I've been thinking about starting my own image board for a while now, but I don't really know how to go about it. I'm not talking about software and I don't think there's any non-technical guide to it. There's aspects of tohno chan I like which don't seem easy to replicate. For one, the lack of shit that most imageboards are flooded with. How would I advertise my image board without attracting "those" kinds of people? If I advertise on other people's boards, that's also basically spam, so it might bother mods and give a bad impression. How does tohno chan do it? Every new board I've seen spam for has been filled with nothing but cancer and most don't make it past three months.Post edited on 27th May 2019, 6:43pm
Even if you weren’t technically illiterate you really shouldn’t, it’s the same handful of people using these boards or they just end up dead. Unless it’s filling a niche of some sort it usually just becomes a circlejerk for friends at this point. There’s some good discussion about this on textboards out there, /iaa/ I think. The consensus was that most people just use IRC or Gopher or some proprietary format, save for the handful of users on sites like these and unless you want a place for friends to hang like tanoshiine or doushio, you’re better off making an existing imageboard less dead rather than splintering the userbase more. Also, to keep cancer out, just have nazi mods. It works for here, sushi and sama.
>>32345 >circle jerk for friends That's pretty much exactly what I want to avoid. An imageboard were even the mods are anonymous and there's no discord, irc, or anything outside of the board itself is what I want to go for. I know there isn't any imageboard out there that really fits me like a glove and I've looked hard, so making what I want seems like the only option.Post edited on 27th May 2019, 7:59pm
Have you tried forums?
>>32347 I don't like forums for the same reason I don't like discord. Too much circle jerking. It's not as bad but it's there. Profile pages, reputation points, usernames, badges, I can't stand it.
There are quite a few "online communities otaku" out there, why haven't they just came together and made a website they're not too snobby to use?
For starters you need a solid founding stock of members to kickstart things. I don't think I've ever really seen a community get going that wasn't originally just a handful of friends doing something. Then you draw people in from other areas who feel attracted to the sort of dynamic you have going on. I'm no online community expert, that just seems to be how it goes. This site was originally a handful of Tohno's friends and then they extended the branch to a bunch of /a/ and /jp/ users who'd became disillusioned with the state of their communities. That's also why it's difficult to just will a community into existence. If everyone's fine hanging out where they're at they'll feel no need to invest the time somewhere else. It's not just that you've created a great platform, there needs to be a reason to move to it. The second part of that is having a set of community standards and enforcing them. Either by moderation or community effort. Community effort basically amounting to mocking or simply not replying to certain types of behavior in order to discourage more of it being made. It's tempting to be very lax but if you do that your community will end up like any other. Exclude exclude exclude. Good fences make good neighbors. Jimmy might be a loon but as long as he keeps to his own I don't care. If he comes in my yard? Yeah, I'm standing my ground.
>>32366 Thanks for the good post. >group of friends That's going to be a problem for me. I don't have any online friends and the few ones I have in real life are not the right fit, even if they do have some vague interest in some kind of Japanese media, like fighting games. If I had the option, I would rather have a payed mod enforce my rules than a buddy or a buddy of a buddy. Otherwise I'd rather do everything myself. >they extended the branch to a bunch of /a/ and /jp/ users who'd became disillusioned with the state of their communities How did they go about this? Just "extending the branch" is too abstract for me.
>>32367 Just add flood and spam prevention, so that if an undesirable does find your imageboard, it is hard for them to massively spam before you can clean it up. Your best bet is going for a gimmick that no other imageboard offers, which will draw people in - look at some of the unique boards here. Also lurk in the places where you're thinking of advertising, as you'll be able to get a feel of the needs of the community and what they'd like to see improved about the imageboard they're using. I completely agree with you on not wanting namefags, as they will only dominate a small chan and put others off.
