We're going to need to participate on normie platforms like reddit in order to get more users & content here. We're also going to want to have a place on reddit (and elsewhere) where some of our content can thrive and become more accessible.
Apparently, Facebook is already marking our URL as spam. I'd imagine reddit will follow if not already. So we can't just dump links onto every marginally left-wing space.
Let this be a thread to spitball some ideas.
ok here is a trick
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take a twitter screenshot
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post to chapo chat
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screenshot chapo chat
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post on reddit
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First and foremost, I think we should take inventory of what friendly subs already exist, and what niches are not already covered.
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r/AllTheLeft is an existing left unity sub, but idk how active it is. Reddit 100% needs to have a dank space where half of the content isn't dedicated to shitting on anarchists or tankies.
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r/GenZedong and r/SendInTheTanks have significant traction in the ML space, but I'm sure they're both on reddit's shortlist for the banhammer.
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r/GenZAnarchist just went private, and r/COMPLETEANARCHY basically feels like a state department psyop. May need a replacement if no alternatives exist.
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r/LateStageCapitalism is for general anti-capitalism and is pretty active.
Also: if you have any other good subs, post em.
I don't know how difficult scraping lemmy would be, but we could go the low effort route and use bots to repost popular content here to various subs, maybe watermark the image with our URL too. Basically map the various subs here to the closest ones on reddit and auto-post top content.
r/ABoringDystopia is pretty much like jokerfied LSC
The Bernie subs can get surprisingly left and will at least happily shit on Biden and electoralism at this point
can't forget r/antiwork, a bunch of disillusioned folks with a scattering of socialists thrown in. prime grounds to radicalize people who hate capitalism but haven't quite gotten around to attributing their particular problems with capitalism directly yet
Throw these on that pile
/r/lostgeneration /r/studentloandefaulters /r/collapse /r/anticonsumption
Edit. The whole /r/talesfromretail universe is probably good, too.
Collapse is interesting, it used to be somewhat right-leaning, but has moved left a lot in the last couple of years
Yeah, noticed that, too. Eventually it's hard to ignore capitalism as the villain if you are watching the world burn
Really? I've gotten the impression recently that r/collapse trending towards malthusianism and eco-fascism rather than de-growth and sustainability.
If you look at the larger posts theres always someone railing against capitalism in the comments.
- /r/InformedTankie
- /r/DankLeft
- /r/DirtbagLeft
- /r/GenZommunist
- /r/LeftistVeterans
- /r/LeftPodcasts
- /r/PeterDaou
- /r/RedPreppers
- /r/Pete_Buttigieg
- /r/SocialistRA
- /r/SRAWeekend
- /r/TrotskyChapo
/r/Sigmarxism, when we first started we poached many of our members from /r/ChapoTrapHouse and /r/Gamerghazi.
There's also a decent lefty Star Trek sub out there somewhere iirc.
/r/DaystromInstitute is a great place for pro-socialist effortposts in the context of Star Trek. They eat effortposts up, frown on oversimplified chud-style responses, and are low-traffic enough for a decent post to get good visibility.
(to be honest I have been super slacking as a mod, haven't really been on reddit at all since r/ChapoTrapHouse was banned. Does not surprise me to hear, but we had a pretty good "childhood.")
/r/RedshirtsUnite/ is probably what you're thinking of? Unfortunately very inactive though.
Yeah maybe remove r/Pete_Buttigieg, I just visited and I can already feel the brain worms taking hold
/r/Pete_Buttigieg
Was that a Mayo Pete sub that was liberated by the left?
Also, it might be a good idea to piss off some reddit neolibs, and make it known where we came from. They'll whine about us, and they're insufferable enough to drive left-minded people to look into our community. I'm pretty sure they inadvertently signal boosted the original r/cth sub.
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Posting quality content and useful resources. It'll be great to have a radicalization sub that I can send to normies that isn't full of inside jokes and crab emoji. But also just effort post about normal things. Cats, jobs you hate, fixing iphone screens, etc
It's just gonna take time as we build them out
Yeah, always feels weird to explain basic shit here, or to assume that people don't agree with basic assumptions.
I guess we just start posting the shit, maybe with a tag or something, and see if it takes off.
Change you wanna be, etc etc
Once Lemmy gets the stickying option to work, maybe @ScreamoBMO and the mods can sticky a "welcome new users" post.
r/CapitalismVsSocialism is definitely filled with ancaps and libs, but I'm sure there's a significant base there that would consider coming here too.
