- Joined
- Nov 14, 2012
Lets have a chat.
The Numbers
Everyone likes being apart of the winning team, yeah? Lets see some numbers.
There was a very high point at the end of December where we spiked at over 1200 active users briefly. Before then even, we were doubling our numbers every 4 months because of other huge draws, for which I believe Jace is primarily responsible -- but I can't know for sure. What I do know is that, after January, there was a big dip in growth. This was also around the time that our site renamed itself from the CWCki Forums, so the loss of familiarity could be it.
So then after this I was stumbling a bit, trying to figure out what the problem was. I thought maybe the site for sure had maybe just died; I had killed it with the rebranding. But that wasn't it. I realized we were still growing, just not in the way I expected. Lets look at two more figures.
The first big red line shows what would have happened if we continued to double active users every 4 months. The second green lines shows the average growth we were receiving before Jace. It appears that all that happened is our casual traffic for the Jace Connors Television Program dropped off, leaving behind the sticky users who are so well integrated with our fine community to this day.
Now, the other interesting thing is guest traffic. The analytics I run on the cwckiforums and kiwifarms.net have ran for 10 months and 8 months respectively. In total, the cwckiforums had 300,000 unique visitors and already we have had 450,000 -- according to Google Analytics, which many people are now blocking. What can't be blocked is Cloudflare HTTP analytics, and that includes requests to our chat system. In total, Cloudflare would claim we have processed 127,769,640 requests in the last 30 days as of writing.
So, in the numbers sense, we're fine. We're quickly becoming the Queens and High Shitlords of Drama on the Internet. Our friends from Tumblr and other communities will be savagely whipped into shape and users will continue to join as guest traffic spikes numbers from our growing and already massive SEO fingerprint.
The Drama Engine
"A community that runs on drama must also create it" -- Sir Isaac Newton, Newton's 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
Every little drama is a special snowflake. They are unique, and beautiful, and a pain in the ass. I've tried going the discrete way, and that didn't work. It turns out it's real fucking hard to cover shit up in a community of some three thousand people. This month I learned the joys and efficiency of burning drama alive. I like how things are now. If you have a problem, contact a moderator or manager. If they have a problem, contact an admin. If everyone has problems, I'll deal with it.
Dealing with it means making sure everyone knows what the problem is. If I've made the right decision, it stops being a problem. This kind of thing requires a little foresight to do but so far it's worked. It stops people from arguing. You don't want your petty bullshit flung out in the open? Don't be petty, or keep it private. Simple. This is my new outlook after dealing with people's problems for 3 years. If you want to stay on the forum, don't make my time here unpleasant; same goes for everyone else.
This leads well into ...
New Policies
Old Rules, New Clothes
We've recently added a bunch of new boards and changed up the rules and added new shit. I'm not going to throw the book out and rewrite it, but I'm going to reword a lot of stuff to be more concise. The main problem with our rules is that they're wordy as hell. A rule needs to be like, 3 words followed by a sentence.
There also needs to be a distinction between a "rule" and a "guideline". Dunno how I'm going to do that. Apparently people think we strictly enforce all rules and that keeps them from wanting to register. I don't know how much of a good thing that is, but I realize big bricks of rule stuff up at the top can be intimidating.
The only rule this website has is what I mentioned. Don't make life difficult. This forum is entertainment. On this board, you're either being entertained, or you are the entertainment. This becomes a problem in cases where there's bait, because it's internal. I feel that the person taking obvious bait and getting into frivolous arguments is more at fault than the person throwing their opinion out to the wind. Where we're going to start drawing the line for this is up for discussion, because many old members do it too, but we'll figure it out.
No Outside Influence
The Democratic People's Republic of North Kiwia is closing its borders; welcome to Juche. For a long time I listened to people on the outside who had criticisms of the board because I was always curious about what people had to say. I felt maybe it was easier for them to say these things on anonymous websites or on foreign communities because there was no risk of being penalized here. I realize now that this, if not previously a mistake, is now a mistake.
At some point I realized that we are a community that routinely gathers 500 people across the world at one time, and are twice as big as anything I would consider a "competitor" put together. And the funniest part is, we aren't even really competitors. People come here because they don't like anonymous posting. They don't like belligerence. So, we're going to try and focus on that, because so far, it's been a massive success.
I was always reluctant to make this decision because I thought, "where will I gather feedback now?" I thought a feedback board would be totally dead, no one could possibly take interest in such a thing, but sure enough it works. Go figure. Now the community doesn't need an Official Shitposting Department to tell us how to run our site; we got ourselves for that.
