The Smoking Cup of Coffee

tl;dr: This is just some more drama about Infinity Next and its downfall, which really no longer matter. Josh leaked user IPs and his statistics system took a week to get working properly and users soundly rejected his software in a referendum on the subject. Next is no longer on the table and 8chan does not need it or want it. Josh is deluding himself with his demands of 10 Bitcoin (over $3500) because he thinks he still matters. If you don’t care about Josh drama don’t read on.

After some meditation, I believe I know what Josh is going to talk about and “leak” in his Valentine’s Day stream. I will leak it for him, because I have nothing to hide, and I have a feeling that the week he supposedly needs to prepare a simple stream will be used to fabricate or doctor evidence.

I could be off the mark — understanding the inner workings of a woman scorned is not one of my fortes. However, due to his mention of Next “dying over a cup of coffee” and his mention of the date of November 26th I believe that I am on the right path.

First, the logs, starting on November 25 2015 and working forwards because reverse order is for chumps. I’m not proud of everything I wrote in these logs, but I don’t care if they’re out there. The only things I scrubbed were server logins and IPs (which have all changed since this was published anyway) — I never used Skype to talk to Josh and seldom used SMS, so this is a pretty complete record of everything we ever said outside of face to face meetings.

Now, the commentary.

Deal #1: The November Deal

This was four months ago and I didn’t make notes of this so my memory is a little fuzzy, mind. On the balmy (what day is not balmy in Manila?) morning of November the 28th, I had my first real argument with Jim since N.T. Technology took over hosting 8chan in October of 2014 and took over the domain in January of 2015.

Jim invited Josh, Mochi and I to drink coffee and discuss Josh’s employment. Jim was impressed with Infinity Next’s beta site, and considered hiring Josh as an actual salaried employee. It was discussed that his duties would be migration of Infinity Next at first, but after that mostly what he would work on would be front-ends for 2ch, as Jim viewed Josh’s design abilities as one of his greatest strengths.

I thought this was a very good deal for Josh, better even than mine. Josh would be paid using the local system 100,000 PHP (trivia: in November 2015, the peso was trading more favorably against the USD then now, at around 46PHP:1USD, so this was a monthly salary of $2173.91. The Philippines also uses a system called “thirteenth month pay”, a tradition which is now law which states that every Christmas an employee gets an extra month, a thirteen month of pay. Figured in for all 12 months, this means that according to the American system, Josh’s actual monthly salary would be 108,333PHP ($2355 + rent) just for a migration and most likely, deadline-based and not hour-based easy frontend work to 2ch.)

However, then Jim dropped his other requirement. He would want all of Josh’s previous commits to Infinity Next signed over and Next from that point onwards (November) developed under a closed source license, which both Josh and I did not agree to, because they were paid for by the community, and we thought that this would be cheating the community. When I first started looking for an alternate chan software, way back in April of 2015, 8chan was not really that slow or broken, I only started it because I forecasted that it would get worse over time.

When Josh refused that, Jim then said “well, then 8chan won’t use Infinity Next.”

I countered that “oh yes, it will” and then Jim bluffed, saying “well, then 8chan is closed”, pulling out his phone and writing “unplug the 8chan servers” into it (and narrating what he was writing).

Jim then left, and Josh and I were stunned for a little while, but then we figured out a plan of action. I went upstairs to warn users before the servers were unplugged, and Josh said that if 8chan were really closed we could perhaps start a chan in Singapore. (this is in fact, impossible for all but the most vanilla of chans, Singapore criminalizes the distribution of all pornography.)

I went back upstairs, and checked my Slack chat, and saw that the “unplug the 8chan servers” message was sent to me, and not to the Servers room itself, so there was no risk and it was a bluff. I was still mad though, so I vented a little bit with Josh.

The story doesn’t end there though. I kept talking to Jim via Slack, and we made up pretty quickly. I was then invited to Taco Bell where I talked to Jim one on one about what had just happened. Jim told me that he actually didn’t understand the development model of Infinity Next and was only interested because Ron told him that Josh was getting a “raw deal” and would probably make a good hire.

I told him that I believed I had everything under control, and I chose the AGPL myself. We agreed to disagree on the merits of it. He said that as long as professional help (as in, 2ch engineering) was not needed, I could license it however I wanted. My grand plan was to use the OAuth protocol to allow proprietary components to work, but Josh never finished the implementation. This would have allowed Jim to create components such as Softserve completely separate from the 8chan codebase.

Remember that at this time, the complete epic failure that were the four (or five? How many were there, when you tally up the ones I wasn’t told about, such as /v/?) migrations were not known. I truly believed that Josh was a good backend developer, and we would not need Jim’s help on the software side, only on the hardware and network side.

What Josh doesn’t understand that in business between adults, disagreements are common. Why he would choose to bring this isolated event which was settled four months ago up in a livestream, I have no idea. I imagine that perhaps his plan was to leave out the resolution, even though if Jim had really wanted to close 8chan or lock the source he would have kicked me out and not allowed me to continue working on Next at all, since at the time it seemed like Next was sure to happen.

What Josh’s “answer” to my criticism doesn’t do is it doesn’t do anything to explain away his lack of care for user privacy. It doesn’t do anything to apologize for his errors with the stats system. It doesn’t do anything to explain why he wouldn’t take a bail-out when it’s clear he has no idea how to implement Varnish (how can implementing a simple reverse caching proxy take over a month?). It doesn’t do anything to apologize to the users of 8chan for his repeated mistreatment of them, such as redirecting the /sp/ and /v/ boards just as “jokes” or in anger. It doesn’t do anything to explain why he tried to get yet another 10 BTC out of the 8chan community (remember, the 10 BTC savings is not mine, it’s the community’s) as a type of blackmail, showing that he doesn’t really care about what he’s pretending to care about (imaginary closing of 8ch source) as long as he gets more money.