6 ms·

Reflecting on Steve Pavlina's 2011 post, "Why I Shut Down the Forums"

78 points by moot 13y ago

pearjuice 13y ago
Got to love how 4chan is financially struggling for years yet it seems that every year it grows in cost. I recently came to wonder "How?" and could not find any other reason but Christopher outright lying about the financial status of his business. A business, you ask? Yes, unknown to some, 4chan heavily relies on the freemium model (Pass) and self-served advertisements and some even think these income streams far outdo the cost of running the chans. One day there might be played an open hand regarding financial matters, but for now you will have to live with the repetetive "I struggle to keep 4chan running and am making massive losses" public announcements, clearly published to gain apathy, now and then.
- Recoil42 13y ago
  >and self-served advertisements For which is has a very limited market -- after all, how many legitimate businesses want to advertise on 4chan? There are some, but not many.
- moot 13y ago
  Oh boy, one of these! Let's look at 4chan's growth over the years, taken from my post commemorating our billionth post: https://www.4chan.org/news?all#106 https://www.4chan.org/news?all#106 In 2008, 4chan was accessed by 30 million unique visitors, and served 2.4 billion pageviews. In 2009, 4chan was accessed by 60 million unique visitors, and served 4.4 billion pageviews. In 2010, 4chan was accessed by 130 million unique visitors, and served 7.5 billion pageviews. In 2011, 4chan was accessed by 190 million unique visitors, and served 7 billion pageviews. And I'll throw in 2012 and 2013 YTD for good measure: In 2012, 4chan was accessed by 229 million unique visitors, and served 7.2 billion pageviews. In 2013 YTD, 4chan has been accessed by 222 million unique visitors, and served 5.8 billion pageviews. (Note that pageviews have gone down considerably due to us migrating a lot of page refreshes over to our read-only JSON API.) Despite growing considerably over the years, the site has historically only made money in two ways: donations and advertising. And it should be noted that we haven't accepted a single penny in donations since the fall of 2005. So basically just advertising. I've ranted about why I hate donations on 4chan in the past, but it boils down to my belief that ongoing donations (a la Wikipedia's fundraisers) are unsustainable for large websites, and their ambiguous goal of "keeping the site alive" creates an implicit and non-mutual understanding of what a user should expect in return for their donation. The last fundraiser we did (in 2005) had a very specific goal of raising funds to purchase servers, colocate them, and pay for one year of hosting -- and so I felt more comfortable with it. But make no mistake, I've always hated donations, which is why I've chosen not to accept them for the past 8 years. 4chan's ad inventory consists of three ad units per page. All three unit sizes are deprecated by IAB standards (728x90 and 468x60 have been phased out by most every major publisher, and are no longer recommended), and none appear in the content. They're at the top and bottom of the page, where users spend little time. Adding them inside of threads would probably increase click-thrus and thus command a higher price, but I don't like the idea of scrolling through ads while I browse. Not only is 4chan's inventory not lucrative from a technical standpoint, but it's primarily not lucrative to 99% of advertisers due to the site being the epitome of "not brand safe." It's both all user-generated content, and has tons of adult content, which means we've always struggled to find companies willing to advertise (our longest running advertiser is a Japanese import toy company -- hardly a Unilever or Macy's). We can't use ad networks or exchanges, and what little direct inbound we get comes from small advertisers with low ad spend. Which is precisely why we introduced the self-serve advertisements you mentioned, but only back in July 2013. If you take a look at the CPMs we sell ads at, you'll find we charge well below market, and in fact most of the ads you see on the site were sold at a fraction of a cent CPM (or sometimes for free!). Not to mention the novelty factor wore off quickly and self-serve sales plummeted, but I digress... You also mention 4chan "heavily relies on the freemium model," and reference our 4chan Passes. 