put the bunny back in the virtualbox
remembering rabbit, the best platform for watching smut with friends
I admit it: I just can’t get into gooning on Discord.
Yes, yes, I’ve tried [your favorite porn server] and I do enjoy watching the flurry of excitement as a new community takes shape, hosts a successful stream, and creates channels for every conceivable fetish, but the vibes are always a little off. Every aspect of the user experience is just slightly wrong. Audio issues. Low resolution and lag. Moderation hell. The alert sound when someone joins the voice chat which I swear to god I just disabled but there it is again. Group chat spammers. Is my mic on—whoops. Kafkaesque server permissions. That awkward moment when you have to decide whether to leave a server that’s kind of interesting but the mods are constantly pinging @everyone. There are minor inconveniences everywhere, like the inability to preview what’s in a server and the bespoke multi-step process to join one.
Part of the problem is I’m comparing Discord to the platform that introduced me to gooner watchparties, Rabbit, which was superior in basically every way. Rabbit (2013-2019) was a video streaming site designed for shared browsing with friends. A Rabbit room was a web page that looked like this:
The host could do anything they wanted in the embedded window—play videos, browse the web, etc. Viewers could type in the text channel or enter voice/video chat, but the stream was typically the main focus of the room. Video chat was disabled if the room contained more than 25 visitors, but otherwise Rabbit had all of the modern amenities like separate volume controls for each user. The Rabbit experience was entirely in-browser—there was no native application. (Ok, there was a mobile app, but no one used that.) Rooms were shareable by URL, and could be designated public or private. Anyone with the URL could join a public room, including visitors without a Rabbit account.
The technology behind Rabbit was pretty neat. Unlike Discord and most other video streaming apps, Rabbit was not doing local screenshare:
When you start sharing in your room (what we call a Rabbitcast), you control a remote virtual machine (VM) where you can browse and view anything you want. We stream an HD video of the VM in real time to all participants of the video chat. Audio is also synchronized so you can watch a movie together as if you were in front of the same display.
The features that really differentiated Rabbit from other platforms were only possible because of this architecture:
The host could give control over the VM (the “remote” on the UI) to anyone at any time, so another person could queue up the next video while the host stepped away. (If needed, the host could forcibly take the remote back.)
Users could visit and/or host multiple rooms simultaneously.
Stream quality did not depend on the host’s upload bandwidth. If the host’s PC crashed, the room would continue, because, again, it’s all running on Rabbit’s servers. If anything went wrong, the host could reset the VM and start over.
It was easy to stream multiple tracks of audio or video, just as you would in your own web browser—for gooning streams, this was traditionally something with visuals in one tab, and audio in another. Also, the VM’s browser even came pre-installed with an ad blocker.
It was the perfect medium for intimate yet low-trust interactions like anonymous porn watchparties. Setting up and tearing down a room were instantaneous, and there were zero barriers to entry or exit. Curious about a room? Click the link. Not into it? One click and you’re gone. Your room is feeling stale? Nuke it, now try something else. This low-commitment regime encouraged experimentation and exploration. Contrast this with Discord, where repeatedly leaving and rejoining a server is a bannable offense. The ephemeral nature of Rabbit rooms felt tailor-made for adult content—it’s like throwing a Kleenex into the trash, instead of throwing the cumsock against the wall and knowing you’ll need to deal with it later.
As a result, the gooning subculture on Rabbit was large and omnivorous—there were dozens of active public rooms at any given time, with many more private rooms below the tip of the iceberg. Power users often hosted several rooms simultaneously, each with a different theme, and it was well-understood that everyone was perusing other rooms in the background. Tube site streaming was king, but slideshows were also moderately popular—these were little webapps which crawl Tumblr or Reddit for images and flip through them at random, at speeds ranging from “glacial” to “epileptic.” Twenty-four hour and longer goon streams were common, with participants passing the remote to each other like the Olympic flame.
One feature the site lacked was discoverability for NSFW rooms—Rabbit displayed tagged/curated rooms on the website’s homepage, but most porn watchparty hosts opted-out to avoid admin attention, or had their rooms hidden by moderators. The community addressed this by aggregating links on the r/nsfwrabbitrooms subreddit and occasionally promoting rooms on Tumblr. To give a rough impression of scale, the subreddit had ~20K subscribers when Rabbit shut down in July 2019, and when I hosted ‘24h+ 2000s porn nostalgia’ Rabbit rooms in 2016-2018 I would typically get a few hundred visitors from posting there—but most didn’t stick around.
Rabbit also had direct messages and group chats, so there were backchannels on the site itself where gooners shared interesting rooms and created private ones. Though Rabbit was a sidecar to the much larger porn/kink communities on Tumblr and Reddit, there was a distinct clique hidden in those group chats. In my experience, the gooners who self-selected into the Rabbit coterie were sociable, enthusiastic about creating the best possible watchparty experiences, and possessing a terrifyingly encyclopedic knowledge of pornography.
streaming in the age of zero interest rates
Rabbit was a cool piece of tech and a fun place to hang out, but it wasn’t built to last. The company was able to procure $20 million of venture capital funding in the lush, low interest-rate environment of the mid-2010’s, but in August 2018 the board’s concerns about lack of profitability reached a tipping point and they replaced the management team. Newly-appointed CEO Amanda Richardson would later explain the conundrum:
[W]e didn’t have a strong monetization strategy. And while it’s often said you can “figure that out later,” you had best have a lot (I mean - a LOT) of funding available and some stellar user growth to buy time until that nebulous “later.”
