So before I went to bed, we were having a talk in another thread about gaining new members and drawing more growth to the site.
I made the statement that we'll never be reddit, and that got a little pushback. Which I've been catching up on. This exposed some things about chapo.chat I wasn't aware of, that people here want to be reddit. I've always seen this site as a rejection of reddit. I don't think reddit is good. I think it's designed specifically to turn people against each other. I think it gameifies the worst aspects of online interactions. And ultimately it's a tool for propaganda/advertisement ie inherently pro-imperial and pro-capitalist.
So I want to make a new thread and discuss this idea of whether chapochat should strive to be reddit or not. And to kind of subtweet @Awoo at the same time since she seemed to be the main proponent of this idea. I'm not sure who all the founders are, but if they could be pinged, that would be helpful.
How people imagine decentralised/federated social media will work and how it will actually play out are completely different.
Reality is that ONE of the fediverse projects will hit it big and all the others will gain some crumbs from that but it will be that one single big project that succeeds that continues on as a major internet force.
Why? Why would any project hit it big? Nothing is guaranteed. And the definition of 'big' varies. Big could just mean getting 500k users for a year or two then dying.
ChapoChat’s trajectory is going to be the same trajectory as reddit’s as long as it doesn’t make a catastrophic mistake that sees the community abandon it. Reddit’s trajectory was as a source for tech news and tech discussion initially and then slowly slowly slowly branching into hobby related content after receiving massive influxes of users from the complete and total collapse of Digg. At the time of the collapse of Digg there were still only a hundred thousand or so active users of reddit. 10k-20k was considered a BIG subreddit back in them days. Breakouts that sailed into the 200k region in the first year of the digg exodus were all the default communities.
Reddit was always a capitalist venture. It was designed to be that. I hope we're not on the same trajectory. What if the community does abandon it? This is just saying "we're either going to be reddit or we're not. and if we're not, it's the community's fault" Do we not believe that right now, at the foundation, we have some agency in what happens with this site? It's up to us to build a strong foundation.
Reddit was able to become big because it had investors. Do we have investors? They could pay for exposure that we can't. Capital rules in capitalism. This lacks materialism. It's the "great man theory" of websites. That a good concept goes further than the cash behind it. There are real world examples proving that wrong, like Uber. Uber is a bad idea with billions behind it, making it work.
ChapoChat’s trajectory will be the same, but instead of being a tech community that then transitioned into many entertainment communities while maintaining its strong tech core (before later killing it off) it is a politics community that will transition into many entertainment communities while maintaining its strong political core… And hopefully not later killing it off.
Hopefully? I'd rather try to not be reddit and remove the chance of losing our core values than try to be reddit and lose it. Don't throw away a sure thing in favor of something that has a large chance of not working.
The pathway is the same one and I do not see the political core as a barrier to creating high quality entertainment communities that other people want to take part in. If the communities are good, if they have high quality content that they’re not getting easily elsewhere because they’re run by libs or focus on easily digestable garbage content, if the content is actually good? People will use them. They will use them because they like them and those communities create value. If the communities do things like start projects that have actual value in those hobbies people will be forced to visit ChapoChat in order to consume the thing that they value because the source of that content is literally here.
I pictured us being a meme site that moved closer to activism. Not a meme site that moves towards entertainment. Was this the goal of chapochat the whole time? Is the hope here that if we just let people talk about prestige TV they'll be open to radicalization because there's a marxist comm too?
The politics doesn’t matter. The vast majority of people do not give a fuck if they want hobby content. If the hobby communities are good it won’t be a barrier at all.
Still confused by this. Are we a leftist alternative to reddit or are we just a hobby/entertainment startup?
We aren’t and never will be as disgusting as 4chan is to the mass majority. The vast majority of people are apolitical and as long as a place isn’t saying something outrageously racist or fascist people really aren’t turned away. Even then, outrageous fascist and racist shit still doesn’t turn many apolitical people away from consuming something like /v/ on 4chan. Don’t overestimate how much starting off from a political core is going to affect the site.