4chan Passes were introduced in September 2012, a little more than a year ago. They've certainly helped right the ship, but haven't exactly sold like gangbusters. This is for a few reasons, but primarily because they do very little -- their sole purpose is to remove CAPTCHA. Why? Because as explained in their announcement (https://www.4chan.org/news?all#109 https://www.4chan.org/news?all#109) and subsequent posts, I have an intense distaste in the idea of fragmenting the community into "those who pay," and "those who don't" (a la Reddit Gold), and so 4chan Passes do one very specific thing, and nothing more. Which is reflected in their modest sales numbers. Which leads us to what probably the main reason 4chan is a shitty business: because I choose for it to be one. If I'd decided to rape 4chan for all it was worth, as many would have, I'd probably be sitting on a pretty pile money from now, but as someone who has browsed the site daily for the past 10 years, the thought of seeing it littered with ads and other garbage makes my stomach sick. If that means scraping by for another 10 years, so be it. I wrote this more for myself than you, but I appreciate your skepticism (and I find it extremely amusing).
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    How the hell did you become aware of their comment and write such an excellent reply in under 45min? You're awesome.
    - Liru 13y ago
      He's the original poster of the article, in case you didn't notice. I'm sure that a) He was expecting a comment like that, as evidenced by the "Oh boy, one of these" comment, and prepared to respond to it, and b) He was watching for new comments on the submission.
      - moot 13y ago
        Haha, I didn't pre-write it -- I'm just used to it. I was in fact puzzled by this getting upvoted and not receiving any comments, so I refreshed the page a few times.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        Liru 13y ago
        Sorry if I implied that you pre-wrote it; I meant that more along the line of "I've answered this question multiple times already, so I know more or less what to say".
        moot 13y ago
        No worries. I don't normally respond with as comprehensive a rebuttal, but was in a write-y mood today (and as someone who hates writing, this is not something to pass up).
      - sillysaurus2 13y ago
        Ah, I didn't notice. But now I want to write an "HN Alerts" service that notifies you whenever someone writes a comment with a certain keyword. In moot's case, that would be "4chan," but I'd imagine lots of people would find it useful.
- 8ig8 13y ago
  > and could not find any other reason but Christopher outright lying about the financial status of his business. None? I would think the growing number of users would translate into increased costs. Bandwidth, hardware, lawyers, etc? Do any sites show decreasing costs with increasing popularity? > some even think these income streams far outdo the cost of running the chans. Some? Do you have some links to share on the matter?
wbharding 13y ago
For sites that are not forums-first, I think the age of the online forum has pretty much come to an end, for exactly the reasons Pavlina explains. We ran our forums at Bonanza for about 4 years, and had millions of posts made to them. We spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours of time building tech and training moderators. In spite of the overwhelming effort we put into making them useful and productive, we ultimately had to concede that the folks who sought to undermine our forums had 100x the time that we did, and displayed a level of resolve (creating duplicate accounts/their own forums/blogs to pick apart our decisions) that could have been a huge asset, if not for being dedicated to subterfuge. After seeing all this firsthand for years, I am now solidly of the belief that the Internet and productive forums are hopelessly at odds. I hope Discourse can prove me wrong. But all it takes is a small handful of people to undermine the best technology and intentions. That Paul Graham has been able to keep HN discussions civil for years (even though I've read it causes him great consternation) is an inspiring counterexample. But I can scarcely imagine the number of cycles he and his team probably have to expend to keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as it is here.
- moot 13y ago
  I agree that it's a mistake for most sites to have a forum as some ill-conceived appendage (I once exclaimed to a friend that "forums are favelas!" on most sites), but think interest-based communities have a bright future.
  - brownbat 13y ago
