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[Hide] (37.5KB, 512x599) Sincerely Fish,
The captcha is extremely gay and filters users. Not because those users are bots, but because it's different. Not different in a "niche, interesting way," either, there are roughly zero captcha otaku in existence.
People use a website because they have a reason to use a website. 4chan was not alone and it was not a monolith. 4chan made a culture of the banned and the soon-to-be banned taken from an already highly creative and cultivated website and mixed this with foreign features. In the early 2000s, banking on lolishota content and weeb ingroup to poach a userbase was not an unsafe bet. At least in theory, we live in a very different era in terms of scrutiny on websites and the content that people will tolerate on them.
Why would I come to sleepychan?
It's slower, seedier, and they aren't sending their best.
There are some great site feature in terms of updating, stability, and secure anonymous posting. These only matter if you have users. If you get users again, the site won't be moderated well enough to keep them.
What is sleepychan about?
It's not an anime website.
It's not a furry website, or about weed, or weird internet games.
It's not even a shitty nu/pol/ bunker like Watkins forced 8chan to become. The diaspora you've mentioned is fractious - weird internet people and weird politics people have a limited overlap and have always been incompatible at heart. You aren't catching either
Why would I come here? Today, following my weird internet person heart, I visited because I wanted to check on another webring site's board (/hgg/), only to find that it is dying, and then I wondered how sleepychan was doing
I have visited sleepychan in the past periodically for the legacy 8chan servers on byond games, /bmn/, clans and guilds, shitting around on Smogon even, community events and relays. Most of these are gone or diminished, so I have lapsed. A whim and some nostalgia got me here. You can't court whimsy, and nostalgia for anything past the explosive exodus and growth 8chan and subsequent implosion is a miniscule target demographic.
Before you begin to advertise, I would find a product to sell. You barely have one - you aren't japmoot or moot or even the feds, probably. That's it. Who else is left? 20 uid/week to generate OC? Be more brazen.
Here are some observations:
8chan.moe has grown mainly by name recognition but it also successfully poached users in 2025 when 4chan was unstable. This completely reversed previously declining PPH. Sleepychan generally filtered these users long-term and the webring was overall not prepared to handle them, though I think there wasn't much issue here server wise. I would expect some amount of user drain from the webring is migratory to 8chan.moe as a byproduct of it achieving moderate activity levels (4-5 digit PPD), which matches the preferences of users of og slowboard users and 8chan posters. Some is certainly also deliberate poaching, because that's how it works. That being said, by a huge margin, these are the largest topics on 8chan.moe currently:
>gacha games
>vtubers
>videogames in general
These would have been a huge opportunity, as for many years there was literally no consistent place to discuss mobage in the English sphere, and there is a culture of being very anti-dox or highly moderated in the vtuber sphere that makes it rife for advertisement as a "free forum" for discussion. I would not chase these opportunities necessarily as there is already a seller in place, but they serve as a decent case study. The webring does not have a good, pushed alternative for gacha or vtubers, what else is missing that would have caught the next wave? You may need to refactor your current approach to board management. Namely, what communities are looking for a home, and who would benefit from use of an imageboard?
Here are some notes, in no particular order:
There is a large and basically uncoordinated community dedicated to game modding spread across Nexus, Loverslab, ATF, etc. A board dedicated to the art, creation, display, and discussion of game mods might be popular or useful particularly as a general board for specific subsets of mods. Obviously this leans towards NSFW in terms of creating a niche. Heroine Rumble 2 doesn't even have a subforum on Loverslab yet but gets new content eclipsing anything put out for Fallout in 5 years every week now.
The last infinity cup was 2022. That being said, where even is /sp/ on the webring? Livestreaming events "very legally" and directing discussion this way causally is a great way to poach users. I say this for non /sp/ stuff, too. There are cults of personality on certain 4chan boards that exist solely around people who reshare payperview events. Throw up a share chat and make it clear where the stream's really coming from. Especially if it's clear that "lowly halfchanners aren't wanted," reverse psychology never fails. Is it plausibly deniable? Yeah, if you do it right.
Foreign language boards are always useful to bunker
Here are some 2chan legacies that were lost in translation,
>a board... where you propose new boards, and discuss their logistics
>Nearly every major board has an "underground"/"backside" version that segments off NSFW & shitposts
>there's a board just for webms, mostly full of porn (webring doesn't really have a /gif/ equivalent yet)
>there's a board called "Upload"/uppu where you can directly upload, 50 pages of shit up to 10 mb and 300 pages of shit up to 3 mb archived
The theme of all three of these is that they give people a reason to regularly use your site aside from liking boards or content already present on that site = this drives retention and growth long-term. There's nothing about uppu that forces you into the rest of the site - it just happpens naturally.
Roblox remains the largest game of all time but no one is brave enough to give the generation of "Roblox Adults" a home, I do wonder how fucked the community would get if literal thousands of semi-human Roblox players swamped /v/ though
Winning people back from Discord is a practice in giving them an identity and something they WANT to say publicly, active highly visible guilds or servers in games is really the cheatcode to drawing in new users these days. Look no further than the autism around Hytale in this regard
, Do Not Redeem