• ComradeBongwater [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    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.

    • JuneFall [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      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.

    • KiaKaha [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      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.