[…]
Maybe we could get users to pay for the service? User feedback was decisive: they loved using Rabbit - but not enough to pay. Maybe we could do advertising? Then it became clear that advertising on top of someone else’s content (to which we don’t have rights) is unappealing to advertisers. Maybe we could sell the data to content creators? Oh yeah, we didn’t exactly have rights to the content, so selling the studios’ information about the content we were using wasn’t really something they wanted to pay for. Could we buy rights to content? Nope. Turns out that’s really expensive and we didn’t have the capital for this model.
It’s unclear when exactly Rabbit management realized the extent of their IP problem, but it’s obvious why they never discussed it publicly—most of their marketing was bragging about how the site can be used to share Netflix content with (non-Netflix-subscriber) friends.
Richardson made a last-ditch effort to buy time for an acquisition with another funding round, and she ordered a complete redesign of the site to shore up the pitch. In an attempt to boost engagement metrics, the new interface discouraged disposable rooms and tried to funnel users into persistent servers “groups” and user pages. The new UI was confusing and difficult to use, and the stylish dark theme and layout were replaced with orange-tinted Salesforce.
Even worse, various quality-of-life features had been removed, including HD streaming (!!!), volume controls on individual users, options to mute chat notifications, and single-sign on. Naturally, everyone hated it. Richardson claimed the redesign was successful and “improved user retention by over 25%” which I’m going to charitably interpret as an artifact of how they designed their metrics rather than an outright falsehood.
Ultimately, these moves failed to satisfy investors and Rabbit’s attempts to secure more funding fell through, as did several acquisition offers. In July 2019, the company’s incredible journey was tragically cut short.
Here’s Richardson again with lessons learned from the debacle:
Figure out monetization early - even if you don’t implement it. Otherwise you’re just giving away free stuff, which isn’t product-market fit - it’s just free stuff being given away. I could grow a user base massively by giving away free beer - but that’s not a business.
Today it sounds utterly insane that a startup CEO would consider this passage insightful, but it’s standard mid-2010’s post-QE brainrot. You really had to be there.
Rabbit’s backend was sold to Kast, another video-streaming startup, but it took them months to integrate the broadcast-from-VM functionality, at which point the user base had already moved on to Discord. There is also a diaspora of Rabbit-inspired companies and side projects. Hyperbeam is probably the most popular, but hosting NSFW content is forbidden on the platform. The closest spiritual successor I’ve seen is watchparty.me, which has many of the original Rabbit features including the ability to host ephemeral rooms without creating a user account. In an amusing repudiation of Rabbit’s blitzscaling business model, watchparty.me has been quietly operating on $5/month subscription revenue.
see you on some other channel
Sadly, there are very few remaining artifacts from NSFW Rabbit on the public internet. You will sometimes see Rabbit in the background of amateur masturbation videos, and some hosts uploaded screen-recordings of their rooms to tube sites, but most of these were destroyed in The Great 2020 PornHub Purge. Now all of this history is lost in time, like cum in the rag.
Rabbit’s tumultuous final months were part of a much larger shakeup of online kink communities. In December 2018, seven months before Rabbit shut down, Tumblr banned all NSFW content, displacing entire subcultures overnight. These communities splintered and partially reformed across Reddit, Discord, Twitter, and NSFW Tumblr clone bdsmlr, but many never fully recovered. Rabbit wasn’t a serious competitor to any of these platforms, but it played a minor role during the transition. After the adult content ban, ex-Tumblr gooners joined Reddit for the first time and discovered r/nsfwrabbitrooms, bringing a small influx of power users to the site. But when Rabbit entered its redesign death throes, Discord became the obvious Schelling point for the porn watchparty subculture—and it remains the dominant player today.
The largest primarily-online gooning communities are still active on these mainstream social media platforms. The technical barriers to creating an independent forum or even watchparty site are lower than ever—but there’s a common understanding, correct or not, that it’s easier to grow a subculture in an existing venue due to network effects. After all, newcomer bdsmlr never achieved escape velocity, whereas gooning thrived on Twitter, Discord, and Reddit during COVID-19. However, there is growing discontent in the NSFW communities on those platforms with the endless samsara of content moderation—Discord sometimes bans everyone on a server if TOS violations are reported there, and porn subreddits often run afoul of reddit’s policies about non-consensual media. I’m still holding out hope that the next big shakeup could finally break the stranglehold of Web 2.0 centralization, and herald a great gooner migration back to sites like Milovana, filesharing forums, or modern creations like PMVHaven. When that day comes—I’ll pass you the remote. ✨