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Why Kuro5hin Failed || kuro5hin.org

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20090522064407/http://www.kuro5hin.org:80/story/2008/9/20/105247/481

Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.

The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is "learning from experience." But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."

So how long have there been signs outside this particular swamp?

And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.

And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."

Communitree shut down in 1978. The boys who ruined it were logging on via a mainframe computer at their high school.

So, after studying the relatively new phenomenon of online communities for 10 years, what was Shirky's prescription for success? First he warns that nothing is certain:

You can find the same piece of code running in many, many environments. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So there is something supernatural about groups being a run-time experience.

But of course kuro5hin reached this point about the time Shirky wrote this article in 2003. So we had the magic secret sauce. But Shirky warns that there are some fundamental things you have to accept and do to hold it together.

Three Things to Accept

1.) Of the things you have to accept, the first is that you cannot completely separate technical and social issues...

2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most." ... But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.

3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion.

Now I can hear the howls of outrage already, but point 3 is not the opinion of some elitist who has decided he is better than everyone else. It's the observation of someone who had at the time seriously studied online communities for longer than kuro5hin has existed, and noticed that this is a necessary feature of all of the ones that have worked.

In 2003 Shirky put up a sign that said, "Don't go in this swamp, there's alligators." And here we are up to our asses in alligators, at least those of us who haven't been eaten yet. And yes, this makes me feel like an idiot.

Four Things to Design For

1.) If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.

Check...

2.) Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."

K5 used to succeed it here, but I recall a number of people suggesting it was a bad idea when mojo was made worthless. You might laugh at Shirky holding Slashdot up as an example of what to do, but let's face it; Slashdot remains a large, successful operation in 2008, and K5 doesn't.

3.) Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.

Welly welly welly. Isn't that what a lot of us have been suggesting since, oh, 2003 or so? This is the aspect of the kuro5hin experiment that doomed it to failure before it was even started; I suspected this even when I joined, but was unaware that someone far more conversant with the subject than me had already posted a sign warning about the alligators in this particular swamp.

4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale.

K5 never quite became big enough for scale to kill it, though it may have been close in the heyday. Shirky mentions metafilter's closing of the new account page; the $5 fee came later, and was probably a better idea because it also directly adds to #3.

So why didn't the $5 fee save K5? By the time Rusty was willing to put up such a barrier, most of the core group had drifted away. Of the several hundred people who made K5 what it was back when, probably no more than a dozen bother to check the page regularly any more. Your standing here, which used to be a platform for international publication before tens of thousands of reliable readers, is no longer worth all that much.

Meanwhile, You can look at every single board that has remained large and successful in the time since Shirky wrote this and see how his principles have been applied, if not deliberately then at least inadvertently. Take dailykos, a site that at one point was running nearly the same software as K5. Call it "dailyfail" all you want, but it's more popular than sex and making Kos enough money that he can run his own polls this election season.

The barrier to entry is there in that you have to wait a week before you can post; it's low but exists. More to the point there is a core group empowered to "garden." Although there's no voting queue the Recommended Diary list performs an almost identical function, with a nearly identical reward. Identities become valuable through such publication so that burning them is a perceived cost. As for the barrier to scale, I'd say it's the difficulty of getting noticed and fleeting nature of publication there; you have to be quite dedicated to become a well known dkos user. The site has really segmented itself into smaller communities some of which have splintered off to sites of their own.

So there it is, all laid out in an article published five years ago. And say, is that a log or an alligator?

"localroger desperately attempts to regain acceptance and relevance on kuro5hin after being smacked down by half the site"

It's the least you could do - throw a lifeline to an old friend who's down on his luck.

But I would add a section at the end, in which you speculate on specific actions the community might take now - given that we're already hip-deep in some alligator's jaws - as well as to invite the reader to post their own suggestions.

Now, everyone will without a doubt protest that Rusty doesn't care about us anymore, and so won't implement anything that requires code or database changes. But that's not true, and I know it not to be.

Rusty does from time to time make significant investments of time and money into the site. But it's easy for me to tell, given my own experience with ad publishing, that he earns very little money from k5.

That means he's had to take other jobs to provide for him and his. I don't know what he's doing now, but at least for a while he was working as a carpenter.

