You can make a village in some interesting ways. 4chan is a village, that's why it's one of the best resources/communities on the internet today. I've learned much of what I know about LLMs and generative AI on /g/. The toxicity/chaos of the place is probably the main thing that enables it to continue to be a village for all these years. There's more than one way to shear a sheep, and I don't think the 4chan method is the best way to make a village, but a village make it does.
I just mention it here because it's probably something that doesn't occur to most people, and maybe it should be something we think about more. I think 4chan has a very interesting property in that the gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth (depending on the board) post being full of slurs. Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's value to that that people miss.
I don't think I agree with the principle of, if you can ignore the hate speech it's actually a pretty egalitarian place.
Like you say, it's not egalitarian towards those who don't have an easy time ignoring the hate speech. And, okay, in principle if the strength of one's stomach for hate speech was randomly distributed to humans with no correlation to anything else, maybe that would not disqualify it as egalitarian.
But it's not. People who face discrimination and hate speech IRL will, on average, surely have less tolerance for it online than people who don't. I have to believe that women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and so on, feel much less welcome on a place like 4chan. They've already spent their "ignoring hate speech points" ignoring someone harassing them on the subway.
So whatever it's virtues -- and I'm willing to believe you there are some -- I don't think that a place with this much toxicity can rightly be called egalitarian.
> I don't think that a place with this much toxicity can rightly be called egalitarian.
You don't make a village by welcoming anyone and everyone. An egalitarian country with strict immigration laws and rampant racism towards foreigners is still egalitarian within its own populace. Likewise, simply because people who disagree with 4chan's abrasive culture don't feel welcome there doesn't make it any less egalitarian within itself.
What does 'egalitarian within itself' mean for an online community where everybody can join? How do you get to have 'rights and opportunities' and how to you keep 'the others' out?
Egalitarian in the sense that nobody is untouchable and everybody gets shit from everyone else. Rights and opportunities are built into the system by anonymity, minimal moderation and the resulting lack of power structure. Others are kept out by self-selection.
Usually, egalitarianism is defined by laxity on the axes most used for discrimination, like race. If your race literally matters less than your tolerance of racism (or free expression of other types of hate speech), and what matters more is the quality of your code in /g/ posts, I would say that's "egalitarian".
Being absolutely egalitarian is a fantasy. No one does that. The government is not egalitarian on the axis of murdering people. Universities are not egalitarian on the axes of failing all your classes constantly and not being able to pay for them. Workplaces are not egalitarian to open racists or people who post on HN all day instead of getting anything done. There's always some elitism at play, relevant to whatever's being emphasized (being a good student, being a good programmer, being a good worker, etc.).
Part of the elitism on 4chan is tolerating horrible cringe banter and opinions. I think that's fair given that the rest of the Internet is elitist on the basis of being as nice as possible and mindful of the algorithmic censors to not upset advertisers' spice flow.
> that the rest of the Internet is elitist on the basis of being as nice as possible
I strongly disagree - tone policing isn't about being nice but about appearing nice. And lately even that pretense is not required when talking about the right groups.
>People who face discrimination and hate speech IRL will, on average, surely have less tolerance for it online than people who don't.
Or maybe its the opposite, because we know words on a screen are not violence. 4chan is egalitarian in that everyone is an n-word, everyone is an r-word and anonymity means we are all the same. There's a reason unnecessary tripcodes are frowned upon.
4chan is what I associate with early 2000s internet. It hasn't changed. The only evolution being having newer, more popular insults, like autist, i guess.
We all called each other various slurs back then and the only reason you'd get mad or emotional over it is because you hadn't been on the internet for long enough. Or if you're getting rekt in a video game and they're rubbing it in, i guess.
The mainstream platforms that have appeared since only brought politically correct faux civility that hid the aggression behind a system of rules that has only made communication less genuine and more toxic. Strip away the identity behind a post and only the content remains. And that's why it works. It shuts down behaviours looking to cultivate a persona, which is bad for engagement, but good for content.
> The mainstream platforms that have appeared since only brought politically correct faux civility that hid the aggression behind a system of rules that has only made communication less genuine and more toxic.
