The Rise and Fall of Gaia Online

if you had internet access and even the tiniest most fleeting interest in anime at any point during the 2000s then odds are you had an account on gaia online at some point in the late 2000s this hmm but I can only describe his anime flavored social media platform had hundreds of thousands of users logging in on a daily basis and the crown jewel of Gaia was its forums which were second only to Yahoo in terms of their popularity and I know that doesn't really sound like a big deal in 2019 but believe me back then that was huge as a matter of fact it was such a big deal that even time ranked it among the 50 best websites but in 2019 it's uh oh god how can I put this politely uh on a good day Gaia looks like a ghost town but on a bad day it's a case study for economists and public relations students who want to see what a trainwreck looks like in their field like legit no joke things went so off the rails on Gaia that it's even mentioned in a textbook by the MIT press so what happened to this anime centric social media platform from yesteryear how do you go from being listed in Times top 50 websites to being a literal textbook example of an economy that's lost control let me tell you all about it this I think we now know his Gaia online was launched back in 2003 a group of roommates wanted to make an online community hub for anime fans and so go Gaia was born but within only a couple of years their little anime community hub would be a really big award-winning website and in 2004 it would be renamed Gaia online the way guy who worked is like this you make an account and you have a customizable avatar to get new items to customize your avatar you need to buy them in the shops and the user run marketplace with the site's currency called Gaia gold to get Gaia gold you would do things like play games post in the forums exploring towns and as you may have noticed all these things don't just generate gold but also social interactions so yeah it's a pretty simple formula Gaia had going on simple but effective and there were other things you can do on Gaia too of course you know there were things like customizable cars and aquariums there were guilds and perhaps the most well-known another feature that Gaia had was an MMO called zomg and as some of you may recall guy was actually one of a small handful of avatar based social networks and games that came out in the early 2000s as a matter of fact Second Life and IMVU both came out within a year of Gaia so then what did Gaia have that they didn't what set Gaia apart from its competition two things forums and anime when Google was founded back in 2003 anime in the Western world was experiencing a massive boom in popularity things like Toonami Pokemon Sailor Moon all the manga that was finally getting released in English it was all creating more English speaking anime fans than there had ever been before and all these new anime fans needed a spot to congregate online where they could just talk and learn more about anime with their fellow fans and so go gaya was born with the intent to fill that void with anime related resources links forums and role-playing with these fun little avatars that you could dress up like anime characters or euro seas and there was nothing quite like this on the Internet at the time it was honestly pretty impressive but of course having a cool new site like Gaia around does zero good if nobody else knows about it so how did Gaia's founders get the word out well they honestly didn't do a whole lot to advertise the site in its early days or to be more specific they didn't need to because the site got a lot of growth a lot faster than any of its founders ever anticipated but either way let me tell you real quick about Gaia's impressively bare-bones advertising because honestly it's nothing short of a miracle that this worked out as well as it did so get this four months after their launch they gave away postcards at two anime conventions then they put an ad in a comic book and then uh oh wait that's it that was literally it the rest of the site's growth came completely from word-of-mouth advertising now I don't doubt that advertising directly to their target audience that a couple of anime conventions was pretty effective but I don't think it would have been effective enough to get Gaia the growth at God or at the very least not by itself whoever was preaching the good word of go Gaia back in those first few months was probably doing a better job of marketing the site than gaius founders were in all honesty like for real word-of-mouth advertising is honestly one of the hardest and most unreliable forms of advertising to effectively utilize because you basically have no control over it but of course when it works well it works incredibly well and for Gaia it worked out a lot better than they ever could have imagined which i think speaks volumes about how much its earliest users loved the site in fact one of the site founders Derek Lee you once said in an interview quote we never anticipated big growth we only knew that the community would be a lot of fun and our goal had been to make the forum as entertaining as possible it's in that same interview that he talks about the transition Gaia was making in 2004 to be less of an anime linked list and more of an anime flavored social gaming and networking site so in other words the site's social aspects like the forums and the avatars we're now gonna take center stage to that end they'd renamed the site Gaia online and they totally revamp it with new features like guilds and friends lists to quote Li you from the same interview