You should consider this article an extension to this one: https://cy-x.net/articles?id=13
If you haven't, you should read that one first before reading this one. I (meatwheels) have purposefully structurally mirrored that article to directly serve this purpose.

A honeypot masquerading as a haven

Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe bills itself as "the best kept secret of the internet." Not much of a secret when you're indexed on Wikipedia and shilled across YouTube by commentary channels desperate for content. But that's the least of their problems.

enjoy the best kept secret of the internet.png

This forum represents everything wrong with modern "old internet revival" - not just aesthetic cargo cult behavior, but active exploitation of people seeking authentic alternatives to corporate surveillance. They've turned internet nostalgia into a monthly subscription service while implementing tracking practices that would make Facebook jealous.

A surveillance café

request is being verified.png

Visit Agora Road with a fresh browser and you're immediately hit with some sort of Cloudflare MITM data collection screen, followed by this gem:

cancer.png

"agoraroad.com asks for your consent to use your personal data for personalised advertising and content, advertising and content measurement, audience research and services development."

Your data will be "stored by, accessed by and shared with 142 TCF vendor(s) and 68 ad partner(s)."

One hundred and forty-two vendors. For a forum that claims to represent old internet values. The original internet culture they're cosplaying actively rejected this kind of corporate surveillance apparatus.

Try accessing through Tor - the privacy tool that enabled the actual Silk Road they claim to honor - and you get banned for "spam." The irony is suffocating.

OOPS banned for spam.png

It's all just a big grift

But the real perversion comes when you see their monetization scheme. Agora Road doesn't just track you - they charge you for the privilege of basic forum features that were free on actual old internet communities.

nice css bro.png

>nice css bro!

Agora Gold: $10/month for custom usernames, profile CSS, and removal of ads. Ten dollars monthly to customize your forum profile - features that were standard on phpBB installations kids ran from their bedrooms in 2003.

Agora Silver: $5/month for slightly fewer customization options but still including "moods" on your profile. Because nothing says authentic old internet culture like paying a monthly subscription to display your emotional state.

Agora Bronze: $2/month - the "entry level" tier that still requires ongoing payments for what used to be default functionality.

This isn't just monetization - it's the complete inversion of old internet principles. The communities these people claim to represent were built by volunteers who provided servers and bandwidth for free because they believed in open access to information and communication.

Riding off of Ross Ulbricht's legacy

Perhaps most offensive is their claimed tribute to Ross Ulbricht, creator of Silk Road. They name themselves after his marketplace while implementing everything he fought against: surveillance, data harvesting, corporate partnerships, and user tracking.

What does Agora Road mean.png

Ulbricht built Silk Road as a challenge to state authority and corporate control. Agora Road uses his legacy to justify operating what appears to be a data collection honeypot with 142 corporate tracking partners. It's like naming your NSA facility after Edward Snowden.

free ross fund store.png

The original Silk Road was accessible only through Tor and designed to protect user privacy. Agora Road bans Tor users and demands manual admin approval for registration. They've taken the aesthetic of rebellion while embracing corporate surveillance.

Lack of actual authenticity

For a site whose logo is literally an old Macintosh - a machine known for responsive, efficient operation - Agora Road performs terribly. Scrolling lags behind mouse movement. Pages load slowly despite modern hardware thousands of times more powerful than the computers that ran the internet they're supposedly nostalgic for.

ALL GOOLAG.png

This isn't an accident. It's the inevitable result of loading tracking scripts for 142 different vendors, running heavy JavaScript frameworks to create the illusion of "retro" styling, and prioritizing data collection over user experience.

Real old internet sites were fast because they prioritized functionality over surveillance. Agora Road is slow because they prioritize surveillance over everything else.

Big grift part 2: selling stolen memes for 17 bucks

Not content with subscription fees and tracking revenue, they've added an Amazon affiliate program and merchandise shop. You can buy obviously stolen memes and recolored anime characters printed on shirts and coffee mugs. Seventeen dollars for a coffee mug featuring intellectual property they don't own.

night shift agora.png

This represents the complete commercialization of internet culture. The memes and aesthetics they're selling were created by communities that explicitly rejected commercial exploitation. Now they're literally putting price tags on stolen culture.

What purpose does Agora Road actually serve?

The users defending Agora Road don't seem to understand what they've lost. They see the retro styling and assume it represents old internet values, missing the fundamental contradiction: you cannot simultaneously honor old internet culture while implementing modern surveillance capitalism.

