What can we do to change this? I don’t think chapo.chat will ever be huge, but it would be nice for it to be consistently active.
I think that’s a byproduct of the active sorting system. It makes it look empty. If you sort by hot or top it looks a lot more populated.
Is that so? For me it’s the opposite. Active sort: top posts with 10-50 comments each. Hot sort: top posts with 0-6 comments each.
Isn’t New sort the default setting though? That one looks super dead. Make the most active-looking one default.
the chapochat fandom is DYING
share if you’re a real hog poster
The place is a bit too visibly Lenniny to recommend to my normie friends the way that I could with CTH.
Yeah, CTH was a left unity sub, this place is very tightly grouped ideologically. Or it at least feels that way.
Kind of hostile to anyone not being exactly in line with it, either. Maybe that drives people away? idk just spitballin
I think we can do better, but we’re not doing bad here, either. A big plus is no mods stepping in to enforce ideological purity of one type or another, and another big plus is a lack of running ideological feuds between individual users. From what I’ve seen we might have a struggle session in one thread but we largely don’t carry that over to other threads.
I’m curious! Are we going to be ashamed of Lenin? I think we treat him fairly.
Which parts do you think are off-putting for your friends? Maybe you’re underestimating them? Give us the reality check
we have the idea that there’s great idealist distance in time and space for political belief: but people already agree with leftism, they just don’t know it. Anyone is capable of changing their minds to any other position at any point in time. There is no real distance.
We should generally try to position ourselves relative to the truth, not lies, and not waste effort imagining that the same socdem pipeline exists in the same way now that we’re off Reddit.
People will use Chapo.chat if it’s fun and distinct from Reddit, which is miserable and dying, so I think what we should be doing is trying to cultivate a socialist experience to draw out this contradiction. We can be smart/fun proles without the dogmatic elitism of “leftist politics” or any of the angry internet fascist vibes that makes everyone pissed off and guarded.
We can pull people straight from neoliberal and idealist mindsets much faster as the community grows if we give them the materialist truth, which they all want, and which is exclusively ours.
also Chapo.chat seems active to me, but maybe Hot by default would look better to users coming from Reddit?
People shit on SocDems and DemSocs… but I used to be very reactionary… and the MLs never appealed to me back then, in fact I used to laugh at them and “destroy” them at debates… but the SocDems and the DemSocs got me to change my mind.
The SocDem pipeline is an important part of building the left, or any community… CTH included.
I come here and there are a few shit posts, but it seems like some of the more factionalist members are just too aggressive towards people who may not be as far along as they are.
It serves to drive people away, rather than making them change their minds.
Lenin is a spooky Soviet dictator cartoon villain that most people have never thought of outside of that context.
Real-world Lenin was pretty cool. Which means treating him fairly means saying he was pretty cool.
Saying this guy is pretty cool is jarring to people who’ve never thought about him outside of a vague cartoony version from old propaganda they consumed when they were kids.
When you link someone a random internet community, the way they consume it is not sitting down and critically analyzing everything they’re presented. They skim through things and get a rough impression - what’re they talking about, what’s the general tone, are they funny, do they roughly agree with me? If the first thing they see is a bunch of things way outside of their weirdness filter / radicalism filter / overton window / whatever you want to call it, then they’ll just close the tab and move on with their life (and lower their opinion of the linker a bit).
That’s all in your head, though!
This is the internet. People watch ISIS recruitment videos and you still think being open about support for Lenin is too far for them to go, because they’re so delicate. You don’t actually need a really high IQ or the gentle brain massage of a deceptive multi-year leftist psyop to understand why peasant uprisings are cool.
The former.
I think the success of the original CTH shows that primarily anti-capitalist top-level posts and actual theory in the comments can work.
Simultaneously more and less hornyposting
I say “wrong kid died,” every time Joe mentions Beaux Biden, and frankly my SO is tired of it.
