About 4chans current stats and infrastructure • Hacker News Board

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#41

Post by wrekkuh » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 3:21 PM UTC

talloaktrees wrote: post #16

I've always seen 4chan as the scumhole of the internet. It scares me that it's so huge. Do I have a wrong impression of it?

It would help to add that while the age of everyone posting is a broad range, the most active users are teenagers and people in their early 20s. At least that's the impression i get after browsing for a few years.

Also, while it could be said that notoriety attracts a good crowd for them, so does their anime discussion as there are several boards dedicated to different styles of artwork (and, of course, the fact that the entire website is styled after another hugely popular Japanese Anime board, 2chan.net).

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#42

Post by TillE » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 3:24 PM UTC

purephase wrote: post #18

talloaktrees wrote: post #16

I've always seen 4chan as the scumhole of the internet. It scares me that it's so huge. Do I have a wrong impression of it?

Not really, no. I think it's size is more indicative of the standard age range it draws (a younger audience). People keep telling me that there are decent parts of the place. Each time I try to venture in it is such a dizzying mess that I stopped trying. It makes me feel old.

I've seen a bunch of people recommend /tg/ (tabletop gaming), that it was totally different from the awful parts of 4chan. I went there, and I think I had to scroll down half a page to see people tossing around f-g and f-ggot.

Yeah, no thanks.

I still think "Reddit for grownups" is a potentially viable business. A semi-moderated community of communities with no tolerance for low-effort garbage or trolling. As it is now, there are plenty of decent topical fora scattered around the internet, but they're mostly not great technically or culturally. I'm not sure exactly how, but there's definitely a lot of room for improvement.

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#43

Post by kokoge » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 3:25 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #38

justinhj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A game that is fun and popular is by definition well designed I would say.

I suppose. I used to find it fun, but some of the changes made more recently have drained much of the fun from it, for me.

Could you tell what changes exactly are you talking about?

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#44

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 3:28 PM UTC

kokoge wrote: post #43

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose. I used to find it fun, but some of the changes made more recently have drained much of the fun from it, for me.

Could you tell what changes exactly are you talking about?

Hunger, biomes (although that's an old change now), Endermen, end game.

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#45

Post by jgrahamc » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 3:57 PM UTC

danvideo wrote: post #31

trotsky wrote: post #9

How on earth does Cloudfare survive charging $200 for nearly 2PB of traffic? Is the profiling/retargeting business really that lucrative? Do big accounts like that have some kind of revshare deal or mandatory link skimming?

Cloudflare offers a good value, but not having things like html caching is frustrating and one of the reasons we're not using them.

Actually CloudFlare does do HTML caching. Details are here: http://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pagerules-advanced-ca...

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#46

Post by druiid » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:06 PM UTC

trotsky wrote: post #9

How on earth does Cloudfare survive charging $200 for nearly 2PB of traffic? Is the profiling/retargeting business really that lucrative? Do big accounts like that have some kind of revshare deal or mandatory link skimming?

To be honest I don't personally think the traffic that some of the accounts running under the free/$20 plans are sustainable. I know for my part we've been running several very large sites through their service which cut our bandwidth usage approximately in half. That's the level of bandwidth that was costing about $3k+ all by itself per month.

Doing the math, I think regardless of Cloudflare and their economies of scale, they will start having to charge more at some point for traffic. I know we'd pay it but I have to imagine for large traffic, but small income sites (which 4chan counts among them I think?) this could present an issue.

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#47

Post by runn1ng » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:08 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #27

lumberjack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of anons are actively blocking online tracking technologies, much more than the usual 1% that run NoScript.

And heck, some access 4chan over Tor, which means any statistics about latency and location are quite probably wrong. (You might think Tor is slow for image-heavy sites, in my experience it isn't. Tor is high-latency, but throughput is reasonable)

Most of the Tor relays are banned on 4chan, though.

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#48

Post by pavel_lishin » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:09 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #42

purephase wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, no. I think it's size is more indicative of the standard age range it draws (a younger audience). People keep telling me that there are decent parts of the place. Each time I try to venture in it is such a dizzying mess that I stopped trying. It makes me feel old.

I've seen a bunch of people recommend /tg/ (tabletop gaming), that it was totally different from the awful parts of 4chan. I went there, and I think I had to scroll down half a page to see people tossing around f-g and f-ggot. Yeah, no thanks. I still think "Reddit for grownups" is a potentially viable business. A semi-moderated community of communities with no tolerance for low-effort garbage or trolling. As it is n…

> I still think "Reddit for grownups" is a potentially viable business.

It's as simple as setting up http://reddit.com/r/redditforgrownups and moderating it heavily. (Well, not really - you won't make any money from setting that up - but at the same time, why would I pay you for a reddit clone when there are already subreddits with good moderators?)

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#49

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:10 PM UTC

runn1ng wrote: post #47

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And heck, some access 4chan over Tor, which means any statistics about latency and location are quite probably wrong. (You might think Tor is slow for image-heavy sites, in my experience it isn't. Tor is high-latency, but throughput is reasonable)

Most of the Tor relays are banned on 4chan, though.

Ah, that's true.

Re: About 4chans current stats and infrastructure

#50

Post by runn1ng » Fri, Jul 06, 2012, 4:12 PM UTC

studio625 wrote: post #14

4chan's comment system is awful. I still don't really understand how it works. It seems like they could improve the design and pipe in new comments as they arrive, thus negating all the extra server load caused by browser extensions refreshing every second. Of course, I have no experience dealing with ~1B page views/month.

What's not to understand? It's so simplistic it can't be simplier.

You just have a thread with no hierarchy (except for the opening post). You can "reply" on some post in some thread, but the "reply" is just marked by post ID.

The 4chanX helps with this.