    Yeah, just disaggregate content and comment. It was stupid to have every local newspaper build a boutique moderation system. We'll have this really figured out when I open a news story in my browser and a second window pops up on my other monitor with a list of comments linked to that article from Twitter, Facebook, G+, HN, Reddit, Digg, or whatever social sites or aggregators I'm into. EDIT: brevity.
    - marvin 13y ago
      That's actually not a bad idea at all, if you are able to do it in a way that works well with the original content. Could be as simple as a Firefox plugin. The big problem is that a lot of people have to adopt it if it's going to work at a large scale (no one participates on an empty comment page). My country's biggest online newspaper recently switched to full-name only comments, which is a dealbreaker for me. It would be great to have an alternative community which isn't subject to each news source's arbitrary moderation policies. I have seen outright censorship many times, and it doesn't feel right to contribute to an online discussion where certain views are removed from consideration. In fact, I feel that the full-name policy is a flawed online discussion strategy, and this would be a good way to solve it.
willvarfar 13y ago
For those of us not knowing anything about moot nor 4chan, what decisions is he alluding to and what's the back story?
- code_duck 13y ago
  4chan is one of the worlds largest discussion forums, with sections covering a variety of topics (mainly comics, manga, games, nude girls, cooking, fitness). The decisions to which he refers are the sort of policy changes and choices faces by anyone who operates a web community - requiring a captcha to post, offering accounts rather than pure ephemeral anonymity and so on.
Dewie 13y ago
Yeah... Pavlina shutting down his forums coincided with him finding out that a few of the regular members of his forum had been starting another forum/online community. He felt that this was a betrayal, because it was "behind his back", although there were no allegiance to his online community. This new community was something of an invite-only thing, which someone felt was elitism, but which seemed more like a clique thing (though some people felt bad about not being invited). There were definitely cliques on those forums, particularly among many of the most frequent posters. I viewed Pavlina's thought process in the wake of this "incident" (there was a lot of drama about him nuking the forums) as very.. after-the-fact rationalizing-ly. In his mind, this was a very calculated decision, something which had been building up to for years, and not just something that had been slightly gnawing at him and then suddenly breaking the camel's back because of one jealous fit over someone deciding to create a more tight-knit community (which he wasn't invited to...? I don't remember). Well that's just my impression of the whole thing.
- dspeyer 13y ago
  Your claim is the exact opposite of what he wrote. Do you have any evidence?
  - ericabiz 13y ago
    Here: http://stevepavlinalies.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/why-steve-pavlina-is-closing-his-forums/ http://stevepavlinalies.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/why-steve-p... (Note: I am not the person you replied to; I was also around the Steve Pavlina forums/website at the time, and know several of the "insiders" personally, though I wasn't a frequent poster there.)
    - jdbernard 13y ago
      Hm. stevepavlinalies.com? I have no history with this issue, but this whole site seems to sit around DH0 and DH1 (see http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). I have a hard time accepting this as unbiased and factual. If anything, this site seems to be an example of the type of user Steve claims derailed the forums to the point he needed to shut them down.
lnanek2 13y ago
Interesting checking the traffic rankings of the two sites. stevepavlina.com killed a popular part of the site and has gone steadily down over the past two years, ranked at 13951: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stevepavlina.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stevepavlina.com 4chan has added boards whenever I check, has gone up rank pretty steadily the past two years, and is ranked at 729: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.org http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.org Both authors intellectually masturbate quite a bit in long posts, but it is clear who made the better decision in terms of user interest.