This. I'm not exactly making an argument that slurs increase genuineness, but forcefully stripping them away definitely does not decrease toxicity. Nobody is suddenly a nicer person just because they can't call you a ***. They just find another way to be an asshole, and maybe work a little extra-hard while they're at it.
In some ways it seems to make the waters more difficult to navigate. You try to engage with people in earnest and get subtly accused of all sorts of bs. Sometimes it's easier if someone just drops a few choice expletives at you and you both just move on with life.
I do wonder how much hate speech, especially in the early 4chan years, was a deliberate shield against those _not_ targeted by such speech but still cannot ignore it. Think of white people who would post a "how dare you" rant when they see the n-word or male feminists. It's a way to keep out the moral guardians and cut down on behavior I like to call "dogshitting." Unlike sea-lioning and its "per our previous conversation…" off-topic nature, dogshitters nominally address the parent post… with nitpicks irrelevant to the thread's larger topic.
Really? Would you not think that being anonymous, performative moral actions would be fewer than a social network which was tied to an actual identity?
I don't understand why in your example, the point couldn't be made without specifically using crude language. It doesn't seem like that racial slurs would contribute to the threads topic.
Don't be combative. It's an American website, created with Americans in mind, with conversation conducted almost entirely in (American) English. Yes it happens to be owned by a Japanese national now, but that fact doesn't seem to have altered the culture or the discourse much. The minorities in question are clearly minorities to the US, and to a lesser extent minorities to the broader Anglo/English-speaking-Eurosphere.
You must be unaware of the phenomenon of /int/ :DDDD
First found on the German site Krautchan, you could hardly describe a forum so inclusive as one dedicated to cultural exchange where anyone may flame in any thread in any language. The concept spread quickly among the chans. And so the users of the /int/ boards became worldwide pollinators of memes, the DNA of the soul.
That optimistic era is passed, however /int/ remains the sixth most active board of 4chan.
4chan and others approach to internet discourse is very approachable for most eastern european millennials. It just works well with their distain for faux/internet personalities, which is something you will end up with when anonymity is not a strong element of a community.
But I have no data on visitors or posters, so I might be projecting.
If we're arbitrarily limiting scope to just America, why stop there? Let's drill down further, and say HN is aimed at California, which is only 34% white [1]. Does that get them the coveted minority status?
I don't see why the only perspective allowed should be one that maximizes apparent white privilege, especially since in other contexts, Eurocentrism is something that is decried.
Most internet websites, such as HN only require an email address to register, beyond that they are totally anonymous and indifferent to the country of origin, religion, gender etc. of their poster. The only hard requirement is that you need to speak English somewhat well, and be interested/willing to join in the discussion (of typically nerdy topics).
I'm not sure what are the actual demographics of HN, but I'd be curious to see what is the actual national makeup of people who post here. Probably more info isn't really possible to collect considering the limited data the site has to work with.
You may have noticed that, over the past few years, the term "minority" has been increasingly often accompanied by qualifications such as "underprivileged", "marginalised", "underrepresented", and I've recently seen "underestimated" popping up as well.
I do not think that is a coincidence, especially since how the qualifiers are so exquisitely unfalsifiable. (wer ein Jud' ist, bestimme ich!)
People who are traumatized by something should seek therapy and perhaps avoid places where they are exposed to that (although perhaps the opposite is better). Demanding others to adapt their culture to fit you is a good way to actually be hated.
So someone feels like a perennial outsider because they're referred to with slur words every time they out themselves as gay or non white or a woman, they should all get therapy and deal with it? Absolutely no responsibility for the people perpetuating hate?
Why don't you test your theory by walking up to some people and calling them slurs. See if they all shrug it off because at least you're not a cop shooting them.
"gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth ... post being full of slurs"
Well, and filter out the CP, dead and butchered bodies, nazis & any number of other horrifying things I ran across when I've looked at the site. Granted that was years ago but it's not really the type of thing you check up on to see if things have gotten better...
