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janederscore
@janederscore

cohost's primary goal right now as a company has been established as "attract as many users as possible", which is very funny bc they've done probably the worst job i can imagine at trying to retain new users. they don't advertise, they don't really have (or seem to want to do) any outreach on other platforms, really the only injections they end up getting in terms of usership are whenever an adjacent social media giant starts hemorrhaging people from their own extremely poor management

if it were me, saddled in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, i would probably put in any amount of effort to retain as many of the people who were dumped on my doorstep as possible. as it stands, it feels very much like the exact opposite situation is at play - there's a Hostility to cohost, foundationally, towards new users. its featureset is philosophically misguided and very limited in every way that matters (no, the css doesn't matter, despite being cool), confusion or concern about said featureset is universally derided (with the attitude across the board being more or less "well, there's the door"), and moderation has made it quite clear that it wants to empower and defend its Already Existing userbase at the expense of all others.

i dunno man. like i had a reasonable but tempered amount of faith in the endeavor prior to this week but yeesh .


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in reply to @janederscore's post:

the plan of what, tripling the existing active userbase assuming same conversion numbers to meet existing costs but also not scaling moderation to match that feels like it has some problems especially given this past week. like good luck to them anyways but i have concerns lol

I'm not sure I'm 100% in agreement with you, but I do think there are some strong points raised. Cohost was never really meant to be a full replacement to mainstream social media, but the nature of a capitalist system expecting constant growth and the unexpected mass user migrations probably put on way more of a strain on the site than was expected.

I think trying to create a more idealized form of the glory days of internet culture does mean forgetting some of the problems that came with those days and not expecting them to crop up again. The present issues you and others are dealing with reminds me of my time in a small fan forum that had taken strides to enforce rules that kept out the toxicity of the wider fandom. However in doing so, the userbase developed an ivory tower mindset that produced its own small-scale toxicity. Sure you wouldn't find people posting swastikas, but you would find people who believed shipping art was (and I quote) "a moral rot that is killing the community".

yeah i think that's more or less a reasonable way to put it. "we must return to the ways of the forum" as a shibboleth has really only served to unearth the problems hidden by rose-tinted glasses.

that said, i think there's definitely a lot of internal contradictions in the way the website is framed. positioning themselves as both The Fourth Website and their quirky niche friend forum is very "have your cake and eat it too" of them. and, in deploying both these frames when most convenient, they ultimately succeed at neither and mostly just come off as At Best incompetent and unprepared for the responsibilities you get saddled with when you try to develop a social media platform - even if whatever their original intention was didn't account for a large userbase.

Your post is largely dead on but I did some napkin math recently and it's almost definitely not tens of thousands of dollars in debt, it's most likely closer to a million https://d-shoot.net/cohostfinance.html

It s been funny having people who work in finance reach out to me and validate this post lmao I feel better about having the most layman understanding of business finances ever.