As I open my email I notice that a domain renewal is coming up. This time it’s for a project that, this time last year, I was extremely excited about. That project was a website that I was calling ‘modmod.fun’. I picked a nonsensical name, because I couldn’t really think of something that encapsulated the idea that I wanted.

The general idea of ModMod was to create a system that encouraged the use of “build threads”. Back in the phpBB days, it was pretty commmon for niche forums to have a build thread, where someone would detail their project in real time, and talk with people inline as they completed their project. My favorite forums had thousands of build threads among them. You never knew what was going to happen inside of a thread. Is the OP going to be great at doing it? Are they going to veer completely off topic and just start attacking everyone else over some inconsequential change. The possibilities were endless, and the entertainment was limitless.

Of course, that all changed as the corporatization and funding of the internet became a thing. Well before AI gave everyone the tools to produce Vietnamese-level slop factories with a GTX 2080, the slop was simply being produced at an artisan level, by artisan slop ‘content creators. The ability to monetize videos lead to the development of attention slop, which really is just content optimized for retention. This meant that the quality projects shifted to youtube because people with talent can make money. Terrible projects shifted to youtube, because the disconnected, untalented people thought they could make money on youtube. The means that all of the development that is happening is simply being hidden on youtube. The only projects that get seen are the ones by big name channels. Small channels, horrible but fun projects, and even just run-of-the-mill projects just completely get ignored, because they don’t make google any money, and that’s simply not OK.

ModMod was supposed to be a rejection of this idea. I implemented a simple tripcode system so that users would be pseudoanonymous. The idea was that by removing the “identity” of the poster You would kill the incentive to hawk channel growth. This, however turned out to be a bad idea.

As it turns out, nobody really knows what a tripcode is or why it matters. Only a tiny subset of imageboard users actually know how they work, and not a single normal person does.

I wrote the application over the course of a few months. Angular frontend, flask backend. running a simple sqllite database. It worked, looked nice, and was nice to use. I got some preliminary feedback from some online friends that was positive. I made a few changes, pushed it out into the world, watched, waited… nothing happened. Posted some more, content gets removed as spam. Try again, post hotlinks to projects with the idea of people clicking the link and exploring the sample projects I had put up (including a meta project for modmod itself). this simply just did not work. Users just won’t actually leave the walled garden of their social platforms.

I tried pushing this project out over the entirety of last year. The advice I kept hearing was “That’s a cool idea” but obviously I missed the mark entirely. The intertia is too strong to get people onto a new platform. You really need some drivers, and I can’t find a way to do that without paying people to post, which in and of itself violates the very nature of what modmod was supposed to be.

Anyhow: RIP http://modmod.fun

2024 - 2025