Sure maybe not on /g/ but that leaves lots of people just one mistaken click away from potential nightmares. That's not a value people are missing, it's a cost they aren't willing to pay for someone else's concept of being egalitarian.
You could fill every post on every site with slurs and I would barely notice. Slurs aren't 4chan's problem though, the crowd of unrestrained sadists is.
People always hype up 4chan nowadays like it's LiveLeak on steroids, but generally speaking any time I browse 4chan it's felt much more mundane. The only major culture shock that most people are in for is the degree of hatefulness and shamelessness that you encounter on 4chan, especially in the memes and vernacular. It's the one place left on the internet where truly Nothing is sacred, and the userbase is happy to make that clear whenever possible.
That said, it's absolutely not worth the time, unless you are bored and feel like most of the internet is too sanitized for your tastes. It's just, unquestionably a big waste of time at best.
I don't think it'll ruin your brain, but it probably won't expand it either.
tbf people even post born on /biz/, they just eat the ban for it, and even when it isn't outright porn it's often very overtly sexual images. The only thing that makes it browsable is the Wingman browser plugin.
Well /b/ is mostly porn, along with few other boards. Relatively "normal" boards are hosted on 4channel.org domain. That said, 4chan is mostly "shitposting" and memes, don't expect serious discussions.
There is an extensive list of boards to choose from with very different types of people, but if porn is all you look for, porn is all you get. The site is like a mirror reflecting your desires and inclinations, reaffirming and reinforcing your fixations.
weeeeeell, people did spam lolicon and gay furry porn in like 2011 for a couple months but the mods swooped in and it's been a well-enforced blue board since
the real problem with /g/ in the current age though is the thought-terminating memes. it's no longer really the bastion of oblique insight it once was. opinions on the board have ossified to the point you're not going to find out about anything cool from them first. this is common across most blue boards these days honestly; they are no longer really tastemakers
Perhaps /g/ is worse, but I feel that applies to most established forums on the internet. It's particularly noticeable if you've bounced around various subreddits that it's just the same 5 opinions rehashed endlessly, and anyone who disagrees has left the building. You just get a different set of 5 opinions when you jump to a new subreddit.
This is why I feel moderation, or perhaps curation is a better word, isn’t a bad thing. A hardcore 4channer might not think so, but I feel the lowest common denominator isn’t. That is to say it just produces a noise that isn’t beneficial at all unless you want to be tickled that way for the lulz.
r/askhistorians is a fantastic example where curation produces high quality insight and debate.
I’m lazily designing a Reddit replacement, can’t really build one while I’m still employed and may never build it.
If you’re not chasing infinite growth, or even if you are but want to set the right culture at the outset, I think the HN moderation model is ideal. Just delete low quality and blatantly offensive posts and ban repeat offenders. You don’t need some complicated mechanism for implementing restorative justice or scaling moderation via community moderation teams, you just don’t want those users to post
4chan is filled with people asking easily googleable questions and the user base generally seems to be about 17. I know that’s the age when I visited the site the most (thank god it was before the 2016 election which irrevocably ruined the site). It has a very low bar for discussion and the signal/noise ratio is terrible unless you’re willing to wade through piles of shit to find a gem here and there.
4chan for sure has useful insights like a very low (captcha) barrier to use the site and a very low-ego culture. But the discussion quality is actually abysmal
I think a central aggregator that is Reddit still produces the less friction. I haven’t felt compelled to sign up for any alternatives sofar. It’s an interesting field at the moment, and with Twitter in flux, a smart player might be able to take advantage of the unique opportunity.
I do too! It’s not just Reddit and Twitter I want to replace. I think Quora and Stack Overflow, even Wikipedia, had some good social ideas as well. Most of these were ruined by chasing growth (diluting out the good original user base) and trying to juice out as much revenue per user as possible. They’ve all been enshittified unnecessarily - even though not all are profitable, in most cases where they aren’t, it’s because of over-hiring. Running a website isn’t that hard
Unfortunately I will need to switch to a non-pseudonymous account to launch and really talk about it, so can’t get into too much detail on this one.
