It became clear during the operation of 8chan that the Infinity software was dogshit and needed to be rewritten to support the high number of users. It was not feasible to simply scale further because the amount of income produced by the site did not scale linearly with the number of users, but the amount of computing resources required basically did.
There was some planning and some discussion between Brennan and some of the prominent board administrators and Josh. We came up with a plan to develop new software to replace Infinity. Unbeknownst to Josh at this time, but known to myself and some of the other board owners, was that we did not expect this effort to succeed.
The actual plan, of which Brennan was fully aware:
During the time Josh was rewriting the software and the site had terrible performance. Users were beginning to fracture off to other sites like Endchan, Julay, and 8chan.moe. The true point of the rewrite was to stem the flow of departures and give the site additional time to survive and to possibly come up with a solution. As long as we had an active "promise to fix 8chan" and were supposedly working on it, the users would not flee. During this time, Brennan would attempt to improve Infinity while Josh was developing new software and vichan and lynxchan and jschan or whatever the prominent projects were at the time would also be advancing.
We hoped that, by the time we ran out of funds to support the operations in the Phillipines, one of these solutions would pan out and we would migrate the site to the new solution.
During this time Brennan did basically nothing and allowed infinity to further decay, while Josh developed very nice-looking software with a lot of features, but had very little experience with web development and did not understand the performance requirements of the enormity of 8chan's userbase. So what resulted from his development was, predictably, not fast enough to serve the userbase. This was entirely predicted by everyone involved.
However, this is where Brennan started losing his fucking mind. He suddenly began acting like all the site's hopes had been pinned on Josh the entire time and like it was all his fault (after having done effectively noting to hold up his side of the agreement for, what, a year? I think it was more than a year) and tried to throw Josh under the bus. He then started flipping out on all the board owners and IRC cabalites because we weren't angry enough at Josh. The rest is history
