I don't think I suggested becoming reddit. I'm pretty sure my point was becoming the size of reddit is not at all an issue or something that should not be strived for or eventually expected to happen. Intentionally telling yourself you don't want to become a major site is ridiculous and in order to achieve that you would actually have to intentionally sabotage user growth or site quality for the average person in some way order to achieve it.

I think it gameifies the worst aspects of online interactions. And ultimately it’s a tool for propaganda/advertisement ie inherently pro-imperial and pro-capitalist.

I'm not sure why you'd focus on the two aspects ChapoChat obviously is not going to become.

Why? Why would any project hit it big? Nothing is guaranteed. And the definition of ‘big’ varies. Big could just mean getting 500k users for a year or two then dying.

Because not a single fucking project in the fediverse is doing the MASSIVE amount of work they are doing the intention of it just being a stupid thing that stays tiny and never goes literally anywhere ever. Everyone is doing the fediverse work with the ideological intention of displacing centralised corporate social media with decentralised non-corporate social media. This by extension requires projects to eventually succeed.

Reddit was able to become big because it had investors. Do we have investors? They could pay for exposure that we can’t. Capital rules in capitalism. This lacks materialism. It’s the “great man theory” of websites. That a good concept goes further than the cash behind it. There are real world examples proving that wrong, like Uber. Uber is a bad idea with billions behind it, making it work.

What? No. Reddit became big because it had 3 employees that injected some labour for several years. Created and maintained a high quality site with a high quality community and then by virtue of good timing and being a parallel project to Digg it went from a projects with a hundred thousand active users to a project with several million users when Digg literally committed suicide by over-monetising their site and pissing off the userbase. Investment did not achieve that, labour achieved that, the only thing investment achieved was to keep 3-5 talented people injecting labour into the site for long enough for it to blow the fuck up. Reddit went through practically zero changes for nearly a decade after that explosion of users and just continued to ride the wave up until they released the garbage redesign that the majority of the existing community resoundingly rejected and continues to use old-reddit because new-reddit fundamentally misunderstands why old reddit worked. Old reddit blew up becauese it empowered its communities and pretended that each community was actually owned by its creators, not reddit. They pretended reddit was a software project for communities despite being centralised. They empowered the mods with tools and css to make something unique. Then redesign literally shit all over that and attempted to refocus reddit entirely on memes, images and auto-play gifs.

The only reason the redesign didn't cause the collapse of reddit is because they never fully transitioned to it, maintaining the old site in parallel for this entire time. Had they pushed and enforced it then half the userbase would have left.

I pictured us being a meme site that moved closer to activism. Not a meme site that moves towards entertainment. Was this the goal of chapochat the whole time? Is the hope here that if we just let people talk about prestige TV they’ll be open to radicalization because there’s a marxist comm too?

Not that they'll be OPEN to radicalization but that it will simply happen by virtue of normalising leftist-run communities. Leftist run communities will never be the same as liberal run communities. The dream I have is to dump every single liberal-run hobby community that exists in favour of EVERYTHING being leftist run. Outside of ChapoChat you currently live inside a liberal world. Everything you consume is liberal. Every hobby you take part in is liberal. Everything is shit. Offering people something different, building a leftist space for all entertainment -- it presents a key step in destroying liberal hegemony.

The politics doesn’t matter. The vast majority of people do not give a fuck if they want hobby content. If the hobby communities are good it won’t be a barrier at all.

Still confused by this. Are we a leftist alternative to reddit or are we just a hobby/entertainment startup?

You've quoted a point out of context here and it pisses me off a bit. It stinks of bad faith. It was in response to you claiming that leftist politics would deter the growth of the hobby communities my response to that was that you think people care about politics far too much. Far-right shit doesn't deter seemingly normal people from taking part in hobby communities. The left will not magically be even more of a deterrence.

It’s interesting to claim to want to be reddit, but I actually think 4chan is more of what we’re going for. 4chan was just a branch of 2chan. It was built around hobbies and entertainment. Then it became super political late in life, after getting very popular. It still doesn’t compete with reddit in any material sense. But it definitely has influenced the culture of an online generation. It’s worth, what, $3M when Hiro bought it? No investor will touch it except nazis. But so far something like 4chan is what’s being advocated here.

4chan was also a much smaller startup, with a few people, in bedrooms. It wasn’t the project of some SV techbros trying to create the next thing. Sounds like us to me unless our founders here are actually techbros.

4chan was always political.

Finally, is the intention to monetize chapochat? Are the founders planning on growing this userbase and then dumping it when they turn 25? What are the plans here?

ChapoChat will be a coop so its goals, I assume, will be decided by that coop. Monetisation might eventually become that coop's desire but I don't see that happening in a 5-10 year timeline. Building something good that grows is in direct conflict with monetisation. Reddit as well as many other services grew on the basis of not pissing their users off with mass monetisation and then monetised in their late-life. If the goal of ChapoChat is to grow you pretty much don't need to worry about monetisation because it won't happen until after the growth. Monetisation inherently lowers the quality of a site and is in contradiction to growth itself.

As an aside I just want to point out that I really dislike this habit of users taking some comment they don't like in an existing thread and then spinning it off into a post of its own that they quote a few out of context things in so as to misrepresent the context of the original thread and pose it from their own perspective. It has happened to me 3 or 4 times now and it always feels like an attack. I'm not even part of policy decisions. I'm not an admin. I'm not in the coop. I'm not important. I just gave opinions and posed personal pushback against what I deemed to be ridiculously unaspirational thinking.

The mindset I boiled your comments in the other thread down to was "I don't want the site to grow" and I view that as inherently harmful to any and all leftist political goals.

Excuse me if I don't participate in the thread any further and if any of this has emotions that might be riding a bit higher than usual, I haven't given it any edit passes and don't have time to as you picked my dad's funeral day for this one.