+1 for targeted donations! We can do it democratically and vote where the money goes too!
We should make burner throwaways and brigade the fuck out of reddit now that we're already banned.
Hell, we probably have enough numbers here to signal boost a lot of shit to the frontpage already.
Also posting screen caps of informative or funny conversations here might be a boon. Just don't crop hexbear and the ChapoChat header, and that could generate a decent amount of search traffic if our SEO isn't ass.
Make sure you use a VPN when using a burner, just in case reddit decides to ban your main (assuming you care) if they they do consider you a spammer.
Those comms need to get off the ground. The reason why alot of people are still on reddit is because of those niche/hobby/special interest communities.
The problem with getting hobby comms off the ground is that you also need population for them. I'm running c/anime and it's great, it's a nice, small, niche community with the same politics and hobby interest. However, due to size of the community there's absolutely no way to compete with the breadth of community related content that a large community can churn out.
These hobby communities must start small, focus on being tight-knit communities and build themselves as nice places with small groups that all like one another and stay together for the sake of growth. Accept the size of the community and accept its going to take time. Enjoy it for the small tight group that it is. Over time, it will change. But site-wide bodies and hobby-community value will only change together in tandem.
In essence, there is a series of progression that communities must go through. Communities can't just go 1>2>10. They can't skip all the steps in between to suddenly provide all the value elsewhere provides. They'll get there eventually but people need to like and enjoy them for being small initially. Then hate them later on as hipster-posters because "it's just not the same" when they're eventually huge.
We also need content to fuel peoples' desires to frequent comms other than c/main...and not just memes. Honestly, scraping certain subreddits for content to repost in the appropriate comms here might not be a bad idea while we're just getting off the ground.
I agree and think we ought to be employing bots to do just that. Not an absolutely enormous quantity, but enough to just to tick things over and fill in gaps from some of that lost value, this is actually a practice many of the hardcore mods employ during the early days of subreddit growth too.
I read this without seeing the "will" and thought it was an excellent reverse psychology op.
We can target left subreddits, breadtubers, and left wing folks on Facebook.
Community growth, paid for by the community.
Paying for ads doesn't work/isn't worth it. I have experienced this myself. Earned media, earned exposure is the only reliable way.
It's right to be skeptical of paid ads (especially when what you're selling is a niche leftist forum), but I've had success with them in the past (in a totally different context, of course).
I like your idea in that thread about advertising in other parts of the left media ecosystem (e.g., MeansTV).
Are there archives of the old subs that contain reddit usernames? We could just divide up mass DMing old users with a link (being careful enough to avoid being marked as spam). I would imagine there's a lot of the original sub that has no clue we exist here now.
...Or make a lefty subreddit with our rehosted content, and an automoderator that DMs with a link here upon subscribing. Maybe see if mods of other lefty subs would be interested in doing the same.
bad idea I think, would just turn into both camps withdrawing into their own bubble away from each other with strawmen living in their heads rent free, even less open to each other
I would consider creating dunk spaces for both which could then be filtered out.. like "dunk_tankies" could then be unchecked by tankies and vice versa.. I can't see any other way except for banning or ignoring infighting.
Can we host the same server at alternate URLs or would it be just a redirect? That may get the new URLs flagged as spam too.
When federation is fully implemented, we could probably just have a bunch of completely separate servers that federate by default with this one.
idk, maybe leftypol is an option. though they tend to be more hostile to idpol, which isn’t the vibe here.
We should probably be taking our culture into account while planning our growth. I'd hate to watch this place become more like stupidpol or libified because we grow faster than we can prepare for. Fast growth and normification ruins a lot of decent spaces online...doubly so if coinciding with the removal of other communities.
Moderation strategy should definitely seriously discussed before we grow beyond control. All it takes is r/stupidpol, r/PoliticalCompassMemes, and a few other yucky communities getting banned from reddit and we'd have a huge threat to our current culture. Not necessarily an existential threat, but migrating elsewhere would be a blow to our progress.
Not to mention, we should be prepared for coordinated attacks seeking to ruin this place...be it chuds, fash, radlibs, infighting fetishists, or alphabet bois.
None of these are immediately pressing matters, but we should be prepared before we have a problem we aren't ready to deal with.