And finally ...
Soon
Lolcow Wiki
People try to fault me for the Lolcow Wiki because it never got finished, but it never got abandoned. The site still runs and I keep it up, but it needs love, and I can't give it to it right now.
See, the Wiki was going to launch with Jace. I had it planned out that we'd make a full wiki for Jace, tie in articles that were well written for people like Vade, and then show it off to the world and open registration via forum accounts. The problem is that Jace turned out to be fake and I quit my job around the same time, so now there's no time or impetus behind the wiki, which is a shame.
The Kiwi Farms is an engine of drama. It constantly creates and finds content and streams it for discussion, but there's no exit point. If anyone looked at Moleman today and asked, "Why is he funny?", they'd either have to be told in a reply, or the OP for the thread would need to be spot-on. This is typically what a wiki is for. The threads generate content, find content, interact with Moleman, and then the Wiki studiously records it. People find it on accident or read it at random for fun. Entertainment is had, new users are acquired, and the collective IQ for the entire world drops a little.
When I have free time, after Infinity Next is complete, I will find love for this Wiki again and it will be finished. The chronicles of this website can begin to be archived. And, while that's fun, I have other goals too.
Lolcow News
The site is so big now that most people miss out on things. A lot of things. I miss out on 99% of shit that goes down. When something funny or interesting happens with people I care about, I try to launch it as a site notice so people know to check it out. This is really cumbersome and short lived (notices lack posterity), so what I want to do is open a blog with a few very talented writers to condense interesting on and off-site events into small articles. copypaste, the owner of 8chan, has already volunteered to write. He knows of a few tech people who deserve some attention and who has interesting stories with.
Both sites will be tied into the forum. News articles will appear on the board somehow, and I'll find some way to put in big threads their relevant wiki pages (i.e. in the vade thread, add a notice that says "[[Vade]] has an article on the Lolcow Wiki."). This would be in late 2015 at the earliest, early 2016 best guess, though. Until then, I'm too busy.
So for now, my Kiwis, carry on. I'll roll out some changes this month to the rules and soon we will be an empire of autism that the vaccine pharmaceuticals could only dream of being.
The Numbers
Everyone likes being apart of the winning team, yeah? Lets see some numbers.
There was a very high point at the end of December where we spiked at over 1200 active users briefly. Before then even, we were doubling our numbers every 4 months because of other huge draws, for which I believe Jace is primarily responsible -- but I can't know for sure. What I do know is that, after January, there was a big dip in growth. This was also around the time that our site renamed itself from the CWCki Forums, so the loss of familiarity could be it.
(There are statistical drops in this from data corruption.)
So then after this I was stumbling a bit, trying to figure out what the problem was. I thought maybe the site for sure had maybe just died; I had killed it with the rebranding. But that wasn't it. I realized we were still growing, just not in the way I expected. Lets look at two more figures.
2014+2015 Weekly Chart
Same Chart with Trend Plots
Same Chart with Trend Plots
The first big red line shows what would have happened if we continued to double active users every 4 months. The second green lines shows the average growth we were receiving before Jace. It appears that all that happened is our casual traffic for the Jace Connors Television Program dropped off, leaving behind the sticky users who are so well integrated with our fine community to this day.
Now, the other interesting thing is guest traffic. The analytics I run on the cwckiforums and kiwifarms.net have ran for 10 months and 8 months respectively. In total, the cwckiforums had 300,000 unique visitors and already we have had 450,000 -- according to Google Analytics, which many people are now blocking. What can't be blocked is Cloudflare HTTP analytics, and that includes requests to our chat system. In total, Cloudflare would claim we have processed 127,769,640 requests in the last 30 days as of writing.
So, in the numbers sense, we're fine. We're quickly becoming the Queens and High Shitlords of Drama on the Internet. Our friends from Tumblr and other communities will be savagely whipped into shape and users will continue to join as guest traffic spikes numbers from our growing and already massive SEO fingerprint.
The Drama Engine
"A community that runs on drama must also create it" -- Sir Isaac Newton, Newton's 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
Every little drama is a special snowflake. They are unique, and beautiful, and a pain in the ass. I've tried going the discrete way, and that didn't work. It turns out it's real fucking hard to cover shit up in a community of some three thousand people. This month I learned the joys and efficiency of burning drama alive. I like how things are now. If you have a problem, contact a moderator or manager. If they have a problem, contact an admin. If everyone has problems, I'll deal with it.
