Welcome to Gaia! ::

Just slapping down quick and dirty notes in this thread to turn into research later. Dump whatever you want here for notes and we'll turn them into real topics eventually.

There this thread I comment on occasionally and it's actually been around since 2007. Its just simple form thread where ppl just say what their currently listening to and everyone been pretty capable of doing simply that since it was formed.

Super insane how a simple thread started in 2007 as what the creator thought be a simple fun thing has continued since.

Hey hum, regarding general Gaia´s history I think a thread talking of the major events could be pretty interesting. Periodization may be useful, I identify some major periods but you may arrange them differently.

The founding (2003).

Originally a Garage project Gaia stared with the ideas and talents of Derek Liu "Lanzer", John Kim, Josh”L0cke” Gainsbrugh, Long Vo, and Charles “CP” Park. Soon joined by Kidkoum “Saka” Visarutvan. Before Gaia was conceived they worked on a previous comic group "Studio XD" Source.

Golden & Silver Age (2004~2012).

I posted it somewhere months ago but what I remember was that the site was at his peak in 2004~7. It was getting as much as a 1 Million post a day, I do not know where to find the concrete graphs but Red Bard used statistitcal data, Lanzer´s interview around the time the site was reaching a million use could be an interesting milestone to add (sadly I could not find it anymore it was here http://www.big-boards.com/int.php?n=60, it is not on the wayback machine emo only found another interview but iirc it is not the same. Prior to the exodus, the site started losing a bit of marketshare probably due to the rise of new social media after 2008~9.

Decline and Downfall (2013~2016)

Then there was the change of Staff in August 2013. New CEO Gary Shoefield Aka "Goldemort" introduced gold generators and implemented criticism censorship and repressive policies, the new comany priority was revenue increase which caused several conflicts listed here. He was backed by COO Jason Loia who also earned the disgust of the community after presentng Gaia features as examples of conditioned training and gamification in a business presentation. Source,Source. The site was falling down with hyperinflated economy many protestors banned and leaving. Some popular games like Heralds of Chaos were discontinued.

Reform & downsizing. (2017~Present)

In Dec 2016 Lanzer and older admins like Lighte came back (source in a reply to the first comment) I am not sure when or if it was the new CEO James Cao replaced Shoefield on Gaia interactive. The old staff tried new projects an example was this app called Lake Kindred Origin. It did not work out and I think it was one of the reasons the Staff publicly apologized in a letter for diversifying the products instead of focusing on the community promising to be more attentive to the user feedback and use it as the driving force of future development. The number of employees as well as volunteer mods has been declining, notable was the departure of Jack Bauer a staff member who stick with the company for many years, there was also one of the lead devs, lead coordinator (I can not remember sweatdrop ). As a consequence there are not a lot of new projects but existing ones include: Night/Dark Mode, The Reverse Market Place (Offer System), Avi chat, Lake Kindred updates (it has taken years), and Ruffle integration of previous popular games like Jigsaw and Pinball. They continue to update small bugs and minor features. The userbase has declined as well, I remember going from 3k active users in 2018 to 1k now as well as many forums being inactive and dissappearing like the My Little Pony forums formerly an independent one. It is a struggle, but the staff does have plans for a new site UI to make it more accessible to new users along with doing major backend updates like a major database migration. (Sorry for not using quotes but all of this is on ATS threads in case someone wants to dig them sweatdrop ).

I quoted a 2019 Reddit post about Gaia in the matching BTY (by-the-year) 2019 thread, which was about the Jason post. I copied the photo to Imgur for easy storage (but that might be an issue for UK).

The post is from 2019, but it's about what apparently went down between 2013 and 2018 based on your summaries above.


On 2025:
There was a mass ban of problematic users (constantly instigated fights afaik) about a month ago, and they just nuked the 'In The News" subforum with no apparent archive.


General thoughts:
Moderator actions and other such drama need to be handled delicately, as mentioned in the Old Drama announcement thread. Any conflict ought to be observed from the perspective of a neutral lens as much as possible.

Generally in such conflicts, I expect modern Gaians to favor whatever side is defending human rights and basic decency. We should probably lean in that direction sociopolitically in our observational writing.

On the issue of censorship, I think it's important that we uncover what records we can, but we should avoid repeating harmful text unless strictly necessary for historical context.


Scratchpad:
This thread is just a quick and dirty spot to dump ideas. I'm not interested in enforcing a hierarchy in the guild unless it becomes necessary for peaceful operation or whatever. Trying to keep this as chill as we can since the subject matter is bound to be volatile besides.

So suggestion new ideas, loose notes, etc. Whatever works. This is currently the space for disorganized content that needs refinement, as well as internal conversations about what we're doing here.


Personally I'm open for suggestions on how to structure this forum. I've just been trying to put up a suitable framework to get us started.

Today's Gaia staff is pretty friendly to users. I bet if we ask the right people we could request some statistics that may be trivial for someone on their side to generate. That would not be an entirely unprecedented level of staff cooperation with random user requests, from what I can see.

Mebbe I should save that for an Ask The Staff day.

Oh, it's sitting in the recycle bin... neutral
(fixed link)

If I'm not mistaken, I believe that means it's slated for deletion.

We need to look for the traffic analytic Red Bard used because I can not find a good one, the only I got with google was this showing a 7.77% decline in visitors. EDIT: Red Bard used a site Alexa rantings, I can not find it nor other site with reliable stats of the visitors. Seems that the decline started in 2008 when the site lost novelty from a statistic in the Red Bard´s video (min 28:04).

In my personal experience I do not see an increased level of activity, most forums I frequent are dead or very calm (Lake Kindred, zOmg, Life&Fitness, even GCD has very few post outside item related threads). I do not know the users in other forums though.

What I do know is that a considerable portion of online users, maybe even greater than 20% are returnees remebering the site but they do not tend to become regulars in my experience. There is also some that come seasonally have hiatus for years. But I rarely see growth with brand new users in the forums that I frequent.