Every year, there is one huge megathread that starts on LowEndTalk on Black Friday.

If you missed this year’s, check it out).  Special thanks to LowEndTalk admin @FAT32 for coordinating and running another great thread!

There’s a lot that goes into planning the Black Friday Megathread:

• Organizing with providers to get their deals loaded into a customs software solution
• Monitoring that solution to watch that it is submitting the deals to the thread
• Monitoring and increasing resources on the VMs to make sure LET doesn’t collapse under extreme load
• Never-ending moderation of the thread

It’s a huge community event.  Let’s take a look at the last five years’ stats:

Or if you prefer it in a more compact format:

+------+----------+---------+
| Year | Comments | Views   |
+------+----------+---------+
| 2020 |     4902 |  257176 |
| 2021 |     9645 | 1160748 |
| 2022 |     6023 |  778126 |
| 2023 |    11040 |  896659 |
| 2024 |    40099 | 3401800 |
| 2025 |    21261 | 2300881 |
+------+----------+---------+

A couple things jump out.

From 2020 to 2025, Views and Comments Have Grown Dramatically

This is due to a couple things:

• More Users: the community is simply bigger in 2025 than it was in 2020.  We have 50% more members now.
• LET Got More Love: When Jon Biloh bought LowEndTalk, it was a disaster of bugs, broken plugins, and unanswered tickets.  After taking ownership, Jon cleaned it up and turned the platform around.  2020 is just post-acquisition so the full benefits of active ownership played out over the following years.
• More Intense Megathreads: As time has gone on, the thread’s technology has advanced and the threads have gotten more intense.  A lot more effort is put into the megathread in 2025 than in 2020.

2024 is an Outlier…?

This one isn’t quite as easy to explain, but I’ll offer a couple speculations.

First, the data is incomplete for 2025.  The 2024 thread shows views and comments all the way to the end of the year, whereas we’re less than week after Cyber Monday.  I expect the 2025 number will continue to grow.

Second, inflation is real.  But how do you interpret that?  Did more people come to 2024 because they were hurting for deals…or did fewer people come in 2025 because they couldn’t afford deals?

Third, there’s a RAM shortage.  Were deals less attractive in 2025?  With the price of RAM skyrocketing – and hence, server costs and hosting prices going up – your dollar doesn’t stretch quite as far today, which is a bit of an about-face from the otherwise steady march of “more specs for lower price” we’ve seen since the mid-2000s.

Does the fact that we had 53% of the comments but 68% of the views compared to 2025 mean there were more tire-kickers?

Another Great Year

Regardless of comparisons to last year, this year’s megathread was fun and a huge hit.  Can’t wait until 2026’s!

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.