We need to move further to the right and get a Cheney endorsement.

a person I know irl was asking “what app is that” when they saw the hexbear on my phone and I said it’s where the most militantly pro-trans tankie communists post, and they said they’d check it out.

Generally the way a thing grows is by getting visibility elsewhere.

This is achieved in companies by sockpuppet sharing (marketing team intentionally targeting other spaces with re-shares of content), watermarks, advertising, collaborations and generally being edgy enough that people talk about you for the fact your existence is novel.

One of the things this community doesn’t do enough of is talk about or share Hexbear outside of Hexbear, like it’s some secret or too embarrassing to mention.

One thing I see on tiktok that Hexbear isn’t doing is slideshows, there’s easy content to produce like “best of hexbear” which is just reposting a slideshow of 4-5 memes, run by an official hexbear account. Reddit does this. It’s relatively easy to do this two ways, targeting leftist stuff and targeting trans stuff, “sharing hexbear memes” (trans) is easy trans bait.

Here’s my idea: provide resources and help that other spaces aren’t providing. The mutual aid comm is a great example of this, but I’ve also been thinking there’s probably a lot more we could provide especially to trans/queer communities. Some folks on the site are already started doing great work in this regard but I think it would be cool and useful to start having for more discussions on DIY help for example, including making and sourcing, though we also want to be careful about this and not get unwanted attention. I’d love to hear feedback on this if anyone has any.

By continuously purging and fragmenting all the comms until every user has their own

I think the fakenews and badposting sections should be banned. There are a lot of people that browse the site on mobile while not logged in and they get bombarded by badpost after badpost that are the lowest of the low when it comes to effort (e.g. “instead of getting swol why don’t we get swoletariot???”). Even in this thread someone posted “I post my butt and call the website OnlyButts.” Seriously, wtf. If not banned, they should be hidden by default unless explicitly opted into. Just make them NFSW so they don’t show up while browsing while logged out.

Also, the site should try to be more like lemmygrad in terms of being serious about things. There are too many posts that just reek of a weird mix of ironic and non-irony. What I mean is, people will be serious when it’s a topic they personally are invested in, but on other topics, they just resort to childish toilet humor and say that this is nothing more than a shitposting forum. It’s the schrodinger’s hexbear: topic I care about = super serious get all mods on defcom4, topic i don’t care about = dIdN’T yOu KnOw that this isn’t real life, it’s just the internet hurrr durr it’s a shitposting forum. Imagine all the global south comrades looking in on this. It’s just not a good look, and yes what I’m saying is that there should be at least some degree of optics for fuck’s sake.

Another thing, people need to take seriously the other pipelines that draw potential comrades away. One serious one is the joe rogan, lonely male pipeline. They may be alienated by capitalism, but on a personal level they are looking for advice on how to maybe get a date or something. Maybe some actual concrete advice (e.g. start hitting the gym, fix your hair, hygiene, conversational tips, actual dating advice). Like Bell Hooks is all good, but we can’t just tell people “here read this book, even tho most ppl in society don’t really read anymore.” Like some actual decent agitprop that isn’t READING A FUCKING BOOK OVER 100 PAGES FOR FUCKS SAKE. Like a short tiktok, then transition into shorter youtube vids, and then maybe recommending a book. Most ppl here don’t even read communist theory so why such a big ask for potential comrades to do so much investment. I hate to say it, but you gotta use some kind of sales principles like not blasting someone with a huge investment up front without giving anything in return.

Lastly (and there are so many more i’m just tired of typing) the mods shouldn’t poo poo this site as a way to organize. They always respond with “this is just a nondescript hole in the wall lefting shitposting site not a subsitute for real life organizing.” Motherfucker the reason ppl are here is because they are isolated/alienated and maybe lack the social cirlces (or social skills to create one) to do real life organizing work. And patronizing them by saying “join an org” is just that, patronizing. The stupid ass Jan 6 guys met up due to internet shit, so why not have a disciplined “organizing” comm or something?

vote

I think 2-3 years ago people were putting Hexbear watermarks on a lot of stuff.

What if instead of a dunk tank, we had a “so close to getting it” section where we stumble over each other to brigade the space in question to agitate left-leaning people?

Raid places and bully Chuds?

