I will bump this thread to share some obscure imageboard history for posterity. If there are any other 8chan oldfags here, you might know this story. Unfortunately, there is not much evidence left so I will have to rely on my memory a lot. This is a eulogy for Demochan.
Demochan was an imageboard that existed for a little over a week in July 2015. I am not sure when it was officially launched, but it should have been terminated around July 14th, 2015. The idea behind Demochan was simple: you voted for the jannies you wanted. If I remember correctly, I believe that you could form a 'party' as a user with some kind of platform and you could vote on a party on any board that you had posted on previously. I don't remember how often you could vote. Demochan had board creation and was clearly meant to be an alternative to 8chan, although beyond that I can't say much about the creator's motivation. Each board had a 'parliament' but whichever party had the majority actually ran the board.
Description from Creamy's homemade list of imageboards:
Demochan prides itself on taking the act of removing the benevolent dictatorship from the *chan equation. Well, the dictatorship is still present, but it’s hidden behind a collection of brand-new board owners that cycle out every week via the magic of representative democracy, chosen by their online peers, thus the site’s name. It’s very similar to Anon-IB, or even 8chan, if you stretch it enough, but the execution is done fairly well, though one should ask, “why should anyone do this?”
Demochan had timing that was both good and bad for the site. By the summer of 2015, I would say that most of the excitement that had come with the Gamergate exodus had died down and, at least among people who cared about that sort of thing, any sense of optimism had been replaced by a simmering resentment against Copypaste and other 8chan staff. As 4chan refugees found out, migrating from one imageboard to another purely because of jannies can often result in little more than trading one tyrant for another. Demochan was attractive because it promised to solve this problem. The timing was bad for similar reasons. Not everyone (in fact, probably a large portion) participated in 8chan's meta flamewars with any intention to actually improve the site, but just to troll people. Demochan ended up getting caught in the middle while the site was still new and finding its feet.
Obviously, the site was immediately raided and honestly, even people like me who were genuinely interested in the idea couldn't help themselves from abusing the voting feature. Apparently, the creator was not familiar with the notion of "the tyranny of the majority", so individual parties could implement drastic changes once voted into power. I'm pretty sure anime was banned on /a/ at one point, for example. I didn't save the post, but I remember the admin saying he wanted to shut down the site because it wasn't growing quickly enough (which was ridiculous considering how young it was) and the imageboard was attracting too many 'wolves' (I think that was his wording) who were abusing the voting feature. Ironically, the world's first democratic imageboard was shut down by a unilateral decision by its owner and against the wishes of its users.
The homepage:
https://archive.ph/2AdsK
/v/:
https://archive.ph/Kfv8f