The old internet wasn't good because of how it looked. It was good because:

• No tracking: Your browsing wasn't monitored by dozens of corporate partners
• Free access: Features weren't locked behind subscription paywalls
• Community ownership: Users controlled their own data and servers
• Privacy by default: Anonymity was protected, not monetized
• Resistance to commercialization: Communities explicitly rejected corporate influence

Agora Road violates every single principle while maintaining the aesthetic wrapper.

Pattern recognition

This isn't isolated incompetence - it's systematic exploitation. Agora Road represents the next evolution of corporate internet takeover: identify communities seeking alternatives to surveillance capitalism, then create fake alternatives that implement even more invasive tracking while charging subscription fees.

They've weaponized nostalgia to extract money from people trying to escape the exact system Agora Road represents. It's surveillance capitalism with a vintage filter.

What happens when you fall for it

Every person who subscribes to Agora Road thinking they're supporting "old internet culture" is actually funding its opposite. They're paying monthly fees to be tracked by 142 corporate partners while participating in a synthetic community maintained by bots and fake accounts.

The tragedy isn't just individual - it's cultural. By commodifying and perverting old internet aesthetics, sites like Agora Road prevent people from discovering what actually made that era valuable. They're selling the wrapping paper while destroying the gift.

What can be done?

Real old internet culture still exists. IRC networks still operate. XMPP servers provide decentralized communication. Self-hosted forums run without tracking or subscription fees. The protocols and principles that made the original internet valuable are still available to anyone willing to learn them.

But that requires effort and technical understanding. It's easier to pay ten dollars monthly to customize your profile on a surveillance platform that cosplays as a vintage computer.

The bottom line

Agora Road isn't preserving old internet culture - it's strip-mining it for profit. They've taken the aesthetic rebellion of earlier communities and turned it into a subscription service with more invasive tracking than the corporate platforms their users claim to be escaping.

The "best kept secret of the internet" isn't their forum - it's that they're operating a surveillance honeypot while charging their victims monthly subscription fees for the privilege.

Ross Ulbricht built Silk Road to challenge corporate and state control over communication and commerce. Agora Road has turned his legacy into a monthly recurring revenue stream backed by 142 corporate tracking partners.

The old internet is dead, and Agora Road is profiting from its corpse.

If you're paying monthly fees for forum customization while being tracked by hundreds of corporate partners, you're not escaping surveillance capitalism - you're funding its evolution.

i found this site through drummy's website and only came for the images, never saw much outside of some forum posts with twitter/reddit screencaps and discussing annoying, modern-day topics with typography where you can tell the person has come from one of the centralized social medias, which made it as generic as any other modern forum.
paid forums perplex me. i get managing servers and all but subscriptions just really annoy me. and it's even more annoying people fall for it. at least unlike places such as 'we are the music makers' (another forum for music autists) you don't have to pay to make an account, yet.
i still think the most honest attempt at nu 'old internet' sites is still heyuri, and they had to take a lot of steps in order to match that environment (i.e. banning annoying culture like jaks, buzzwords or greentexts) because people can't behave themselves today, and encouraging culture. though i think that's harder for an account-based forum like agora.
also, i think you might have covered this briefly under 'community ownership', but you forgot to mention how this forum is running on proprietory forum software, XenForo, like many other modern forums (so it just blends in with them, so much for replicating the old internet), which was released in 2011. never mind programming your own forum, i would have even accepted phpBB at this point, because that's just egregious, and they don't get to add any fun features thanks to their half-assery.

who is drummy

Isn't it a bit hypocritical to praise that libertarian man as a hero, and then blame someone else for making a bit of money to pay for server costs? I can't help but feel that you're trying to push some kind of agenda here. And it's a bit weird, I mean: a black market where drugs were sold = last bastion of freedom - but forum that sells anime/meme merchandise = pure evil...? Huh?

And I really don't think anime communities ever cared this much about capitalism, they just... enjoyed anime. They also bought a lot of merchandise.

This article would have been better if the author had just reported the facts.

Heyuri seems interesting, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Oh god, Agora Road I remember actually joining and being around the site for a bit embarrassingly enough. Truth be told, I wasn't as down the rabbit hole as I'm in now with the communities at the time of discovery but I was always icked by how much trackers and shit was on the Website which was Ironic in a way with what the users of the site believed in. As I said before, I joined because there was no other place I knew besides 4chan (and Sharty) that was a Forum. I fucking hated using Xenforo as the site was WAY worse than what it currently is now aesthetically.

Okay to be fair there was Mariana Bay which at the time when I discovered that site it too looked so fucking shitty and basically have the same issues as Agora's Road

Anyways, Great article going down a deep dive for how the site functions.

