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4chan Is Running Out of Money and Martin Shkreli Wants To Buy It (theverge.com)
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/...."
8chan seems to be getting by and they have twice as many chans.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
why should we help them stay afloat?
Lets hope 4chan stays afloat, because otherwise 4chan posters will be dispersed throughout other sites and communities. Like a cyst bursting into bloodstream.
He's somehow not telling the whole story, he shut down the site's ads without warning, complaining about ad serving costs and urging people to buy 4chan passes. My guess is that he wants to be done with the site, causing a surge of subscriptions before claiming it's unsustainable and closing the servers. Moot was very clear about leaving the site with a solid foundation so this wouldn't happen, yet a year later the site is apparently on the verge of collapse. With Hiroyuki's track record, this seems highly suspicious and there might be something shadier going on.
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.
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 *