The Den of Amateur Writing

Goodbye Denizens

I've mulled over this decision and what to say about it for some time, however I think I'll just keep it as simple as I can. The internet in 1997 was a different place. It was a wild new world of discovery. People were willingly sharing information with the idea of open and free information for all. Then capitalism caught up with it. Between ad prioritized and paid search results, users becoming lazier and wanting quick easy things to digest, wanting gratification of some kind through videos, social networks and just mostly not wanting to have to work to find new sites and actively participate in communities as much; a free site that has no ads and no incoming funds cannot compete. The Den could survive if we could afford to put out ads and get enough users to click in to our corner of the web to find the right users to keep life in the site. In reality I cannot afford to keep running it as is.

The Den survived thanks to fair and free search engines being users primary goto to find sites on the net. Over the years I've lost the SEO game more and more as it requires money to succeed in these days. I spent 5 years rebuilding the site to compete for free as best I could, watched as the new site reached near 100% indexing and then watched Google just deindex 99% of the site for no reason with no explanation. Our top keyword has always been "amateur writing" or "writing community" - we've always placed number 1 or 2 in that search result list on the front page. Recently I've seen us dive as low as page 20 in that result with nothing but ads sponsored sites on the front page. I'm tired of fighting the big tech companies in order to provide a free community. I've kept up a good fight for nearly 27 years, but its time to move on. I have other things I need to focus on and skills to develop. My finances need to go to my family and my home.

To all of the denizens who lived the spirit of The Den by commenting, providing feedback, and being as interested in helping others with their writing as getting feedback on their own; I thank you. You understood what I wanted to create here and you were shining examples of what The Den was meant to be. The times we had on the site will always be in my heart. In accordance with various user data privacy practices, I have deleted all of the sites data, all user submissions, accounts, user data and all backups.

Sincerely,
Chris Routh
Owner, Developer and Creator of The Den