And don't give him crap about blowing all the CMF money on himself - I am completely on his side with this. Now, I will grant that he was being unrealistic with his expectations for the CMF, but when it came right down to allocating the money, he as a self-employed person - and I am speaking from my own hard experience of being a self-employed and married man - had to take care of his first responsibilities first - and that is to feed and house his family, and not coding us up a fancier Scoop.

If there are any specific changes to Scoop that are found to be required, I recommend that someone who knows the codebase - or at least knows Perl and MySQL - implement the code themselves and submit patches to the Scoop Open Source project. Rusty will get your contributions the next time he upgrades to the latest Scoop version - which he does do from time to time.

The entire - and much larger - community of Scoop sites will benefit as well.

But there are many, many things that we as members can do to help that wouldn't require Rusty to even lift a finger.

One such that I've been meaning to post for eons would be for us all to introduce at least one friend - whether meatspace or virtual - to Kuro5hin. We could double our membership overnight!

Of course you'd have to make the case that Kuronhood is worth five bucks - but that's not the only way. Full membership can also be obtained by placing an ad here; I have a great deal of experience that demonstrates that K5 Self-Service Text Ads are a very, very good value. I can provide specific figures if you like.

Thus you can flog our site to anyone you know who pays to advertise their own site.

--

The only winner is Michael Crawford. After the fall of society, the only currency will be Free Music CDs. -- ensignyu

It provides a place for rusty to comment at where he has absolute power.

It provides a place for you to post your trollish articles.

It provides a place for a wide variety of different trolls to troll each other with varying levels of creativity.

And finally, it provides a place for those of us who are amused by any of the above to look on.

Could k5 have been more? Maybe. But let's be honest...none of the people who have any right to complain about it are still around. k5 is exactly what the current population made it and, it's worth noting, you were one of the big movers in the creation of k5's current state.

to a large degree the report is correct.

Also, there are a number of users (for better or worse) whose sole purpose here is to destroy the site completely. meh

All that is left now are the same users(trolls or otherwise), saying the same tired, lame crap over and over to the same users. How stupid is that?

To submit anything worth reading here is not worth the effort. All one has to do is look at the front page titles for the last year. Hardly any Tech stories are posted any more for example and the main fare here are stories about K5. why would anyone after spending 5 minutes reading the diaries or articles spend a pittance of $5 to join?

Obama: Trickle up poverty

--

The coming reality of change [...] is that a lot of what we now call schizo is NORMAL -- i.e. within the set of variances that produces a functional Human being.

k5 is like failblog for smart people.  What could possibly go wrong?

So how does Shirky's analysis apply to 4chan? /nt ( 2.66 / 3) ( #16)

by Mathemagician on Sat Sep 20, 2008 at 03:50:45 PM EST

I wouldn't say it failed ( none / 1) ( #17)

by cbraga on Sat Sep 20, 2008 at 04:10:07 PM EST

It's still a working site and community, albeit smaller than it used to be.

For comparison, the story An In-Depth Anaylsis of the Cultural Ramifications Evidenced in the Powerpuff Girls posted in 2002 in K5's golden age had 146 comments, which I think was typical. The average story on the frontpage today has around 60, so maybe the community is half the size it was.

That's hardly a failure I think. With few exceptions the posted stories are of about the same quality they were, I think. There are only less of them. Actually they improved from the time NIWS was running wild.

Look at the popular sites such as Digg and once we get past the frontpage there's the same inane discussion that we have here in the diaries, maybe worse. ESC[78;89;13p ESC[110;121;13p

yes rusty, please enforce mojo again

i think i speak for all of the original alligators when i say that i miss lording my TU status over "serious posters" like maynard, partykidd, infinitera, localroger &c.

Rusty drained the swamp after the flora died ( 3.00 / 3) ( #19)

by Liar on Sat Sep 20, 2008 at 05:10:39 PM EST

Rusty encouraged the trollishness up until it was directed personally at him at which point he leaped into action and shut down new user sign-ups. By that time, most of the people who wanted to invest in this place were already driven off and didn't have an incentive to endure the childish troll antics. Now, the only people who remain are those who enjoy trolling and those who are too apathetic to move on--and neither group leads to compelling content or a particularly worthwhile culture. Rather, it's like Escape from L.A.