78 points by moot 13y ago

Got to love how 4chan is financially struggling for years yet it seems that every year it grows in cost. I recently came to wonder "How?" and could not find any other reason but Christopher outright lying about the financial status of his business. A business, you ask? Yes, unknown to some, 4chan heavily relies on the freemium model (Pass) and self-served advertisements and some even think these income streams far outdo the cost of running the chans. One day there might be played an open hand regarding financial matters, but for now you will have to live with the repetetive "I struggle to keep 4chan running and am making massive losses" public announcements, clearly published to gain apathy, now and then.

Recoil42 13y ago
>and self-served advertisements For which is has a very limited market -- after all, how many legitimate businesses want to advertise on 4chan? There are some, but not many.
moot 13y ago
Oh boy, one of these! Let's look at 4chan's growth over the years, taken from my post commemorating our billionth post: https://www.4chan.org/news?all#106 https://www.4chan.org/news?all#106 In 2008, 4chan was accessed by 30 million unique visitors, and served 2.4 billion pageviews. In 2009, 4chan was accessed by 60 million unique visitors, and served 4.4 billion pageviews. In 2010, 4chan was accessed by 130 million unique visitors, and served 7.5 billion pageviews. In 2011, 4chan was accessed by 190 million unique visitors, and served 7 billion pageviews. And I'll throw in 2012 and 2013 YTD for good measure: In 2012, 4chan was accessed by 229 million unique visitors, and served 7.2 billion pageviews. In 2013 YTD, 4chan has been accessed by 222 million unique visitors, and served 5.8 billion pageviews. (Note that pageviews have gone down considerably due to us migrating a lot of page refreshes over to our read-only JSON API.) Despite growing considerably over the years, the site has historically only made money in two ways: donations and advertising. And it should be noted that we haven't accepted a single penny in donations since the fall of 2005. So basically just advertising. I've ranted about why I hate donations on 4chan in the past, but it boils down to my belief that ongoing donations (a la Wikipedia's fundraisers) are unsustainable for large websites, and their ambiguous goal of "keeping the site alive" creates an implicit and non-mutual understanding of what a user should expect in return for their donation. The last fundraiser we did (in 2005) had a very specific goal of raising funds to purchase servers, colocate them, and pay for one year of hosting -- and so I felt more comfortable with it. But make no mistake, I've always hated donations, which is why I've chosen not to accept them for the past 8 years. 4chan's ad inventory consists of three ad units per page. All three unit sizes are deprecated by IAB standards (728x90 and 468x60 have been phased out by most every major publisher, and are no longer recommended), and none appear in the content. They're at the top and bottom of the page, where users spend little time. Adding them inside of threads would probably increase click-thrus and thus command a higher price, but I don't like the idea of scrolling through ads while I browse. Not only is 4chan's inventory not lucrative from a technical standpoint, but it's primarily not lucrative to 99% of advertisers due to the site being the epitome of "not brand safe." It's both all user-generated content, and has tons of adult content, which means we've always struggled to find companies willing to advertise (our longest running advertiser is a Japanese import toy company -- hardly a Unilever or Macy's). We can't use ad networks or exchanges, and what little direct inbound we get comes from small advertisers with low ad spend. Which is precisely why we introduced the self-serve advertisements you mentioned, but only back in July 2013. If you take a look at the CPMs we sell ads at, you'll find we charge well below market, and in fact most of the ads you see on the site were sold at a fraction of a cent CPM (or sometimes for free!). Not to mention the novelty factor wore off quickly and self-serve sales plummeted, but I digress... You also mention 4chan "heavily relies on the freemium model," and reference our 4chan Passes. 4chan Passes were introduced in September 2012, a little more than a year ago. They've certainly helped right the ship, but haven't exactly sold like gangbusters. This is for a few reasons, but primarily because they do very little -- their sole purpose is to remove CAPTCHA. Why? Because as explained in their announcement (https://www.4chan.org/news?all#109 https://www.4chan.org/news?all#109) and subsequent posts, I have an intense distaste in the idea of fragmenting the community into "those who pay," and "those who don't" (a la Reddit Gold), and so 4chan Passes do one very specific thing, and nothing more. Which is reflected in their modest sales numbers. Which leads us to what probably the main reason 4chan is a shitty business: because I choose for it to be one. If I'd decided to rape 4chan for all it was worth, as many would have, I'd probably be sitting on a pretty pile money from now, but as someone who has browsed the site daily for the past 10 years, the thought of seeing it littered with ads and other garbage makes my stomach sick. If that means scraping by for another 10 years, so be it. I wrote this more for myself than you, but I appreciate your skepticism (and I find it extremely amusing).
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  How the hell did you become aware of their comment and write such an excellent reply in under 45min? You're awesome.
  - Liru 13y ago
    He's the original poster of the article, in case you didn't notice. I'm sure that a) He was expecting a comment like that, as evidenced by the "Oh boy, one of these" comment, and prepared to respond to it, and b) He was watching for new comments on the submission.
    - moot 13y ago
      Haha, I didn't pre-write it -- I'm just used to it. I was in fact puzzled by this getting upvoted and not receiving any comments, so I refreshed the page a few times.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - Liru 13y ago
        Sorry if I implied that you pre-wrote it; I meant that more along the line of "I've answered this question multiple times already, so I know more or less what to say".
        moot 13y ago
        No worries. I don't normally respond with as comprehensive a rebuttal, but was in a write-y mood today (and as someone who hates writing, this is not something to pass up).
    - sillysaurus2 13y ago
      Ah, I didn't notice. But now I want to write an "HN Alerts" service that notifies you whenever someone writes a comment with a certain keyword. In moot's case, that would be "4chan," but I'd imagine lots of people would find it useful.
8ig8 13y ago
> and could not find any other reason but Christopher outright lying about the financial status of his business. None? I would think the growing number of users would translate into increased costs. Bandwidth, hardware, lawyers, etc? Do any sites show decreasing costs with increasing popularity? > some even think these income streams far outdo the cost of running the chans. Some? Do you have some links to share on the matter?

