Originally Posted by
complich8
Yeah, statistically we're pretty much dead. I still see people visiting and posting in a couple subforums. I have it down to a couple things.
People's anime consumption habits have changed a lot. With the advent of legit crunchyroll and simulcast anime, there's a lot more predictability about where people are getting stuff. Back when fansubs were more of a thing and we were a tracker affiliated with a fansub group, there was always a draw: come get the new whatever the group was releasing, and while you're at it chat about it on these forums over here. Nowadays, there's not a lot of reason to find us.
Moreover, I think with anime becoming a lot more mainstream, people are treating it as more of a commodity like domestic TV, and less like a weird novelty. If you can talk about the thing you just watched on netflix with your IRL friends, why seek an internet community at all? But if you're a super-fan or don't have a lot of IRL people to talk to about it...
Well, we weren't super-great at being a welcoming community. There was always a bit of a sharp-edged boys' club nature to a lot of the discussions here. A lot of good members felt driven away by other people's behavior. In a way, I guess we can feel sorta chuffed that we went through in 2008-2012 what twitter and reddit are going through now, but personally I feel like I should have done more to push against that.
A lot of our community has also just sort of aged out of the thing entirely. I started getting into anime and the fansub world when I was in college, like 19 or 20 years old. I'm 37 now. I've watched pretty much everyone in my age group undergo drastic priority changes. You find someone to spend some time with, you start a family, you get busy with your career, whatever it is, you probably spend your time differently. Back when we were in our peak mode, our average age was probably like 17. That was probably in 2004-2006, so now that average age of people is closer to 30.
Last off, we totally lost the war against spambots, so registration is closed and has been for years. Last time I turned registration back on, we got about 3000 new spambot registrations in a couple hours. We'd have to do extensive customization to make the registration workflow non-standard enough that off-the-shelf spambots didn't just storm in and wreck the place, and "we" is in this case just me, I never was able to find another person willing or able to go mucking around in the backend side of things, and I don't really feel like I have the time or energy to deal with it, given the rest of the whole situation.
So the future pretty much looks like: Ciber's still paying some comparatively crazy amount for his ancient dedicated server that hosts the gotwoot.net dns, and still owns the gotwoot.net domain. I'm still paying the pittance I pay to maintain the gotwoot.org domain name and the digitalocean droplet that the forums actually run on. Eventually, Ciber's server will probably kick it (my money's on sooner than later, it's a pentium-4 generation system). Or he'll stop paying for it. Either way gotwoot.net will stop working -- but that's why I got gotwoot.org. Eventually (I'm guessing a few years from now) I'll wander back by and notice that nobody's posted anything anywhere in a long enough time that I'll stop seeing the point in keeping the forums alive. Or some security vulnerability will show up in the mostly-dead vbulletin 4 branch that actually affects us and vbulletin will say "4 is eol, no patch for you", and I'll feel like it'd be irresponsible for leave it running as is. Either way, I probably pull it down and put up a static page for a year or so on the other side of that decision, is how I imagine that going.
Alternatively, I could just like die in a car wreck or something, and the forums would probably stop working a while after that. We don't exactly have a business continuity plan, on our business that has never made a dime and isn't registered as a business, and is just me keeping the thing running this last decade and change...
All that said, it's been a good run, and made for some interesting memories.