We’re going to need to participate on normie platforms like reddit in order to get more users & content here. We’re also going to want to have a place on reddit (and elsewhere) where some of our content can thrive and become more accessible.
Apparently, Facebook is already marking our URL as spam. I’d imagine reddit will follow if not already. So we can’t just dump links onto every marginally left-wing space.
Let this be a thread to spitball some ideas.
Anyone got domain names they’re not using?
I mean the point was that we can’t have a space on reddit. If we just go make a subreddit and post there, what’s the point of this site? Considering r/cth had, what, at least 4x the amount of users, it’s safe to assume people aren’t willing to give up reddit to come here. So if we make a sub, then new people will just post there instead of here. I don’t think the problem is that not enough redditors know we exist. Reddit itself is the problem. And we’re likely never going to be reddit.
I wouldn’t even bother with Facebook. I would imagine twitter has similar issues as reddit. The people who post a lot there already have a home and won’t come here. New people will just become part of that ecosystem.
So the trick would be to completely transplant major draws to this site. If virgil texas quit twitter again and came here and advertised, then we’d get more people. But there’s no real incentive for him to do that. Or anyone. In fact, I would bet a lot of the celebs would think we’re stupid. Just like they thought r/cth is stupid. Just like they think twitter is stupid, but they use twitter because it’s a necessity.
Twitter is necessary because it’s a business than pushed its way into everything. It’s became a platform for advertisement and quickly pushing out short posts. Are we willing to do that as a site? Probably not. So we’re not going to compete with twitter either.
Our only draw is that we can post John Brown memes and not get banned. I’m not sure that has enough mass appeal to get whatever large amount of users you want. Really, you can say some pretty crazy shit on twitter too and probably not get banned. Being banned isn’t much of a problem for people like us because we don’t have enough of a stake in our posting accounts. We can just make new ones and continue. Sure it’s annoying to get owned by a corporation, but it’s not so annoying a million people will leave twitter or reddit to come here.
I’d say we’re a fairly niche website and we offer something to a very narrow group of people. To even have 10k people onboard is pretty good tbh.
Just to game this out some more and not be such a negative nancy:
Having almost 10k people is actually pretty good. We’re probably bigger than a lot of clickfarm businesses. There’s probably around an average of 500 people online at once at any given time. Even having half of that raid something can get something to the front page of reddit. Though reddit would quickly see the manipulation and just correct the scores after banning our accounts.
My point is that we should welcome growth, but perhaps put more effort into organizing the people we have. I mean if we bring 1M people here tomorrow, then what? We just all post the same memes over and over all day? If you’re looking for a project in organization, why not turn the site into something? Or at least a portion of it. Like figure out a way to hide traffic better and then conduct raids. Figure out a way to create mass amounts of reddit accounts, disperse them to us, and then point us where to vote or post. Same with twitter. We can maybe get a trending hashtag if we tried hard enough. Become a leftist cyber “espionage” group. Fight back against the social media places. Hijack content creation for our benefit. Develop tools and means of doing all that. Call it guerilla disruption or whatever you want.
If that’s not your bag, then fine. I’m not saying that should be the whole site. Keep the lemmy as a way of communicating. Create closed groups to do that kind of thing. Also organize in a more traditional leftist fashion. I know we have some comms for that already, but work on growing those from within our own community. If you can’t get 10k people to get more involved then having 40k people won’t matter. We’d just be a leftist meme site.
This mirrors my thinking. If we want to be more than just dank edgy memes, we’re going to need more users to keep the more niche comms afloat and active enough to be worth using for organizational purposes.
I suspect most people are currently using this place as I do: as a place for cool, dank lefty memes and almost exclusively browsing c/main. It would be nice to be able to organize efforts to poison fascist organizing, bring awareness for regional events, and manipulate the online media sphere.
4chan has basically done similar shit for years. I see no reason why we can’t have a similar role, but with better goals. It really doesn’t take a huge number of people to accomplish great things if properly organized. We already have decent numbers, it’d be a shame if the only thing we did with this is shitpost.
So if we make a sub, then new people will just post there instead of here.