currently all our ideas revolve around role-playing Gaia will be as much of a game as it is a forum and of course the changes to the site we're all very well received by 2007 Gaia was a full-fledged social networking and gaming site and getting more than three hundred thousand unique daily logins on a daily basis and as if that wasn't enough the average visit to Gaia lasted about two hours and there was an average of 64,000 users on it any given time of day in fact Gaia's user base was getting so massive that it became one of the first sites to integrate what we would now call social media marketing Gaia hosted official campaigns for things like Alice in Wonderland skittles and perhaps most infamously yes there was an official campaign to promote B movies and what makes this all the more impressive is that these campaigns were actually super successful way more so than similar campaigns on Gaia's competitors but of course all this is to say that during the 2000s Gaia was considered a very major platform its users knew it marketers knew it other social media platforms and games knew it and then when Time ranked it in the 50 best websites in 2008 the world knew it this was by all means the golden age of Gaia but of course alas not all that glitters is Gaia gold and behind the scenes of guyís Golden Age the groundwork was being laid for an economic crisis so bad that and I cannot stress this enough it would land this site with equippable yaoi petals and Naruto headbands into an MIT press textbook on economics to fully grasp just how awful the economy and Gaia would eventually become first we need to understand Gaia's relationship with real life money the first encounter guy's economy had with real life money would have been in the site's infancy in June of 2003 do you remember what I told you earlier about how in Gaia's early days its user base was getting super huge super fast well believe me that didn't come without a literal price namely that it was getting more expensive to upkeep the servers and other maintenance costs and since this was just all happening so fast Gaea had no choice but to turn to its users for help by asking them for donations and ultimately it all worked out of course the site was maintained and the users who donated were thanked with a new and super exclusive item called the angelic halo and it's worth noting that at the time they had no idea that they would be thanked with an item let alone a new and exclusive one the angelic halo was a surprise thank-you gift from Gaea to its donors and it was given after the donations had already been accepted so what this means is if you wanted an angelic halo but you didn't donate then the only other way to get one was by buying it from someone who did donate through the site's marketplace and since angelic halos were so exclusive their price got pretty high pretty fast now let's keep it pin in that for now and let's talk about the next encounter guy ahead with real life money with the angelic halo Gaia established the financial system that would help keep them afloat for the next couple of years they started selling monthly collectibles actually a fun fact up until October of 2006 they were called donation items but they changed the name to monthly collectibles because it caused some confusion that Gaia was a charity which of course it isn't but back to the topic at hand in July of 2003 the new collectible items were the Panda and grizzly hats and this time users knew that they could get the items by donating and thus one of Gaia's longest lasting income sources was born the way it worked was every month from that point onward or at the very least until march of 2017 when they would get rebranded Gaia would come out with some cool collectible items that you could only get in these envelopes and the only way to get an envelope outside of hoping that someone put one on the marketplace was by paying 250 for them and by 250 I actually $2.50 you could send the payment via PayPal via your old flip phone or you can even snail mail him the 250 because you know the early 2000s and of course just like the angelic halo prices for these monthly collectibles tended to get pretty high pretty fast after they recycled out since you could only buy them through Gaia during the month that they came out after that your only hope to get them was through the site's marketplace and the marketplace I'd like to remind you had prices that were completely dictated by the site's users and you know you don't exactly need a degree in economics to understand the basic principle of supply and demand by 2007 it was pretty much impossible for your average user to obtain the older monthly collectible items because their prices were just getting absurdly high unless you were particularly lucky or active the site's typical gold gathering methods like posting in the forums playing games and visiting towns and all that could only net you 1 maybe 2,000 gold a day now more recent monthly collectibles these were a little more obtainable they were usually sold for a couple of tens of thousands of guyot gold but then there's the older monthly collectibles like the angelic halo and the panda hat and they would routinely be sold for hundreds of thousands and even millions of gold it's around this same time that some users took to selling their Gaia items on eBay for real money rather than Gaia gold since eBay doesn't have an archive system it's kind of hard to say just how frequently this was happening and how much money these sellers were making but we do know at the very least that Gaia was more than aware of it I mean in early 2007 to be pretty hard