SurveyMonkey links: Part 1, Part 2
Edit: apparently Survey Monkey maxes out at 40 responses and I’m not about to pay $100 to raise that cap because I’m broke af. Don’t use Survey Monkey
The survey
- Are you now, or have you ever been, a subscriber of the subreddit r/ChapoTrapHouse?
- How long have you been active on Hexbear/ChapoChat, including time spent lurking or on previous accounts?
- How long did you lurk before making an account?
- How long did you have an account before you posted?
- In a typical week, how many times would you estimate you visit the site?
- When you make a post or comment, is it typically in response to something else on the site or is it usually prompted elsewhere? (For example, some people will create a post to follow up on other posts and some people will make megathread comments which have no relation to other comments)
- Are you more interested in the topics discussed on Hexbear or in the people who are present here?
- These are some of the goals we had in mind when launching the site. Please provide a rating from 1 to 5 of how well you believe the site has accomplished these goals. 1 is the least successful. 5 is the most successful. Feel free to provide commentary after your rating. The goals are, in no particular order:
- Create an online space which would preserve as much social momentum from r/ChapoTrapHouse as possible following the ban of the subreddit
- Ensure the space was welcoming to marginalized voices and identities
- Provide resources which aid in organization efforts
- Foster a culture which allowed for leftist education and discussion
- Allow users to use the site as a positive outlet for their mental health
- Contribute to the open source community generally and to the fediverse specifically
- Encourage privacy of our users by default and create a culture which values basic opsec
- Experiment with what modern social media could look like outside of corporate control
- Minimize sectarianism and make a robust case for left unity
- Make sure the space is a fun and less habit-forming experience than corporate social media
- Please add any additional comments below, including any relevant context about yourself or specific issues you with to discuss:
Please include the prompts with your answers
FAQ
Who are you, BMO?
I was one of the original admins for the site. I was in the dev server prior to launch and was involved with the inner workings of the admin team for the site’s first year.
Why did you put together this survey?
I’m looking to put a tidy little bow on this chapter of my life by doing a post-mortem of it. That means I want to hear from people here; Lurkers, newgang, casuals, and PoWEr pOStErs alike. I want to hear anything, good or bad, from the serious all the way to the inconsequential.
I’m particularly interested in people who haven’t felt well represented by the admin team or by the site’s more active userbase. If you’ve ever had an issue with the site that you haven’t felt able to voice, now’s as good a time as any.
Is this survey coordinated with the admin team?
Nope. If they don’t like me doing it they’ll remove the post and I’ll let it be. If they see any results, it’ll be in the same way y’all do: in a post on the site.
Edit: it appears the post has been featured, but this answer still stands
Can I participate in the survey anonymously/privately?
I’d prefer site DMs from active accounts, but feel free to send me messages from throwaways, comment on the post, or fill out the SurveyMonkey survey
I may share a summary of my findings in a post, but I will not be sharing copies of the surveys and will not be quoting any of them verbatim without asking first.
Edit 1: Added a SurveyMonkey option
Edit 2: I rephrased the questions about the survey because y’all couldn’t help repeating the same joke of answering those questions instead of the survey lol
Removed by mod
I don't like to talk about Modchat but I think it was a mistake to bring in Reddit vegans. Mod chat was a fucking mess while we were trying to get certain people to stop comparing industrial agro farming to the holocaust. It was enraging. Even if I could make that intellectual leap, what a horrible way to go about getting people to switch.
The fundamental issue was that we gave authority to a group of people who quickly viewed the majority of the site as opposition, including a sizable chunk of admins and mods. In retrospect this was super obvious, but I think we found it akin to some general dirtbag energy or maybe some of the ribbing of cis people during the trans struggle sessions.
In fact, I would trace a lot of our mistakes to a desire to hold on to a certain amount of dirtbag energy. I think it’s paid off in terms of how we now handle wreckers and chuds, but the flip side of that is that we often came off like a dad trying to act cool after a divorce. As in, “we’re not like those Reddit admins. We understand your in-jokes and culture and we’ll let you say death to slave owners in the house.” That accounts for the tone problems we had in early announcements, at least. And then of course it made us blind to what was obvious to a lot of people here: that Chapos were never going to respond well to VCJ’s culture, or at least enough of us wouldn’t that the VCJ mods would perceive it as the whole site.
I dunno, it was was definitely a big part of why I’m not involved anymore. While there were genuine complaints throughout, those complaints were indeed heightened by wreckers like always. So whatever wreckers were doing that heightening shit during that whole incident, it was probably the most successful couple days of agitation that ever happened on here.
About that, we definitely should be seeking to cultivate our mods from within the community, instead of inviting people we can't fully vet to use their mod powers for the best of the community or the site.
That said, when you are on reddit, anything other than cis het dude bro lulbertarian energy, feels decidedly under siege. You can see this with socialist subreddits, chapotraphouse, SRS, veganism, etc. So you learn to be mocking and a giant fucking asshole back, cause it's about dominance. You gotta out-crazy the asshole talking about "communism means no food" and find a way to shut down the worthless conversation. It feels like a trauma response, on guard and violent at the drop of a pin. When I found chapo and started learning more about socialism, I found :reddit-logo: less and less worthwhile, we got quarantined and I can tell you: it did literally fuck-all. I was already visiting chapotraphouse through the url/bookmark, I had on my phone. Bringing that sort of "we are being besieged by dude bros" energy into hexbear threw the fucking vibe off and it just caused turmoil and roiled the community. The VCJ mods should have taken a different approach but it takes months to stop feeling like you are besieged from 360 degrees. But any hexbear user that feels violently opposed to veganism should definitely examine their beliefs as to what's stopping them from advocating or even switching to some vegetarian-friendly food at least once a week.
The wonderful thing about having a kid and being in grad school. I basically picked a couple of projects and keep tabs on the mega and keep my head down, I am not as involved as I wished I was, but it has the benefit that I let most of this stuff glide like water off a duck; it also gives a certain outsider perspective. I don't think anyone took my advice, but I do think that, as opposed to every other social media site, creating an account should not immediately grant you posting and commenting power, like you should be encouraged to lurk and read before posting, so you get a sense of the voice in the site.
What was your advice, by the way? I remember liking what you said but it’s pretty lost in the shuffle at this point
Just that new accounts shouldn’t be allowed to post immediately. It would shut down a lot of wreckers and shit.
Oh gotcha. I think we actually did do that but ended up making the limit super lower because it just encouraged people to blend in with new legit lurkers for longer
deleted by creator