It was an interesting one-year experience — 9 months of development, but only 3 months live. Below you can read why I made this decision. In short, sites like this cannot exist due to conceptual, technical, ethical, financial, legal, and sovereignty reasons.
Rule34.xxx, the main image provider, is moving to private APIs. This means that free access to their database with millions of images is no longer possible. r34.net was entirely built on that system. This event was the trigger for shutting down the site.
We still have Danbooru and E621, and we could have continued working with them, but the roots of the problem go deeper — I'll explain further.
Sovereignty, in simple terms, is independence — the right to decide something without anyone's supervision, mediation, or interference. For a website, sovereignty means you decide what to do, what new to build, what to shut down, what to change — and no one can suddenly stop you or cut you off. The opposite of sovereignty is parasitism.
The idea of r34.net was to create a slightly more convenient and beautiful UI/UX using data from donor sites. That's a parasitic approach. In fact, we were freely using the work of dozens or hundreds of moderators and thousands of artists. Parasites eventually get expelled from organisms.
Even though throughout its existence this site never showed a single ad and earned not a single cent, it was still conceptually parasitic. The original artists never gave explicit consent to be on this site — and honestly, that's not cool. r34.net also created load on the servers of the original boorus without giving a single cent in return, which also feels wrong. The work of moderators and the cost of servers should be financially rewarded. Using those resources for free is parasitism.
The concept of r34.net was parasitic. For success, the site would have needed to be sovereign and independent (with its own images, moderators, CDN, storage, etc., so that nobody could just cut off access to half the functions). But instead it became a parasite site, dependent on three other sites. The result of that game is what you're reading now, instead of enjoying the site.
We could have continued working with rule34.xxx, modifying our backend to use their API key. We could have paid for API access, which would have solved the parasitism issue. But it would have worsened another one — the financial problem.
Even in its current form — without paying a cent for the millions of images on the site — we were running a monthly loss just from hosting. r34.net had 15k daily visitors, making around 200k views per day. We could have monetized this with ads and maybe survived longer. But we chose differently.
We believed in idealism, hoping that at least a few people would support us by buying gems or premium for even $2 — enough to cover hosting. In 3 months, with over 300k unique visitors and 4 million views, the site earned $0.
The goal of the site wasn't money — otherwise we would have just added ads, like the sites you'll now use instead. We wanted to make a genuinely pleasant, ad-free experience for everyone, regardless of whether someone had premium or not. Over time, this idea turned out to mean that the idealistic developer ends up hungry, writing this text, while you read it instead of enjoying the site.
99% of people used the site as a porn site. And that's fine. (Though the idea was that anyone could build a gallery of their favorite images.)
And while anime girls and furry femboys may feel like everyday youth culture in the 21st century, the law's view of pornography hasn't changed. We live in states, gerontocracies, run by elderly people (hello UK, US, and basically the whole world). Every year, these people pass crazy laws making it harder and harder for you to spend your time how you want, watch what you want, and do what you want with your private parts.
Will this change in the future? Yes. But not in the next decade. And for now — you're reading this text, instead of enjoying what you like.
R34.net was my personal hobby project. I studied programming and cybersecurity while developing it. Honestly, I don't see further prospects for myself in these fields. The job market is terrible, it's impossible to find work. My experience isn't enough for a serious full-time job.
And the experience of making personal projects, creating something of my own, something that could provide a small passive income and let me grow further — in practice it proved itself unviable, and led me here, writing this text.
If in these 3 months at least one person enjoyed using this site — that's great. I'm grateful! That means the year of effort wasn't wasted.
In these three months not a single person left a single letter of personal information or a single cent of money. So while I still have the moral right to chop off this site's head…
🪓 …I take the axe!