for them not to be aware of it after all someone would have just sold an angelic halo for drumroll please 6000 dollars USD oh does it sound like a big number well guess what I know a way of making it even bigger if we adjust that for inflation that's about seven and a half grand in 2018 in an article for I'm honestly not sure how to pronounce this I'm sorry but in a 2007 article titled move over myspace Gaea online is here Sherman would say about this transaction wonderful to tell you but bad for what we're trying to accomplish Gaea knew something had to be done and sure enough in July of 2007 something was indeed done Gaea introduced a new form of currency called Gaia cash you could get it by spending real-world money and you could use it to buy items like that month's collectable envelopes evolving items and a couple other good miscellaneous items from the brand-new Cash Shop now the good news is Gaia seemed to immediately realize the danger they could be putting their economy and by introducing a new and much more obtainable form of currency like this only a month after Gaia cash was implemented Gaia hired two economists to help keep the CITES economy in check and prevent inflation and this actually worked out pretty well they introduced taxes into the marketplace and they were actually able to successfully fight off inflation or at least for now despite guyís efforts Gaia cash did still have one fatal flaw you couldn't use it in the marketplace that was still Gaia gold only and this would end up causing Gaia a lot of economic problems down the road but before I tell you about how Gaia addressed these problems let's go ahead and take a look at what was happening behind the scenes from 2006 to 2010 Craig Sherman was the site CEO and as we've seen Sherman always seemed really cautious in dealing with Gaia's economy and because of that guy's economy actually remained pretty stable for a while but then in 2009 a new problem was starting to make itself known on Gaia and that was a declining active user base the dawn of the new decade was kind of a weird time for Gaia because on one hand they were making upwards of a million dollars a month thanks to the installation of Gaia cash but then on the other hand for the first time in the site's life they're starting to see a noticeable decline in its active user base there's no single big reason why this decline was happening it was more like a salad of small and medium reasons like the site's novelty wearing off on its aging user base new competitors like Facebook and Tumblr gaining relevance frustration with diet cash few to no updates on the site's unique features you know stuff like that it was just all starting to pile up but the bottom line here is that in 2009 interesting Gaia was starting to go down and this wasn't just dangerous for site management but also for Gaia's economy let me paint you a picture if you decide that you want to stop using Gaia but you have a rare item maybe even multiple rare items one of two things is gonna happen either you don't give it away and it lessens the amount of something that's already in short supply or alternatively you host a giveaway for your items and enough leaving users chose option 2 in the early 2010's that it started to cause mild but manageable inflation all you really need to know is that around this time inflation is starting to creep into the Gaian economy again but of course the site's economy had been kept pretty stable for a while now so guys higher ups were more preoccupied with figuring out why people were leaving and how they could get them to stay and ultimately the site ended up getting bought out and Gary Schofield was made the new CEO in March of 2013 this was effectively the beginning of the end for Gaia they say you can tell a lot about what kind of a CEO someone's gonna be based on their first major action with the new title so what was the first major thing Schofield did once he was sitting on Gaia's big boy chair maybe something to help incentivize old users to come back promoting new signups or hey maybe something to help the site's economy before that manageable inflation becomes unmanageable huh no he fired more than 20 of Gaia's best staff members and in response many of its remaining staff members resigned a lot of them would end up leaving scathing reviews of their employment at gaya and I'm telling you this because a lot of these reviews are eerily prophetic of the problems that were about to start plaguing gaya which I think just goes to prove how apparent it was even from this early on that gaya would be having a lot of problems under its new management like seriously listen to this one he used to be great but new execs are destroying culture in morale new executives seem to some genuine patronizing and disconnected employee benefits and privileges are slowly being stripped away morale is currently at an all-time low we are losing valued co-workers weekly so now that Schofield's already made himself super disliked by guy his employees what's his next course of action simple making himself super disliked by Gaia's user base the first thing he did to supposedly help guys economy was introducing personalized sales into Gaia the idea was that through private messaging Gaia users would get access to sales that were tailored to their interests and this sounds fine on paper right well in practice it consisted of Gaia users getting the same three messages every day nagging them to buy Gaia cache Gaia users got so annoyed by this that they tried reporting the admin account that was sending them for spam and the site feedback forum was full of complaints