I honestly think that, if these sites had been ok with measly 9 figure valuations and didn’t go chasing 11 figure valuations (or, a huge nonprofit treasure chest, or allowed petty busybodies to exert undue influence on the site), none of them would have gone to shit.
That's an odd example. askhistorians is meant to reflect current American historians' scholarly consensus, and rigidly moderated to stay that way. While this does sometimes produce insight it's one of the least debate-oriented places on the internet.
I've seen plenty of posts in which people had conflicting accounts of historical events, including anti-Western, anti-Eurocentric, and anti-Imperialist ones, and as long as they are well-sourced they are fine.
The bigger issue is that r/askhistorians is an English-language subreddit, and English is the most widely-used language of the Western-Imperialist powers, so it makes sense that if you ask in their language, you are mostly going to get their answers. The people who would have equivalent expertise from other viewpoints are mostly not lurking that subreddit.
And yes, it's not meant to be a place to debate, it's meant to be a place to get access to historians' subject matter expertise. When 2 historians' accounts conflict with each other, they aren't supposed to start arguing about it, they're supposed to each make a separate reply to OP with their sources.
It's interesting how people go to a certain board specifically infamous for posting that kind of stuff then are shocked to see said stuff, then generalizing the entire site off that one interaction. It's as if I equate /r/AskHistorians, a heavily-modded academic sub, to /r/(insert raunchy sub here).
The users from one are going to be around on the other. This is true everywhere. When Reddit banned various hate speech subreddits you stopped seeing those guys "just asking questions" about the inherent inferiority of certain races in unrelated subreddits anywhere near as often.
Holy shit, in what world is /b/ not full of gore and porn today. Outsiders can't help but make confident sweeping statements about a site they don't even use. This comment tree is laden with cringe-inducing posts, you think using 4chan is so cool that you're willing to pretend that you know anything about it?
It's more egalitarian and accessible than any other social media I can think of, yes.
In 4chan a literal nazi, a drag queen, a bona-fide pedophile and a luddite can exchange opinions with no prejudice, because none of them know anyone else's background.
You might think that these people can't talk about certain things, but any subject in which discussion becomes too caustic simply doesn't even take place in other platforms, and not every discussion is a life or death discussion, they can talk about photography just fine.
"In 4chan a literal nazi, a drag queen, a bona-fide pedophile and a luddite can exchange opinions..."
This is overly romantic. I just visited /g/. Less than 1 min in, I see "nigger" and "faggot".
I'm sure there are blacks, gays and drag queens that see value in 4chan and are desensitized to those words. But, I'd estimate 99% of the population is white men/boys with antisocial tendencies.
Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with like minded people building a village. But let's not pretend the culture of the site, doesn't instantly weed out a huge chunk of multiple demographics.
>This is overly romantic. I just visited /g/. Less than 1 min in, I see "nigger" and "faggot".
Yes, and if you spend an hour in it, you'll see them dozens of times more. Words hold the meaning we give them, by constantly seeing words like these you stop caring about them. This is part of what makes 4chan so inclusive.
Because rather than having a social agreement not to call someone this or that, everyone calls everyone this or that so, so often that it bears no meaning anymore.
A nice exercise in you thinking the whole world is only what you see for yourself. Here are the actual demographics:
Demographic
Age: 18-34
Gender: ~70% male, ~30% female
Location: United States (47%), United Kingdom (7%), Canada (6%), Australia (4%), Germany (4%)
Interests: Japanese culture, anime, manga, video games, comics, technology, music, movies
Education: Majority attended or currently enrolled in college
"Desensitized to words" is normal mental development; infants may be excited by sheer words - not beyond.
Beyond infancy you (should) have gained filtering and control;
before that and after social experience, you should be able to understand actions as part of "playing" ("non-seriousness", transversality of intention).
It's absolutely not for everyone, but I think the anonymous nature makes it so low stakes it's trivially easy for me to just not care, not engage. You can just ignore things you don't like!
I do think this is one of the big hidden problems with upvote/like systems.
