BETTER MODERATION by moot - 09/03/12 @ 5:30PM EDT #
In my last news post, I touched on an ongoing issue concerning a lack of consistent moderation.
Over the years 4chan has grown considerably, but the team has not.
More than 20 million people will visit 4chan in a given month, and of
those visitors, 2 million will submit almost 25 million posts. In
contrast, there are less than 50 volunteer moderators and janitors.
Why the large gap? For one, it's hard to recruit from an anonymous
community, since it can be difficult to identify the best contributors
when you don't know who they are. Second, it's just not feasible to have
hundreds or thousands of moderators and janitors due to the amount of
time it takes to recruit, train, communicate with, and monitor their
activities. To that end, instead of scaling the team over the years,
we've focused on making moderation more efficient.
Today I'm pleased to announce a big improvement we've made to our ban
system. In the past, bans have been submitted individually by
moderators, leading to widely inconsistent ban reasons and punishments.
Although we do have guidelines in place, they don't cover every
circumstance where a user might be banned, and require slow, tedious
entry. Ideally, all of this should be automated—and now it is. Every
global and board specific rule has been imported into a drop-down list
in the ban panel, and moderators must now select from a set of
pre-populated ban reasons and lengths, all of which are codified in the Rules.
By standardizing ban reasons and lengths and making sure they
correspond to the posted rules, we hope to make life better for everyone
on the site. Moderators can perform their tasks more efficiently,
banned users will have more insight into why they were banned, and
everyone will benefit from rule-infringing content and offenders being
removed from the site more quickly.
In addition to rolling out the revised ban system, we'll soon start
accepting janitor applications. For those who are not aware, a janitor
is a user who has the ability to view the reports queue, delete posts
from their assigned board(s), and submit ban requests to moderators. We
limit janitors to one or two boards in an attempt to select people who
are knowledgeable and frequent visitors to the boards they're assigned.
Ideally these people are some of the best contributors on a particular
board and wish to make it a better place through both quality
contribution and the ability to remove offending content. If you haven't
read the application page yet and are interested in applying, I'd encourage you do so.
We will begin accepting janitor applications on September 9th, and will only accept them for 24 hours.
The application consists of a few pieces of information about yourself
such as which boards you browse and what hours you're available to help
out, and three long-form questions. All applications are blind screened
by the team—we don't see your name, e-mail address, or other personal
information during review. Because we received over 9,000 applications
last time around, the entire process is expected to take weeks, and we
ask that users do not contact us to inquire about the status of their application. Those who are selected to advance through the process will be notified by e-mail.
Last month, we re-launched /q/ - 4chan Discussion.
It's been great to have a place to interact with the community
one-on-one again, and I've thoroughly enjoyed reading through the
feedback. We've yet to hold our first Q&A session, but I plan to set
aside a few hours on a weekend later this month to hang out, answer
questions, and respond to your feedback. The thread will stay stickied
for a week, so even if you miss out on participating in the discussion,
you'll be able to read through it later.
All in all, I hope these changes will address some of the community's
concerns about moderation. It's important to remember that the
moderators and janitors are people like you—people who actively use and
care about 4chan. They've contributed an untold number of hours in an
attempt to keep the site free of garbage, and do an excellent job given
the challenges they face—reacting swifly and consistently, pleasing a
rather vocal and unforgiving audience, and being severely outumbered by
the userbase and constant stream of new posts.
Thanks to them for their hard work, and thanks to you for your patience.
As always, I can be reached by e-mail at moot@4chan.org, on Twitter at @moot and @4chan, and on AIM at MOOTCHAT.
BEYOND ONE BILLION by moot - 08/06/12 @ 1:45PM EDT #
With the exception of my note On Extensions,
I haven't published a substantial news post since July 2008. It's
certainly been an interesting and eventful four years, and I've written
and re-written a number of updates that for one reason or another never
saw the light of day (or glow of basement).
Let's begin where we left off.
In August 2008 we moved our servers from Texas to
California, which involved me renting an SUV and speeding across the
desert with 4chan hurriedly loaded into my trunk. I made the trip with a
friend and we managed a respectable 24 hours and 10 minutes from Dallas
to Los Angeles. The move upgraded our maximum bandwidth throughput from
100Mbps to 1Gbps (later 10Gbps), and resulted in a noticeably faster
site.