about this as a matter of fact there's a massive sticky thread about this that survives and it has almost 400 pages worth of replies where users do nothing but talk about how annoyed they are by it so yeah needless to say these sales were extremely unpopular on June 23rd after only five days of these sales they were totally discontinued and as many took note of although they were definitely being discontinued due to the large volume of complaints the announcement saying that they were going away is noticeably absent of any mention of the criticism it received hmm interesting but gee whiz if Gaea can't send a constant stream of personal messages to its users to buy Gaia cash then good golly how is it ever gonna nag them to buy Gaia cash if only there was some kind of announcement system it could abuse oh wait On June 28th Gaia hosted a summer sale for cash items one that sold the angelic halo for the equivalent of a grand which is of course a horrible thing to do for a long list of reasons but I'm telling you about this because up until this point Gaia had never sent more than one site wide announcement per day but from this point forward the site would make increasingly more announcements on a daily basis and when you have an unread announcement the notification sticks until you read it and before this announcements were generally well proper announcements you know sometimes they would be about sales but sometimes they would be about new items new additions to the site changes that were being made you know stuff like that but now important announcements were getting buried by sales and reminders to buy Gaia cash and buy buried I really do mean buried there's a thread from June of 2014 that counted more than 3000 announcements relating to Gaia cash in only 11 months that is absurd the way guys new management wanted to run the site wasn't just abundantly clear but it was even being spammed to its user base multiple times a day and is though to prove that Gaia was about to release its most dangerous item as a cash exclusive it's the item that's responsible for propelling Gaia's economy from inflation to hyperinflation and it's an item called Flynn's booty so what is it what does it do what makes this so awful well it's a gold generator you'd buy it for 99 Gaia cash and then it would spit gold right back out at you the amount you'd get was random but there's a thread from shortly after the item came out the documents that users were getting anywhere from fifty thousand to ten million gold oh and by the way is now a good time to remind you that 19 Gaia cash was equal to a dollar one singular US dollar and that one of the most common ways of getting Gaia cash was by buying it on gift cards for ten and twenty five dollars at a time yeah that might be worth mentioning now flings booty wasn't the first time Gaia had brought a gold generating item onto the site and unfortunately it wouldn't be the last either in fact it'd be quite the opposite it's after the release of Flynn's booty that guy has started to release new gold generators regularly but what made this one in particular so different or more specifically what made Flynn's booty so economically dangerous well before Flint's booty the only other gold generators that came out were in 2008 there were three of them they were called the bag of wind bag of win two and gold gold revolution wheel right off the bat what sets these apart from flynn's booty is that they're not just gold generators in the bag of wind there was a chance that you'd get an item instead but even if you did get a lot of gold out of either of these or if you picked the gold wheel one their maximum gold output was nowhere near the output of Flint's booty and two they were being cautiously released into a much safer economy than 2013's Gaia but 2008 staff at the time still knew that if they didn't pull the plug on these items quick enough that they could have dangerous repercussions for the site's economy as a matter of fact there's a journal entry by one of the site's economists at the time that goes into a lot more detail on this so basically what I'm saying is 2008 Gaia released its gold generators as a very cautious economic experiment they saw that they were dangerous recorded why it was dangerous and stopped making them 2013 Gaia on the other hand feeling confident as ever said in an FAQ promoting Flynn's booty that quote it is not predicted to have any long-term negative effect on the economy what a surprise that's the distinct tang of a liar Flynn's booties economic effect was literally immediate there is a surviving graph that shows just how much gold was being spent in the gaya marketplace per day since November of 2012 through September of 2013 and you might notice that the spot when Flynn's bootie came out is marked not that it really needs to be because the spikes are pretty apparent according to a paper called the gold rush by Nicole Chan it's thanks to the release of Flynn's bootie and the other gold generators that were to regularly come out after it that marketplace gold revenue increased from 10 billion to 3 trillion in five months and I know it's really tempting to think that those numbers sound absurd and hyperbolic but the thing is that they're not there's also a thread on reddit that tracks how bad inflation on Gaia got around this time and it shows that red ink for example had been worth 500 gold at the beginning of 2013 in October it was worth 1,400 gold and then by March of 2014 it was 30,000 kyuk gold in just that year its price had gone up 150,000 percent and it would still somehow get worse by August of 2014 red ink would