the fuck is Nen

a small /jp/ imageboard
https://kakashi-nenpo.com/jp/index.html

Activity begets activity. In the case of kissu it has almost everything to do with the unique set of circumstances surrounding /qa/‘s community. I reckon most of the difference between nen and kissu can be explained by timing and audience the site targeted. kissu was made and marketed at the right place, at the right time, to the right people. Another thing that drastically help kissu is that when this new market of posters from /qa/ became available there wasn’t really any other competition in town. It’s also a good thing that kissu has “grown up” in a period where there is a sole primary imageboard like 4chan that is “alive and well” but none of the secondary sites are as large and well known as 8gag was to act as the default place for all users looking a non-4chan imageboard.

I think kissu has a higher density of NEETs/no-lifers that helps drive activity, it leads to the speed sometimes being faster than some other places with a larger userbase that post less often. There are also downsides to this, but it's not major. nen is great as an aside.

>This theory is why I personally think image-boards that abandon rules thrive
I don't really agree with this. These boards are usually full of intense spam waves because the community is really somewhere else, usually on a discord, and that's where the real activity is. The imageboards that rise and die every few weeks tend to lack rules as well- people still need content to read and reply to and that's the biggest draw of any community site. Finally, when there IS a "no rules" board with a decent speed, the quality tends to be abysmal as people essentially rely on clickbait to get replies.

1. An imageboard needs to have a reason to exist. If people can get the same or better experience from a more well-known site then no one will go to yours.

2. On the opposite extreme, a board can't be excessively niche or else they will quickly die off as soon as the initial content runs dry, if they can even get off the ground in the first place. If the rules clamp down too hard on what topics can be discussed on a site then that stymies potential activity and makes it hard for a community to develop.

3. People need a reason to keep coming back. That means either an active community to interact with, or for there to be new things to discuss. A board about a weekly airing series will have people returning each week even if it is dead in between, whereas vaguer discuss-anything boards are dead for good as soon as they go inactive since they require constant discussions to keep people engaged (if every active user has visited the site since the last post was made and hasn't added anything new, then that's the end of it).

4. There needs to be a path to get new users to the site. Even dedicated posters slowly peel off from the community and if there is no one to replace them you'll quickly get into a downwards spiral. Having a strong community identity is important to keep people engaged but if that is the -only- appeal of your board then it won't last for long as no one new will join. There also needs to be a way for potential users to find your board (and preferably without spamming other sites).

5. Excessive fragmentation is a killer. If discussion is split over too many boards then none of them, or at best one or two, will have any consistent activity. That turns away new users who will struggle to find active discussions and regular users will just congregate in the few active spaces without ever even looking at the rest of the site. Personally I think an imageboard (other platforms can be different in this regard) should have no more boards than it does (semi-)separate communities, with certain exceptions such as to prevent off-topic discussion from clogging up an otherwise niche topic site. If a board can't maintain its own identity then it only serves to weaken the identity of the site as a whole.

6. Active moderation that is engaged with the community. Imageboards are a major target for spam and if it isn't cleaned up quickly then that's a good way to kill a site. Also if the moderators are excessively 'hidden' then it weakens the sense of community and makes the site look like it is continuing solely because of user activity rather than because the owners actually care about it at all.

>>8202
The only two that I think I could disagree(or not even disagree but reword) with are 1 and 5.

1 because a site doesn't need to have a purpose, it doesn't have to be better or doesn't even need to be good. It can suppose a purpose to others or merely market itself as the true alternative to X. Hence why I think that the free speech imageboards are popular. More what I'm trying to say is that I would reword 1 to say An imageboard must validate it's reason to exist with marketing slogans that target a focus group.

5 because moderation and features can compensate for the fragmentation problem. An overboard removes the problem of fragmentation and a mod team who focuses on organizing and instructing others about the right way to do thing. Boards are simply an organizational tool, not a way to separate communities. This of course depends on how you view image-boards as either belonging to the 4/8chan model(each community is seperate) or how I think kissu works, each board is used by the same group and they can selectively hide whatever content they don't want to see (removing /sum/ for having too much real life content or /ec/ for being too sexual).

>>8202
I drafted >>8216 before you wrote this, but some of our ideas overlap.