>>32367 >That's going to be a problem for me. That was largely what kept any community I attempted to establish from ever flourishing and I don't think you'll ever manage to attract users simply by making a solid platform. Specifically I'm thinking back to the days of invisionfree forums. I'd spend endless hours creating the perfect css, user roles, even tinkering and customizing scripts other people had made. But I never had any success because people would show up, see the nearly empty forum, and leave. I tried several times. It was... quite an odd early teenage obsession I have trouble understanding in retrospect. I don't mean to be mean but based on my own experience I don't think you'll have much success unless you've got a group of friends to use it like their little club to begin with. Especially now with everything being so heavily centralized. If you can get it going for a while you'll have a shot at a community that drags in new people but it becomes very much a case of being able to market and make friends. I saw several much more shoddily put together forums take off but for what it's worth they really were better places to hang out at since they actually had people around. >Just "extending the branch" is too abstract for me. For a good while people hung around on places like /a/ and /jp/, and various groups associated to them. When they saw someone they thought would make a good fit they asked them if they'd be interested in checking the place out. At least that's how I ended up here. Again, apologies if I come off as hostile, just sharing what experience and observations I've had attempting to start my own communities before.
>>32369 Thanks again for the advice. Getting a bunch of e-friends to use a forum isn't going to be easy. Finding interested people in the first place is tough. Everybody's on discord. Finding interested people who aren't faggots is even tougher. I never went on irc or discord because I just don't like circle jerking and memeing. I don't have the patience for that crap. If I got a bunch of buddies on my board, they'd probably also want special privileges and the whole thing that annoys me about e-cliques already. In the long term, those original members will probably be the least actually invested. I think people who are put off by an empty board lack creativity. An empty board means you could post just about anything and nobody can say it doesn't belong there. One or two replies to your own original thought are more rewarding than thirty replies to shit you just regurgitated and put no thought into. I guess a gimmick and original content is my best bet. What was your forum about?
>>32370 >In the long term, those original members will probably be the least actually invested. That seems to be how it goes. A lot of times you even end up with people in something like discord or IRC that don't even bother with the regular board. Either because they came in without ever having been on the board or because they grow tired of it for some reason. I don't entirely blame people for this though. Slower moving formats aren't as much "fun" to people and they don't tend to net you many friends. It's probably been to my detriment that I've mostly stayed away from them. >I think people who are put off by an empty board lack creativity. An empty board means you could post just about anything and nobody can say it doesn't belong there. An empty board gives the impression the place is dead though, people won't want to invest the time in especially when they have no idea what sort of culture will take root.
>>32382 >that seems to be how it goes. A lot of times you even end up with people in something like discord or IRC that don't even bother with the regular board. That's exactly how it was in a board I used to go to. I was a low level staff memeber there at one point. For three days straight the owner begged for dontations to keep the board up because the host was going to take it down TODAY otherwise. I caved in and gave sixty bucks since no one else cared. Before this, he asked for donations every month and other people always gave him money. A bit after I was basically kicked out because I complained about new posting restrictions and found out a guy who was there from the beginning, who never posts outside of the discord anymore, asked the owner if they could pay for hosting like years before. His offer was declined. He didn't even know the site was about to be taken down since he never goes there. I got fucked out of sixty bucks for no reason. >An empty board gives the impression the place is dead though I think that can be alleviated if there's less sub-sections and an "all post" option. One of the the problems I see in Tohno-chan is too many sub-sections. If I want to keep track of the small number of total posts, I have to check every sub-section. What people consider "dead" is subjective and people who crave more activity tend to have the least to say. Investing your time into a place where people can't find your post after less than two minutes makes way less sense.Post edited on 11th Jun 2019, 3:19pm
To add to this discussion, someone on a textboard I frequent occasionally nobody bothers to make their own websites anymore and are redirected to “the usual places”. People with friends just set up a discord server. I imagine it would be practically impossible for OP to start a website without a group of friends. I don’t even know if spamming the shit out of a larger site will work anymore.
>>32384 Mulling it over, I'd say the only way to mitigate this network effect is to offer a preexisting community an appealing social space in a vanguard, expanding medium of online discourse, before the old guard has the opportunity to establish themselves. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software)#History >Discord was publicly released in May 2015.[10] According to Citron, the only area that they pushed Discord into was for the Reddit communities, finding that many subreddit forums were replacing IRC servers with Discord ones. I know of a few examples where someone birthed a splinter community simply by making the first Discord channel for a preexisting community, and if they got a strong enough base before the old guard reacted and made their own channel, the community would be split in two. Another example would be 8chan/endchan splinter boards for dead imageboards, or for generals on 4chan which grew too big to really be comfortable in one thread. In both cases, people were already ready to jump, and the admin was just whoever happened to create to most attractive server/board/etc. when the watershed moment was reached.