cost a staggering 25 million gold in case my point hasn't gotten across yet let me say it plainly Gaia was now experiencing full-blown hyperinflation now hyperinflation is pretty hard not to notice you know especially when you're using this site on a daily basis and the site's users weren't happy about it at all but what about guys higher-ups how are they feeling about this whole thing well apparently pretty good because in September Gaia's then-ceo Oh Jason Loya held a now infamous presentation on gamification where he encourages entrepreneurs to sugarcoat a bitter pill and tells them that the holy grail of gamification is addiction and as bad as all this stuff already sounds on its own when you put it into context with the economic problems Gaia was having at the time which is really hard not to do by the way since one of the slides has an image of Flynn's bootie then really paints a picture of someone who just doesn't care about his sites user base as a matter of fact he seems to consider them in his own words lab rats you know what really matters to me booty someone leaked the images of him giving the presentation in October and it immediately blew up users were rightfully so furious and there was a massive call for his resignation and the discontinuation of Flynn's booty and so how did Gaea respond to this on October 16th only 10 days after the images were leaked users began to notice that threads that mentions Schofield her Loya by name were getting quietly removed and then on the next day Gaia announced that they were discontinuing its ask the admins threads which were a kind of weekly feedback thread where users could ask the admins about the stuff that was going on so in other words Gaea responded by silencing its users the official reason the threads were discontinued was because of a growing volume of questions and help needed in the threads and a lack of resources which was kind of true you know it's true in a way but it neglects to mention why they were getting an increased volume of questions it neglects to mention Schofield or loya because you know of course it does but this wouldn't stop users from talking about them now instead they just gave Schofield the nickname of gol de Mort and referred to him that way instead but yet again they were silenced in December when Gaea made amendments to its Terms of Service that literally prevented users from criticizing Gaia or its employees by name or by nickname and right before that they added an amendment that stated that they didn't have to tell Gaea users that it was adding amendments to its Terms of Service does that sound like an incredibly scummy thing to do by the way yeah that's because it is both guys morale and economy were at their absolute worst as a matter of fact the economy in particular was getting so awful that this is it this is finally when Gaea would become a textbook example of an economy that's gone off the rails in May of 2014 the MIT press published virtual economies design and analysis by villi Ladon vita and edward castronovo and sure enough the sorry state of guy's economy is mentioned and you know speaking of the sorry state of guy's economy how's it doing in 2014 ha trick question you and I both know that it was abysmal but I think the whole text book thing actually kind of bugged Gaia or at the very least it made it apparent to them that the site's economic problems wouldn't go away if they just ignored him which had kind of been their approach to it up until this point well drastic times call for drastic measures so Gaia was about to do something extreme they were get this about to listen to its users oh my god imagine that they sent out a user feedback survey in July and the results of this survey have never been publicly released but seeing is how there was a temporary stop in gold generator sales shortly after the survey was sent I think it's pretty easy to make guesses tell you what makes it even easier to make guesses is that a user run survey was made just a couple of months later and its results were publicly revealed as I'm sure you can easily guess it was bad news for Gaia back in 2007 Gaia's absolute wealthiest users were a very small number of millionaires meanwhile in 2014 of the 490 people who took this survey 67% had more than a billion gold and yet 83% felt that they didn't have enough gold almost a hundred percent knew inflation was a problem on Gaia and they weren't exactly feeling optimistic about Gaia's willingness to do much of anything about it oh and if you think those numbers are absurd you haven't even heard anything yet one guy a user by the name of Zandi made a thread in which they noted that marketplace sales had been starting to plateau at 300 trillion gold in sales per day 300 trillion per day in 2014 and maybe it's because Gaia's economy was starting to hit such unheard-of extremes that at long last the staff finally addressed it kind of they asked the admins threats were finally brought back under a new name in October of 2014 now they were called ask the staff and in the very first post in the very first thread they explicitly mentioned that they were aware of the inflation issues on Gaia I mean better late than never right well in this case maybe not they ended their paragraph about inflation by saying that they wanted their economy to work in tandem with gold generators which completely defeats the whole point and at this point it was pretty well known that gold generators were eating the economy alive but no matter how many users knew it and no matter how many admins knew it guys decision-makers just didn't care you remember how that review