It's interesting to claim to want to be reddit, but I actually think 4chan is more of what we're going for. 4chan was just a branch of 2chan. It was built around hobbies and entertainment. Then it became super political late in life, after getting very popular. It still doesn't compete with reddit in any material sense. But it definitely has influenced the culture of an online generation. It's worth, what, $3M when Hiro bought it? No investor will touch it except nazis. But so far something like 4chan is what's being advocated here.
4chan was also a much smaller startup, with a few people, in bedrooms. It wasn't the project of some SV techbros trying to create the next thing. Sounds like us to me unless our founders here are actually techbros.
Finally, is the intention to monetize chapochat? Are the founders planning on growing this userbase and then dumping it when they turn 25? What are the plans here?
Your emojis are very impressive, you must be very proud.
typing :somerandomshit: and there being an emoji that pops up, especially when its a leftist thing, is absolutely perfect.
theres so many new ones over the past few days its absurd.
:doggo-matapacos:
Can we add a !cars? It would be so great to have a leftist space for car enthusiasts. Any time anything political comes up, you just get horribly out-of-touch hatred getting spewed everywhere in the comments section. People that have enough money to buy a corvette or used 911 tend to lean conservative.
I’m in the embryonic stages of planning out a web solutions co-op (aka, it’s an idea I started thinking about recently and I want to learn more about co-ops and pursue this if it could work). If Chapo chat gets to the point where you’re getting a co-op off the ground before i can, I’d love to be a part of it.
we're gonna be like those old school forums. all here because of interest in the same topic, but talk about a variety of things. the good ol days
I was thinking just that earlier today. It's nice to be in an online space that actually has its own, decent culture again, where you get to know your fellow posters over time and everything isn't absolute, race-to-the-bottom attention economy posting. Like a community.
Have an upbear my good sir!! Your comment made me breathe air through my nose!! Comedy 100!!!!!
EDIT: Thank you for the goldbear kind stranger!!!!
Yeah I'm starting to recognize way more names than when chapo was on reddit.
I've talked about the homogenization of the internet a lot recently and it bums me out so hard that we've lost a lot of communities and forums to websites becoming all encompassing. There used to be a sense of accountability on old internet. You couldn't just make a burner account say some dumb chud shit and go back to posting on your main you'd stick out and people would talk about it. People knew who you were and how you talked and would call you out.
Also to just like continue in a sort of related way. Why did Facebook need to add a marketplace? Craigslist used to bang and was it's own thing. More recently we look at Instagram taking stories from snapchat and reels from tiktok. This shit sucks.Chapo Chat sigs on posts when. I want to be cool and make those again.
The rise in prevalence of Discord servers is even worse for this IMO. Forums let you interact with lots of diverse people across time zones. Discords encourage you to only talk with people who tend to be online when you are.
Moreover, discord topics aren't organized, so you either have to be perpetually online or trawl for interesting things.
Chapo Chat sigs on posts when. I want to be cool and make those again.
Tryin to make a change :-\
Fuck I'm so hype. I completely missed out on them and absolutely love what chapo.chat is becoming
Where do I find more of these for other subjects? I really like that format, and I especially like it when you get to learn who the other users are, I'm kinda sick of the modern reddit like shit...
car, band/record label, and gun forums were the big ones back in the day. oh, and bodybuilding. then reddit showed up and ate them all and in the process made it worse because now any asshole can drop into your thread and be a dumb shit and then they'll disappear back into the anonymous horde
I used to (still am to a lesser extent, I mostly got tired of the politics of some people there) frequent a flat earth forum simply because it was relatively small but active and similar to older forums (it is an older forum). Also most of the users weren't flat earthers anyways.
Before reddit, I used to really like the ign boards. Any other teh_vesti old heads in here?
Chapo.Chat needs to be what the old sub was, but with various extensions to hobbies or interests through a left lens. It cannot fall into the online drama of left disunity because that’s stupid as fuck. It cannot become just a meme board. It should be like how the old sub was, but better. And we need our own Blackwolf Feed community.
