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I thought 4chan was the largest forum on the Internet, and in fact I remember when 4chan displayed the total amount of live content on their servers as being 10

by ue_ 9y ago

I thought 4chan was the largest forum on the Internet, and in fact I remember when 4chan displayed the total amount of live content on their servers as being 100GB. Now it's more than 1300GB. 4chan thus seems to have become more popular. People really do hang out on 4chan, though it's lost some share recently to 8chan, but 4chan is certainly a very large forum, the 200k+ current users, as displayed on their homepage too, confirms this. For a place where you don't have to worry about drive-by downvoters, for all its faults, 4chan is excellent for getting your opinion across.

skybrian 9y ago
I meant compared to the really large scale social networks. I don't know how accurate this is, but to put some numbers on it, Reddit seems to be #9 and Twitter #11 according to Alexa [1] and 4chan is rated much lower [2]. Although, Hacker News ranks higher than I expected [3], which seems suspicious. Perhaps there's a better way to measure it? [1] http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites [2] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.com [3] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  There's a chance HN could be artificially compressing the number of upvotes site-wide in order to maintain the illusion of smallness. Reddit did this same thing for nearly a decade. E.g. Obama's AMA only appeared to have 14k upvotes even though in reality hundreds of thousands of people voted on it. It'd be harder to get away with on HN, but maintaining the illusion of a tight-knit community for as long as possible is pretty crucial to the site's success.
- r721 9y ago
  That's wrong 4chan domain - it should be 4chan.org, not 4chan.com: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.org http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.org
wcummings 9y ago
4chan makes almost $0, for all the time moot poured into it and all its supposed users. Moderation or lack thereof is probably why the ad space is so worthless. Its silly to compare it to Facebook.

by ue_ 9y ago

skybrian 9y ago

I meant compared to the really large scale social networks. I don't know how accurate this is, but to put some numbers on it, Reddit seems to be #9 and Twitter #11 according to Alexa [1] and 4chan is rated much lower [2]. Although, Hacker News ranks higher than I expected [3], which seems suspicious. Perhaps there's a better way to measure it? [1] http://www.alexa.com/topsites http://www.alexa.com/topsites [2] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.com [3] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com

sillysaurus3 9y ago
There's a chance HN could be artificially compressing the number of upvotes site-wide in order to maintain the illusion of smallness. Reddit did this same thing for nearly a decade. E.g. Obama's AMA only appeared to have 14k upvotes even though in reality hundreds of thousands of people voted on it. It'd be harder to get away with on HN, but maintaining the illusion of a tight-knit community for as long as possible is pretty crucial to the site's success.
r721 9y ago
That's wrong 4chan domain - it should be 4chan.org, not 4chan.com: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.org http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.org

wcummings 9y ago

4chan makes almost $0, for all the time moot poured into it and all its supposed users. Moderation or lack thereof is probably why the ad space is so worthless. Its silly to compare it to Facebook.