
Reflecting on Steve Pavlina's 2011 post, "Why I Shut Down the Forums" - moot
http://chrishateswriting.com/post/68484046612/reflecting-on-steve-pavlinas-blog-post
======
wbharding
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
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
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
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
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
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.

------
pearjuice
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.

~~~
moot
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).

~~~
selmnoo
> but it boils down to my belief that ongoing donations (a la Wikipedia's
> fundraisers) are unsustainable for large websites

But... they work. They're not unsustainable. If they were unsustainable, the
very example you cite wouldn't exist. Hell, even really small websites make a
killing purely by soliciting donations. Maria Popova of brainpickings does it
and makes an unbelievable amount from it (though, she does it by misleading
her users and doing ethically dubious things here and there). There's a
balance to be reached here, but I don't think it's particularly difficult to
pull off.

> 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)

That depends on the implementation. Reddit did an awesome job of rolling out
Reddit Gold, it most definitely did _not_ fragment the community.

> 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 don't know moot. Who's to say 4chan would've gotten as big if you were more
involved in getting money out of it? Seems to me, that considering the
userbase of 4chan, another place like 4chan but without the ads would've been
the go to place for them if 4chan wasn't very much like 4chan as it's been.
User-experience matters in getting the users -- that's why Reddit won, that's
why Imgur won, etc. etc.

~~~
moot
> But... they work. They're not unsustainable. If they were, the very example
> you cite wouldn't exist.

I disagree. Wikipedia is one of the best examples of sustenance-by-ongoing-
donations, but it's an extreme edge case. They rely on their non-profit status
and support from companies in the form of free hardware/bandwidth/etc, in
addition to donations from end users. There are few examples of large websites
successfully sustaining themselves long-term via donations, whereas the web is
littered with plenty of dead websites that attempted the same (or transitioned
away from relying on donations).

Perhaps I should have specified donations as your "primary/sole funding model"
as unsustainable.

> That depends on the implementation. Reddit did an awesome job of rolling out
> Reddit Gold, it most definitely did not fragment the community.

I would agree Reddit has done a good job with Gold, but wanted to emphasize
the contrast between the two. Gold offers tons of great features, whereas
4chan's Pass only offers one, because its more in line with the ethos of the
site (that everyone shares an equal voice, etc).

> I don't know moot. Who's to say 4chan would've gotten as big if you were
> more involved in getting money out of it? Seems to me, that considering the
> userbase of 4chan, another place like 4chan but without the ads would've
> been the go to place for them. User-experience matters in getting the users
> -- that's why Reddit won, that's why Imgur won, etc. etc.

I can't tell if you misinterpreted my response, or if I'm misinterpreting
yours, but I didn't intend to take credit for 4chan's success, but think it's
important to point out (in the context of OP's comment) that I've deliberately
forgone the opportunity to monetize 4chan to its full potential throughout its
existence. At almost every fork of "making a quick buck" and "staying the
course," I've chosen the latter. It's only when we've been in truly dire
straits that I've chosen the former.

~~~
uchi
please continue to stay the course, moot. For better or worse, I love the site
and its community. 4chan has been arguably more influential and relevant to
the internet as a whole than many other similarly sized communities. It's
managed to weather the influx of new users very well, which is something that
has greatly degraded the quality other sites like reddit and tumblr.

------
Dewie
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
Your claim is the exact opposite of what he wrote. Do you have any evidence?

~~~
vinceguidry
I was a member of both forums. I watched the whole thing go down and
participated in the discussion, including a short correspondence with Steve.

The GP is correct in his characterization, as was Steve in his post. Steve had
been mulling over the 'forum problem' for some time, not really sure what to
do with it. The discovery of the alternate forum was what finally tipped his
hand. There was a sense of betrayal and it pervaded his posts and his actions
in the last few days before he killed it.

The other forum itself was, as the GP put it, a very private, invite-only
community. It remains so to this day. They started it because of a
disagreement in how the board was being moderated. Many long-time Pavlina
posters were disappointed when very personal posts became fodder for vitriol
and they perceived that nothing was being done. After about a year of this,
they voted with their feet and went to the new place.

I witnessed a very curious dynamic in the last few days. The members Steve was
complaining about with the "sense of entitlement" and the members who'd
started the new forum were exactly the same. There were lots of hurt feelings
flying around and a lot of things were said that would have been better left
unsaid. Steve wielded his ban-hammer with little concern, perhaps because he'd
already decided to shut it all down.

I detected a bit of unacknowledged self-serving-ness in Steve's blog post
concerning the shutdown. Everybody was cool with Steve's benevolent
dictatorship, but after awhile he'd just moved on, not posting much if at all.
I guess he thought that the king could leave the castle for years and the
subjects would just welcome him back with open arms when he finally steps back
in and hands out royal decrees. His blog post swept a lot of stuff under the
rug, that, honestly, probably should have been, but he didn't take
responsibility for any of the bad stuff and just pawned it off on the new
forum.

The situation definitely needed to be rectified, but his handling left a lot
to be desired.

~~~
vinceguidry
I was going to go search through the forum archives to find relevant threads,
but he took them down. Though, if memory serves, he'd deleted most of that
ugly firestorm anyway, particularly the parts that one could use to paint him
in a negative light.

