Hi everyone,
Since our initial rebranding, we’ve received a lot of complaints from many different users about our new name. Some have said that the process wasn’t democratic, others liked the “to our roots” nature of Chapo.Chat, and other still just thought the name wasn’t great. After weeks of deliberation, the admin team has decided to revise our rebranding into something that alleviates all of these issues. Everyone, Welcome to Hexambear.
Addressing your concerns with a new brand
- “The process wasn’t democratic. There was no input from the users.”
With this new name, taking input from our userbase was a top priority. Although initially a throwaway gag, we realized the poll to name Lady Hexbear herself gave us valuable input into how the users felt about the direction of the rebranding. “Amber” was a top-voted and recurring submission into the poll, and the signal couldn’t have been clearer. Although we’re not dropping Hexbear entirely, we think combining the two names is a healthy compromise between what the core team and yall want.
- “Dropping the Chapo branding will hamper name recognition. No previous CTH users will come to the site after a rename.”
Although we initially disagreed with this argument, the facts are clear. After an entire week without a single new user, it’s clear something changed that drew users away from the site. We believe Hexambear drops the negative connotations of the CTH pod while still retaining that name recognition and giving a subtle nod to our humble roots as a subreddit.
- “I don’t like the name Hexbear.”
It’s hard to gauge whether people will like something new. After the initial name announcement, the name Hexbear became especially polarizing - some people loved it, and others despised it. After weeks of debate, graphing, and even some limited focus groups, we’ve discovered Hexambear “crosses the aisle” between these two groups, and even could bring in more newer, less radicalized and “online” users. By combining both the simplicity of Hexbear and the Chapo roots of Amber, we believe this name will please everyone already here. We’ve also discovered that, by “humanizing” our branding with a common name, “Hexambear” can also broaden the reach of our current site to more than just those on the left.
We’re excited for all of the new opportunities with this newer, revised, branding. Although we can’t wait to move forward, we’re announcing this in advance because this will be a hard change. As an anti-spam measure, most ISPs don’t allow a single entitity to set up more than one redirect per year. As we already have one that sends chapo.chat URLs to here, we are forced to completely change the URL, which will happen on April 7th. So set your calendars, change your bookmarks, remember your passwords, and welcome to the new Hexambear!!
Amber.