We've currently got a spambot talking about making $12k a month while working only 11 hours a week. The bot doesn't realize that we're trying to do even more than that for everybody. We're an obscure and fairly custom website so I'm wondering how it even got on here.
Did somebody have to program it just for Hexbear? Is it a Lemmy spambot that found our site? Are spambots now sophisticated enough to sign up to a site like ours without custom programming? Did anybody spend human effort to spam our site? I've realized I don't know much about how spambots work and would love to hear from somebody who does if we've got somebody like that here.
As for a solution, we could make our own CAPTCHA system that displays historical communist leaders and you have to select the ones that were revisionists.
Yeah it does and doesn't on various people. In my experience it works on the kinds of people that actively try to become power users and it works on getting people to do their first "i'll try it out" action like making a post or comment to break the first-action barrier that leads to more activity. But yeah it's definitely not something that works on everyone, all these systems are "if it works on a % of people, even if small, it has a tangible effect on changing the balance between user churn and user gain", everything in community site growth is about taking small tiny actions to tip that balance slightly further in the positive direction.
There's a thing called Dunbar's number that might be worth reading about because you're basically referencing it. There's a bit of phrenology to it and I'm not exactly convinced it's that exact number as I've seen it vary even up to 500 depending on how groups are organised but there's some interesting ideas in the theory, there is obviously some sort of limit and it's likely a range that can be impacted upon in different ways.
Oh, yeah, I got that number from my anthropology classes and just keep referencing it because honestly if I had to write down a list of 200 people I know I'd probably start blanking out around 80-90 (if I even know that many people). My whole thing is that I'd rather know someone well than have a bunch of little fav drones following me around.
I will admit you have a point there. I suppose my worry is just how we prioritize things. Focusing only on growth like commercial sites is like burning through a lamp wick faster to get more light. Sure, you got more light, but now you've sacrificed a bunch of wick because you didn't give the fuel a chance to burn off. There needs to be a middle ground of slow burn so we can let users shine on their own, I think.
I agree, but right now the alternative is the status quo which is literally doing nothing, which is achieving nothing other than maintaining the equilibrium. My goal is revolution and I'll end up on other sites that are pursuing growth to achieve greater influence and more socialists to achieve that instead of sites that exist purely to entertain themselves and their clique of people that actively do not want to grow because they're worried it might hurt the vibe. I agree there's a balance to be found between the two, right now Hex isn't at it.