Nicechan is an anonymous and ephemeral discussion forum open for posting only to paying members.
It is a relaunch of a site I built during the pandemic called Club P that generated a pretty active participation. However, the new incarnation has been less quick to take off. Stillborn might be a better description. Missing now is the censorious environment of 2020, and being trapped at home and hungry for expressive outlets. Kickstarting a network effect is a difficult thing indeed.
There is an exhaustive manifesto and technical explanation about Nicechan on the site, and I excerpt it below.
On social media platforms like X, users have a persistent identity (even if it is a pseudonym). This fosters completely natural incentives for status competition, but those incentives are unnaturally exacerbated by the gamification inherent in likes, retweets, and follower counts. Additionally, your view on the world is limited by the set of people you have chosen to follow, and by platform algorithms that are trained to keep you hooked and not much else. The result is conversation that is often performative and susceptible to groupthink and tribalism.
An interesting alternative mode of online conversation that is still public, and not cloistered, is that of anonymous “imageboards” made (in)famous by 4chan. They are web discussion forums with no user registration and no identities tied to posts. Postings are also ephemeral and are erased after a short time. Thanks to this architecture, imageboards foster a very different kind of conversation. Because there are no usernames, no follower counts, and no likes or retweets or karma, there is no ego or status-seeking tied to users’ expressions.
Because user content is presented chronologically, and neither you nor an algorithm curate what you see, you’re exposed to a greater set of expressions.
Without identity everyone’s expression is on equal footing and can be judged on its own merits regardless of its authorship. Such a peculiar arrangement can engender unreserved contributions to group creativity, which is why the origins of so much of what we take for granted as “internet culture” today—from lolcats to rickrolling—can be traced back to 4chan.
Of course, as 4chan itself shows, anonymity can have a very dark side. Without identity there is no accountability, and without account registration there is no way to screen out trolls and troublemakers.
After a lot of thinking about how we might be able to get the good of an anonymous discussion forum without so much of the bad, we came up with is Nicechan.
Nicechan is essentially an anonymous and ephemeral discussion forum but with important differences compared to traditional imageboards. Most significantly, you have to be a member to post, and membership costs $3 per month. That’s a modest amount that after hosting and service fees should leave little profit, but will be a barrier to entry that hopefully screens in earnest folks.
No identifying information is ever presented on the site—no username, nor email address, nothing. And on the backend, although we have access to payment information and will therefore be able to see the identity of who is a member, we will never know which subscriber wrote which post or reply. In the end Nicechan will have no more info about you than Elon does if you have a pseudonymous X account—less, in fact, because we won’t know what you wrote.
See the site for a technical explanation, but in a nutshell, when you post a thread or reply, we don’t store any info that ties it back to your account—no email, no user ID, nothing. Instead, we generate a unique pseudonym (like “Happy Fox”) for you in each thread using a random code based on your session and the thread itself, not your identity.
A pseudonym sticks with you within each thread, so you can tell within a thread that you are talking to particular individuals, but it’s different in every new thread you join. Even our database can’t connect your posts to your subscription email—it’s designed that way on purpose.
Last updated November 18, 2025