Dealing with it means making sure everyone knows what the problem is. If I've made the right decision, it stops being a problem. This kind of thing requires a little foresight to do but so far it's worked. It stops people from arguing. You don't want your petty bullshit flung out in the open? Don't be petty, or keep it private. Simple. This is my new outlook after dealing with people's problems for 3 years. If you want to stay on the forum, don't make my time here unpleasant; same goes for everyone else.
This leads well into ...
New Policies
Old Rules, New Clothes
We've recently added a bunch of new boards and changed up the rules and added new shit. I'm not going to throw the book out and rewrite it, but I'm going to reword a lot of stuff to be more concise. The main problem with our rules is that they're wordy as hell. A rule needs to be like, 3 words followed by a sentence.
There also needs to be a distinction between a "rule" and a "guideline". Dunno how I'm going to do that. Apparently people think we strictly enforce all rules and that keeps them from wanting to register. I don't know how much of a good thing that is, but I realize big bricks of rule stuff up at the top can be intimidating.
The only rule this website has is what I mentioned. Don't make life difficult. This forum is entertainment. On this board, you're either being entertained, or you are the entertainment. This becomes a problem in cases where there's bait, because it's internal. I feel that the person taking obvious bait and getting into frivolous arguments is more at fault than the person throwing their opinion out to the wind. Where we're going to start drawing the line for this is up for discussion, because many old members do it too, but we'll figure it out.
No Outside Influence
The Democratic People's Republic of North Kiwia is closing its borders; welcome to Juche. For a long time I listened to people on the outside who had criticisms of the board because I was always curious about what people had to say. I felt maybe it was easier for them to say these things on anonymous websites or on foreign communities because there was no risk of being penalized here. I realize now that this, if not previously a mistake, is now a mistake.
At some point I realized that we are a community that routinely gathers 500 people across the world at one time, and are twice as big as anything I would consider a "competitor" put together. And the funniest part is, we aren't even really competitors. People come here because they don't like anonymous posting. They don't like belligerence. So, we're going to try and focus on that, because so far, it's been a massive success.
I was always reluctant to make this decision because I thought, "where will I gather feedback now?" I thought a feedback board would be totally dead, no one could possibly take interest in such a thing, but sure enough it works. Go figure. Now the community doesn't need an Official Shitposting Department to tell us how to run our site; we got ourselves for that.
And finally ...
Soon
Lolcow Wiki
People try to fault me for the Lolcow Wiki because it never got finished, but it never got abandoned. The site still runs and I keep it up, but it needs love, and I can't give it to it right now.
See, the Wiki was going to launch with Jace. I had it planned out that we'd make a full wiki for Jace, tie in articles that were well written for people like Vade, and then show it off to the world and open registration via forum accounts. The problem is that Jace turned out to be fake and I quit my job around the same time, so now there's no time or impetus behind the wiki, which is a shame.
The Kiwi Farms is an engine of drama. It constantly creates and finds content and streams it for discussion, but there's no exit point. If anyone looked at Moleman today and asked, "Why is he funny?", they'd either have to be told in a reply, or the OP for the thread would need to be spot-on. This is typically what a wiki is for. The threads generate content, find content, interact with Moleman, and then the Wiki studiously records it. People find it on accident or read it at random for fun. Entertainment is had, new users are acquired, and the collective IQ for the entire world drops a little.
When I have free time, after Infinity Next is complete, I will find love for this Wiki again and it will be finished. The chronicles of this website can begin to be archived. And, while that's fun, I have other goals too.
Lolcow News
The site is so big now that most people miss out on things. A lot of things. I miss out on 99% of shit that goes down. When something funny or interesting happens with people I care about, I try to launch it as a site notice so people know to check it out. This is really cumbersome and short lived (notices lack posterity), so what I want to do is open a blog with a few very talented writers to condense interesting on and off-site events into small articles. copypaste, the owner of 8chan, has already volunteered to write. He knows of a few tech people who deserve some attention and who has interesting stories with.
Both sites will be tied into the forum. News articles will appear on the board somehow, and I'll find some way to put in big threads their relevant wiki pages (i.e. in the vade thread, add a notice that says "[[Vade]] has an article on the Lolcow Wiki."). This would be in late 2015 at the earliest, early 2016 best guess, though. Until then, I'm too busy.
So for now, my Kiwis, carry on. I'll roll out some changes this month to the rules and soon we will be an empire of autism that the vaccine pharmaceuticals could only dream of being.
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