wbharding 13y ago

For sites that are not forums-first, I think the age of the online forum has pretty much come to an end, for exactly the reasons Pavlina explains. We ran our forums at Bonanza for about 4 years, and had millions of posts made to them. We spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours of time building tech and training moderators. In spite of the overwhelming effort we put into making them useful and productive, we ultimately had to concede that the folks who sought to undermine our forums had 100x the time that we did, and displayed a level of resolve (creating duplicate accounts/their own forums/blogs to pick apart our decisions) that could have been a huge asset, if not for being dedicated to subterfuge. After seeing all this firsthand for years, I am now solidly of the belief that the Internet and productive forums are hopelessly at odds. I hope Discourse can prove me wrong. But all it takes is a small handful of people to undermine the best technology and intentions. That Paul Graham has been able to keep HN discussions civil for years (even though I've read it causes him great consternation) is an inspiring counterexample. But I can scarcely imagine the number of cycles he and his team probably have to expend to keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as it is here.

moot 13y ago
I agree that it's a mistake for most sites to have a forum as some ill-conceived appendage (I once exclaimed to a friend that "forums are favelas!" on most sites), but think interest-based communities have a bright future.
- brownbat 13y ago
  Yeah, just disaggregate content and comment. It was stupid to have every local newspaper build a boutique moderation system. We'll have this really figured out when I open a news story in my browser and a second window pops up on my other monitor with a list of comments linked to that article from Twitter, Facebook, G+, HN, Reddit, Digg, or whatever social sites or aggregators I'm into. EDIT: brevity.
  - marvin 13y ago
    That's actually not a bad idea at all, if you are able to do it in a way that works well with the original content. Could be as simple as a Firefox plugin. The big problem is that a lot of people have to adopt it if it's going to work at a large scale (no one participates on an empty comment page). My country's biggest online newspaper recently switched to full-name only comments, which is a dealbreaker for me. It would be great to have an alternative community which isn't subject to each news source's arbitrary moderation policies. I have seen outright censorship many times, and it doesn't feel right to contribute to an online discussion where certain views are removed from consideration. In fact, I feel that the full-name policy is a flawed online discussion strategy, and this would be a good way to solve it.

willvarfar 13y ago

For those of us not knowing anything about moot nor 4chan, what decisions is he alluding to and what's the back story?

code_duck 13y ago
4chan is one of the worlds largest discussion forums, with sections covering a variety of topics (mainly comics, manga, games, nude girls, cooking, fitness). The decisions to which he refers are the sort of policy changes and choices faces by anyone who operates a web community - requiring a captcha to post, offering accounts rather than pure ephemeral anonymity and so on.

Dewie 13y ago

Yeah... Pavlina shutting down his forums coincided with him finding out that a few of the regular members of his forum had been starting another forum/online community. He felt that this was a betrayal, because it was "behind his back", although there were no allegiance to his online community. This new community was something of an invite-only thing, which someone felt was elitism, but which seemed more like a clique thing (though some people felt bad about not being invited). There were definitely cliques on those forums, particularly among many of the most frequent posters. I viewed Pavlina's thought process in the wake of this "incident" (there was a lot of drama about him nuking the forums) as very.. after-the-fact rationalizing-ly. In his mind, this was a very calculated decision, something which had been building up to for years, and not just something that had been slightly gnawing at him and then suddenly breaking the camel's back because of one jealous fit over someone deciding to create a more tight-knit community (which he wasn't invited to...? I don't remember). Well that's just my impression of the whole thing.

dspeyer 13y ago
Your claim is the exact opposite of what he wrote. Do you have any evidence?
- ericabiz 13y ago
  Here: http://stevepavlinalies.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/why-steve-pavlina-is-closing-his-forums/ http://stevepavlinalies.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/why-steve-p... (Note: I am not the person you replied to; I was also around the Steve Pavlina forums/website at the time, and know several of the "insiders" personally, though I wasn't a frequent poster there.)
  - jdbernard 13y ago
    Hm. stevepavlinalies.com? I have no history with this issue, but this whole site seems to sit around DH0 and DH1 (see http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). I have a hard time accepting this as unbiased and factual. If anything, this site seems to be an example of the type of user Steve claims derailed the forums to the point he needed to shut them down.

lnanek2 13y ago

Interesting checking the traffic rankings of the two sites. stevepavlina.com killed a popular part of the site and has gone steadily down over the past two years, ranked at 13951: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stevepavlina.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/stevepavlina.com 4chan has added boards whenever I check, has gone up rank pretty steadily the past two years, and is ranked at 729: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.org http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.org Both authors intellectually masturbate quite a bit in long posts, but it is clear who made the better decision in terms of user interest.