The name chapo is the last tether this place has to being good like the subreddit, and is a way new people find this place
If it changes to hexbear, even fewer people will recommend it to anyone, whoever came up with that idea should have downvotes re-enabled on all their posts
I mean at some point we'll have brought over all the folks from the old sub anyway (frankly I think we're at that point already). Literally can't think of any other reason to keep the Chapo name. We need to change it IMO, the podcast genuinely isn't good.
Nothing wrong with that, I think it's hit and miss these days, the recent one on child tax credit/child benefits was informing and good I thought
It's just kinda meh. There are way better political podcasts out there that don't rely on forming parasocial relationships with the hosts to be more than tolerable.
i like all the hosts and i like the good episodes, but they really need to reign in the focus, it feels a lot like "whatever we feel like talking about this week through a dirtbag leftist lens" rather than a political podcast
dirtbag leftist lens rather than a political podcast
instead of being focused they should boring and irrelevant as sht
I mean at some point we’ll have brought over all the folks from the old sub anyway (frankly I think we’re at that point already).
Unless I'm missing something, this site is at like, 10% of the old sub
I have personally messaged like five people on reddit who turned out to be /r/cth posters but had never heard of this place. And I'm not going out of my way to find people, that's just from the very minimal browsing I do these days. There's a lot of people who aren't online enough to have sought this place out.
Honestly, we could probably make a bot to message users en mass if archive.org has some of the comment sections saved
I should have said "all the folks we're going to get", not the entire user base of the old sub. I say once we've gone past a year of the old sub getting shut down, I'm not worried about an old sub user finding this site just on the name.
What a goofy take. “Our name is what makes us good because people know the podcast and then they’ll think of us” even though most of us are more well rounded than one podcast and most of us listen to other podcasts more frequently than chapo lol.
“If you change the name no one will come.” Says who? The brand appeal of chapo ain’t very high, even in leftist circles, and to be honest the outreach and engagement by the posters hasn’t been the best.
The reason it’s good idea is because we can carve out our own branding that brings people in and we don’t have to play this game of “we’re the leftovers from chapo subreddit” that ain’t a good look.
I think the notoriety of the subreddit is reason enough to hang on. No branding will bring users to a communist forum. If anything the name chapo signifies it's dank shitposting past, which is a bigger draw to most than any other reason. If we're looking to gain users, infamy is probably our best bet, so hanging on to the vestiges of a banned subreddit is probs a good idea.
Also, are there any other good lefty forums? Chapo is pretty much the one place on the internet where we can post funny memes about taking your landlord out back without being banned or flooded with chuds.
“No branding will bring users to a communist forum” but the name Chapo is going to bring people here.
Don’t you think that’s a contradiction?
Yes, but not exactly my message. No rebranding will bring users here, so we might as well keep the name that has any recognition at all. Our best bet for picking up users is hoping former sub users end up here because they remember the memes.
Our best bet for picking up users is hoping former sub users end up here because they remember the memes.
Why even exist at all if that’s all we’re going for? It’s like this site is determined on having a boomer mindset.
I'm not saying the old sub is our ceiling. I'm saying that there's no reason to ditch what little name recognition we have just to slap a fancy new label on it. Keeping the name just allows former sub members to more easily find us.
And alienates us from any other group. If you were a streamer/podcaster/social media personality would you promote a site with the name chapo in it?
or we could just not change the name, have we considered that? If you hate the podcast that much, if anything continuing to share the name will annoy them.
Most of us literally don’t care about them. Why are so many of you attached the the podcast? It’s dying as we speak. And the sub literally died. The name makes no sense at this point.
That’s pedantic. The sub was based off the podcast and by including it in the name it also still gives sus affiliation with the podcast whether or not that’s how you think about it.
It's not pedantic, the sub changed from being about the podcast to about its own thing. This is named after the thing the subreddit evolved into.
And like, it doesn't even CONTAIN "TRAP HOUSE" ANYMORE.
You might as well say we're named after El Chapo, and that we really need to distance ourselves from the Sinaloa cartel.
You might as well say we’re named after El Chapo, and that we really need to distance ourselves from the Sinaloa cartel.
There ya go. Now we have quite a few good reasons to change the name.
El chapo
Unnecessary affiliation to a podcast
Attached to a dead subreddit
Doesn’t say anything about the people that currently uses this site
Not really its just not something you think about, but it probably turns a lot of people off who only know chapo from that one person and that’s the origin of the podcast name .
It always feels like the remain side has to justify it. Let’s flip it around. Why change?
You don’t like the branding? You liked it enough to join and stay, and I can’t see anyone leaving over the status quo.
You don’t think an association with the podcast is beneficial anymore? It’s a large, relatively inoffensive left wing podcast. Piggybacking on that branding helps, not hinders, and there’s no decisive reason to distance ourselves.
You don’t think the association with the subreddit is beneficial anymore? We still have people from Reddit drop by because of that association.
A brand is not something you change on a whim, like an outfit. It’s used as a tool for marketing, and right now there’s no good reason to do a major overhaul.
On the note of marketing, though, you know what we could use people agitating for? A marketing budget. Let’s actually get some ads out there, to get member growth. There was all this talk of being a ‘pipeline’, but we’re disconnected from everything. Guérilla marketing is a cool idea and all, but it’s no replacement for the consistency of a budget.
Agreed on the association being positive even if we don't like the pod.
On the note of marketing, though, you know what we could use people agitating for? A marketing budget. Let’s actually get some ads out there, to get member growth....Guérilla marketing is a cool idea and all, but it’s no replacement for the consistency of a budget.
