I am curious about what other large sites there are out there run by a single person? Is 4chan the biggest site run by one person?
VISITS TO DRUDGE 11/27/12
033,621,596 PAST 24 HOURS 1,218,005,142 PAST 31 DAYS 11,345,750,362 PAST YEAR
He heavily influences a lot of conservative politics, as his reach is massive. Many people think he helped drum up Romney support with a specific narrative across his site in the 2012 Republican primary (whether or not he was paid is up to which conspiracy theorist you speak with).
A link on his site can result in millions of page views
I started reading the Drudge Report a couple of years ago, but the more I read, the more I feel like he is catering to racists, homophobes, and the other extremists that have destroyed the republican party.
Disclaimer: I share many libertarian views, but I also believe in many things that would be considered "liberal." Dividing politics into clearly defined parties only inhibits honest self-assessment and productive conversation.
It was so much that we actually had one/two day campaigns ready to launch when we were featured..
As for the story:
I launched it back in 2009 as a last ditch effort to save my company (Searchles) and was featured on TechCrunch a few times that first week. But, since then, the coverage has been almost nonexistent. I have relied on organic growth, SEO, and old fashioned, bullheaded persistence since then. It has grown about 5x each of the past 3 years.
I have been running it in my spare time since March of 2010, and I am not the world's greatest web developer, so almost all improvements have been on the back end just trying to scale the site.
If you are interested in the tech: I run MySQL on a 2TB SSD RAID 5 array, but then I use data caching servers I developed myself to speed up serving the site (some data in memory, most on SSD). The near real time search was also developed by me. Only 4 total servers are used to run the site.
does the "possibly_sensitive" attribute in the Twitter API help at all? I ask because I'm looking into using it on a project, but I don't have enough source data to be able to tell how accurate it is.
Would it hurt your traffic too much to not have it displayed so prominently on the front page?
I tried some searches on imgur and nothing nasty comes up. On Twicsy it is very easy to get nasty stuff to appear.
Looks like imgur uses Google Adsense, they have cut me off several times.
Maybe you need to do the same thing: set up an "un-affiliated" website that allows you find all the 18+ content on Twicsy, haha
Do you think it's your user?
Also what are your thoughts on twitters changes to their rules of the road? I'm launching my own 3rd party service and have been warned by some mates. What advice can you give?
My answer is 4chan FYI. Although IMO janitors count as staff...
The hardest part was to scale it economically. I have always been a big fan of SSD's, which are instrumental in scaling a site that doesn't have the resources to put data they need fast access to in RAM. For example, a site with more money might use redis to cache all the pics for each user (sorted, unique lists), plus all the tweets that point to a pic, but there is too much for me to do that in RAM without selling organs. Also, redis is not very memory efficient. But the advantage is that technologies like that are easy to use and easy to scale. If you have money.
The Twitter rule changes freak me out every day but I have not seen any specific moves that make me think they are after me. It is probably a matter of time, but then you need to think about what form that will take. Will they just cut off the Streaming API? That would be a big move. Will they remove pics from the streaming API? I doubt it. Will they make moves to single me out? That would be weird. Will they come after me with lawyers for caching tweets? I don't see that either. But, while I don't see anything specific, there are a lot of what ifs.
My advice is to use Twitter to get off the ground and then move away from Twitter altogether if at all humanly possible. That's the strategy they are forcing with their stupid rules, so maybe they will see the light at some point and rethink their strategy.
Some suggestions:
1) Improving the quality of the site
2) Remove the adult content to attract better ad providers.
3) Look at adding a paid service (for power users) to hedge ad revenue. Be careful not to alienate current users.
4) Focus on a few key things and do them very well.
If you could find any feature at all to charge for, you might be surprised to find people signing up. For example you could have "featured tweets" with a retweet button underneath on the right side instead of (or in addition to) the ad block and charge for placement there for people who want their content to be more popular.
You probably are getting a little(lot?) more visitors than what ga says.
I was the only engineer on the project. We had 5-10 volunteers to help support our service (general help, technical support, etc). So, to say I ran the service myself would be a lie.
No man['s website] is an island.
e.g. the 3rd sentence...
>I also dont see any that had just a single founder.
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There is hope yet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okcupid
Created by Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan, Christian Rudder and Max Krohn
OkCupid’s founders (Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder,
Sam Yagan and Max Krohn)
Plus there are not dictatorships on the internet. People vote with their feet and are, especially on an anonymous site such as 4chan not locked in, like they are with Facebook profile/networks.
If there were something describable as dictatorships on the internet, I would argue that it is those sites that try to impose their own values and judgments on their members, and not 4chan (and to a minor degree reddit), which (in most parts) only rule is to avoid completely illegal themes.
I disagree. 4chan is if anything more democratic than most sites even if it is a sort of semi-anarchic mob rule version of democracy.
The first thing I'd like to counter is the idea that the available categories are determined by the 4chan admins and by moot in particular. It is true that he's the one who makes new boards to talk about specific subjects but that doesn't mean that if there isn't a board it doesn't get talked about, generally it'll happen in whatever board has the most users interested in that subject, and if it becomes a problem or starts taking over the board there will be a general purpose board spun off for that subject in particular. Examples of this (in the positive "lots of people are talking about this and need a space) are /tg/ which spun off from warhammer wednesday on /b/ and /lit/ and /toy/ were both spun off from recurring topics on /tg/. Less positive examples include /soc/ and /adv/ which were supposed to clean up /r9k/ and /mlp/ because pony threads were a huge problem on /co/.
I think the problem here is that Reddit's (and HN's for that matter) "democracy" function is explicitly part of the site whilst 4chan's is hidden and based on the whims of the audience.