Reflecting on Steve Pavlina's 2011 post, "Why I Shut Down the Forums" | Hacker News Reader

Reflecting on Steve Pavlina's 2011 post, "Why I Shut Down the Forums"

chrishateswriting.com

78 pointsmoot39 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

For those of us not knowing anything about moot nor 4chan, what decisions is he alluding to and what's the back story?

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.

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.

>and self-served advertisements

For which is has a very limited market -- after all, how many legitimate businesses want to advertise on 4chan?

There are some, but not many.

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

  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) 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).

How the hell did you become aware of their comment and write such an excellent reply in under 45min?

You're awesome.

He's the original poster of the article, in case you didn't notice. I'm sure that

a) He was expecting a comment like that, as evidenced by the "Oh boy, one of these" comment, and prepared to respond to it, and

b) He was watching for new comments on the submission.

Haha, I didn't pre-write it -- I'm just used to it.

I was in fact puzzled by this getting upvoted and not receiving any comments, so I refreshed the page a few times.

Sorry if I implied that you pre-wrote it; I meant that more along the line of "I've answered this question multiple times already, so I know more or less what to say".

No worries. I don't normally respond with as comprehensive a rebuttal, but was in a write-y mood today (and as someone who hates writing, this is not something to pass up).

Ah, I didn't notice. But now I want to write an "HN Alerts" service that notifies you whenever someone writes a comment with a certain keyword. In moot's case, that would be "4chan," but I'd imagine lots of people would find it useful.

> But now I want to write an "HN Alerts" service that notifies you whenever someone writes a comment with a certain keyword.

You should absolutely do this.

Ok. Would you email me (sillysaurus2 at gmail) so that I can have you beta test it? It's pretty straightforward, but I'd feel better if you look at it before I publicly launch it.

(I know how busy you are, so I'll always be brief.)

There's actually a useful Zapier script that already does this [0]. I remember reading about it on Mike Knoop's (Zapier cofounder) blog [1]. I haven't tried it out but you should be able to hook it up to any of the alert services that Zapier integrates with. (Which is a lot!)

[0] https://zapier.com/zapbook/webhook/rss/8249/hacker-news-ment...

[1] http://mikeknoop.com/my-zaps/

And in case there was any doubt, it's one of my favorite Zaps :)

It uses the awesome HNSearch API to poll for new mentions of phrases and triggers a Zap whenever it finds one. (I have it send me an SMS).

Here's a better, more direct Zap Template: http://zpr.io/gsjS

> 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.

> 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.

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.

4chan is an incredibly influential online community, to a greater extent than most people realize. And it's the perfect case study of the advantages and disadvantages of online anonymity, in which the former wins by a large margin.

This wouldn't be the case if you tried to whore out your users to advertizers. Kudos for doing a great job :)

One of the features of reddit gold is that it allows you to turn of their ads. Honestly I would be kinda pissed if I had brought some membership to a community and it didn't turn of the ads (or at least allowed me to). It feels like double dipping.

> and could not find any other reason but Christopher outright lying about the financial status of his business.

None? I would think the growing number of users would translate into increased costs. Bandwidth, hardware, lawyers, etc? Do any sites show decreasing costs with increasing popularity?

> some even think these income streams far outdo the cost of running the chans.

Some? Do you have some links to share on the matter?

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.

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

Here: http://stevepavlinalies.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/why-steve-p...

(Note: I am not the person you replied to; I was also around the Steve Pavlina forums/website at the time, and know several of the "insiders" personally, though I wasn't a frequent poster there.)

Hm. stevepavlinalies.com? I have no history with this issue, but this whole site seems to sit around DH0 and DH1 (see http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html). I have a hard time accepting this as unbiased and factual. If anything, this site seems to be an example of the type of user Steve claims derailed the forums to the point he needed to shut them down.

The GP asked for citations; I picked the first one that came up in a Google search. I'm also privy to the issue, having been involved in the community at the time (as, I'm guessing, was the OP "Dewie", though I don't know who he is IRL or if I know him as well.) You now have three different people explaining this side of the story--and I'm sure there are plenty more Google-able references out there.

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.

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.

He's right. The new forum is at http://pdforyou.com/ and you can go read all about it there, if they haven't buried the drama.

The people in this online personal development community have a love/hate relationship with internet drama. Steve Pavlina was the biggest of them all of course.

I doubt they buried anything, but you'd need a login to read any of it. I have one, but I'm not about to violate these people's privacy just to satisfy a morbid curiosity.

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