earlier called Gaia's new management disconnected yeah that definitely turned out to be the truth guys decline at this point is all too clear and 2015 and 16 would end up being comparatively quiet years for Gaia and I don't doubt that that has a lot to do with the prominent censorship across the site the poor morale and of course steadily falling traffic in any case economic problems persisted Gaia cash was introduced into the marketplace in 2015 but it didn't have any long-lasting effect in fact many users just saw it as another gold generation method since the seller received gold instead of cash furthermore even though gaius started limiting the number of gold generators that could be sold the fact of the matter is that they were still being sold and they weren't being limited enough to do much of anything to fix the damage that they'd already done case in point by 2015 gold generators that could spit out at least a trillion gold were pretty normal another feedback survey revealed the increasing frustration with the gold generators and inflation but as Gaia's new general manager at the time stated if gold generators are no longer sold it would mean we would have a harder time hitting our daily and monthly goals with goals not being hit cuts will need to be made either an art features or updates to the site with all the ongoing problems Gaia was having at this time this was no doubt the worst time to be on Gaia but at long last after watching Gaia burn itself alive for four years the community was at long last even the good news that it had been waiting for in December of 2016 Sheffield and loya were finally no longer in charge of Gaia in fact more importantly not only were they leaving their positions at Gaia but this allowed a group of three of the site's original creators and artists to take the wheel again effectively putting Gaia under new old management and guess what the new old management get this actually cared about the state of the website in fact the new old leadership wasted no time in fixing the economy the last goal generator to have been sold was the gold truffle box in January of 2017 in August of the same year they introduced the site's new currency gaya platinum which would be exchanged at a rate of 10 million gold per one platinum for now at least the site's economy still seems pretty stable the year is currently 2019 guys current Alexa ranking is 49 64 in the states and 21 976 overall it's pretty lucky to see more than a few thousands of users on at any given time its days of attracting hundreds of thousands of users per day are long gone that being said guys community is a lot smaller now but it is still there if you want to watch a good video about what gaya is looking like these days just as a user then I'd highly recommend billions video on it fun fact it actually inspired this video but of course this isn't all to say that guy's problems have all magically been solved and things are all fine and dandy on there now because frankly that's not the case to list off just some of the more well-known problems for starters a lack of traffic continues to be a really big problem and then there's the discontinuation of flesh in 2020 which could mean that a lot of Gaia's games and features are gonna have to be removed or at the very least reworked and who knows how long that's gonna take and then perhaps the most infamous struggle Gaia has had recently were there financial problems toward the end of 2018 they resulted in Gaia needing to yet again ask its users for help as well as a large number of layoffs the future of Gaia online or whether or not it even has a future at this point honestly seems pretty unclear in any case I hope I was able to answer all your questions about the decline of Gaia online making this video was a really weird trip down memory lane for me because Gaia used to be my social media platform of choice back in my early and mid teen years and I had no idea up until I was working on this video that things got so bad on there cuz I left around 2011 ish in any case if you still have any more questions feel more than free to ask in the comments where hopefully either I or someone else can get to you and on that note actually tell you what here's a fun little fact that I couldn't find a good spot for in the video so one of the main items people will use to track inflation on gaia is the emo bag this is done partially because it's in the aforementioned group of items in at reddit post that trekked Gaia's inflation and partially because there was a pretty popular quest thread by a user called moldy lunch box who had been saving up for one in 2008 this therefore gives us a really good time line of the emo bags price and that's why it's such a common example for showcasing just how bad inflation on gaia got but incidentally that user who started the thread moldy lunch box she wouldn't soon be known to the Internet as boxy and I don't doubt that there's a lot of you who are too young to remember her but suffice to say she was quite a meme back in the day and many of her earliest videos actually mentioned Gaia but so boxy is not just an iconic meme from yesteryear but it's thanks to her that we can track inflation for the emo bags so much more effectively than we can other items small world we live in huh thank you and shout out to and I'm sorry if I'm not pronouncing this right for Laurie and Hoff on know your meme who documented most of the information about the fall of Gaia that I mentioned during this video I'll link to it in the description because the amount of research they must have put into this is incredible PS watch simple gear

