No commentary here. I just think we should find more comrades and bring them into our fold. How do we do it? Post your ideas, no matter how wild. Maybe someone will see it and get inspired and make something happen.
Form a biker gang called Heck’s Bears
And they’re all twinks
I mean just spread the link around. Go into other communities and tell them about here.
It’ll be very incestuous though since there’s no “One Big Leftist Forum” to leech off of all we’d be doing is getting people off other niche communities. Which is fine but it’s not all that significant one way or the other.
all we’d be doing is getting people off
Trick question. Hexbears grow in the summer to store fat to make it through winter hibernation.
I don’t think that Hexbear is going to grow because smaller communities do not exist. What do I mean by this? Hexbear is basically one community and a few smaller communities which are the megathreads, but still basically the same community. Nobody actually takes the time to browse each board individually. If a post doesn’t show up on the front page of “all”, then it is basically invisible and dies quickly. This limitation means around 15 posts are worthy of engagement at any given moment and half them are engagement bait spam posts.
Communities aren’t given the opportunity to form. You have to jump through hoops to create a board and then repeating my previous point, people don’t browse individual boards.
Because Hexbear is basically one big comm, many people seem to have the idea that they have to like every post on like a personal preference level. People get mad about the fakenews comm because it doesn’t match their taste of humor. There have been many times where I have posted a video on the video board and someone will comment that they didn’t watch the video but they’re mad about the video or they say they don’t watch videos. People who aren’t interested in the subject of a board should not post on that board. This kind of behavior is reinforced by lacking individual comms, users only browsing one big comm ie all/active, and lacking moderators for niche interests.
The way that reddit was able to grow is that there are so many niche sub boards with users who have niche interests and moderators who curate the boards because they have the shared interest. If someone posts on a history subreddit that they hate learning about history, then they get banned from that history subreddit.
Hexbear has people with many different personal preferences, who can still overall agree on politics. Some people don’t like certain memes or certain videos. If you don’t like a certain thing, you can choose to not engage with it.
There is a “fight for the frontpage”. Every user is either trying to get on to the frontpage or bullying people for making posts they don’t want to see on the frontpage. The solution should be to severely limit the frontpage so that it forces user to find smaller communities that fit their interests. This is already happening with the megathreads, but lemmy is a link aggregator software and is not really designed to work this way. Limit the frontpage to 5-10 “official” comms and hide every other comm from the front page. Hide badposting, fakenews, gossip, slop, etc. People who think fakenews is funny can still browse the comm and nobody gets angry about being tricked. Allow users to make niche comms which do not show up on the front page.
This also would solve the problem of the confusion of which comm posts should be made on. The current way of thinking is that posts should be posted to specific boards based on the assigned topic of the sub board. When people are fighting for the frontpage, they don’t put much thought into which board a post is made on because the audience is all the same. If most boards are hidden from the front page, people will choose which board to post a link on depending on which group of people they think will want to see the post.
We need to move further to the right and get a Cheney endorsement.
Generally the way a thing grows is by getting visibility elsewhere.
This is achieved in companies by sockpuppet sharing (marketing team intentionally targeting other spaces with re-shares of content), watermarks, advertising, collaborations and generally being edgy enough that people talk about you for the fact your existence is novel.
One of the things this community doesn’t do enough of is talk about or share Hexbear outside of Hexbear, like it’s some secret or too embarrassing to mention.
One thing I see on tiktok that Hexbear isn’t doing is slideshows, there’s easy content to produce like “best of hexbear” which is just reposting a slideshow of 4-5 memes, run by an official hexbear account. Reddit does this. It’s relatively easy to do this two ways, targeting leftist stuff and targeting trans stuff, “sharing hexbear memes” (trans) is easy trans bait.
too embarrassing to mention
I always liked the memes that were just shit like “silence, liberal
” with a chapo/hb watermark, that always seemed like it would snag the kind of people that would fit in hereOne thing I see on tiktok that Hexbear isn’t doing is slideshows, there’s easy content to produce like “best of hexbear” which is just reposting a slideshow of 4-5 memes, run by an official hexbear account.
That’s a really good idea
With trans memes too they don’t even necessarily need to be from here lmao, although if you have good ones you should post them here too lol. But generally just reposting shit works and the algo will do the rest eventually.
The main barrier is having someone that wants to do it and keeps it up consistently.
