this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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Yesterday I was informed by the head mod that "this site has never prioritized growth" and I was like that's news to me I remember people actively adding HB watermarks to memes to spread on , and everyone was encouraged to spread the word about HB to the r/CTH diaspora.
I specifically remember the mods and admins straight up inviting entire communities separate from the r/CTH diaspora early on in order to grow the site leading to a lot of drama. The recent bouts of struggle sessions of admins attemting to clamp down on the chauvinism which is apparently keeping people away could be construed as not attempting to grow the site but to change the userbase I guess.
If I recall correctly, that was mostly TC69 doing outreach several years ago, including giving a guided tour of sorts to a very perplexed PSL person who pointed out that we had literal color revolution rhetoric going on in the User Union comm. Our mods and admins have seen some shit, and I don't envy their unpaid labor in the slightest.
Yeah, don't really envy them, but to say that they never tried to grow the site is pretty obviously false. There was a lot of trying to grow the community back in the day (was one of the biggest arguments for federation with the rest of the lemmyverse as well) and more recently in trying to grow the community in certain directions.
The biggest drama was when we were hosted as a lifeboat for vegancirclejerk. Looking back at those dramawaves makes the most recent ones seem pedestrian.
Wasn’t that a big point of criticism leveled at the Admins during the nascent days of chapo.chat, that they failed to retain or being back even even a tenth of r/cth’s userbase? To say, ‘this site has never prioritized growth’ is kind of an affront to everyone who saw this site as the lifeboat that would retain the massive community that was fostered on reddit
I mean, they also banned a lot of that early "lifeboat" userbase, and also changed the entire name of the site specifically because they didn't want to be associated with the old subreddit; or the podcast anymore.
HB mods/admins have always been more interested in making the site their personal bonsai-tree project over anything else really.
And If I’m being honest, I don’t like that they went in that direction but it is what it is
I don't remember admin being blamed for not getting a similar user base to r/CTH as I see it that's hardly the job of the admin team that responsibility lies with all of us.
I agree with your last point though.