Seeing a post you don't like or disagree with on Twitter/Facebook/Reddit with a lot of likes/retweets/upvotes/etc psychologically puts you on the defensive. 10,000 likes on a post you disagree with means you're up against an army of 10,000 people who disagreed with you! So you do what's natural: you fight back, you summon your own army of people (hoping to get a respectable counter-army of likes). This creates a toxic environment and you can see it play out on Twitter: every Democrat-leaning tweet will have its top reply be a Republican-leaning tweet with a counter-point, and every Republican with a Democrat.
Meanwhile, on 4chan or other old-style message board withouts those systems... yeah, it's just some asshole with a stupid opinion. Just ignore them, no need to waste effort engaging.
It's actually even worse on some sites. For example Reddit does not necessarily show the real sum of votes to begin with, but a different one created in an intransparent manner since the code isn't public. They call this "vote-fuzzing". Arbitrary changes to the ranking algorithm have over the years completely changed what users see when they look at the vote count¹, and I suspect that's just the tip of the iceberg that's made public.
Right, this is sold as a technique against vote manipulators (to not let them know if their bots are working) but it requires a lot of trust in the operator not abusing it.
Arguably, the addition of showing links to all the replies to a comment could have contributed towards 4chan's drift further into engagement-baiting content. It's the closest analogue to the visual, numeric feedback mechanism you describe.
Interesting because from a functional user experience perspective, it's an objectively useful feature for navigating discussions. An obvious addition in terms of web design, yet with unforeseen repercussions. The medium is the message, after all.
Very true! But even then, the dynamic is a bit different. Reply-links on a post that's an obvious joke are analogous to upvotes, but reply-links on a politically controversial topic could be anything, though most likely disagreements. Plus the absolute number is going to be orders of magnitudes smaller than likes.
But I do agree it's contributed to bait posts a lot, yeah. Interesting to see the impact of such a seemingly small UX change.
I think you sort of do it indirectly. You frame your counter-response in a way that is likely to garner the support and upvotes of the opposing camp (opposing to post you're arguing with). Battle lines having been drawn, the internet goes to war.
Sure, which is why I ignore 4chan. I don't want or need to be associated with/exposed to that crowd. I was just very surprised to hear it described as egalitarian and accessible. It's the cesspool that all other cesspools are measured by.
> I don't want or need to be associated with/exposed to that crowd.
Remember Anonymous? That was all derivative of various chan boards and Something Awful. You probably overlap with those users more than you'd like to admit.
A thing I realized was that there's a lot of people who lurk the chans and end up promoting the more mainstream-ready content to their other communities. The chans are essentially the boiler room in terms of their role in the ecosystem of the internet.
The most accessible places tend to become cesspools since being anti-social is one of the main traits that limits people's access to more exclusive places.
> It's the cesspool that all other cesspools are measured by.
The biggest difference to other cesspools is that it has less manners and moderation. But in terms of pure toxicity Twitter etc aren't any better, all the scheming, backstabbing and insults are just more polite and use a lot more emoji, and when someone loses the argument they block everyone.
I think a lot of this is a cultural issue you learn to get over. Outside of pol, it’s just shock-humor teenage boy talk.
I’m Jewish and mentally filter out all the antisemitic stuff without even thinking about it. 95% of the content outside certain pockets is not even antisemitic, it’s just a shock humor phrase used independently of any actual relation to being Jewish like the term “goyslop”.
And yeah, a certain portion of the population does actually hate Jews/transgender people/black people. But when you post nobody knows you are like that. It’s ego-less, you don’t even have an account, so you really don’t even have any reason to care because it’s not directed at you in particular, so it’s just like if you saw something racist on Twitter. Just a very different model compared to the pseudonymous forums/Reddit/hn and fully-linked regular social media.
This is a deep misunderstanding of 4chan, enough so that I find it difficult to believe you've even seen any board on the site you are discussing. The abuse is directed at everyone; no matter what opinion you share, no matter who you are, you will be verbally abused in a variety of ways. Totally innocuous opinions that you would be lauded for or totally ignored for on another site are just cause for being berated and harassed on 4chan, though the extent of it is largely governed by the culture of the particular board.