Definitely a consideration. My main concern is that the void is being filled by subs that only do counterproductive infighting bullshit.
I don’t think the problem is that not enough redditors know we exist.
I definitely think this is at least somewhat of a hurdle. Only extremely online internet leftists are going to know this place exists. r/cth had a reputation, but I’m pretty sure most redditors (even leftist ones) only know it was banned.
I’d say we’re a fairly niche website and we offer something to a very narrow group of people. To even have 10k people onboard is pretty good tbh.
I think we have a good, healthy community so far, and it will grow naturally, but I would assume many of us also are interested in getting our agitprop out to a wider audience. I definitely think it’s detrimental to our causes if we’re all isolated from the internet at large. We don’t need this place to be super popular, but it would be a shame if r/GenZedong and r/SendInTheTanks got banned and there was no place on reddit without the red scare/china bad shit.
What would solve those infighting subs would be for us to just go there and participate in them, drawing the culture away from infighting. Telling those people that chapo.chat exists would just bring them here. We can do that kind of thing, where we go to reddit and reshape/take ownership of communities there. That was the point of my reply to myself. We can infiltrate and bring those communities into a more productive state. Then we can use that to grow leftist presence on reddit and then redirect people here as needed. I have a half-assed plan for that if you’re interested.
I see both as effective. We can directly influence those other communities to be less infighty and toxic and also bring people from more infighty places to a forum less focused on cultivating edgy identities and more on common ground praxis.
I don’t remember the chapo sub (and its derivatives) ever being as obsessed with maintaining ideological rigidity as all the subs for specific ideologies that spun up in it’s absence.
Tbh I’m not sure if it’s a natural consequence of the good generic lefty subs getting banned or an actual op to keep the left divided and weak. We need to be cautious to avoid that happening here too, but I think we’re well-suited to resisting that because we’re basically a reddit clone dedicated to anti-capitalism and general left discussion. As long as mods share those values and keep the bullshit to the flavored corners of this site, I think we’ll be fine.
I have a half-assed plan for that if you’re interested.
I am! That’s why I created this thread. We should probably make a comm for this specific type of stuff. It’d be nice if this was something we collectively thought about after this thread has gone stale.
Most of this is small-time thinking. We’ve grown since launch. Posting is above what it was earlier. Users online is above it. The total number of new accounts being made every day is accelerating. New users are accelerating. Comment counts are accelerating. Posting is accelerating.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and there’s nothing to indicate we won’t be 3x to 5x the current size 12 months from now, and then 3x to 5x that again a further 12 months down the line from that.
Just be patient and enjoy the site. The growth is very much there.
That’s fair. I’m just saying there’s no need to discourage OP or the big thinking. I strongly disagree with “we will never be reddit”.
I remember it clearly back on reddit when reddit’s numbers were probably in the 1000-10000 “currently online” numbers. Back when Digg was the titan of the internet and Reddit was the small extremely nerdy techie hangout. Reddit back then was basically dual-power to Digg and when Digg’s userbase got pissed off enough they made a transition in massive waves.
We’re creating a space that will grow because it can’t exist on literally any corporate social media that currently exists. The numbers are growing and they’re going to keep growing. We’ll become a strong large community and then coexist on the internet until a “revolutionary moment” hits other major services through pissing off their userbases and crises occurs due to company sales and new owners deciding to milk the users to death. We’ll push on through those things and consistently grow due to the level of quality we can be without pissing off the users with corporate bullshit. Real and authentic communities will blossom well and eventually you CAN count on the corporate platforms to eventually kill themselves through the usual patterns of online media.
Not growth necessarily. Just a non-negligible step up from the former sub(s) in terms of influence. We used to feed content downstream to other subs like r/LateStageCapitalism. Outside of reddit, we don’t have some useful things to bolster our impact like crossposting or a shared login to the rest of the site. Getting regular folks to stumble across our content is going to be much harder here, especially now while we’re in our nacency.
I’m less concerned about our numbers and more concerned about the posting vacuum created in the absence of r/chapotraphouse and the likes. The current state of lefty reddit is garbage, and us being outside of the rest of the reddisphere means chuds could have an even greater grip on public perception than they do now. If we don’t have a plan to either get users to migrate here or export culture to reddit, we will only lose what little influence we had.
