sectarianism" is a false goal. While there aren't a lot of bitter personal back and forths that I see on this site day-to-day, it doesn't compare to what really was a kind of melting pot on /r/chapotraphouse. There's a very clearly delineated "line" here on, for example, China. Emphasising the dialectic, as it were, of the discussion itself is more valuable than emphasising the unity of everyone.

    Make sure the space is a fun and less habit-forming experience than corporate social media

    2. I don't have a social media habit. I visit this site a lot less than the old subreddit. There are fewer posts, of lower quality. So I browse reddit instead.

    1. This might appear that I'm very negative about the project, and indeed I've seen more internecine bullshit here than anywhere else, but I'd like not to be. I don't think this site or the project is worthless or "bad", but I think there's a big misalignment of goals. There's a sort of idealistic misapprehension of what a link aggregation website can and should be.