A web community is a garden requiring constant tending and cultivation. K5's garden has a busted chevy on cinder blocks sitting on top of it and stale oil saturating the soil. Rusty may as well have salted the earth.

I admit I'm a Liar. That's why you can trust me.

is money and popularity. how then can we apply this metric to your own life? i ask because i happen to be one of the "original alligators" who, if i may be so bold, is largely responsible for "killing" k5, namely lowering the bar for acceptable content to the depths which it sits now. i ask because if you truly thought these things mattered, you wouldn't be here.

i didn't kill k5. neither did jason or insomnyuk or hobo or any of the other trolls. we saved it. we kept it true to its libertarian roots by making sure it didn't fall prey to the groupthink gardeners you seem to admire but never validate by fucking off to husi. for me, the measure of success of this board is whether or not i can still write NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER without getting banned by some uppity faggot admin on a power trip. the more we piss you off, the stronger we become.

and guess what? the trolls rallied and moved out to invade the rest of the internet and eventually meatspace in the form of chanology. $cientology isn't the enemy and never was. you are the enemy. you and the faggots like you who want to make the world safe for your delicate faggot sensibilities. thankfully, hard-working trolls are here to rape that sensibility into submission.

Last I checked, Cat 4 hurricanes haven't landed in Florida

- postDigital -

However, I am attracted to it because out of everyone who posts desudesudesu, there's legit comments. It also has quite a nice google pagerank for newish stories. The flintlock article I wrote has showed up in some weird places (including the local gun club) too. Also it can be intellectually challenging without having to worry about politeness being in the way. Even though postDigital is a partisan hack trying to post as a centrist (him and CTS have gay sex I swear), I still enjoy discussions with him. The opposite is true also, even though I enjoy Michael Crawfords perspective on life, I still think it's funny to encourage him to kill himself.

YFI - whoever heard of someone distilling beer, FFS? - Nimey

Neither a log nor an alligator... ( none / 1) ( #27)

by mirleid on Sat Sep 20, 2008 at 08:46:14 PM EST

That this article doesn't explain how to create a healthy online community. It just gives recommendations on how to start an online circle-jerk.

The real reason why k5 "failed" is simply because k5 doesn't tolerate self-indulgence. It doesn't matter if you wrote 20 of the best articles ever posted to this site, if you write some self-indulgent bullshit, someone is gonna call you out on it. And probably call out yuor mom too.

But creative types tend to get self-indulgent every now and then. This is something movie studios and record companies are good at dealing with. They'll make a deal allowing the artiste to make his silly project, as long as they go back to making profitable movies afterward. Sure they lose a few million but it keeps the talent from getting all pissy.

k5 doesn't do that. So the creative types will go off to Husi or wherever where they are encouraged to be self-indulgent and never again produce worthwhile content.

So in conclusion, my dear localroger...

HUSI-------->

Dailykos is successful because it has a motivating passion a hundred times larger than k5 ever had, and it came along at exactly the right time.

Hey, wow, my first comment in years, and it's on a story about how k5 lost all its users. Yeah.

Hi, I'm one of these old users you talk about ( none / 1) ( #38)

by Sheepdot on Wed Oct 01, 2008 at 11:23:04 AM EST

I wanted to post a story to Reddit (which is about to fail) about why K5 failed and found this one. I think you got it entirely wrong, however.

A website can be successful without being a walled garden, you just have to give even more editing abilities to the users, such as, letting users vote on not just the content of the story but also the title of the story (the author's title has to compete with other suggestions from the users), where it links to (if  like a digg or reddit), the section it's placed in (hey, no political crap about Paulin in our business section, please), comment or vote on comments, and whether or not they want to move the story up or down on the front page.

But here's the kicker: "They only get one vote".

That means they can either:

  1. Comment and not be able to vote on the comments (Hello, Slashdot!)

  2. Vote on comments and not be able to comment or vote on any of the following:

a) Title of story (both change and vote)

b) Where story is sectioned

c) Where the link or links in the story point to

If someone does 1 they can still change the story and where it is sectioned as well as where the link or links in the story point to, but any comment voting completely nullifies your ability to do anything else. This means that users that contribute in the site are more powerful than users that simply read, comment, and upvote the things they agree with and downvote or vote to remove the things they disagree with.

