It was ages ago we hit 10000 members. We should be 20000 strong arr en.

  • LangdonAlger [any]
    hexbear
    103
    3 years ago

    How are people gonna find it? We're pretty insulated. There was the watermarking of memes for a while. Frankly, we're pariahs. Chapo the podcast was already divisive among demsocs and libs, and the subreddit exaggerated those divisions to the point it gained a notorious reputation as a place for trans tankie psychos. And we're the die hard soldiers in the jungle fighting years after the ban. That's not exactly an easily marketable brand.

  • Poop [none/use name]
    hexbear
    79
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    People stopped advertising on reddit, at least not nearly as much as summer
    For example back in the day chapo was so active that the posts would get on rising and top/hour so a whole bunch of easily radicalized libs (like me) could get trapped in. Now there is no outlet to the general lib population
    Edit: to be clear i dont really know what the solution is here, I think it just goes back to trying to advertise on other bigger sites. Maybe try and get some screencaps on whitepeopletwitter or aboringdystopia, places that are generally somewhat receptive to left-lib ideas

    • Woly [any]
      hexbear
      64
      3 years ago

      It also feels like the reddit leftist population is more stratified after the chapo sub went down. Since they specifically forbid any subreddit made for the same purpose, so the only subs that survived had different focuses. So now we have genzedong, dankleft, breadtube, etc, and they all sort of hate each other.

        • Woly [any]
          hexbear
          76
          3 years ago

          Basically. Maybe some people will disagree, but to me it felt like the old sub had some actual semblance of left unity, and was quickly becoming some kind of, I don't know, cultural force on reddit. And I totally believe that bannening was 100% about getting rid of r/chapotraphouse and had nothing to do with the alt-right subs that got banned at the same time.

          • Sonnenvogel [he/him]
            hexbear
            29
            3 years ago

            The subreddit became so influential on the online left they even named a podcast after it!

          • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
            hexbear
            13
            3 years ago

            And I totally believe that bannening was 100% about getting rid of r/chapotraphouse and had nothing to do with the alt-right subs that got banned at the same time.

            Remember, T_D had been a ghost town for months when reddit finally took out the trash. IIRC a bunch of their mods had been removed by admins and they had a long window where they could direct users to their off-reddit site via a sticky on T_D's corpse.

            The rest of the alt-right subs taken down in the same ban were pretty small.

  • Cherufe [he/him]
    hexbear
    57
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    We had a limited pool of people that liked r/cth that cared enough to check if there was a place to go after the ban and join this site shortly after it was created. A rough aproximation of the size of that pool is how many people cared enough to join the discord.The discord has about 10k people if im not mistaken so it was natural that about that many people would join the site quickly and the number of users would stagnate after reaching 10k

    • thefunkycomitatus [he/him,they/them]
      hexbear
      38
      3 years ago

      It's funny people listing ideological reasons why people don't want to come here but I think you hit the right, material, reason. We're simply not the large contingent we think we are. Whatever numbers that were subbed on reddit clearly wasn't accurate or wasn't committed enough to pursue posting outside of reddit. People are trying to tie their personal grievances (usually with the mods) to why the site isn't living up to their standard of success. Not saying that's what OP is doing by asking the question, just what some commenters are doing.

  • jabrd [he/him]
    hexbear
    54
    3 years ago

    The John Kerry posters stopped making alts

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    hexbear
    49
    3 years ago

    Go to leftist subs and make really stupid liberal complaints about chapo.chat.

  • Awoo [she/her]
    hexbear
    48
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Growth doesn't happen without labour. You actually need to be doing something to create growth, everyone on Reddit has this absurd idea that communities just grow all by themselves because that's how reddit is setup -- to feed population from the site into its various communities.

    Reddit's admin team actually has to put in work to grow it and to continue to grow it through outside sources.

    Growth doesn't come without labour. I am practically the only person actually doing any advertising. Everyone talks the talk about wanting to see the site grow but you actually need to put 5-10 minutes of effort in once a day somewhere else to create that. If a hundred of you did this once a day we'd be fucking steaming ahead, right now I'm responsible for anywhere between 10 and 30 new accounts per day, up to 50ish on a good one.

    Go and actually do something to spread the site. Literally nothing happens unless you put the site in other places and hardly anyone is actually doing that.

    Seriously just take 10 minutes out of your day once a day to plug the place somewhere. Do it every single day. Make it a routine.

    • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
      hexbear
      10
      3 years ago

      Growth doesn’t come without labour. I am practically the only person actually doing any advertising.

      This is why we're not growing, but not for the reasons you think.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        hexbear
        3
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Do you want to expand on that or just sit in the peanut gallery claiming to have the answers while not being forthcoming with them?

            • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
              hexbear
              8
              3 years ago

              In short, posting here can seem a lot like work. There's an expectation of work, or needing to read the right theory or perform the proper amount of self-crit and just a high level of needing to justify one's continued presence on the website to other users.

              The audience for such things is a lot smaller than low-effort nonsense. That's fine; higher demand activities have necessarily smaller audiences.

              • Awoo [she/her]
                hexbear
                6
                edit-2
                3 years ago

                That's a fair criticism for the retention side. I don't disagree that retention can be improved and that some element of user-fatigue due to over-expectations of their leftist credentials and self-improvement might be playing a role in that.

                What you must understand however is that growth on a site like this is actually made up of 3 parts:

                1. Acquisition - This is the part where we get users to come here from somewhere else, but before they have made an account.

                2. Conversion - This is the part where the user is convinced to actually make an account.

                3. Retention - This is the part where the user is convinced to continue using the site longer than 1 or 2 days after making their account.

                These 3 parts come together to form the whole. I don't disagree with you that retention issues could be improved, but in terms of "growth" as it were my point was really about the Acquisition part. Chapo has almost no Acquisition going on.

                • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
                  hexbear
                  6
                  3 years ago

                  Retention and Acquisition are coupled. Each person retained is a potential evangelist, and each person driven off is a potential gainsayer.

                  A bunch of goofballs from the original subreddit didn't mesh well here, for better or ill, and now they're easily found typical diaspora haunts, and when a potential proponent of this site talks it up, it gets criticized.

                  I've been monitoring redditsearch.io results for this website since it got launched, and typically, any positive mention is quickly met with a criticism, justified or not.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        hexbear
        9
        3 years ago

        Previously I took things from here I knew were good, slapped watermarks on them and posted them on reddit. 5 minutes of effort and half of them would blow up.

        These days I post stickied comments to /r/therightcantmeme threads that are hitting /r/all.

        At any other opportunity I mention the place and proselytize shamelessly about how good it is and how important it is to build leftist-owned media independent of liberal ownership.

        The point isn't really what you do though. It's that you do something. It doesn't matter whether it reaches 1 person or 1000 persons. What matters is the consistency in doing it. It all adds up over time and it all adds to the normalisation of the site as a force to pay attention to.

  • KiaKaha [he/him]
    hexbear
    46
    3 years ago

    Our marketing department is only slightly larger than our marketing budget, and that’s because some users post watermarked stuff on Reddit once in a blue moon.

        • cosecantphi [he/him]
          hexbear
          14
          3 years ago

          Have the false allegations against Beatnik affected chapo.chat's standing with those friendly leftist subreddits in any way?

          Hoping the only people for whom it has are the ones who already hated us.

          • Awoo [she/her]
            hexbear
            17
            3 years ago

            I've not seen it mentioned literally anywhere except on here. It was such a short event and completely fell flat on its face. Nobody cares.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        hexbear
        21
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        /r/therightcantmeme stickies chapo ad comments to the top thread every single day.

  • BigBoopPaul [he/him]
    hexbear
    38
    3 years ago

    The first few months felt like it had a more open exchange of ideas as an alternative to reddit. Now it just feels like a mirror to r/genzedong, r/ShitLiberalsSay, and r/offmychest with a lot more navel-gazing and infighting.

    Still enjoy this place, I'm just on it a lot less.

    • AdamTheMarxist [he/him]
      hexbear
      3
      3 years ago

      Exactly, the mods are in here complaining that we're not doing the 'labor' of advertising the site. Maybe it's because the site isn't very good so why would people want to share it.

  • Wmill [he/him,use name]
    hexbear
    24
    3 years ago

    I say poor marketing. How will citations needed fans know to find us when we named chapo chat? Who even is chapo I've certainly never chatted with them. Smh fix this injustice mods, being order and sense to this site.

  • shoko_babishmo [they/them]
    hexbear
    21
    3 years ago

    Drama and cliqueishness. Self indulgent week long struggle sessions instead of this is the way it from now on. k thnx byebye