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

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.

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.

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.