As it turns out, fast has a downside. Back in early 2008
I quoted our old server administrator saying "4chan consumes all
bandwidth," and that once again proved to be the case. The resulting
surge in bandwidth consumption more than doubled our operating costs,
and with the wonderfully timed financial meltdown of 2008, 4chan came as
close as it's ever been to going under. This resulted in the widely
circulated $20,000 debt figure reported in a Washington Post profile published in February 2009.
I still have the drafts of news posts I wrote while laying awake in bed at 5:00 in the morning. Whatever I would have published, it wasn't a pretty picture.
In 2008, 4chan was accessed by 30 million unique visitors, and served 2.4 billion pageviews.
Yet somehow we made it into 2009, and things began
to look up. Long plagued by an inability to attract mainstream
advertising, I partnered with an individual who took over representing
4chan's ad inventory, and for the first time in years the site began to
break even.
April brought an amusing twist to an otherwise uneventful year, with the gaming of the 2009 TIME 100 poll. This article
goes into what happened in greater detail, but I was proud to represent
the 4chan community in the magazine and at the gala. It even spawned an meme.
Towards the end of the year I purchased the first of what would
eventually replace the site's aging Dell severs, which were procured
following our "DONATE OR DIE 2005" donation drive. I also unplugged the servers from the Internet for fun—sorry!
In 2009, 4chan was accessed by 60 million unique visitors, and served 4.4 billion pageviews.
Lev Grossman of TIME once compared 4chan to Star Wars' Mos Eisley and mused "Spammers don't even bother to spam 4chan." If only that held true. 2010
brought wave upon wave of spam in the form of JavaScript worms and
affiliate link spammers, and the state of the boards reached a new low.
After months of trying to mitigate the spam through various means, we
resorted to implementing reCAPTCHA across the image boards, intending it
to be a temporary fix. Fortunately, it was successful in blocking most
automated attempts to spam the site, and immediately reduced the number
of malicious images being uploaded to our servers. In fact it worked so
well that we decided to make its addition permanent. While verifications
can be a pain in the butt to fill out, the unfortunate truth is that
4chan represents a lucrative opportunity for spammers and malware
authors. Without CAPTCHA and other measures in place, the site today
would be completely overrun with spam as it was in 2010.
Another big change came in the spring of 2010. In May I decided to take a leave of absence from school and start a new project, Canvas.
I began working on Canvas to answer the question "What would forums
look like if they were invented today?" The form, function, and
aesthetic of the modern message board hasn't changed much since the days
of Usenet and dial-up BBSes, and I wanted to take a crack at doing
something new and different. What we ultimately launched is a community
site with the concept of remix culture at its core, something I came to
love after years of poking around 4chan MS Paint threads, and /b/ when
it was still a fountain of original content.
Many people have asked why I decided to start Canvas as a separate
project instead of modernizing 4chan. The answer is simple: I, like you,
enjoy 4chan the way it is. I thought it inappropriate and incompatible
to change 4chan solely because I wanted to work on something new, and so
Canvas spun off while 4chan remained the same.
In 2010, 4chan was accessed by 130 million unique visitors, and served 7.5 billion pageviews.
In January 2011, I fucked up. Frustrated with /r9k/ and /new/, I removed them from the site. It took this exchange (continued here)
months later with the founder of Encyclopedia Dramatica for me to
realize how wrong I was. Shortly after, I re-added them and apologized
to the community.
In October I cosplayed Sigourney Weaver at the Web 2.0 Summit and gave a short talk on online identity and video interview
explaining some of the history of 4chan. If you're at all curious about
my opinion on the modern web and 4chan, those might be a good place to
start.
November was a rough month. No stranger to distributed denial of
service attacks, we were hit by one of the largest we've seen to date.
This prompted the transition to using CloudFlare. I've already explained
a bit about what CloudFlare does and does not do, but to recap,
CloudFlare helps 4chan primarily in two ways: it caches and serves our
images via a CDN that is distributed around the world, making the site
load faster and reducing strain on our servers, and helps defend us
against the aforementioned DDoS attacks.
