I'm getting too old for this shit.
This is not a notice of closure. These are my thoughts which will impact the direction of the site moving forward.
I’ve been deeply unhappy this month, perhaps more so than I have ever been since I left the United States in 2018. I find myself trapped in a tenuous and unprofitable position staring down the barrel of 30-years-old, in no better position than I was when I was turning 20-years-old. I have been afraid to say this because I have a large sense of pride, and I have many people rooting against me. It has been important for me for years to save face and maintain a stoic defense against opposition. Now, after much reflection, I realize these people I find myself contending against are all in their 30s and 40s with no personal accomplishments, no wife, and no children. When death finds them, sooner rather than later, they will have left no mark on this earth. Proving them wrong is not something I am concerned of any longer. I feel liberated to express myself freely in this post.
These are the realizations I have come to in the year of 2020 which are now things I must deal with:
1. I want to start a family.
2. I do not consider fighting for “free speech” in and of itself noble or worthwhile.
3. I think the forum has lost what made it special.
I will now address each of these concerns directly.
I want to start a family.
When I was a teenager, I did not value myself very highly. I remember writing at different times that I would find it worthwhile to give my life to save a cat from a tree. Dynastia once wrote about me that I “couldn’t find a hill not worth dying on.” I wore this as a badge of honor. I considered the impact a person has on the world at large, through cultural contribution and direct effect on other people, to be more important rather than offspring.
I am now much older and with a developed sense of self-worth. My priorities are shifting, in part because I am older, in part because I have accomplished much of what I set out to do, and in part because the forum has become a less interesting and less fun place for me. A part of me hopes to see Trump repeal Section 230 in full so that I can throw my hands up and say, “I did all I could”, and move on without the guilt of having ‘lost’.
As the certainty of America’s future and freedom of speech has wane the world over, my certainty over the purpose of life has solidified. I believe it is family. Not a big, extended family, or a small town, but rather the nuclear family with traditional family roles. The husband provides, the woman takes care of the home. I believe popular depictions of traditional families as “creepy” or “oppressive” is a deliberate effort to undermine this system. Unified, heterosexual households with one stay-at-home parent raise children which excel in every category of development.
I will never be able to pursue this adequately so long as I continue to do what I do. I was hoping the world would be a more free place 7 years into the game, and my burden would lessen over time, but it has become a less free place in every possible way.
On free speech.
Fuck it.
If there’s anything I’ve seen in my time here, it is how universally despised my ideology has become. What people truly want is not freedom, they want consistency and convenience. The average person wants today to be like yesterday, and tomorrow to be like today. They do not want a radical website plastering their names and photos all over the place and making fun of them for being shiteaters. Why does my relatively small forum attract an inordinate amount of hate? It inconveniences people.
The Kiwi Farms is not the thing I host that gets the most negative attention. After starting my hosting company and selling services, I’ve received only about a dozen customers. This is to be expected because my VPSs aren’t really the best, or most affordable. They are simply complaint resistant, so the sites I do get have high complaint volumes.
The site I get the most complaints about is an archive site. There is a Russian Craigslist that this website archives. I receive emails every day about this site. I get complaints via email, via Cloudflare, via tickets on my hosting service, directly through the RIR I lease my IPs from, I have people who have put my phone number on Craigslist pretending to sell things I don’t own as “revenge” for hosting this site.
Though this site has no ideas. It is not a publication. It is not some Nazi front – and indeed the sites I host with extremist ideology get far less attention – it is just a fucking archive. It just happens to have a lot of information and phone numbers people want gone and which it does not take down.
Minor convenience is far more important to people than freedom of speech.
That was the big epiphany I got to enjoy after Trump threatened Section 230. The sheer number of people I saw who have ardently enjoyed this site as a platform to be pro-Trump on, when few others afford that liberty, suddenly turn against it was shocking. It became abundantly clear that almost every single user who joined in 2019 and 2020 would gladly throw this site and everything I have ever done under the bus if it meant ‘getting back’ at Silicon Valley. If they got to call Obama a nigger on Twitter, it would be worth it to them.
