WickedFire just DIED (1-8-2019) while reading FatBat TumbleWeed Thread in STS

While I wasn't fond of people getting roasted all the time (although sometimes it was certainly warranted), I do miss seeing people getting dickrolled. Even after being on there for 4-5 years, I would fall for it myself. It was always that moment where you're like..."God Damiit!! I can't believe I just fell for that!".
 
Bwahaha, I remember after being on there since 2007 I'd still fall for it. My fiance' at the time was walking by and seen that wierd swirling thing flying around on my computer and was like wtf!!? Imagine trying to explain that shit to her lol
 
Ryuzaki said:
In my mind, Wickedfire died due to four things that happened in this order:
  1. Resisting new users' attempts at joining the culture, which meant the active user base was steadily dwindling.
  2. Penguin destroying 90% of the user base's income overnight, sending most of them off into the Bitcoin world, the closes equivalent to the EMD world of the pre-Penguin era.
  3. Raising the price of the BST to just under $250 a month, while requiring you to start a new thread every 2 weeks and constantly lose all momentum. This meant the cheap stuff like social bookmarks couldn't exist there, and thus at least half of the lurkers and posters had no reason to lurk any more.
  4. Forcing a paid subscription on content even to the users who wrote the content. I suspect less than 1% of the user base signed up, and most of that was for one month to scrape the content and then cancel.
That's what happens when saving face is more important than admitting you made a mistake and being seen undoing a past mistake. It's okay to step backwards and salvage something nice. Otherwise you're just patching patches on a sinking ship, applying them with a battle axe.
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All of the above but I believe the main reason is simply competition: Thousands of Facebook groups, Reddit, YouTube and competition from other forums and the ease of Wordpress allowed anyone to publish affiliate related content. You could find much better content that was actually helpful.

Jon's lack of involvement didn't help either (he was very active in the the beginning) and the forum grew to be very toxic with it's attitude that also contributed to it's demise.
 
WF died cuz Jon decided to let it die. That's all.

That said it will never die.
The community is still alive in a tertiary sort of way.
Former members have gone on to found an insane amount of successful plays in performance marketing and web services. There really is a paypal mafia effect. You can basically run an M&A firm just doing deals off contacts from that place.
 
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Either the server was located at KingsLanding or Jon forgot to put auto-pay on his domains before being sent to the wall...

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Damn, this thread gives me "collective unconscious" vibes. On a random urge, I checked out WF last week just to remember what it was like. Then I come here and CCarter's post is the first thing I see! Kind of like the story of how people hallucinate seeing a loved one on the night that they die.
 
So, does anyone here plan on trying to snatch up the domain if it reaches that point? What would you all estimate the value of it to be?
 
eliquid said:
In reality though, Jon never had a ball to begin with
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We agree I was more referring to his bullshit paywall fiasco that went up in flames. Once that died it was game over he pretty much vanished into the ether.
 
Jared said:
So, does anyone here plan on trying to snatch up the domain if it reaches that point? What would you all estimate the value of it to be?
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I don't think it's that valuable for any traditional SEO metrics. From a marketing angle Wickedfire doesn't have the best reputation either, from its community or the nature of the content they were allowed to post. But it did have gobs of delicious info if you were willing to wade through the metric butt tons of crap (which stopped being a problem when the paywall went up, and now isn't a problem at all).

Here's what I'd imagine you'd get by redirecting it or having a squeeze page to push people to another forum:
  • 1/20th of old timers looking for nostalgia
  • 1/20th of newcomers to the game hearing about it and trying to check it out
  • 18/20ths of third worlders looking to spam in some fashion
If you have good spam walls in place, you could get something out of it, especially with the first blast of news going around that it's dead and redirecting to a different forum. That would die out in about 48 hours though.

Of course, you could just build a new forum on the domain and hope the old crowd reinvests into it from the ground up. Doubtful since the majority quit thanks to Penguin and went into crypto and whatever opportunistic stuff is available.

I don't think it's a valuable purchase past a few grand total, really. Someone really willing to deploy some slick marketing could make a real go at it though, in which case I could see spending upwards to $25k or something (totally winging the numbers here).

Of course you'll have the copyright issues to contend with. Just because a ball was taken home doesn't mean it won't come into play again, especially when it's a beach ball covered in S A L T.
 
Wickedfire is live again for anyone interested in becoming Committed to Success™
 
I wanna know what Jon did with Luke's original Bitcoin thread.
 