IMHO, the above system is better, but really doesn't have to do with why K5 died. The reason why K5 died (and the above system would have helped with this) is because K5 became a website about politics and not technology. The users rewarded people who talked about politics and not technology. The stories voted on and commented on

were about politics and not technology.

Look at your sections even today, the politics one gets posted to far more often than technology. This is because K5 now sucks.

Politics on K5 - 6 stories in the last 3 months

Technology on K5 - 6 stories in the last year

And whenever we asked rusty to fix the site because it was too much to deal with, his response was always "technology and culture, from the trenches". So slowly everyone that spoke of technology left the site, and eventually you were only left with those that spewed whatever liberal hogwash you wanted to.

I've noticed a trend with K5, Digg, and Reddit:

  1. New community-based website starts - "We're so much cooler than X (previous community-based website)"

  2. Libertarian & Liberal techies post about technology - "Check out this 2k Windows 3.1 install, I programmed "Go" on my car computer, someone makes a Tesla coil sing 'Oh Susanna'"

  3. Liberal and Libertarian techies post about politics - "Screw fascism and war, free teh Internet, go Team Atheism!"

  4. Conservatives troll or Trolls troll - (Needs no description)

  5. "Faux-tech liberals" post about politics - "Obama mentions Linux (well, not by name) in a talk about net neutrality!"

  6. Libertarians, seeing the faux-tech liberals post about how "free markets" and "capitalism" are the great Western devil and how regulation is needed, post a few links to reason, mises.org, lew rockwell, etc. - "Check out a rational piece of advice from Ludwig von Mises regarding <insert US gov't socialistic action>. Ron Paul's reasoned stance against Net Neutrality."

  7. For whatever reason, they get downmodded into oblivion, censored, or just plain chastised as neocons. They leave the website. -"zOmg that sounds conservative you corporate sellout! DWONMOD!!!"

  8. The website continues, but loses most of its Libertarian content-monitoring base, and certainly a large enough technology contingent that the website ends up being essentially a liberal political blog. - "OBAMA touches a computer with Linux installed!!! Paulin refuses to say if she molestered a boy from Mexico!"

  9. A liberal techie asks why the website is about politics all the time now and not cool technology anymore, all the other liberal techies want to know as well. - "Hey guys, just a suggestion but, can we not post about Karl Rove or waterboarding in the business and technology sections!??!"

  10. The liberal techies leave but stay in touch. Blowhards take over the website and eventually post stories about why said website failed, AND they get it wrong. Few people read the story and even fewer care.

Stage 7 is happening at Reddit now. Digg's somewhere between 9 and 10 in it's tech section, but they've kind of "commercialized" enough that they are becoming a temporary haven for conservative trolls as well in their politics. Perhaps as a response to Reddit. I don't know, nor do I care, but I'm looking for a new website to replace Reddit now.

not exactly my experience here ( none / 1) ( #43)

by manjal on Wed Nov 26, 2008 at 10:15:04 AM EST

why did i leave? because my account got banned.

why did it get banned? i was never told, and when i asked people on irc, they also refused to tell me. now, rusty denies even knowing about it.

so i stopped coming, and stopped writing.

----

'good' you say, 'you were a troll'.... well, maybe that is just your opinion. because, even if i was, i still got several stories voted up, and a lot of comments on my diaries, and people even 'looking for me' years after i left.

----

so, from my perspective, you guys have plenty of 'core people' who 'crack the whip'.

what you lack is

  1. a consistent set of rules about what is allowed and what isnt

  2. transparency about how decisions are made

  3. any sort of 'checks and balances'  in your 'government' to protect 'the little guy'.

systems of government are necessary, but without some sort of checks and balances, accountability, and transparency, governments wind up stifling diversity, destroying freedom, and stopping dissent... diversity, freedom, and dissent.. some of the foundations of modern civilization, without which science, art, technology, commerce, business, and the internet itself, could not exist. these issues are timeless, written about in ancient greece, and coming up again in every society, again and again.

as for dailykos, their 'success' is in people like ArcXIX getting slander published as stories that go on to pollute the mainstream media? and the rampant misoginy? do you really want that kind of 'success'? slashdot's comment section is also an odd example, because it is not 'social'. there is not much 'community' there, you cant even send private messages to another user.