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4chan Is Running Out of Money and Martin Shkreli Wants To Buy It (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the this-can't-end-well dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The infamous message board 4chan is struggling to stay afloat and will have to make changes to reduce costs, the site's owner wrote in a post on Sunday. "4chan can't afford infrastructure costs, network fee, servers cost, CDN and etc, now," writes Hiroyuki Nisimura, who bought the site from its founder last year. Nisimura says ads haven't been effective enough to support the site, nor have subscriptions offering additional features. "We had tried to keep 4chan as is. But I failed," Nisimura writes. "I am sincerely sorry." There are three options for 4chan to survive going forward, as far as Nisimura sees it: sell more subscriptions, include "much more" -- and potentially even malicious -- ads, or cut traffic to the site in half. That might be done by closing message boards, slowing down the site, or reducing the size of images that can be posted. Nisimura makes it sound bad (his post is titled "Winter is coming"), but he also proposes changes to save the site. Meanwhile, another infamous name -- Martin Shkreli -- says he's interested in buying 4chan; he's in touch with Nisimura, so maybe we'll see how that remarkably bad combination turns out. Martin Shkreli tweeted: "I'm open to joining the Board of Directors of 4Chan. @4chan." Not too long after, Hiroyuki Nisimura replied: "I have replied your DM. Thank you for supporting 4chan @MartinShkreli twitter.com/MartinShkreli/...."

5 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. For your amusement. From /g/. by bmo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Notch now looking into buying 4chan Anonymous 10/03/16(Mon)19:51:42 No.56909338â->>56909384 >>56909411 >>56909683 >>56909721 >>56910005 >>56910058 >>56910195 >>56910297 >>56910483 >>56910593 >>56910655 >>56910945
    A lucky anon on /b/ got quads, summoning Notch to look into buying 4chan.

    "Assuming it's not too expensive, and assuming I don't have to do any actual work myself, I'm in."

    Who here would work for notch maintaining the 4chan codebase ?

      Anonymous 10/03/16(Mon)19:56:06 No.56909384â-
    >>56909338 (OP)
    >entire website will be Java based
    >everything inside one .jar

    --
    BMO

  2. Crowdfunding campaign to save 4chan by Shane_Optima · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you want to help keep 4chan the way it is and not have it all crapped up with ads, a crowdfunding campaign has been set up here.

  3. Re: inb4 by silentcoder · · Score: 5, Funny

    So Shkrelli wants to have one company that causes cancer, so his other company have more people to sell overpriced cancer drugs to.

    --
    Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
  4. Re:inb4 by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Funny

    I was ignoring 4chan before it was cool.

  5. Re:inb4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    4-who? You mean that support group for sociopathic outcasts who aren't smart enough to venture out onto the real internet?