
SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society. - bkanber
http://burakkanber.com/blog/sitechat-a-postmortem-or-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-society/
======
steve8918
This post turned out to be much more interesting than I initially thought it
was going to be. I thought it was going to be another post-mortem on why a
particular startup failed, but this was in fact much more interesting.

The idea that this community bootstrapped itself, and self-evolved to the
point of including things like trolls and "white knights" to me is extremely
fascinating.

The other thing interesting is the idea that it was able to get 10k users
without any effort. There was definitely a market for this particular app, but
only because it's free. I'm curious how much a monetization attempt would have
hurt the bootstrapping effort, and whether or not it would be translatable to
things like Instagram or Pinterest, which has zero monetization but a lot of
users.

------
pixelmonkey
Burak is a world-class hacker.

I am one of the friends whom he mentions "make fun of me because I write
software entirely from scratch". It's true, I bust his chops about it (for
example: he once wrote a search engine with PHP / MongoDB so he could learn
about tokenization techniques / inverted indexes; luckily he threw it away for
ElasticSearch eventually).

But, that's what makes him an awesome programmer: he hacks things to learn,
then builds thing to last. And he has fun doing it.

~~~
bkanber
I think I have _too_ much fun doing it. Isn't work supposed to be boring, or
something?

------
danso
This post epitomizes the fun of being a hacker

~~~
GuiA
Building and observing virtual communities is the most fun I've ever had in my
life (dabbling self-proclaimed psychologists could write dozens of blog posts
on the matter :) ).

For almost 7 years now, I've been a moderator of a once very active (several
thousand daily active users) and still somewhat active forum; and the
mythologies, unspoken norms, cliques, memes, etc. that emerge are just
fascinating. It's really a miniature world in itself.

What's even more interesting is adding arbitrary game mechanics on top of it.
I've built a couple PHP webgames when I was in college, and while none of them
became quite big, fascinating patterns emerged. In most of them, I would, by
design, let as many elements as possible be up to the players; and you end up
with micro-societies that tend to show the same basic behavioral patterns as
our own, just on a smaller scale.

For example in one of them instead of just collecting resources and spending
them to build weapons like most games of the genre do, the game would force
you to join a coalition where a player-elected leader would decide how to
spend resources collected by the players. Players could plot to overthrow the
leader, or re-elect him if they felt he was fair, but also smuggle resources
to enemy coalitions, etc. In some coalitions, the leader tried to be fair and
just, but that would ultimately lead to his demise; in some others, leaders
would be dictators that the other players actually appreciated and supported;
and in some others, the leaders would plot like crazy with some players while
pretending to be honest publicly.

Yeah, these experiments are fun and humans are fascinating :)

~~~
brador
Sounds fun. Any links to material on making Php games? Did you just link spam
forums for users? What stops people playing?

~~~
GuiA
There's not that much literature, surprisingly. You can find some basic
tutorials on how to create scripts to do basic things, but to my knowledge
there are no complete compendium walking through the creation of a complex
game like OGame or Travian (two of the most well known) from A to Z.

As far as users, I publicized the games to my friends and on forums where I
was an active member, and it was pretty much all word of mouth from there. I
never went past 4 digits though.

As for what stops people playing, it's a good question with varied answers.
Some people have naturally a short attention span, and move on to other
things. Some people just slowly fade away after a few weeks/months because
they find another newer game they like better. Some stay for a long time even
if they get bored by the game because they like the community. It's very
varied.

Ultimately, if you want to keep your players, you need to be active in the
community you created: organizing events, communicating with players to solve
their problems/questions, adding new features (and publicizing upcoming
features they can get excited about); and all of that is very time consuming
and hard to do if you're not full time on that project.

------
akkartik
This story reminds me of [http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-
Cannot-Possibl...](http://www.metafilter.com/98848/The-Post-That-Cannot-
Possibly-Go-Wrong#3435145)

------
ivix
Interesting post. This is exactly the same kind of thing that happens on
smaller IRC networks. Power groups come and go. Sometimes servers (with their
own regular users) join the network and stay for a few months. Political
compromises are made (you can enforce your crazy rule if you bring X number of
users). Fascinating to watch, but a colossal time drain.

~~~
bkanber
A good friend of mine, pixelmonkey, likes to say that SiteChat was just me
rebuilding IRC as a Chrome Extension. I agree with that assessment!

------
adrianwaj
I remember Pud let mobog go even when it had many thousands of users some
years ago when mobiles could start taking photos and sending emails. Probably
a mistake, ask him. But, why not get webmasters interested in it, give them a
widget and a different color username for their site and watch what happens.

\- also put in a bitcoin address for donations - both for you and the
webmaster.

------
dns
Burak hocam sen paylaşırsında ben vote etmem mi yahu :)

~~~
bkanber
Anlamadim.. cok az Turkce biliyorum!

~~~
derleth
> Anlamadim.. cok az Turkce biliyorum!

This, on the other hand, is translated quite well:

> I beg your pardon .. I know very little Turkish!

~~~
bkanber
Finally, Google translate accurately translated something! Though I meant
"anlamadim" as "I didn't understand you".. which is close enough to "I beg
your pardon", I guess.

