The Hive

~ the obit ~

The Hive sits in the part of internet history I can read about but cannot remember from the inside. I got online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, which puts me in the right years and nowhere near the right room. This was an english-language american room, organized around a subject I had no reason to be anywhere near.

It opened in 1997, built by Hobart Huson, a Texan who posted as Strike and who had already published a set of books on drug synthesis through a small press. The forum was the discussion layer under those books. People turned up to argue about procedure and about what the law actually said.

It got big for what it was. Later accounts from people who were there put it past eight thousand active accounts and somewhere near half a million posts, with participants from all over the world including academic chemists posting under handles. Reference threads got compiled and mirrored, which is the behavior of a community that expects to be taken offline.

That expectation turned out to be the correct one, and it is the reason the archive still exists and the forum does not.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

Structurally it was a late-90s bulletin board with a wiki growing out of the side of it. The valuable part was never the conversation, it was the accumulated reference material a moderator called Rhodium kept organizing into a separate archive on his own domain. The forum generated the raw material and the archive was where it went to be usable.

The thing that makes it worth a marker is what it demonstrated about the shape of the web, not what it discussed. Information that had previously required a university library or a specific person willing to explain it was now a search away and being peer-reviewed in public by strangers with pseudonyms. Every argument that has been had since about what a platform should be allowed to carry was already running here in 1999.

~ the dateline episode ~

NBC's Dateline spent about ten months on it and aired the result in 2001 as an episode called The X Files, about MDMA production. The program identified Huson by name and filmed him at his chemical supply warehouse. He was arrested. In september 2003 he began an eight-year federal sentence in Texas and was released in june 2009.

The counterintuitive part is documented and worth saying plainly. National television coverage grew the site. Huson had already stepped back by then and Rhodium was running it with a handful of admins, so the founder going to prison removed a person rather than the institution. A DEA operation called Web Tryp ended in july 2004 with ten arrests among research-chemical vendors. That is the same year the forum went down, and no source I found connects the two.

~ what outlived it ~

The end was administrative. Late in 2004 the hosting provider terminated service over what was on the servers, and the forum went dark for good. No announcement and no migration. Seven years of threads went off the web in the time it takes to disable an account.

The archive is what survived, and it survived because people had already copied it. Erowid holds a preserved copy of the Rhodium collection and of the forum material, though the forum pages inside it stopped working properly around late 2016. A successor board turned up afterward under a different name. The site died and its library did not, which is close to the only good outcome available to a community that knows somebody is eventually going to pull its plug.

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