This complements realizations I have made over the years regarding personal investment. The forum has fifty-thousand users, with over seven thousand logging in every day, but it is I alone who deals with the consequence. When things do get hard, people simply leave. I have seen so many people come over the years, I don’t get to know them anymore. After the hack in September, I barely recognize anyone.
Simply put, no one would ever stick their neck out for me as much as I have stuck my neck out for everyone.
While donations are on an upward trend, and Dick Masterson in particular has taken on an unbelievable burden of trying to enable me to make money through my podcast, what I do earn – even with this help – is incredibly inconsistent and not the kind of financial arrangement I can move forward in life with.
I’ve decided that generosity at personal expense is a mental disorder. I must start being selfish.
The fun factor.
I’ve frequently said that if I was not having fun with the forum, I would close it. At this point in my life, I am having to consider how much fun I have with the forum.
The era of the lolcow is dead. There is no such thing as a lolcow anymore, almost specifically because of this forum. It is too big for its own good, too well indexed for its own good, too well known for its own good. The forum went from a small community that could playfully posit itself as the arch nemesis for dopey people that saw themselves as cartoon character protagonists of their own life, to the Internet’s Eye of Sauron. Our gaze now quickly incinerates a simple person. They go into hiding almost immediately, or the act of observing them changes who they are in a way for the worse.
The enduring categories of the site have become three things: Internet celebrities (who enjoy attention), women (who enjoy attention), and politics (which is fucking cancer and killing the site).
In truth, I enjoy the female areas of the site the most. It’s what closely resembles the original spirit of the forum. It’s not quite the same, but it can be fun.
The Internet celebrities are all just the worst fucking people, and unlike real lolcows they consider the site a stepping stone to cashing in on infamy, and impart on the site their own audience of rabid anti-fans who do not come to have fun but instead further their personal vendettas.
Politics exploded in 2016 and has slowly become a defining feature of the forum. Right-wing politics has turned any discussion of trannies into a communally written manifesto about Jewish influence on society. It is the antithesis of fun, and what should be lighthearted prodding of mentally unstable Buffalo Bill impersonators is instead a ‘culture of critique’ on underlying issues and the political realities that people like Jonathan Yaniv pose to the world. Perhaps this is inevitable, as indeed people like Yaniv specifically are starting to impact lives, courts, and legislation, but it is also undeniably having a negative effect on the site.
Yaniv specifically represents the arc of the site excellently. A small-time lolcow the site became an arch-nemesis of, turns to local celebrity through shenanigans and attracts fucking nutjob anti-fan vigilantes like Henry Case, and then finally evolved into an international circus that devolved his board into Canadian Politics General.
The site is now peaking in traffic because of the riots but it profits the actual community nothing. It is just a place to go because every other place is politically slant in favor of the riots. I can’t bring myself to shut it down because I understand the need for this free discussion, but I can’t bring myself to deal with the consequences of tolerating it as it harms the site. Instead I’ve slowly been removing myself from the community and letting mods take over all duties, which is what Lowtax did before Something Awful began mutating into what it is today.
On the topic of moderators, while we do have some very good new moderators, almost all the old guard left after the hack. The very people who helped make the site and define its culture are now gone and will never come back because what they left was not what they joined in the first place.
Much like how Imageboards have waned in favor of small Discord servers, the people on the original forum have left for their own carefully managed cliques. In part because the site isn’t fun to them anymore, in part because the site is too big to be a true community. It is now a true empire, consolidating hundreds of different groups together. All empires have one thing in common: they fall.
My attempt to open 9chan as a relief for the forum problem of politics has failed. I have seen no adoption of the site from forum users. The culture it has developed is one part fans of my podcast, one part neo-Nazis, one pornography, and two parts people who really seem to only post because they hate me in particular and constantly upload illegal or rule-breaking material only because they know I have to look at it and delete it.
In conclusion, I am left asking myself three questions as a complement to my three problems.
1. How do I move into stability and towards a more fulfilled person?
2. How do I refocus my efforts so my workload is more manageable?
3. How do I have fun again?
This isn’t really a discussion, or questions I am asking the general public. This is just what’s on my mind.
Josh is the sort of person where if you make one post he doesn't like he'll constantly check up on your account every day to find more things he doesn't like.
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