Finally, someone calling out Agora Road for being a cancerous, pretentious trash that was made for the sole purpose of making money and it's full with terminally online zoomers obsessed with politics.

I did the mistake to make an account there but fortunately they later permanently banned me without a single warning or informing me about my ban and why they banned me (they obviously banned me for not embracing their radical political beliefs).

One of the many reasons I hate Agora Road and its shills that hasn't been mentioned by OP is that it brags about being credited as the site that popularized the Dead Internet Theory topic despite the fact that at the same time it admits that they originally learned about DIT topic at 4chan.

>One of the many reasons I hate Agora Road and its shills that hasn't been mentioned by OP is that it brags about being credited as the site that popularized the Dead Internet Theory topic despite the fact that at the same time it admits that they originally learned about DIT topic at 4chan.

Inventing something and popularizing it are 2 different things...

Sizeofcat recently created a small private forum, and it's beautiful. The users are smart and nice. One of the rules is "no politics". I'm mentioning it in case someone is looking for an alternative.

How do you expect people to join Sizeofcat's forum if it's private?

And does it actually follows its "no politics" rule? Because lots of online groups/communities have same rule and yet they actually allow politics with lame excuses like "IT'S NOT POLITICAL! IT'S ABOUT SOCIAL EQUALITY!". Also identity politics are still political.

>How do you expect people to join Sizeofcat's forum if it's private?

It's private, but registrations are open for now. You just send him an e-mail asking for an invite. At some point in the future, registrations will be closed, and the only way to get in will be receiving an invite from one of the members.

So I'd join now if you're interested. The beta period ends in a week, after that I don't know what the admin is going to do.

>And does it actually follows its "no politics" rule? Because lots of online groups/communities have same rule and yet they actually allow politics with lame excuses like "IT'S NOT POLITICAL! IT'S ABOUT SOCIAL EQUALITY!". Also identity politics are still political.

So far, only one political thread has been made, and it was immediately locked. I have reason to believe that the admin is a leftist, but he's serious about the no politics rule. The community in general seems more interested in technology and anime than political activism. There's a shared sentiment that personal freedom is important, and that censorship is bad. The atmosphere is relaxed.

So it's a pretty good place to be at the moment. I can't guarantee that it'll stay this way forever, but it's a good start.

> I have reason to believe that the admin is a leftist
Yikes! That's a huge red flag.

Anyway, I hope it will stay as chill as you say it is.

Why did you feel the need to post this exact thread on 50 different forum sites?

>Why did you feel the need to post this exact thread on 50 different forum sites?

I don't think anyone's doing that. I found this site posted on /g/ once and never saw it again.

>I don't think anyone's doing that.
Here's one example from the admin:
https://basementcommunity.com/threads/524?postID=5881#5881

Why does this whole site just seem like a bunch of reposts

>Here's one example from the admin:
>https://basementcommunity.com/threads/524?postID=5881#5881
Really gotta put it straight to you but I don't think that just because someone puts the name of the website as their username and does nothing but post one article doesn't make them the admin

If I go on reddit and post under any variant of "Facebook", would that make me mark suckerballz?

For what other reason would anyone else post this other than to advertise the thread?

>For what other reason would anyone else post this other than to advertise the thread?

To deliberately attempt to damage the reputation of the site through brute-force advertising.

You've seen the site from /g/. You've seen the site from KiwiFarms. You've seen the site from Reddit, HackerNews, Discord, or the basement forum.

That doesn't mean it's being spammed across multiple forums by us. We’re not here to flood the internet with the site for attention, and I can assure you that we didn't post it there.

> That doesn't mean it's being spammed across multiple forums by us. We’re not here to flood the internet with the site for attention, and I can assure you that we didn't post it there.

Suuuuuuuuuure!

>then blame someone else for making a bit of money to pay for server costs?
Can you monetize nostalgia and still preserve its integrity?

On one hand, server costs and moderation justify some monetization..

On the other, charging for CSS and moods while heavily tracking users isn't “reviving the old web”. That's just disguising Web 2.0 under a retro skin.
Agora Road fucked up in their execution but that doesn't mean someone could do it without resorting to such invasive, scummy tactics.

Anyone who legitimately uses this fucking site reaps what they sow. It doesn't even load properly on old browsers. That is what happens when you use Xenforo shit instead of making your own thing.

What's the purpose of Agora road??

has anyone considered posting this article on their site and seeing how they'll react to it? would love to see a spergout or a redemption arc

It will just get deleted and nothing will happen, feel free to try though and keep us posted

>has anyone considered posting this article on their site and seeing how they'll react to it? would love to see a spergout or a redemption arc

You did, evidently. I have read this article in its entirety and have duly filed it under "faggotry." Good day.