We don’t have !veganism, we have !food. We don’t have !marxist_theory, we have !books and !philosophy. We don’t have !socialistra, we have !guns. And the mods are all leftists by design. Because we as leftists are used to pigeonholing ourselves into the leftist version of other things. On this site, the left is the default.
That's something interesting I didn't notice before.
"If you ain't left, you ain't RIGHT" ~ Screamo at the 5th Comintern
The minute this site becomes anything like reddit I'm gone. The reason we can make posts about hobbies and stuff that's not politics is because I know that everybody on here is coming from vaguely the same point of view on the world, and don't have to explain those things to justify my own opinions. I don't have to worry about my words being misinterpreted or my thoughts being flamed into oblivion.
:biden: nothing will fundamentally change
j/k I think the reddit board style is good for being able to go on e-hiatus and come back and not feel fomo. I would not participate in a chan-style board or a classically formatted forum. I think the reddit format's main weakness is threads dying, but they are at least still viewable pretty easily later. I like having everything on one page. I would love to see a new sorting method for revived threads/necroposts. That could make posting into old threads more fruitful, and allow bumps for important or frequently-visited old content, but in a compartmentalized "area" of the site. I'm not sure what to think about federation, because I don't really understand its meaning. As long as I can visit the boards under one account, that's fine
Oh definitely, I was just thinking out loud about an optional sorting method in the vein of "new" vs "hot" or "top" that could facilitate interaction with older content if the user wished it. Necromancy! The current default algorithm is much better than the launch one for sure. Idk how it would be programmed exactly, but seems like something I would tinker with myself (if I knew how to write algorithms). Maybe I'll get there some day
sorting by new when you could be sorting by juche. smh
:juche-boi:
I want a site that builds toward a unified left rather than a bunch of isolated subs fighting each other like /r/marxistsleninists and /r/socdems and /r/non-vegan-leftists-aren't-real-leftists. Idk how to go about that, but memes about how shity capitalism is is a start.
I think OP's point about how reddit gameifies online interactions is correct. I've already deleted bad takes I've had on this website and downvoted others. Upvotes and downvotes are superficially democratic but they lead to hive mind culture that ultimately gatekeeps away potential comrades who are just learning or even already-comrades who have solidified their views about how we fucking end capitalism and bash the fash.
One thing from a software dev perspective - "wtf is a federated website to a user? How is this website not just a lefty reddit, what about it is different from just a reddit alternative run by lefties? I can already go on reddit and create any community I want. Why does the github repo being available to everyone make this a more democratic space?" - I think articulating the answers to users (read: the proletariat) is not something that's been done effectively before in any non-techie community.
wtf is a federated website to a user? How is this website not just a lefty reddit, what about it is different from just a reddit alternative run by lefties?
federation means different communities are run by different people who can enforce different rules. on reddit you can't say "death to slave owners" because the people who run the site forbid it whereas here you can. moreover, because reddit is not federated with this site, you couldn't maintain your identity on reddit (your reddit user) and come here to post leftist stuff. so what federation does is allow communities to set up their own sites with their own rules but still access the broader cohort of potential users who can drop by and post from their home site without needing to make a new account on your site.
federation makes your online presence portable while allowing diverse communities to talk to each other.
it also means, for example, that you could use the code behind chapo.chat to host your own discussion board for your local activist org while other local orgs use platforms more like discourse or mastodon and everyone can still talk to each other without an immediate collapse of opsec because the sites are run by some large, capitalist entity. these kinds of tools are necessary if we're going to be able to communicate with each other through the intense repression of the state.
I kept reading calls to improve the site's outreach, which I found strange but fine I guess since I supposed the point of this site is to "pipeline" and radicalise people while providing a place to talk politics and share political memes for its users without fear of being banned or held back. If trying to be the reddit of the federated internet is the goal then that fucking blows.
