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Comment by sam_lowry_ | Hacker News Reader

How did it end?

I pulled the plug when I got my first job and had no longer the time to moderate the endless stream of child porn, videos of eastern guys using hammers in interesting ways (blood was involved), and people hating on me for banning them when they posted inappropriate content.

I just had no time. I moderated most content together with a friend, and he also was no longer interested in continuing the project due to the amount of garbage.

It started as a fun site to share funny videos/pics or just talk about stuff with “no rules” and some adult content, but it suddenly (after 2 years or so) gained international users as a hub for weird shit, and it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away.

I put it in read-only mode with an announcement and within a month, I just ended the VPN contract.

I do have an encrypted backup of everything, somewhere...

"it drove the “fun” users (we even had IRL meetings sometimes) away"

That seems to be a mandatory phase in any kind of online social space, unfortunately.

Online or not, and social group must be protected from bad actors or they will drive everyone else away. As an example, long ago I knew of a group for single adults which had one creepy guy who drove away all the women, and of course their absence drove away the men. The creator of the group took the lesson, and started a new group which required permission to join; the way it worked was you would briefly talk with the founder, and as long as you didn’t seem like a creep you were in.

You should upload the backup to Archive.org

If the site had ongoing problems with CP, I really can't imagine that the Internet Archive would be willing to host its content either.

Ah. I didn't realize the site had that kind of content. Burn it with fire.

I second this. It was already offensive at the time, but now just 10 years later, much of the stuff did age really poorly.

It went 4chan levels really fast, including racism, sexism, sharing of personal information (without consent) incl those of public figures (there was one video of some person licking a dog’s... “thing”)

And it got worse and worse every day. Also note that most of it wasn’t english. It was not an international community, the site was dutch, but that didn’t stop people from joining and posting weird shit in all kinds of languages.

> If the site had ongoing problems with CP, I really can't imagine that the Internet Archive would be willing to host its content either.

Except that the CP posts were moderated away, and presumably wouldn't be part of the archive.

Given the parent's description of the site as being "hammered" by inappropriate content (not just CP); the fact that the site was real-time, so older content could easily slip under the radar; and the fact that it was shut down abruptly -- chances are that any archive of the site would probably still contain a significant amount of illegal and/or objectionable material.

Honestly, even just the shock content and (legal) pornography would probably get a hard "no" from the Archive. They really don't want to be seen as a source for adult content.

Why not start a live archive online?

Sounds like a liability if the content was as perverse as the person describes.

Versus, running it for a while, as they did?

Well I did pull the plug for this reason.

It ran for a while without problems. It was just a group of people sharing videos and talking about how their parents sucked (most were teenagers and young adults).

People started sharing offensive material and adult content, so I created a part of the website where they could keep that stuff separate (you had to opt-in, but no login required to opt-in).

Surprisingly that adult section of the website became really popular. First it was porn and liveleak shit, than just random gore, hentai and just weird stuff.

After a while, there was suddenly a lot of international visits. I think some sites linked to us as a source of free adult content without ads. It was just in a few months where it turned really bad suddenly. it was fun/challenging to moderate it for a while (and to increase efficiency to do so) but when letters from lawyers start coming (because people were witchhunting IRL people and sharing personal details like phone numbers and addresses), while people were also posting CP increasingly often, it was time to unplug it

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