this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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askchapo
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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.
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.
when a community doesn't subsume itself into the wider site network and instead leaves partially or entirely offsite, that's a split. That's what I meant. I know how this site was formed.
I think the site should want to grow - i think the site needs a way to bring people in - like current users should be encouraged to bring people in they know that would be a fit for the community. However, soliciting/doing work on places like r*ddit to bring people in is going to get the wrong kind of attention, and success in terms of user count can be a major failure in terms of ideological priority if done incorrectly, and I think the general desire to "grow the site" as a direct first-priority concern is not the way to grow hexbear such that it keeps what makes it a worthy place to come to.
not all growth is good. the site problems facing hexbear are things that would be rendered completely dysfunctional at a larger scale - the site mods and admins need a better handle on their internal processes and how they interact with the community, for one. If there is this much drama at this scale, that's not something that can weather a user influx and stay usefully itself imo.
I think there's virtue in obscurity and any growth strategies should seek to preserve it as long as possible.
Genuinely baffled how "I think the site should grow" continuously gets heard as "I think the site should grow at all costs with no concern for retaining any of the aspects of the community we cherish".