I think this is what OP meant by "egalitarian" (though I certainly wouldn't have chosen that word) -- equal opportunity abuse. This shared constant toxicity plus no karma/upvotes and no attachment to an online persona through anonymity mean that the playing ground is perhaps uniquely level.
> The abuse is directed at everyone; no matter what opinion you share, no matter who you are, you will be verbally abused in a variety of ways.
Yeah, this is what people misunderstand about 4chan. Obviously my race gets a lot of flak, but I've even seen racial slurs about white Europeans I've never heard anywhere else.
I'm not saying it's morally right, but it feels more of a hazing tactic than legitimate hatred. Once you pass that filter you have access to some interesting information.
And? Imagine, for example, a comedian who pokes fun at all groups exactly equally. There are infinite types of people, he wouldn’t be able to say a word. Different things are different and that’s not inherently wrong.
They're not misunderstanding it they just don't accept your model of its value.
No matter what your ethnicity someone on 4chan will make a joke about genociding you. The difference is that some people in the world actually are doing genocides. And someone from one of those groups, knowing that, is going to experience those jokes differently.
4chan, (and to a serious degree, HN) places the duty and the transgression on the person who has the bad experience with the genocide joke. But a completely valid model is actually that no, the genocide joke is the transgression and the one making it the transgressor.
4chan is not separate from the world it is part of it. And by fostering this environment you're providing cover for atrocities. Because not everyone is there just to have a fun time saying slurs! Some of them really do want us to die, and 4chan isn't just a diversion it is an actual site of conversion and radicalization towards their goals.
> And by fostering this environment you're providing cover for atrocities.
To be clear, I am not "fostering [an] environment" or defending 4chan here at all, I am just pointing out that this is a misunderstanding of what the culture of 4chan is.
Like the person I was replying to, I somehow doubt you have spent any time there. Where on the site are you even talking about? /g/? /lgbt/? /k/? /mu/? /pol/? /bant/? /sci/? /b/? Even though they share the cultural features I was talking about, they are quite distinct otherwise. Many people read threads on a topical board like /mu/ or /g/ and haven't spent any time on the more offensive or stomach-churning parts of the site like /pol/ or /b/.
> Because not everyone is there just to have a fun time saying slurs
I resent this implication that merely because I suggest people understand the things they are talking about that I am on 4chan using slurs. This style of argumentation would be right at home on the worst boards of 4chan...
> it is an actual site of conversion and radicalization towards their goals
4chan is not a person, it doesn't have "goals" or opinions any more than heterogenous online communities like eg HN or Reddit do. I would agree that 4chan as a community does house more polarized opinions than most online communities, though that seems to be largely a function of not having upvotes and allowing anonymous posting.
To your overall point, that this is a value difference between myself and the GP, I fully disagree. I am making a factual (and not value-centric) claim that toxicity towards anyone posting on the site is an integral part of the culture there.
I find it absolutely ridiculous that you keep telling people that they haven't visited 4chan and are wrong. This is hackernews. Most of us are in our 30s and were perpetually online during the rise of 4chan and are not ignorant whatsoever to what chan boards are like. The last time I went there it was full of CP and I lose all respect for people who use that site no matter how you try to spin it.
I'm in my 30s and I don't know which boards you frequented to see so much CP because that was not my experience at all. Most of the criticism around the alleged tons of CP seemed to come from people who had an ideological ax to grind against the site in general.
Yeah, you're right. We all have an axe to grind against 4chan. We're all making up that we saw CP on it.
I'm a former Goon. I've been all over the trashy parts of the internet. It doesn't benefit me whatsoever to lie about seeing CP on 4chan. I even remember exactly what the picture I saw the last time I went to it looked like. It is seared into my memory. That was my last visit to that trash site.
My sympathies. I never spent any time on 4chan. But between doing some desktop publishing and helping friends with abuse on the first web-based chat, I saw a bunch of things I could not unsee. It took me maybe 15 years for that stuff to not come back as what they call "involuntary autobiographical memories". It has now faded to the point that I can't bring the full images back at all, just hazy, untraumatizing vague versions. I hope you get there soon!
