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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/...."

4 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Nishimura, with an h by Andreas+Mayer · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's just a different spelling for the same name.

    Wikipedia says his name is ... um, Slashdot doesn't like Kanji - look it up here.
    The most commonly used transliteration in English is Nishimura Hiroyuki, according to the Hepburn system of romaji. It's Nisimura when written using the Nihon-shiki or Kunrei-shiki system.

    (Knowledge totally stolen from https://www.italki.com/questio...)

  2. the most punchable face (as its know) by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelli...

    a fark theme, too, of course.

    --

    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  3. Re:Crowdfunding campaign to save 4chan by Shane_Optima · · Score: 4, Informative

    *sigh*. 4chan is what started and popularized that meme. Don't mod down a joke just because you don't get it. (and don't mod this up informative, either.)

  4. Re:Crowdfunding campaign to save 4chan by wvmarle · · Score: 4, Informative

    OP is actually one of the very very few posts that deserves to end up with a "Score:5, Troll" distinction.