Just so she doesn't log on and be like "wtf" I want to clarify my post. I don't think she meant that we literally become reddit. I just had some concerns about what it means to fill the space that reddit does and to have the mass appeal that reddit does. I don't want to put words in people's mouths either, which is why I wanted a broader discussion just on the direction of chapochat rather than the specific line of discussion we were having in that thread.
thank you for clarifying this, in my surprise I think I glossed over the details a little
This place is still a carbon copy of reddit format-wise, but the feel is closer to (the smaller boards) of 4chan because of the population size. Except without the sexual pathology/anger
people here also have that, zhe ne ce qua that 4channers have, where you just shit on your opponents
I appreciate we don't have a total post/comment karma thing on our profiles, or if we do I've never seen it/not obvious to find. I feel like some people, no matter the subreddit just wanna farm karma and it can lead to some seriously lame as fuck posts and reposts, but here it doesn't seem like karma matters as much as people just wanting to post something good, informal or start a discussion.
I also appreciate it shows upvotes and downvotes as well. Reddit use to do that and it was annoying they removed it because it can be hard to distinguish a genuinely controversial take that is like say 10 upvotes and 8 downvotes since it just looks like a 2 upvote post when it could just be a hot/bad take to some. Sometimes controversial comments can be good in that it might just be a legit unpopular opinion— so long as it isn't harmful in anyway, it's just a bad opinion but people may sorta agree with it? Not sure if I wrote that sensibly.
Agreed—I find it freeing not to have an overall score, and I really appreciate that the mods/admins solicited community feedback before making that decision.
Nice effort post.
As for the growth part, idk if we have any statistics to pull up, but it does feel like it's growing, slowly but surely. I lurked for quite awhile before I registered, I was sorta feeling it out if it was was going to be worth getting into or if it was going to meet similar fates that other reddit clones have. It's very hard to grow a new platform, but I'm also seeing people comment on certain subs reddit like, "I miss CTH" and almost every time now there is someone plugging chapo.chat. Which is good, I think some people are like me where they waited a bit to feel it out and eventually registered as well. Just keep plugging it, but don't spam it. I've seen people plug it on subs that were politically left but not necessarily about politics like r/asablackman which sorta caught me off guard in a way.
Oh yeah when plugging, it might be wise to type chapo dot chat or something similar to avoid url spam sitewide. Reddit does automatically notice if you plug 1 url too often and may be shadow banned or actually banned. Just something to consider. IDK if this has actually happened to anyone here so far, but it's something to consider if you care about your main account.
That is great news and hopefully this also convinces fence sitters or people who still haven't gotten around to registering that it's a good place to stay as a community that wont just wash out.
We should totally bring in our friends from r/conservative and r/neoliberal
As long as they say thank you whenever we reply "fuck you" to them.
I don't think I suggested becoming reddit. I'm pretty sure my point was becoming the size of reddit is not at all an issue or something that should not be strived for or eventually expected to happen. Intentionally telling yourself you don't want to become a major site is ridiculous and in order to achieve that you would actually have to intentionally sabotage user growth or site quality for the average person in some way order to achieve it.
I think it gameifies the worst aspects of online interactions. And ultimately it’s a tool for propaganda/advertisement ie inherently pro-imperial and pro-capitalist.
I'm not sure why you'd focus on the two aspects ChapoChat obviously is not going to become.
Why? Why would any project hit it big? Nothing is guaranteed. And the definition of ‘big’ varies. Big could just mean getting 500k users for a year or two then dying.
Because not a single fucking project in the fediverse is doing the MASSIVE amount of work they are doing the intention of it just being a stupid thing that stays tiny and never goes literally anywhere ever. Everyone is doing the fediverse work with the ideological intention of displacing centralised corporate social media with decentralised non-corporate social media. This by extension requires projects to eventually succeed.
Reddit was able to become big because it had investors. Do we have investors? They could pay for exposure that we can’t. Capital rules in capitalism. This lacks materialism. It’s the “great man theory” of websites. That a good concept goes further than the cash behind it. There are real world examples proving that wrong, like Uber. Uber is a bad idea with billions behind it, making it work.
