Do you think controversy can be used for social value? RE aligning with "socialism"

EH
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https://news.ycombinator.com/ite... I've been spending my nights and weekends studying the root-causes of many of the things I don't like about the world, and building tooling to accelerate my self-education in the company of like-minded individuals. This has resulted in a "collaborative self-education platform", with a bit of a "socialist" tilt: money earned by the platform is split 50/50 with the members of the platform, and over time, the platform will become increasingly open-source and collectively owned. I started listing the platform on various startup directories (BetaList, AngelList, etc) as sort of a nonchalant experiment as I approach "minimum viable product" status, and then I decided to share it on HackerNews. I was expecting maybe a ping or two, but it essentially hugged my little virtual machine to death. Here's a screenshot of Google Analytics from this morning, demonstrating the consequences of not adequately preparing for traffic: Despite the suffocation, I was able to capture quite a bit of awesome feedback from the kind folks over at HN. There were a few comments on the thread (linked above) that got me thinking: "It was a poor choice of words to put [socialism] in the tagline then, for a number of reasons." "Eliminate the ideology, focus messaging on the value and support. "Socialist" is a very broad and burdened term." "No. Eliminating the ideology is never possible. If you try, you implicitly support the dominant one. Avoiding the term is a good idea though." I'm wondering if the fact that it's a controversial, ambiguous, polarizing, sometimes incendiary term is actually an *asset* to my mission, which is to "accelerate the world's transition to socialism through collaborative self-education". By branding it as a "socialist social network", I'm thinking the polarization will be self-selecting. People who have made up their minds will steer clear; people on the fence might get curious; people who identify as socialists will be very curious. The original branding was "cyberpunk social network" in an avoidance of polarization, but I'm wondering if polarization can be more effective than playing it safe. I would love to hear what you think of this dilemma.
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