Did someone actually post on Agora Road? I would love to see their dumb reactions to it.

Too bad I can't check it out since I can't access it over Tor.

> Consider the following: https://cy-x.net/articles?id=27
> You have fallen into a trap. Get out of it.
> Move on from the Agora Road.

Hi, somebody posted this on my guestbook(I'm guessing it was OP, which I think adds up with what others said about it being spammed on 50 forums in an earlier comment?). For context my site is https://risingthumb.xyz

I've read through the post, and I agree with some bits(cloudflare, advertising) and disagree with other bits(description of old internet, dude look at geocities, it's literally Yahoo. Even usenet or old BBS systems don't fit your description, tribute to Ross, it being slow software(this site loads in 1200ms in network request, Agora Road's site loads in 1400ms in the network requests, func_msgboard loads in 100ms, so both this and agora road are an order of magnitude worse in comparison to func_msgboard in terms of speed of use), perhaps get out of the same ballpark before criticising it for that, otherwise you're just a hypocrite).

Anyways, my question is, what's the trap? Or is it just clickbait to get people to look at your article?

>Even usenet or old BBS systems don't fit your description

wdym how does that now fit the article's description
>Real old internet culture still exists.
>IRC networks still operate.
>XMPP servers provide decentralized communication.
>Self-hosted forums run without tracking or subscription fees.
>The protocols and principles that made the original internet valuable are still available

>tribute to Ross
why do you disagree with the criticism on that

>>register on agora road using tor
>>the article says this exact thing btw
>>the same exact thing the silk road needed in order to work
>>get banned

>this site loads in 1200ms in network request, Agora Road's site loads in 1400ms in the network requests

95% of agora road's network requests consist of javascript bloat and advertising spyware

>func_msgboard loads in 100ms
>perhaps get out of the same ballpark before criticising it for that, otherwise you're just a hypocrite
this quake forum wasn't even mentioned in the article
also your statistics are horribly fucking wrong

cyberix 858 ms.png

cy-x.net: 858 ms

agora road 5 fucking seconds.png

agora road: FIVE FUCKING SECONDS

what the fuck are you on

even if we use your own statistics cyberix remains faster than agora road anyway and is inherently superior to agora road:

1 - cyberix tries to atleast use homemade software
^ agora road just uses xenforo with a larp skin
2 - cyberix tries to be minimalist
^ agora road will make you casually waste 5 megabytes on loading the front page
3 - cyberix is not monetized and only takes donations
^ agora road slaps advertisements and popups everywhere
and their entire shop just consists of shitty 4chan memes and recolored anime girls

if you had any hope of loading agora road in any browser that's even slightly below standards then good fucking luck. pale moon takes eleven fucking seconds to load the front page and that's even worse than chromium's 5 second loadtime + whether or not chromium tried preloading the website from the address bar

i also find it funny how you pull up these old protocols and even an old quake forum but the second half of your post is criticizing cy-x.net for taking at most 2 seconds to load. maybe you've never actually had to deal with older internet speeds back then

>what's the trap?
this site resembles absolutely nothing of the old internet that most people think it is, it's inherently a honeypot made to suck people who are interested in cultivating a culture similar to it but are unaware that there are better options out there. it's absolutely appalling that you've even linked a forum that represents the old internet more than agora road but it doesnt seem like you realize what the problem is just yet

>wdym how does that now fit the article's description
>>Real old internet culture still exists.
>>IRC networks still operate.
>>XMPP servers provide decentralized communication.
>>Self-hosted forums run without tracking or subscription fees.
>>The protocols and principles that made the original internet valuable are still available

From the OP to show how it fits with article's description:
>The old internet wasn't good because of how it looked. It was good because:
>No tracking: Your browsing wasn't monitored by dozens of corporate partners
>Free access: Features weren't locked behind subscription paywalls
>Community ownership: Users controlled their own data and servers
>Privacy by default: Anonymity was protected, not monetized
>Resistance to commercialization: Communities explicitly rejected corporate influence

Just to say it, XMPP is hardly old internet, it's mid-2000s. Anyways it's still pretty rubbish because of how many differing implementations and how all over the place parts of the XEP are implemented. A pipe dream for tech autists, and absolutely miserable for an actual user. I know this because I've set up an XMPP server in the past and got some users to use it, and the differences between clients meant it was an absolute nightmare. Perhaps one of you guys had better luck than me, but sorting it out for people who aren't technologically literate was too much for me.