What? No. Reddit became big because it had 3 employees that injected some labour for several years. Created and maintained a high quality site with a high quality community and then by virtue of good timing and being a parallel project to Digg it went from a projects with a hundred thousand active users to a project with several million users when Digg literally committed suicide by over-monetising their site and pissing off the userbase. Investment did not achieve that, labour achieved that, the only thing investment achieved was to keep 3-5 talented people injecting labour into the site for long enough for it to blow the fuck up. Reddit went through practically zero changes for nearly a decade after that explosion of users and just continued to ride the wave up until they released the garbage redesign that the majority of the existing community resoundingly rejected and continues to use old-reddit because new-reddit fundamentally misunderstands why old reddit worked. Old reddit blew up becauese it empowered its communities and pretended that each community was actually owned by its creators, not reddit. They pretended reddit was a software project for communities despite being centralised. They empowered the mods with tools and css to make something unique. Then redesign literally shit all over that and attempted to refocus reddit entirely on memes, images and auto-play gifs.
The only reason the redesign didn't cause the collapse of reddit is because they never fully transitioned to it, maintaining the old site in parallel for this entire time. Had they pushed and enforced it then half the userbase would have left.
I pictured us being a meme site that moved closer to activism. Not a meme site that moves towards entertainment. Was this the goal of chapochat the whole time? Is the hope here that if we just let people talk about prestige TV they’ll be open to radicalization because there’s a marxist comm too?
Not that they'll be OPEN to radicalization but that it will simply happen by virtue of normalising leftist-run communities. Leftist run communities will never be the same as liberal run communities. The dream I have is to dump every single liberal-run hobby community that exists in favour of EVERYTHING being leftist run. Outside of ChapoChat you currently live inside a liberal world. Everything you consume is liberal. Every hobby you take part in is liberal. Everything is shit. Offering people something different, building a leftist space for all entertainment -- it presents a key step in destroying liberal hegemony.
The politics doesn’t matter. The vast majority of people do not give a fuck if they want hobby content. If the hobby communities are good it won’t be a barrier at all.
Still confused by this. Are we a leftist alternative to reddit or are we just a hobby/entertainment startup?
You've quoted a point out of context here and it pisses me off a bit. It stinks of bad faith. It was in response to you claiming that leftist politics would deter the growth of the hobby communities my response to that was that you think people care about politics far too much. Far-right shit doesn't deter seemingly normal people from taking part in hobby communities. The left will not magically be even more of a deterrence.
It’s interesting to claim to want to be reddit, but I actually think 4chan is more of what we’re going for. 4chan was just a branch of 2chan. It was built around hobbies and entertainment. Then it became super political late in life, after getting very popular. It still doesn’t compete with reddit in any material sense. But it definitely has influenced the culture of an online generation. It’s worth, what, $3M when Hiro bought it? No investor will touch it except nazis. But so far something like 4chan is what’s being advocated here.
4chan was also a much smaller startup, with a few people, in bedrooms. It wasn’t the project of some SV techbros trying to create the next thing. Sounds like us to me unless our founders here are actually techbros.
4chan was always political.
Finally, is the intention to monetize chapochat? Are the founders planning on growing this userbase and then dumping it when they turn 25? What are the plans here?
ChapoChat will be a coop so its goals, I assume, will be decided by that coop. Monetisation might eventually become that coop's desire but I don't see that happening in a 5-10 year timeline. Building something good that grows is in direct conflict with monetisation. Reddit as well as many other services grew on the basis of not pissing their users off with mass monetisation and then monetised in their late-life. If the goal of ChapoChat is to grow you pretty much don't need to worry about monetisation because it won't happen until after the growth. Monetisation inherently lowers the quality of a site and is in contradiction to growth itself.
As an aside I just want to point out that I really dislike this habit of users taking some comment they don't like in an existing thread and then spinning it off into a post of its own that they quote a few out of context things in so as to misrepresent the context of the original thread and pose it from their own perspective. It has happened to me 3 or 4 times now and it always feels like an attack. I'm not even part of policy decisions. I'm not an admin. I'm not in the coop. I'm not important. I just gave opinions and posed personal pushback against what I deemed to be ridiculously unaspirational thinking.