I’m gonna write to Soros to increase our funding. Maybe we can buy some billboards in Ohio.

GOOD posts getting reposted on tiktok, Instagram, Reddit - in that order too, maybe?

Very simple.

A struggling theatre near me has refused to spend money on proper internet advertising. They spend most of it on big posters on the London underground. Well, recently one of the cast members made a concerted effort to post about it on tiktok - behind the scenes post, character profiles, mini interviews.

The theatre just had it’s first completely sold out run in years.

Everything the tiktok algorithm touches turns into gold.

Then again, perhaps the content doesn’t translate well since it’s not video. In which case, Reddit and Instagram posts.

I mean just spread the link around. Go into other communities and tell them about here.

It’ll be very incestuous though since there’s no “One Big Leftist Forum” to leech off of all we’d be doing is getting people off other niche communities. Which is fine but it’s not all that significant one way or the other.

Rich nerds financing podcasts having hexbear name to be read out

hexbearscare

I got here years ago because someone posted a link on reddit. I think it was on r/trueanon. Are people still doing that?

I feel like posting HB links is most effective during periods of decades happening. People want the posts. But the last thing I’m thinking about when things get wild is “I should post HB links on reddit”.

I do think that while the shit posting part of this site is great, and honestly what drew me in, it’s the effort posts and theory discussion which kept me here. I think this component of this site is lacking promotion. Effort posting gets buried under the nth slop post. It looks like we now have unlimited pinned posts, so maybe pinning a recent effort post for a few days would drive more engagement there and promote that kind of posting more.

I feel like if we did start to market HB or whatever, posting links to effort and theory posts is not a bad idea. While the general vibe here is shitposty (and I think thats generally good because it keeps things casual), there aren’t many places on the internet to have in depth theory discussions. I think part of this is there is a kind of ideological consistency here, even if we don’t always agree, that provides a nice basis on which to have these discussions.

Idk, I like this site. I would be sad to see it die, but I also don’t think it will anytime soon even without much growth.

I don’t think that Hexbear is going to grow because smaller communities do not exist. What do I mean by this? Hexbear is basically one community and a few smaller communities which are the megathreads, but still basically the same community. Nobody actually takes the time to browse each board individually. If a post doesn’t show up on the front page of “all”, then it is basically invisible and dies quickly. This limitation means around 15 posts are worthy of engagement at any given moment and half them are engagement bait spam posts.

Communities aren’t given the opportunity to form. You have to jump through hoops to create a board and then repeating my previous point, people don’t browse individual boards.

Because Hexbear is basically one big comm, many people seem to have the idea that they have to like every post on like a personal preference level. People get mad about the fakenews comm because it doesn’t match their taste of humor. There have been many times where I have posted a video on the video board and someone will comment that they didn’t watch the video but they’re mad about the video or they say they don’t watch videos. People who aren’t interested in the subject of a board should not post on that board. This kind of behavior is reinforced by lacking individual comms, users only browsing one big comm ie all/active, and lacking moderators for niche interests.

The way that reddit was able to grow is that there are so many niche sub boards with users who have niche interests and moderators who curate the boards because they have the shared interest. If someone posts on a history subreddit that they hate learning about history, then they get banned from that history subreddit.

Hexbear has people with many different personal preferences, who can still overall agree on politics. Some people don’t like certain memes or certain videos. If you don’t like a certain thing, you can choose to not engage with it.

There is a “fight for the frontpage”. Every user is either trying to get on to the frontpage or bullying people for making posts they don’t want to see on the frontpage. The solution should be to severely limit the frontpage so that it forces user to find smaller communities that fit their interests. This is already happening with the megathreads, but lemmy is a link aggregator software and is not really designed to work this way. Limit the frontpage to 5-10 “official” comms and hide every other comm from the front page. Hide badposting, fakenews, gossip, slop, etc. People who think fakenews is funny can still browse the comm and nobody gets angry about being tricked. Allow users to make niche comms which do not show up on the front page.

This also would solve the problem of the confusion of which comm posts should be made on. The current way of thinking is that posts should be posted to specific boards based on the assigned topic of the sub board. When people are fighting for the frontpage, they don’t put much thought into which board a post is made on because the audience is all the same. If most boards are hidden from the front page, people will choose which board to post a link on depending on which group of people they think will want to see the post.