It's been so long, but I wanted to give closure to this board's archival project in some way, so here I am.
I'm not who originally started this board indexing process, of course. Someone else did, and then gave up for time reasons. I decided to step in when I saw the board up for claims, determined to give to any newcomer, or any user looking for content, an updated and reasonably working index of active communities to pick from on 8chan. Sadly, over and over Jim - and by reflex CM - with their reckless actions drove away users upon users. A bleeding that started with the Infinity Next fiasco. HotWheels turning against us, even organising hate campaigns and trying in every way to sabotage what he once created and administrated. But now, I think I see why he did it. He knew Jim would've driven this place to the ground. He knew that the only reason he was trying so hard to own 8chan was to compete with Chinamoot and 4chan. To have influence and money out of it. He never liked, or appreciated chan culture, board communities, or even aknowledged our needs in the right way. Always half assed, always far and hard to reach. And always pointing only towards appeasing the whole Q shitshow, and /newsplus/ - his failed news forum.
I remember, and saw, all the betrayals, the backpedals. From how /news/ headlines got removed from the homepage, replaced with /newsplus/ until mass protesting made him backpedal - to the whole loli debate, where CodeMonkey and Jim kept contradicting themselves, pointing fingers at each other, and blamed in the end the US laws when no one sane would actually follow that reasoning. Not to mention how they ruined /pol/, or how at least half of the boards from 8chan didn't migrate to 8kun, and many more. Hell, even /boards/, that was used to advertize boards sitewide, has NOT been migrated. That's literally absurd. And speaking of /pol/, the reason given for its absence on 8kun was that "the admin of that board didn't request it", when Jim knew PERFECTLY that CM made that board global, so with no admin. Total bullshit.
On the topic of not migrated boards, one especially hurted me: /scenic/. Not many knew that board, but it was a massive, massive catalog of /c/ landscape wallpapers. Literally thousands of images, even including ALL the landscapes from all the /c/ threads from 4chan. All that? Gone. never migrated, and probably lost forever. Same thing for /otomad/. And I know there's many other similar examples that I don't know of.
But the biggest telltale sign, to me, is that right now there is literally NO way to publicly contact the administration of this site for any reason: ask for clarifications, or point out bugs even. There used to be a board for that - /operate/ at first, then moved to /sudo/ - but that got quietly deleted. Now the only way is to email them in private, which is absurd if you think about it - everytime there is a bug or a question, a new email. Come on, really? Where is the transparent communication?
All in all, the numbers here tell by themselves the result of this hellish conduct. This site is pratically dead - besides the Q shit, of course. Which probably it's ok for Jim, since it was what he wanted - to appease the Qboomers and keep a loyal mass of them flooding the site, while every single other community got chased off and scattered away from one of the many, many errors or lack of interest shown by Jim.
In the end though, I have to snap a spear in favour of a person - CodeMonkey. That guy, while not surely very into chan culture, at least did put effort into this. He listened to us. He fixed bugs, kept us updated, tried what he could to keep this site alive. He is a good guy in my opinion - he just lived under the shadow of Jim, so with not much freedom to do anything more than merely helping on the purely technical, bug fixing aspects.
If only Jim was less interested in money or influence, and more into the wellbeing of this site's userbase…. Maybe the outcome would've been different.
So, if you wonder why this board list has SO MANY dead links, now you know it. It is the living testimony of how many boards died, of how much people was driven away. And even the ones that still exist, are almost all dead. Empty shells of themselves, reduced to nothing. Only spam and dead links. It is why I won't delete anything anymore, here. To remember.
It's a shame. I've been here for so long, saw so much going on. From back when 8chan was just a minuscule site at 8chan.co, with almost no activity, to the boom in popularity, to the inevitable demise. So many shitposts, memes, wins and losses. I even made friends here, and got help from other anons which got me to where I am now. And yet, looking back I still feel sad. There could've been much more. It could've gone much better than this. And now, we could've been all together still, posting and shitposting like a one, giant, disfunctional family.
But it is what it is. Hopefully, this story will serve as a lesson. Do not let your hunger for fame and money blind you. Who wants too much, will hold NOTHING in the end.
Goodbye, it has been a pleasure shitposting with ya all.
In memory of 8chan, 2013 - 2019
Rest In Peace.
Post last edited at 10/08/23 (Sun) 00:51:11