The mindset I boiled your comments in the other thread down to was "I don't want the site to grow" and I view that as inherently harmful to any and all leftist political goals.
Excuse me if I don't participate in the thread any further and if any of this has emotions that might be riding a bit higher than usual, I haven't given it any edit passes and don't have time to as you picked my dad's funeral day for this one.
Look, the only reason I split it off was to bring more people into the discussion, I especially wanted to hear from the founders. The thread we were in was already 17 hours old and it would have just been you and I DMing each other basically. You can easily see my post history and see that I don't make a habit of doing that. I'm unaware of this happening to you before, and I'm sorry that I made you feel attacked. I don't attack people and most of my posts feel like effort posts, or at least sincere posts. I'm not attacking you. But for how you feel attacked, or feel frustrated by me not characterizing your point correctly, I feel the same way. I still do not understand why my posts came off as me saying I don't think big or that I want the site to not grow. You started off saying that I'm discouraging people from thinking big, and I feel like haven't been any more unfair to you than that. I even said here, that I don't think you meant that we would literally become reddit. It's a discussion and there's going to be critical language involved just as you have been critical of my points.
I'm sorry about your dad so I won't respond to you anymore about this considering it's a tough time for you.
The dream I have is to dump every single liberal-run hobby community that exists in favour of EVERYTHING being leftist run.
Please give us an art sub and you'd get a full-blown convert. lol.
All the discussion I’ve seen so far misses federation, which is the whole point of Lemmy (or at least it’s supposed to be). Maybe because most of the users here have never used a federated or distributed platform before. ChapoChat isn’t like Reddit or 4chan, it (will be when the upstream devs finish) just one node in a network, although we’ll be the biggest (not sure for how long).
Here’s a few resources
Yeh, I’d like to know more. I’ve heard vague things like “it’s like email!” but I feel like I still don’t understand lol
You can set up your own server with an "instance" called cooldudes.net or something, and it'd be just like chapo.chat. Maybe chapo is too lib for you or it's gay themed or whatever idk.
But then you miss all the great posts and your old friends back on chapo.chat so you send Beatnik and the chapo admins a few emails to see if chapo.chat wants to "federate" with cooldudes.net. If everyone coordinates and adjusts a few settings or whatever, then when you log into cooldudes.net you'll see posts from chapo.chat on your home screen, and you'll be able to comment on chapo.chat posts using the same account you use on cooldudes.net (and vice versa). Repeat x100.
Ideally if another instance approaches you in good faith, you federate with them, even if they aren't to your personal taste, other users on your instance might be interested in their content (and vice versa). If you notice that there's an instance that is full of annoying bs (stupidpol stuff, for instance), you can un-federate with them and go your separate ways without it becoming a whole "censorship"thing (although the users on your instance could get pissy, as they do)
I just made a comment with a few links. There’s a decent amount of articles and videos discussing it at various levels of technical depth if you want to know more.
I will say I can already feel myself recovering from redditbrain for a few reasons :
-There’s still the dopamine hit of the upbear but it’s not summed up anywhere, making it less prestige.
-The default feed prioritizes engagement over virality. You still get twitter memes, but you also get real convos too.
-Things still sit predominantly in !main so I haven’t been able to hide in a Curated bubble. I think that’s kind of important though I know that’s not the intention and opt-in communities are ultimately better. Who knows maybe opt-out should be considered unless the community wants to hide.
-Everyone here is actively against capital and is attracted to here for being anti-capital. This place can help radicalize but it’s not a gateway. I don’t know if you could AstroTurf for a company here like you could reddit.
All online communities go through the Reddit/Digg/Fark/Something Awful trajectory. You can't escape turning into a lowest common denominator shit hole or a den of pure inequity and backbiting. Just enjoy the ride while you can.
It took Reddit a few years to get bad and over a decade to get to its current emascated state.
Chapo.chat is... what? Two months old? And there's no profit motive (that I'm aware of) behind this sub, either. So Admins and Mods aren't incentivized to be hacks.
