About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

If you look at ClouldFlare's report, Google Analytics misses at least 30% of the pageviews, so there's a good chunk of unaccounted visitors. You are more like a third/quarter the size.

Minecraft videos are regularly in the top 10 most viewed on YouTube. I think it's that Minecraft is huge plus the players are very engaged on the internet with it.

To be honest I don't personally think the traffic that some of the accounts running under the free/$20 plans are sustainable. I know for my part we've been running several very large sites through their service which cut our bandwidth usage approximately in half. That's the level of bandwidth that was costing about $3k+ all by itself per month.

Doing the math, I think regardless of Cloudflare and their economies of scale, they will start having to charge more at some point for traffic. I know we'd pay it but I have to imagine for large traffic, but small income sites (which 4chan counts among them I think?) this could present an issue.

Cloudflare offers a good value, but not having things like html caching is frustrating and one of the reasons we're not using them.

Where are you getting $200 from?

Think of it like a really crowded dormitory whose lower floors are overrun by a never-ending frat party. The first person you run into when you show up will likely be projectile vomiting, or teabagging someone who passed out. Bored jerks are free to wander upstairs and urinate in any room in the building, and the deafeningly loud music and incoherent screaming is a backdrop (albeit distant at times) to every stimulating conversation that takes place.

If you want to enjoy yourself, you kind of have to know where you're going, and how to knock. Even on "quiet" boards like /lit/, the front page is churning with new threads. Everything is steeped in weird slang and inside jokes. There is no respect for newcomers. People who don't "get" the culture are dismissed with "lurk moar" or simply ignored.

Also, there is always someone, somewhere, who will find any given post hilarious.

Sort of. Each board is more or less its own community (much like how different subreddits are independent of each other on Reddit). /b/ and /v/ (Random and Video Games) contain the cause of the great majority of 4chan's esteemed reputation.

The other boards are a lot more calm and enjoyable. But some people enjoy the chaos :)

So far 4chan is one of the last places I found which still fosters an absolute anything-goes policy. It is almost a last frontier of a world where people can dump their thoughts, ideas just without having to use any form of self censorship. Once one gets over some idealistic expectation how other people should behave it is, at least from my perspective, a truly liberating experience.

Not really, no. I think it's size is more indicative of the standard age range it draws (a younger audience).

People keep telling me that there are decent parts of the place. Each time I try to venture in it is such a dizzying mess that I stopped trying.

It makes me feel old.

To add to what has been said - on 4chan, the very "controversial" topics are beaten over and over and over again.

Go to /pol/ and you will see at least two rasict threads at any given moment, then some other name-calling and misoginy. Go to /g/ and you will see non-stop dumb OS wars ("Mac OS X sucks!" - "STFU, your mother is a whore"), and so on.

Feminism, homosexuality, religion, those topics are always popular no matter the board.

It would help to add that while the age of everyone posting is a broad range, the most active users are teenagers and people in their early 20s. At least that's the impression i get after browsing for a few years.

Also, while it could be said that notoriety attracts a good crowd for them, so does their anime discussion as there are several boards dedicated to different styles of artwork (and, of course, the fact that the entire website is styled after another hugely popular Japanese Anime board, 2chan.net).

I would recomend the /fit. Is a great place to get tips and encouragement for exercises.

But go away from /b, it's a mess.

Maybe you've got a wrong impression of humanity?

>4chan's comment system is awful.

They better change it to be successful.

Hacker newsers: don't get caught into this silly line of thinking. Remember myspace? Remember how many people wanted glittery text of their name?

The comment system is part of its charm, it comes from the japanese imageboards.

What's not to understand? It's so simplistic it can't be simplier.

You just have a thread with no hierarchy (except for the opening post). You can "reply" on some post in some thread, but the "reply" is just marked by post ID.

The 4chanX helps with this.

What kind of comment system do you want?

I'd write something in detail but I really can't guess what your complaint would be. Unless you want recursive threading or tags.

Install the mentioned 4chanx extension. Hovering a quoted post ID will actually show the post, and you can also see/expand replies to a post in the top right.

The chaotic comment system IS the application. There's nothing else and that's what makes it so unique.

If you have an adWords account, you get to exceed that limit.

Google doesn't enforce this limit (yet)

My understanding is, not at the scale they operate at. You're not saving any database lookups, and their bandwidth is probably cheaper. Plus the lifetime of their uploads is extremely limited - an hour or two?

yeah. has been slashdotted!