I was inspired by Knightwise's
episode
4109 on future-proofing HPR.
I agree with many of your criticisms, but I'm not sure that a marketing
strategy is the best way forward. Many of the most successful and
sustainable businesses and organizations have been built on
word-of-mouth.
For example I heard of Google, Zoom, Gmail, Facebook, Slack, Twitter,
Discord, etc from my IRL friends and coworkers rather than from a
marketing message. And most of the open source communities I'm a part of
(Linux, Python, Firefox, Hugging Face, etc) are successful precisely
because their success is not subject to a BigTech algorithm or
exploitative terms-and-conditions.
Most open source projects are able to build community much by actively
resisting the temptation to create a marketing message or social media
campaign and instead focusing on the authenticity and quality of their
"product" and catering to their contributors' and users niche needs and
sensibilities.
I share Knightwise's love and concern for the HPR community
I agree the intro theme song and voiceover could be accelerated and
improved
I whole-heartedly agree the comments interface could be made easier
to use
I agree that the HPR community feels like a monastery or convent.
Perhaps faith in FOSS is a kind of religious belief or value that
supersedes normal human instincts and drives.
I 100% support hackers that evangelize for HPR on their favorite
bigtech social media platforms.
My FOSS podcatcher Antennapod,
automatically skips the intro. I had to rewind in order to hear the
episode number and host username in order to compose my reply.
And I have trouble engaging with the comments interface on the HPR
site.
I wasn't even aware of comments on my previous episodes and once I did
learn of it I found it easier to reply on Mastodon rather than on the
HPR website.
As a community, I think we take it on faith that there is a place in the
world for people like us that just want to share ideas, unmediated by
shadow-banning, rug-pulling corporations and attention-hacking
algorithms. I want to have a conversation with thoughtful people. I
don't want to be engaged or monetized or exploited
Many of us know that what we do in life cannot be measured in
dollars or like button
clicks, but rather by the quality of our friendships and the
collective ideas that we share.
Zombies on Facebook, Twitter, Discord and Slack must eventually "see
the light" for themselves and come flocking to "the small
web" as they did during Xitter's decline.
HPR has been a significant positive force in my life and I would
hate to sully its openness and authenticity with SEO or other marketing
strategies (I know this is not what you proposed)
I think the enshittified
Discord network is the wrong business to entrust with our community, for
one thing, its app doesn't work on Linux
Marketing and SEO are effective tools for growth-seeking businesses,
but ill-suited for an open source community
Open source communities such as Reddit, Reddis, Terraform, Mongo,
Substack, Medium, and MySQL were destroyed by growth-hackers pulling the
rug out from under open source contributors and authors who eventually
rebelled to fork or reverse-engineer these products and "win the
day."
We geeks at HPR are not alone in our disaffection with
business-mediated social interactions. Look at the mass eexodus from
twitter. And the exit from substack. And from open source communities
like reddit, reddis, terraform, mongo, and mysql. If you want to
contribute your labor to a newly enshittified product they are actively
seeking new contributors (and marketers) as their founding engineers
abandon ship and create their own forks.
People share personal private contact information here that could
endanger their emotional and financial well-being and information
security if it were exposed to a scammer/malware platform like Discord.
Discord sells your phone number to con-artists and scammers. And Xitter
users talk about the blue checkmark validating their social value, but
it's really a mark of shame. Discord hawks a similarly worthless token
of social cred, and paywalls something as fundamental to communication
as emojies. No thanks. They can take their dancing robot and
bursting-heart emojies and shove 'em where the sun don't shine.
Enhance the comments
interface?
Would a bridge server that pulled from our RSS feed and posted to an
HPRbot channel on Mastodon help?
Comment #1 posted on 2024-05-13 07:03:39 by Knightwise
Just a small correction.
Thank you for your show. I appreciate you taking the time to respond, but do need to clarify some points.
The first classic mistake is that people confuse marketing and sales. Marketing is about finding the value proposition behind a certain product and finding the right audience who would benefit from it. It’s not about pushing a product or selling adds. It’s about telling the story of ‘free software / the small web / open source … what have you” to people who don’t know about it and would benefit getting to know it.
At no point in time did I say we needed to chase popularity, controversy or propaganda. At no point did i say we need to monetise HPR. I am saying we need to speak about the VALUE of HPR to people who benefit from it and give everyone a simple way to interact to further engage in the value of building a community.