One year later - WF forgets to renew domain... again. You can't mourn something that's "almost dead", but not quite. Kill it so we can move on!

9pp4pzf.gif
 
CCarter said:
One year later - WF forgets to renew domain... again. You can't mourn something that's "almost dead", but not quite. Kill it so we can move on!

9pp4pzf.gif
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Jons still got some pretty nice traffic.

Its my top performing ad still.
 
U2RYBLL.gif
In the year 2029, the barriers of our world have been broken down by the net and by cybernetics, but this brings new vulnerability to humans in the form of brain-hacking. When a highly-wanted hacker known as 'The Puppetmaster' begins involving them in politics, Section 9, a group of cybernetically enhanced cops, are called in to investigate and stop the Puppetmaster. The pursuit will call into question what makes a human and what is the Puppetmaster in a world where the distinction between human and machine is increasingly blurry.


 
WF is down again, but it and other 2005-era internet forums will be something I hope always to remember. It was a magical time in many ways. Legitment smart and successful people sharing "secrets" publicly without trying to make money off every word.

Everything you guys mentioned impacted it, but I have not seen anyone mention a critical reason that killed all the forums around 2009-2012.

Guru bloggers.

From 2000 to 2010, people who made things happen posted what they did on forums. Not as another avenue to make money but just because they wanted to for whatever reason.

But when bloggers started stealing the best content to reproduce on their blogs, almost all the "doers" stopped feeling like sharing. This made me stop wanting to post in the FB thread. Even if the same content got posted on a blog, it wasn't the same; the poster controlled the moderation of comments, so the BS could not be called out. 90% of the "case studies" I would see on blogs used fake data.

I'm thankful I got to live through that time on the internet.
 
miketpowell said:
WF is down again, but it and other 2005-era internet forums will be something I hope always to remember. It was a magical time in many ways. Legitment smart and successful people sharing "secrets" publicly without trying to make money off every word.

Everything you guys mentioned impacted it, but I have not seen anyone mention a critical reason that killed all the forums around 2009-2012.

Guru bloggers.

From 2000 to 2010, people who made things happen posted what they did on forums. Not as another avenue to make money but just because they wanted to for whatever reason.

But when bloggers started stealing the best content to reproduce on their blogs, almost all the "doers" stopped feeling like sharing. This made me stop wanting to post in the FB thread. Even if the same content got posted on a blog, it wasn't the same; the poster controlled the moderation of comments, so the BS could not be called out. 90% of the "case studies" I would see on blogs used fake data.

I'm thankful I got to live through that time on the internet.
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I know I wanted to share on forums, because I thought ( incorrectly ) it would help me with opportunities in the space and open doors for me, on new projects that weren't my own projects.

And while I met a ton of great people, and did end up ( many many many years later ) landing 2-3 small gigs where I wasn't the originator of the project/deal, it never panned out as thought when it came to collabs and such. Not at the level I wanted it to.

Everyone wanted to be on my projects it seemed, but getting on other people's never really happened except for 2-3 small ones.

So when the bloggers came in and stole, and turned that into ad revenue and content for youtube and sponsership deals.. it def was the knock of death for many posters who more than likely had the same outlook I did and were already burnt out from sharing.

Why keep sharing if it's getting you no where and now people are stealing it for their own gain?

I know I stopped sharing ( I was posting, but not "sharing" ) back in 2009 personally when everyone stole my landing page ( the 2 product combo lp of Green Tea/Acai and Colon ) that I invented at MediaTrust when we were AOR for Jesse Willms and Just Think Media... and it got ripped and spread on Wickedfire and other people started to claim as their own after stealing it from me. To this day, I'll talk to someone at a network and they will say, "oh really? my boss said he invented that!" and I'm just rolling my eyes.

I think greed ultimately was the death blow.

Greed in bloggers, greed in "guru's", greed in theft, etc.

Today I only post when I'm bored at forums and want a good laugh or if I know someone else can;t answer the question correctly.

Def. not the same as before though.
 

"All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you." - PuppetMaster - Ghost in the Shell (1995)​
 
CCarter said:

"All things change in a dynamic environment. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you." - PuppetMaster - Ghost in the Shell (1995)​
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Did you finally snatch the wf domain?
 
Satvrn said:
Did you finally snatch the wf domain?
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Lol, I wish. Usually when you see a "coming soon" or "we'll be right back" and then 1 or 2 weeks pass - it's not coming back.

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New forum software.
 
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