We could do a member interest check similar to the mod interest checks and get 2-3 people on the TikTok account to possibly solve the consistency issue.
maybe it shouldn’t have visibility? like maybe the reason hexbear exists as it does, with its tacit and built-in leftism is entirely a product of obscurity?
like everytime something gets big, it becomes a threat, if not to profit-seeking competitors simply threatened by the diverted attention, then the ideology being out of step and what is otherwise outside of permissible mainstream discourse.
attention is bad imo
let the people meant to find this place find it, leave everyone else to their bullshit.
maybe the reason hexbear exists as it does, with its tacit and built-in leftism is entirely a product of obscurity?
This might be true if it wasn’t the direct descendant of a community several orders of magnitude bigger
Having seen a few large community -> small community splits, this doesn’t guarantee infamy or any kind of mental penetration within the userbase of origin at all.
Small is safe, is all i’m really saying. A large influx of users will not be good for this place as a leftist hangout, bet.
HB doesn’t exist because of a split though. It exists because the r/CTH was banned with no warning and this is was created as an alternative afterwards with no way to communicate that with the rest of the community.
The site has been dead since the comms struggle session. More active and engaged users would mean more good posts. If we don’t grow we’re just going to slowly die. Once the boards start to feel slow, people feel less likely to bother checking in, meaning the boards slow even more, and then you just have one more dead community.
Yesterday I was informed by the head mod that “this site has never prioritized growth” and I was like that’s news to me I remember people actively adding HB watermarks to memes to spread on
, and everyone was encouraged to spread the word about HB to the r/CTH diaspora.I specifically remember the mods and admins straight up inviting entire
communities separate from the r/CTH diaspora early on in order to grow the site leading to a lot of drama. The recent bouts of struggle sessions of admins attemting to clamp down on the chauvinism which is apparently keeping people away could be construed as not attempting to grow the site but to change the userbase I guess.If I recall correctly, that was mostly TC69 doing outreach several years ago, including giving a guided tour of sorts to a very perplexed PSL person who pointed out that we had literal color revolution rhetoric going on in the User Union comm. Our mods and admins have seen some shit, and I don’t envy their unpaid labor in the slightest.
Wasn’t that a big point of criticism leveled at the Admins during the nascent days of chapo.chat, that they failed to retain or being back even even a tenth of r/cth’s userbase? To say, ‘this site has never prioritized growth’ is kind of an affront to everyone who saw this site as the lifeboat that would retain the massive community that was fostered on reddit
I don’t remember admin being blamed for not getting a similar user base to r/CTH as I see it that’s hardly the job of the admin team that responsibility lies with all of us.
I agree with your last point though.
Here’s my idea: provide resources and help that other spaces aren’t providing. The mutual aid comm is a great example of this, but I’ve also been thinking there’s probably a lot more we could provide especially to trans/queer communities. Some of already started doing great work in this regard but I think it would be cool and useful to start having for more discussions on DIY help for example, but making and sourcing, though we also want to be careful about this and not get unwanted attention. I’d love to hear feedback on this if anyone has any.
The DIY care thing would be very timely too.
Agree that providing resources other sites don’t or can’t will attract people
I think well worded effort posts could be picked up by search engines or easily spread to other sites but then we’d have to effort post
Memes are good but the basic ones are a dime a dozen, effort posts and resources are way more difficult to compile on other sites
If the anarchist’s cookbook was so good how come they never made a sequel?
Yeah the cookbook itself is a joke but I just mean the broader concept of “secret repository of DIY stuff the government won’t tell you about”
I’m gonna write to Soros to increase our funding. Maybe we can buy some billboards in Ohio.
a person I know irl was asking “what app is that” when they saw the hexbear on my phone and I said it’s where the most militantly pro-trans tankie communists post, and they said they’d check it out.
I said it’s where the most militantly pro-trans tankie communists post
The smoking reefer scene from Walk Hard, but it’s about Hexbear instead.
Which would make a good meme.
Hexbear? It’s not habit forming and it makes sex feel better
I think 2-3 years ago people were putting Hexbear watermarks on a lot of stuff.
What if instead of a dunk tank, we had a “so close to getting it” section where we stumble over each other to brigade the space in question to agitate left-leaning people?
I like this idea. Put in a comm request!
vote
Rich nerds financing podcasts having hexbear name to be read out
hexbearscare
I don’t know that we can or should. I don’t think this site will ever work as an organizing space, so there’s not utility in growing it. Growing it is going to make modding it more difficult meaning it probably won’t be as well curated and we’ll have to deal with lib and Chud
I think we should remain a walled garden for lefty shitposting.
What does bring an organizing space have to do with anything?
Why would growing it make modding more difficult? Is there a reason you think new members would be less willing to help with moderation than current members?
It’s just been my experience on forums, as population grows you end up with more logistical problems. I could be wrong but it’s my experience