The transition was relatively painless, although we did experience a
number of hiccups as we brought the site back online. Many of you
encountered "Website Currently Unavailable" errors during this time, and
have periodically since then. I want to be clear that almost every time
you see these errors, the problem is on our end—not theirs. Since 4chan
is run on a shoestring budget and with the help of few volunteers other
than myself, things can and do go wrong. Believe me, I am just as lost
as you are when the site is down, and always do my best to get it back
up and running as soon as possible.
In 2011, 4chan was accessed by 190 million unique visitors, and served 7 billion pageviews.
2012 got off to a good start. In May we re-wrote the
image boards to be valid HTML5/CSS3—the first major change to the HTML
in almost nine years. This was done to improve client-side performance and allow for the easy creation of user scripts and extensions, and enabled us to serve a pretty nifty mobile site
too. We also added support for secure browsing via SSL, SPDY, and have
made a number of improvements on the backend to make the site run faster
than ever.
On the heels of those improvements, last week 4chan crossed 1 billion
total posts. Never in a million years would I have predicted reaching
this milestone.
This year, 4chan has been accessed by 134 million unique visitors, and served 4.5 billion pageviews.
Since 2008, it has been visited by more than 500 million people.
Which brings us to the present. Where do we go from here?
The most pressing issue facing the community is a lack of consistent
moderation and communication from myself and the team. Sound familiar?
That's because it was the same story four years ago. Before reading on, I highly encourage you read the linked news post.
If you've been paying attention to the statistics woven into this
post, you'll have noticed the site has grown considerably over the
years. That growth has strained us in every way imaginable, and it
shows. Four years ago, I proposed doing a sort of "Prime Minister's
Questions," where users would have the opportunity to submit questions
to be answered by myself and the moderators. Unfortunately it never came
to pass, but the idea always stuck with me. After all, any thread I
post in as "moot" tends to immediately devolve into an impromptu Q&A
session.
Today I'm pleased to announce /q/ - 4chan Discussion.
Our earliest users will remember the "/q/ - Questions" image board from
back in 2004, and the "/sug/ - Suggestions" discussion board from
2005-2006. Both served as a place where users could discuss the site
amongst themselves and with the team, and in that spirit, I plan to host
regularly scheduled Q&A sessions (think PMQs) and use /q/ as a
venue to interact with and collect feedback from the community.
In addition to launching /q/, we'll be re-opening janitor applications
in the coming weeks. For those who don't know, janitors are users who
can access the reports queue and delete posts from their assigned
board(s). They cannot ban users and are not full moderators. We debuted
the janitor program some years ago to give dedicated members of the
community the ability to clean up the boards they care about and visit
frequently.
I hope this news post is the first of many to come. While they can be
daunting to write, you all deserve to be updated more than once every
four years, and there are a few more things I look forward to announcing
in months ahead.
Before I end, I want to explain why I still do this.
I founded 4chan in 2003, when I was 15 years old. As of today, I've
been running the site for almost 9 years, which represents more than
one-third of my entire life. I have used 4chan daily since its inception
and cannot imagine a life without it. As I said earlier—when 4chan goes
down, I'm just as lost as the rest of you.
I think of 4chan as a hobby and not a business. To that end, I don't
operate it in a way that any sane business person would. I am proud of
the fact that I've been able to provide the site free of charge, with
minimal advertising and without annoying donation campaigns for almost
seven years now. As I've said in the past, we do a lot with very little,
and despite being constantly resource constrained, the site has
flourished. None of this would have ever been possible without the
thousands of hours of time generously given by our dedicated volunteers,
and support of our loyal community.
I have met countless people and made great friends through
4chan—Hell, I've even dated a few. For as bad a rap as 4channers can get
from the outside world, my experience has been the exact opposite.
While posting on the boards can sometimes be a crapshoot, every single
person I've met on the street, at a meetup, conference, or for bubble
tea has been awesome.
This community has accomplished remarkable things. You have all
impacted the Internet, mainstream culture, and history in a profound
way. It has truly been a privilege and great honor to be a partcipant
and witness to it all.
I can honestly say I wouldn't trade these past eight and a half years
for anything in the world. And for that, you all have my thanks.
–m♡♡t
As always, I can be reached by e-mail at moot@4chan.org, on Twitter at @moot and @4chan, and on AIM at MOOTCHAT.