Channel: Red Bard

Views: 1,209,738

Rating: 4.9419293 out of 5

Keywords: gaiaonline, gaia, gaia online, what happened to gaia online, rise and fall of gaia, rise and fall of gaia online, gary schofield, goldemort, lanzer, virtual economy, virtual economies, gaia textbook, hyperinflation, flynn's booty, angelic halo, billiam, billiamthies, did gaia online die, second life, imvu, rise and fall of gaiaonline, anime, anime social media, early social media, gamification, gold generators, virtual currency, gaia gold, gaia cash, gaia platinum, virtual currencies

Id: vyzQnsa8SA0

Length: 33min 30sec (2010 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Hell_Tutor]

: o. Can't believe I lived long enough to see a vid being made about it.

Like an historic piece, internet museum level.

[u/3spoopy_5me]

Gaia was popping back in ‘08💔

[u/Romeomoon]

I joined in 2005, just before a mass of the older community was leaving. There was a lot of mature and interesting conversation, kind of like what I still see on reddit these days. Veteran players helped out the n00bs and tons of Guilds were forming everyday. I feel that by about 2009, a different crowd moved and the place became more trolly and spammy. zOMG was active, but it also seemed to split the population between the forums and the game with few people willing to post outside of their Clan. I pretty much stopped playing by 2010, only occasionally popping in to see if anything had changed. I missed out on all the drama surrounding the admin around 2012/2015. By then, the conversations I was looking for online had shifted to places like reddit.

I did, however, start a short stream series on Twitch for zOMG. When I got to the grind, though, I basically gave up and moved on to stream other games: https://youtu.be/WeE07d-pars

[u/Ellistrae]

I joined in 2004 but it died and when it did it was cause they were greedy and had bad mods nothing can save it

[u/Sireanna]

Gaia still exists? Man I used to be sooo active on there. Hanging out in the art threads and word games... I gave up on the site in 2014 when things got super rough. It used to be so fun. I remember playing zOMG and hanging out with the devs.

[u/lessadessa]

I just watched this last night. Such an awesome, well-spoken and accurate video!!!!! I joined back in 2004 and got to experience the hey-day of Gaia. It was so much fun, I spent hours a day on there and I don't even know why lol. It was just a fun website that allowed you to express yourself, interact with other people your own age (mostly) and learn new things. Absolutely LIVED for the holiday events too. My first donation item was the KiKi kitty plushie. God, I miss those days.

[u/[deleted]]

Shame I totally forgot my password and email. Would've been nice to go down memory lane.

Then again, the forums have shifted to something unsightly.

[u/yunibyte]

Great vid, I haven’t been on since they fired all the zOMG devs. That was such a fun little MMO. Our crew probably blew up inflation too, we’d do SS runs under 15 minutes and each of us would net like 20k. Think I’m still a few robofish short of a badge though. :(

[u/[deleted]]

I made a joke about Gary with my original 2007 account and got banned instantly. No reason or warning. Still never heard anything about my ticket. That was back in 2014.