>>32344 I think I might have an idea. Why don't you get as many cancerous people as you can until you have plenty, and then set very strict but clear cut rules for your imageboard?
>>32386 High quality posters will be put-off in the first place. I'll also invariably piss of some people who will feel the need to "get back" at me. Look at boards like perfectchan. They seem to like raiding other boards with no rhyme or reason behind it.
>>32391 They find it funny and they dislike the posters on the sites they target. It’s annoying sometimes but in a way it’s nice people are keeping traditions like that alive.
>>32391 Then make them post better quality content. Do or die. That's what the strict rules are for.
>>32398 I seriously doubt they're capable.
>>32398 >strict rules Having a critical mass of users who are generally of poor quality and at the same time trying to enforce strict moderation on them is what happened with 4/a/ in my final years of posting there. It eventually came down to a handful of posters that considered themselves good constantly complaining and practically begging to have the moderators be even more strict. It eventually got so bad that I filtered it heavily to find little actual content outside of meta and the poor content the meta is complaining about. I don't think that approach works, if you can even get a userbase like that in the modern day since the average users good to bad just go to the well-known sites, but that is the last thing I would try to build a community around. Aside from having friends to start the community to make it look less slow, perhaps having a niche that isn't properly filled (using this site as an example, TC and a handful of other boards/sites are the only ones catering to hikkineet waifuists) could attract a community to build around. Alternatively, since nearly every alt-imageboard shares the same userbase, it could be better for the medium to just post on the ones around now and make them less dead with your posts.
I would tell you to add me so we can talk through it, but heh... My advice is to lurk more more meta threads. It’s tough being an autist who doesn’t fit in with the circlejerks.
>>32345 >nazi mods It really is a shame we have gotten to a point where mods have to be authoritarian assholes just so we can have some good post quality. I used to quite enjoy the silly shitposting of early to mid 2000's 4chan. But nowadays, it has become apparent that if you give a userbase too many freedoms, they will abuse it and turn the site into a social media/porn site (see the current state of 4chan's /b/ for details).
>>32675 The idea that an imageboard can be "good" and maintain a steady level of quality is a myth which has been disproven many times. Change is inevitable. If a board is good it will become popular and if it becomes popular it will attract all the worst type of people (posers, wannabes, opportunistic self promoters, etc.) who will eventually ruin the site. This patten has repeated itself on the internet dozens of times, eventually any thinking person is going to recognize the dynamics at play and realize that the idea of consistent quality over a substantial stretch of time from a user generated content site is not within the realm of real possibilities.
>>32680 Sites may have their ups and downs, but after a shitty stretch, things can improve again if the correct measures are taken.
>>32344 What would that imageboard be sbout?
>>32695 Well it's kind of embarrassing to talk about since it's only an idea now. I'd theme it on saya no uta and have only a couple of boards. I'd want it to be more focused on content creation and being constructive, so I'd prohibit any posts complaining about personal life or the real world and any post x threads. A big part of it would be allowing most kinds of 2-d porn to be posted without spoiling it, regardless of context, since that's been something that's bothered me about the chans I've used in the past. I thinks loli is a great way of filtering certain types of people. Saya no Uta would be original and it can represent a lot of my ideals. Again, I can't be sure it'll ever really exist.
>>32680 User filtering is the hardest, you want many users but you don't want lame-posters. That's a hard balance to achieve...
> But I never had any success because people would show up, see the nearly empty forum, and leave. Another (possibly less ethical) solution to the issue of seeding initial posts is to just make them yourself. If I recall this is basically what Reddit did in their early days – the founders just posted things from accounts they made themselves and had it look organic. Doing this on an anonymous board would be even easier, and you get to shape the intended direction of the community in the process.
>>34134 >had it look organic If you're a one man band that's tough. I came up with a good way of advertising. If you know moon runes, you can translate stuff and put your ads on the last page. You can draw specific people in that way too.
Do not invite political polarization. In time, tohno will gravely regret the creation of /tat/.
>>34657 Great thing about that, though, is its recent activity isn't shown on the homepage.
>>32345 >Also, to keep cancer out, just have nazi mods. It works for here, sushi and sama. I was quite confused by what you said, but then I realised that you didn't mean "nazi" literally.
>>37044 While that phrase is one which refers to overly strict moderators, literal nazis are not exactly unheard of among imageboards.
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