Honestly, I think a simple reddit bot that posts our top image content with our URL watermarked to the appropriate subreddits would go a long way.
This is a bunch of baseless nonsense.
We are growing. At a pretty comfortable rate actually. There’s no real problem to speak of.
We can target left subreddits, breadtubers, and left wing folks on Facebook.
Community growth, paid for by the community.
Paying for ads doesn’t work/isn’t worth it. I have experienced this myself. Earned media, earned exposure is the only reliable way.
Are there archives of the old subs that contain reddit usernames? We could just divide up mass DMing old users with a link (being careful enough to avoid being marked as spam). I would imagine there’s a lot of the original sub that has no clue we exist here now.
…Or make a lefty subreddit with our rehosted content, and an automoderator that DMs with a link here upon subscribing. Maybe see if mods of other lefty subs would be interested in doing the same.
idk, maybe leftypol is an option. though they tend to be more hostile to idpol, which isn’t the vibe here.
We should probably be taking our culture into account while planning our growth. I’d hate to watch this place become more like stupidpol or libified because we grow faster than we can prepare for. Fast growth and normification ruins a lot of decent spaces online…doubly so if coinciding with the removal of other communities.
Moderation strategy should definitely seriously discussed before we grow beyond control. All it takes is r/stupidpol, r/PoliticalCompassMemes, and a few other yucky communities getting banned from reddit and we’d have a huge threat to our current culture. Not necessarily an existential threat, but migrating elsewhere would be a blow to our progress.
Not to mention, we should be prepared for coordinated attacks seeking to ruin this place…be it chuds, fash, radlibs, infighting fetishists, or alphabet bois.
None of these are immediately pressing matters, but we should be prepared before we have a problem we aren’t ready to deal with.
First and foremost, I think we should take inventory of what friendly subs already exist, and what niches are not already covered.
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r/AllTheLeft is an existing left unity sub, but idk how active it is. Reddit 100% needs to have a dank space where half of the content isn’t dedicated to shitting on anarchists or tankies.
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r/GenZedong and r/SendInTheTanks have significant traction in the ML space, but I’m sure they’re both on reddit’s shortlist for the banhammer.
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r/GenZAnarchist just went private, and r/COMPLETEANARCHY basically feels like a state department psyop. May need a replacement if no alternatives exist.
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r/LateStageCapitalism is for general anti-capitalism and is pretty active.
Also: if you have any other good subs, post em.
I don’t know how difficult scraping lemmy would be, but we could go the low effort route and use bots to repost popular content here to various subs, maybe watermark the image with our URL too. Basically map the various subs here to the closest ones on reddit and auto-post top content.
can’t forget r/antiwork, a bunch of disillusioned folks with a scattering of socialists thrown in. prime grounds to radicalize people who hate capitalism but haven’t quite gotten around to attributing their particular problems with capitalism directly yet
Throw these on that pile
/r/lostgeneration /r/studentloandefaulters /r/collapse /r/anticonsumption
Edit. The whole /r/talesfromretail universe is probably good, too.
Collapse is interesting, it used to be somewhat right-leaning, but has moved left a lot in the last couple of years
- /r/InformedTankie
- /r/DankLeft
- /r/DirtbagLeft
- /r/GenZommunist
- /r/LeftistVeterans
- /r/LeftPodcasts
- /r/PeterDaou
- /r/RedPreppers
- /r/Pete_Buttigieg
- /r/SocialistRA
- /r/SRAWeekend
- /r/TrotskyChapo
/r/Sigmarxism, when we first started we poached many of our members from /r/ChapoTrapHouse and /r/Gamerghazi.
There’s also a decent lefty Star Trek sub out there somewhere iirc.
/r/Pete_Buttigieg
Was that a Mayo Pete sub that was liberated by the left?
Also, it might be a good idea to piss off some reddit neolibs, and make it known where we came from. They’ll whine about us, and they’re insufferable enough to drive left-minded people to look into our community. I’m pretty sure they inadvertently signal boosted the original r/cth sub.