Anyways back to the old internet... there was no privacy by default as MITM attacks are trivial on HTTP, the others probably had other vulnerabilities that are trivial to exploit that do not consider your privacy(aside from XMPP). They were resistant to commercialisation. They were resistant to tracking(though tracking as a whole with the internet was more of a thing after cookies existed). It was absolutely not community ownership. Just as the owner of Cyberix is a benevolent dictator of this forum and can ban people at will and volition(even if they choose not to, they have the power to), it's not community owned. You also do not own your data. As soon as I make this post, you own all the associated data effectively. And besides, an open protocol still led us into all this mess! The modern internet is all built on "open protocols"! You want something that maybe goes a different way? Look into the Gemini Protocol, but to me it's kind of a dead end. Maybe you'll have better luck?

Also you said the old internet wasn't good because of how it looked. I disagree, it was good because of how it looked, but they just designed things better back then. As an example, remember winamp?

>>tribute to Ross
>why do you disagree with the criticism on that
A tribute is just a show of respect, gratitude or admiration man. Just because you do a tribute doesn't mean you hold all or the same values, and it's pretty extreme to expect that.

> what the fuck are you on
I use Brave with adblock so maybe that contributes to the load times compared to using Palemoon. I cede the point, I suppose it is slower, but not slow enough for me to find it disgustingly worse than other modern internet sites. I've attached an image of my speeds for Agora

>>what's the trap?
>this site resembles absolutely nothing of the old internet that most people think it is, it's inherently a honeypot made to suck people who are interested in cultivating a culture similar to it but are unaware that there are better options out there. it's absolutely appalling that you've even linked a forum that represents the old internet more than agora road but it doesnt seem like you realize what the problem is just yet

I'm aware it's not an old internet site. It's a site that has nostalgia for early 2000s and 90s stuff, and it's pretty plain and evident to anyone who has eyes how it goes for a style similar to geocities(which is what I think of when I think old internet, not a bunch of protocols). Anyways, func_msgboard? Not old internet either as it's mostly used for announcements of map jams and new releases while most of the community hangs out on the Quake Mapping Discord. It's sad and I'm not a fan, but network effects has the most power here.

If you're telling people to move on from Agora Road, do you have an alternative that at least tries to capture the same spirit it's going for? This place certainly doesn't. I have looked around at other forums before and most are just pretty sterile :(

>I've attached an image of my speeds for Agora
not that invested in this thread but fyi anonymous attachments are removed after 10-15 minutes of posting because of the child porn bots

You need to make an account for the attachment to stay up.

>Do you have an alternative that at least tries to capture the same spirit it's going for?

Agora Road has no spirit. It is inherently piggybacking off of sanitized corporate aesthetics and a child's idea of what they think the "old internet" would be in the form of a spyware infested Xenforo forum.

I'm a former Agora Road user for a long time, I left about a year ago because I was tired of some of the same discussions, and some of the new users were annoying. I always disliked the setup of the website, I tolerated it because I wasn't aware of any other website remotely like this.

I lurk here, lainchan, Heyuri, 4-ch, and a ton of other places, but I have the most fond memories of Agora. Through some times, visiting the site felt like I stepped from a cold dark day into a warm pub with familiar faces. Spending time on there, you get to know the people there, and there is this somewhat personal dimension that no other site really has.

In terms of the relation to the first article, Agora Road users would be more in agreement with the article. Personally, I couldn't care less about the site aesthetic, and I was not the only one. We were laughing for days in the aftermath of Yesterweb's demise, a 'collective' who used old-web nostalgia to promote communism, while being mostly organized on Discord. Agora users tend to value original content/discussion and criticize lazy repetition.

Though that said, I don't know if it's the same anymore. I check it here and there and nothing captures my interest anymore. Where are the really interesting discussions I remember? Another thread of nusers basking in the afterglow of purging their social media (will they stick the course?)... more bland media discussion... etc. Though threads here don't seem particularly good yet. I've seen a lot of shit-slinging, personal attacks, and bland thread starters, but I like the idea of this site and will stick around a little while to see if it's good.

>I've seen a lot of shit-slinging, personal attacks, and bland thread starters

I’m cracking down on these kinds of threads and the users posting them until they step up their game. I’m definitely going to be stricter about this garbage because, frankly, I can’t stand it either. These posts are lazy attempts to drag in the worst of short-form, low-effort posting culture to a forum that’s trying to break free from exactly that. I’m here for quality information and real discussion, not “huehuehue hey guise social MEDIA is bad what do u think guise!!! thats so crazy!!!!! right???” nonsense.

Welcome to Cyberix.