20 years ago, I came back from my internship at the Ayn Rand Institute’s OCON conference excited to meet other Objectivists.
This was a year before Facebook when IRC Chat was still the most popular venue for Objectivists to chat. So I decided to start my own Objectivism Forum - Objectivism (then )
Here is the post announcing the new site:
/t/102
Quote
The Ayn Rand Institute has been very helpful with material support, speakers, and literature, but without a peer-based website, it cannot really form an online community for college students like me. I believe that a new a new site oriented specifically towards university students and campus Objectivist clubs could be very helpful in increasing communication among rational students, sharing materials, encouraging writing, sharing strategies and success stories, and facilitating active discussion in philosophy to increase student’s interest in Objectivism.
After I graduated college in 2004, I handed off management to a series of admins and moderators, continuing to this day. I’ve continued to host the forum over that time, accumulating the following totals:
- 10,160 members
- 31,374 discussions
- 337,656 posts
The site was most popular for the first few years, hosting events such as a live chat with Onkar Ghate, all sorts of features like The Objectivist Metablog, hosting for Ayn Rand clubs, event calendars, hosted email accounts, photo galleries, and much more. At live events, we would have hundreds of people participating and hundreds of posts per day. After Facebook became popular in 2009, traffic dropped off a lot, but as you can see, the site is still active today.
