this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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askchapo
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While hostile comments temporarily bump a thread, it is part of the hostile culture and discourages people from forming smaller communities. That's the whole reason that users make these comments. Examine the motivations of the poster. Think of the long term effects.
I never said to get rid of any mega thread, nor do I believe that the existence of the mega thread is in itself a confinement. The trans board was created on near the end August 2023. So it has existed for around 15 months. There are ~1090 posts on the trans board. 1090 posts over 15 months is 73 posts on average per month. But for the past 5 months, there are only 40 posts per month. You can actually go back into the hexbear history and see the point where the megathread ballooned and the monthly average posts dropped. In July 2024, the megathread grew from averaging 300 comments per week to thousands of comments per week. Prior to the growth of the megathread, the board had 80-100 posts per month, now 40 per month.
I do not believe that the comm is being intentionally confined, but there is an observable decline in number of posts made at the same time that the megathread grew. I think users are choosing to post in the megathreads of various boards more frequently because of various factors which make posts low visibility.
What I believe is that there are a number of factors in Hexbear's design which limit or prevent the growth of the website. One possible factor is that hexbear changed the active algorithm in April 2024. When the trans board was created, Hexbear was still using the lemmy algorithm from the federation upgrade. I thought that the lemmy algorithm was better and it may have been better for promoting posts of the trans comm.
For Hexbear to grow, it has to be allowed to branch out into smaller communities. Trees grow branches. Users should be encouraged to make posts in communities specific to their interests.
Or don't.
The site is social rather than gameified. People get nothing out of posts, the primary use of the site for most users is engagement.
The comms that produce engagement produce the highest number of posts because of this.
The problem you have is that the only way to flip that incentive over is to go the gameification route for posting.
It feels like you are being intentionally obtuse because even if the site is 100% socially motivated as you say, then my points are still correct.
Let's assume that the website is 100% socially motivated. Why then are posts treated as less social than comments? The website is link aggregator software. The social purpose of the website is sharing links and receiving links. The website should treat link posts as more social than comments. A post is a vehicle for socialization. A comment is a single unit of socialization. Prioritizing single units of socialization over vehicles of socialization is antisocial. That's narcissistic.
Engagement bait is called bait because it is not real engagement. The news comm produces real engagement. I want to post links to news stories and I want people to discuss that link in the comments. I want to be able to comment on other people's news posts. A post which says "I heckin love beanis" and 10 comments which all say "beanis" is not real engagement. That's anti social behavior. Imagine the situations in real life. You would talk to a real person about a news story. If you said to a real person "I heckin love beanis", they might stop talking to you forever.
You can see that the website has people who are interested in talking about news and people who post news articles want their posts to be seen by other people. They put links in the megathread because if they make it as a regular post, then it would not be seen by other people. The trans comm is the same way.
It's that simple. People want a link to be seen. Posts are not being seen because the front page is limited to 15 posts and people only look at the front page. Posting links is a good social behavior. Make good posts more visible. Make bad posts be less visible. It's not more complicated than that.
So I have said that my solution is limiting the front page to good social comms like the news comm and the trans comm. Then encourage people to browse individual comms which are not on the front page. If people want to spam beanis, the do that on the front page of the beanis comm. We can already see that people are willing to look at other front pages because the behavior is similar to browsing the megathread.
Why are megathreads not supposed to be the primary vehicle for socialization? It's not designed to work that way. This is a link aggregator website. The website it designed to create posts which link to images or other websites. Using a megathread to share links and images is like storing books in your refrigerator. It's like riding a bicycle in a swimming pool. It's like digging a large hole with a small spoon. These things are possible, but not practical. Situational megathreads are okay, but creating new posts should have priority.
Why is Hexbear not growing? Because Hexbear is using the software incorrectly. We're digging the large hole with the small spoon and it's not growing and it's not going to grow until the proper tools are utilized. Hexbear is trying to grow a tree in a teapot. It's not going to grow and it keeps getting more cramped in the kettle. At some point, I start to think that Hexbear wants to not grow.
A post is only a vehicle of socialisation when the users are talking to the poster. Otherwise it is a topic where people talk about the topic, not with the poster.
Not to you it's not. To the participants it absolutely is.
This is like saying a football chant isn't real socialisation. It fundamentally misunderstands the group's behaviour and how they're bonding over the stupid thing they're doing together as a group.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way as I agree with your goal of increasing posts. But I'm not going to shy away from pointing out where your site theory is incorrect.
You're right that it's not designed to work that way but that Hexbear's community specifically makes it so. Megathreads as a vehicle are a cultural thing, they house a different group of people to those outside them. Usually people who are interested in faster-paced engagement than they will get from posts.
As I see it there are 3 groups of people in the online space and they're occupying different places depending on the pace of engagement they prefer:
Posts are a slower form of engagement, with stuff happening over a 24 hour period. For people that check-in infrequently or only want to check-in a few times over the course of a day.
Megathread comments last a couple hours at most and have faster paced engagement. For people that like semi real-time engagement.
Discord/Chat. A message lasts seconds and disappears, for those that want constantly involved real-time engagement.
These are different audiences that like different things.
No. It's because it is not talked about outside of Hexbear. Changing the way the software is used isn't going to magically produce content about Hexbear outside of Hexbear. Growth comes from exposure. Making more posts on Hexbear will not make more people see Hexbear, if you want Hexbear to grow then what is needed is posts and content that are NOT on Hexbear.
You can not say this anymore. This was the purpose of the federation. Hexbear is advertised on the main Lemmy federation website. The federation was supposed to make Hexbear talked about outside of Hexbear. What happened after the federation? Droves of users went to other instances and posted PPB until other instances chose to Defederate. All of Lemmy knows about Hexbear because it's worse than other Lemmy instances. Hexbear is talked about but it is viewed negatively.
Here's what telling someone about Hexbear would go like: Hexbear is like reddit -- Oh reddit sucks -- actually it's not like reddit, it's an instance of Lemmy which is a copycat of reddit which allows a bunch of different websites to share posts with each other -- Oh so you can browse other Lemmy site from Hexbear? -- No, all the other instances blocked Hexbear because they spammed images of pig feces -- The users sound hostile. So what does the front page of Hexbear look like? -- It's usually just a bunch of meta jokes that don't make sense unless you browse the website for 10 hours every day -- Why doesn't the front page show things that are actually interesting? -- Hexbear uses a different algorithm than other Lemmy instances which prioritizes showing these meta jokes all of the time and any post that is actually interesting gets buried within 2 hours -- So why do you use this website? -- if you actually want to find something interesting, you can scroll through one of the seven 3000 comment weekly megathreads -- What was that other website? -- Lemmy -- Yeah I'll check out Lemmy.
I've even seen multiple users from other instances say they would use Hexbear but they don't because the megathreads are hard to navigate from other Lemmy instances. If Hexbear had more posts and less megathread comments, then Hexbear posts would have visibility on other instances. I'm not even saying to get rid of megathreads. I'm saying that people should be encouraged to post links outside of the megathreads. That would make Hexbear more talked about outside of Hexbear.
And federation did cause growth. When Lemmy was growing. Lemmy is not growing either anymore, because Lemmy is not talking about outside of Lemmy.
I can't take this seriously. You can't believe that was the reason, you just can't. The reason was ideological, not based on behaviour that is easily managed with a ban.
If you're not going to recognise this in your next reply and roll back I'm tossing this whole conversation in the trash and accepting that it was a complete waste of my time because this is just nonsense bad faith shit.