A waste of time and money that could be spent on mutual aid. We will never have a marketing budget. Our best marketing is making sure the dankest left memes shared on reddit and twitter have a chapo.chat watermark.
Maybe I'll make a bot to repost our content on friendly subreddits but with a watermark.
There was all this talk of being a ‘pipeline’, but we’re disconnected from everything.
The way I see it, we can either choose to explicitly be a pipeline or risk getting overwhelmed by stupidpol types and hurting some of our most marginalized users. We absolutely do need some leftist training-wheel type spaces, but I feel we may be too radical and ban-happy to become that.
Our best bet is haunting the internet with the spectre of communism and dank memes and hoping people check us out.
but I feel we may be too radical and ban-happy to become that.
Good. The way the world works is that difference builds up meaning, not similarity. If people who feel left are seeing we have more exact positions about what is to be done they will be aware of it, even if they take time to get there themselves.
I still see that people are welcomed and if people are new they get a lot of slack, but not in the sense of accepting problematic behavior, but calling them out and saying: You can still be part of this.
A waste of time and money that could be spent on mutual aid.
If I want to donate to mutual aid, I’ll donate to mutual aid. I donate for the success of the site.
That said, if you really want to go down the charity donations route, countless NGOs have mapped this out. Money spent on growth is almost always worthwhile. If we increase our member base, and simultaneously push for donations, we increase both the amount we can donate to ‘mutual aid’ causes and to pushing the site as a whole, with an added benefit that we actually grow our community, which is a form of mutual aid in itself.
Is advertising the scourge of the earth? Yes. Is it gross to be giving money to Google, Facebook and Reddit? Absolutely. But, as trite as it sounds, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. A boycott is a tactic, not a moral imperative. And tactically, boycotting major advertisers hurts us a whole lot more than it hurts them.
This website supposedly loves Deng, whose crowning achievement was harnessing private capital for socialist ends. We shouldn’t be afraid to put into practice the theory we profess.
Edit: all that said, an auto posting watermark bot would be dope, and the sort of thing I’d like to see on the payroll of the marketing budget, once income allows for it.
We're not named after the podcast we're named after the sub.
And I think a lot of you are missing out just how big a deal the sub was. There's a ton of people who know about the legacy of the sub but have never heard of the podcast. Due to his number of reddit users (> 400 million) I honestly wonder if the sub was more famous than the podcast - if you're not already on the left you probably have never heard of the podcast before.
And the sub is notorious for good reasons - high quality shitposting, unabashed support of John Brown, etc. I think we should keep the name because the sub is our heritage, and it's a good heritage.
I also think a lot of you are over estimating just how online potential comrades are. There's been a ton of work going into spreading chacha memes and spreading the word - the way that name recognition works is that each time someone sees that stuff it incrementally makes them more curious about checking this place out. Changing the name for no reason other than that some users don't like the podcast erases basically all of that work.
We're not named after the podcast, we're named after the drug lord
All of the watermarks we made will be useless though. Name recognition is huge, and a small still-growing community messing with what little recognition it has seems like a bad idea to me.
I've been a lurker of the subreddit for a while before it got taken down, but I've been curious as to what chapo even means, like there's a podcast, but then you guys aren't like a fan base that's just discusses them. You guys are your own thing.
But I see what the people saying to keep the name mean, heck I found this place because I was looking for a chapo substitute and finaly decided I should make an account and not be a lurker anymore.
the podcast is good. idk who everyone else here is or what their deal is but you should listen to it. this isn't a bit.
edit: wait never mind i just remembered it has no redeeming value and it's nearly incoherent if you haven't been deeply personally invested in it for the last 3 years. so pretty much exactly why the site name shouldn't change.
Maybe I'm just a boomer who still enjoys the podcast a little and enjoyed the stupid memes on the subreddit in '17, but it did make me feel a little sad when the discord changed its name to "the Praxis factory" (now the JBLS). The fact that the podcast's hosts visited the sub like three times and were dogpiled every time leading them to publicly denounce the subreddit (and continue to do so almost a year after it's destruction) should signify our disconnect with the podcast and our unique culture. Speaking of our unique culture, it has evolved dramatically over the past few years from edgy stupidpol types to soc-dems fighting Jucheists to post hog to John Brown posting to MLs fighting soc-dems. It has evolved quite a bit here (imo for the better) too, but through all those changes it retained the name Chapo and I liked Chapo because it was the scourge of Reddit and the hub of online leftism for my formative years. Idk it just means something to me I guess and I'll be sad if the name changes.
Speaking of our unique culture, it has evolved dramatically over the past few years from edgy stupidpol types to soc-dems fighting Jucheists to post hog to John Brown posting to MLs fighting soc-dems. It has evolved quite a bit here
idealist superstructure: narcissistic LARPer distinctions. Materialist base: middle class redditors
Thesis : keep the name
Antithesis: change the name
Synthesis: chat.chapo
If you want to have a shrinking club of increasingly hostile users at siege from trolls, this is a good way to do it
:grillman:
Personally I think we should keep the name, until we can get large enough to piss off the podcast one again
chapo.chat for now, then we change to chapotraphousepodcast.com
I bought the domain and redirected it here after I came up with this bit
Chacha is revisionist garbage and I will die mad about it. I'm in the "change the name" camp purely to kill the abbreviation.
YOU CAN'T DOWNVOTE ME NOW BITCHES
:sicko-yes:
I would've downvoted if I could but I'll still upvote cause I like your enthusiasm
I'm honestly looking forward to all the memes about how the name is still/never was chapo once the inevitable change is made. What I mean is, chacha will still be a funny word we can meme about.
