askchapo

One of the primary reasons I started lurking, then posting on Hexbear a few years ago (this current alt is new) is that it was actually active. Baby communist me very well could have become active on a number of discords, raddle, or lemmygrad but chose to stay on Hexbear due to its high activity. It’s not boring here, you’re not seeing the same posts for weeks and weeks. We must keep posting comrades, don’t let the struggle session get in the way of that.

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.

Trick question. Hexbears grow in the summer to store fat to make it through winter hibernation.

I post my butt and call the website OnlyButts

The hexbear podcast with your host [TBD]

The solution is obvious. We must transition to HeptBear. Adding another vertex is the only way to grow the website. We must keep adding vertices until we approach infinite vertices at which point HexBear will become CircleBear, ~~enclosing~~ including everyone on Earth in it.

Of course this plan carries the risk that there will be a struggle session (perhaps several!) on whether to use Latin or Greek prefixes for Bear which will inevitably cause splits and a loss of vertices. However I think it is a risk worth taking.

We should try to get more AMA's with notable people (we've had second thought, who else is good?) and trying to get powerful posters here from places like Twitter (slammer? aldanmarki?)

The admins and mods could start by stop making broad sweeping changes to the site. Sorry for referencing the recent drama, but newcomers aren't going to want anything to do with us if we're still in dumpster fire mode. Seriously, that shit is so embarrassing. If people want to talk optics, this is optics. Imagine some potential newcomer stumbling upon some tl;dr scree by an admin referencing a subreddit that hasn't existed in almost half a decade. It's intimidating because it gives the impression that the newcomer has to memorize esoteric Hexbear and /r/chapotraphouse lore if they don't want to be eaten alive by the locals.

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.

How do we grow Hexbear?

By individually inviting cool people we might randomly find around the internet.

We don't need a huge community to be a worthwhile community and it's evident that the staff are struggling to cope with the current pace of posting right now anyway. So we don't need to strategise about growing the site in some systematic way.

Let it happen organically. This isn't a growth-at-any-cost sort of site and every cool site I've been a part of that fell to the impulse to grooow eventually ended up a shitshow full of users who don't know/remember/understand the original purpose of the site, the history behind various rules and site culture etc.

Let corporate owned sites compete for user share. Let us avoid that impulse.

I get the impression we should be thinking more about user RETENTION than anything. This is the first day in a while where I've woken up from a fucked up nightmare, opened "my comfy favourite site" hexbear and then immediately felt a wave of dread at what I might find on the party agenda for the day.

And sure enough another pinned comment, another struggle, more upset users, more shitty bad faith replies to upset users from moderators.

The only growth desirable I see being valuable is in MAYBE federating with other like-minded sites and perhaps networking with similar efforts using different protocols and platforms, like for example matrix servers that share most of our positions and values but not actually administered by the same people who administer hexbear. Just an example. I dunno. I'm tired and grumpy and sad and adding MOAR USERS doesn't assuage any of my fears about the state of affairs here.

Hijack trans Reddit with links to Hexbear

Who are you looking to have join? What would they be interested in?

Since it seems that many users came here in the wake of their past communities being closed, destroyed, banned, ruined etc, maybe it would make sense to keep an eye open for endangered leftist spaces and give them an invite. These are moments when people are actively searching for new spaces and have space to fill in their lives.

Here is a general purpose list of websites that may soon close: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Deathwatch

But leftists are always getting kicked out of wherever they are at.

One element of hexbear that the existing users really enjoy and value is the cliquishness. Its a lot of in jokes and references. Constant callbacks to specific threads that happened years ago and either aren't online or aren't findable. Having been here for a year and a half I can mostly follow the main themes but lots of it wooshes past me. People like to pull rank and show how long they've been here. Once you are in a group like this it is extremely comfortable and nice and you feel connected to other people.

I am not saying this as any sort of criticism. It is what it is and overall I like it. but it is inherently difficult to recruit people into such a scene. New users are at a disadvantage. Plus there is the dynamic state of behavioral expectations and current meta discourse.

If the site wanted to make an effort to grow, it would need an idea about how facilitate integration of new users.

I can't imagine a successful recruitment campaign not leading to hella drama. It would inherently change the character of the site.

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.

Imo the best way to grow Hexbear is by feeding her more beans

Hgh: hexbear growth hormone /jk For real though what got me was outreach when r/traa was closing down and some brave soul (I assume somebody here) mentioned hexbear as a leftist alternative to blåhaj zone that's very trans friendly. I missed having r/cth around, so lurking here and eventually making an account was pretty natural. /Srs

Getting rid of the entry barrier would help.