Today, the domain ponychan.net was sold at auction. 7 bidders, including myself, made 88 bids on the domain. In the end, it was bought for $4050 by what I can best describe as a domain merchant. The absurdly high bid was likely based on the residual footprint of the site from its heyday 15 years ago. Of course that amount makes zero sense today, but for people using bots to value sites based on ancient backlinks, they might get the false impression that it does. Good luck to the winning idiot who's trying to make a buck off of it.
As you might have noticed, the runner-up bid was me, at $4000. This was substantially more than I had originally allotted myself, but the idea of a relaunch later in the year or next year using ponychan.net, vs letting the domain fall to some parking service with scam listings and porn, was worth $4000 to me. It's probably best that I didn't get it, as blowing every penny I have on a dead website would have been a dumb thing to do, but I was willing to do so.
I'd just like to point out that, at any time, the administration of the now long-dead Old Ponychan, i.e. ponychan.net, could have opted to have someone else pay for hosting while the site was still active. They could have let someone else pay for the domain upkeep. They could have opted to let someone else maintain the servers. They could have passed the domain on to anyone else after they lost interest. Even after it sort-of-closed-but-not-really-because-they-were-