Ps: Your comparison between a marketeer and a drug dealer to me, feels a little naive and quite offensive. Stallman “markets” free software too, remember ?
Comment #2 posted on 2024-05-13 08:09:14 by kdmurray
Ok but...
- People can skip episodes they don't enjoy; we don't have to limit the audience to semi-retired geeks
- Many of those who 'flocked' to the small web have kept it as an ancillary add-on to their other more mainstream tools: take it from one such Zombie
- Marketing strategies don't by their nature sully anything, they simply make things easier for a target audience to find; it's up to our community to deploy them sensibly
- Discord works just fine on Linux; I use it daily
- There's a big difference between trying to attract some fresh ears and a splinter group trying to "win the day"
But maybe evolution isn't what the community wants. In which case I'm happy to let it continue on its way and meet whatever fate awaits it.
Comment #3 posted on 2024-05-15 19:46:58 by Ken Fallon
Actual Actions ?
Hi hobs and KnightWise,
I think you both say to have meaning full conversations with the community, but each have your own preferred way to do this.
This is fine.
What I am missing is clear statements of actions that HPR can do to increase the number of shows and the number of hosts.
If you say the website needs improving, then at a minimum provide examples to what needs improving. Better point us to stylesheets we can use to fix your points.
When you talk about the comment system needing work, tell us what work is needed, so that we can see if it's intended to be like that (anti spam, or avoiding flame wars), of if it can be improved.
And don't forget that the Janitors just do what they are told, and the owners are the community members. So some things have already been agreed on the mail list. To change it you (not the Janitors) will need to argue your point and convince them to do so.
Looking forward to more very constructive shows that will focus on these goals.
Ken
Keeper of the broom.
Comment #4 posted on 2024-05-17 05:30:14 by knightwise
Low hanging fruit
Hey Ken.
I've been thinking about some "low hanging fruit" we can pick to get some extra traction.
1: Realtime community interaction : Set up a Discord server for HPR community members and listeners (with a janitors closet channel for operational managerial stuff).
2: Social Media presence: I don't think we should be on "every" social media channel, just the ones where our community and target audience is. So keeping in the spirit of "freedom" we might want to focus on Mastodon (and if possible a link with Threads). I think we already have an automated RSS feed that posts links to all the new shows on Twitter and Facebook, but getting "tracktion" on your Social Media presence is easier if you choose a "primary" channel for your engagement.
3: Promotion of these channels in the bumper/trailers of the shows to pull in listeners into engaging with the community. This way we can encourage them to record their own show
4: TALK about HPR in non HPR podcasts: Do we ever have hosts that are guests on other podcasts ? Talking about a podcast "anyone can join" is a great showtopic for other podcasts too.
5: Record a Youtube tutorial on HOW to record and upload a show. Stick it somewhere that is immediately obvious or behind a url www.hackerpublickradio.org/howtorecord
As for redesign of the website, i think we should take a look at the way the pages are built and organised to make it easier to attract new listeners and make it more obvious they can contribute too.
Intro music and voiceover: You know how I feel about it. It's long winded, slow and well... it's built to help people dose off. It should be carefully laid to rest, covered with soil and flowers and replaced by something shorter and snappier. (i'm more then happy to help if you need a new voiceover).
To put my money where my mouth is : Here is the HPR Discord: https://discord.gg/4WwngKE8
Are these some steps in the right direction ?
Comment #5 posted on 2024-05-19 13:38:28 by norrist
Mastodon Comments
I've been experimenting with methods to include a mastodon thread as comments in a static html page.
I'm thinking we can include replies to the hpr bot, https://botsin.space/@hpr as an additional way to comment on a show.
I'll do a show about a few different ways to include mastodon comments.
One method I've been looking at is using the mastodon API to pull the mastodon replies , therefor allowing an opportunity to gate what comments appear on the web page.
Comment #6 posted on 2024-05-31 20:17:31 by Ken Fallon
The link appears invalid
Just had some time to look at the Discord link but it doesn't appear to be working
https://discord.gg/4WwngKE8
Leave Comment
Note to Verbose Commenters
If you can't fit everything you want to say in the comment below then you really should record a response show instead.
Note to Spammers
All comments are moderated. All links are checked by humans. We strip out all html. Feel free to record a show about yourself, or your industry, or any other topic we may find interesting. We also check shows for spam :).
