SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society.
burakkanber.com
burakkanber.com
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.
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.
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 :)
That project had 10,000 active users, and it was all word-of-mouth.
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.
- also put in a bitcoin address for donations - both for you and the webmaster.
This, on the other hand, is translated quite well:
> I beg your pardon .. I know very little Turkish!
Google Translate has a fun take on this:
> I do not vote you fuck my teacher John paylaşırsında
"Burak, my teacher, I won't vote your shared fuck"
I still can't figure out what it means. My Turkish is very weak.
I have no idea why "yahu" is translated as fuck though. It means something like "oh my Lord" in Arabic, Turks often use it as a filler.
> My teacher* Burak, wouldn't I give you a vote (up) when you share?
By the way, his sentence is grammatically incorrect in Turkish too.
* I've translated "hocam" as "my teacher" but it's not a accurate translation. In Modern Turkey it's slug which means something like "someone who you value their opinions".
edit: kayral's translation is more accurate then mine.