What an absolutely stupid comparison. Yeah, goatse was tamer than child porn. Got it, bud. I see where your morals lie. FBI, this guy right here. And who said I saw it one time? I literally said it was full of CP. Good work, man.
Likening Goatse to child sexual abuse photography seems akin to likening an action movie to ISIS execution videos (except even in that case the mere possession of the material isn't a crime so perhaps it's understating the case).
You again. K. No, I don't use the site anymore. I've established that. If you're going to say that I've never used the site, I've also established that I have. More drivel from you. Thanks for replying absolute joke replies to multiple posts of mine. I love that your your username is your name and you post this trash defending CP.
Yikes. On 4chan you'd have just blindly implied that the poster fathered himself in a freak accident with his mother, who is a bovine. Here, on the nice polite internet, you merely implied that a real person, whose name is attached, is defending ch1ld s3xual abuse.
You're so upset about there being a forum you don't like that you've decided to use one of the most powerful accusations you can make about him - one that imho could justifiably get him killed if true - so casually. So much hatred.
Oh sorry bud, I guess I shouldn't be upset that there's a forum that I saw tons of child porn on. And nazis. And trans-hating homophobes. I'm so sorry, I'll try to be better.
The guy has replied to every single one of my posts after I said I quit going to 4chan because of CP defending 4chan. A little odd considering my circumstances for leaving it. That shouldn't even remotely be a debate on why I left.
> That shouldn't even remotely be a debate on why I left.
Sure, you're the definitive source for why you left.
> there's a forum that I saw tons of child porn on.
It wasn't a forum for that though (I hope), it was a forum where people trolled others by posting it. Do you know someone put CP in the bitcoin blockchain?
And yeah, I use a no-images no-JS browser for a lot of things and 4chan would be one. I expect to be blocking 99% gore, but that last 1% is many things I'm also happy not seeing.
> I guess I shouldn't be upset
Upset at who, though? Upset at the people who enjoy an uncensored forum and have accepted that it'll be full of crap, or at the people who feel the need to poison it simply because someone else was enjoying themselves?
> trans-hating homophobes
Anonymous forums are actually one of the first places trans people were free to discuss themselves. You might (will) be flamed and trolled for it, but also engaged with. Reddit seems more free to be trans, except if you look at the forums there's always someone being banned for non-hateful things, such as being the wrong type of trans, or detrans. (Truscum vs Tucutes vs old-school Transexuals ...)
Correct me if I'm wrong but, you and others are saying that posting racial slurs, CP and gore for shock value are an integral part of the culture?
I don't understand why it's important to be flamed at all by people who are anonymous? I might banter with friends, but there's a shared history of understanding there; in an anonymous message board there's none of that so I don't understand what it's trying to achieve?
No, that stuff is gross and you block/avoid it. The integral part is that the forum uncensored - even if a large quantity of that uncensored content is unwanted.
And fwiw, 4chan is only one example of a (nearly) uncensored board, it's far from the best or nicest.
> I don't understand why it's important to be flamed at all
That's not the important part, but that you can have the conversation at all. The idiots running around screaming are like ghosts in Harry Potter, distractions if you let them be but almost invisible if you ignore them.
> racial slurs ... are an integral part of the culture?
Well sometimes yes, actually. Like the now banned subreddit, 2balkan4u, sometimes "hate subs" actually aren't. I'm familiar only via gaming friends, but it's basically people who've come together around "hating" each other for ethnic reasons. It doesn't look friendly but is, with people bonding over their shared history - often dark - and collectively watching the world go by from a cynical pov. It's like therapy and the hanging out with the only people who understand you, something many veterans feel even when meeting ex-"enemy" combatants. A sanitized version of this wouldn't work.
> The guy has replied to every single one of my posts after I said I quit going to 4chan because of CP defending 4chan.
Uh. I replied to two posts; everything else has been direct back-and-forth with you. Every one except this one anyway; this one is because you're directly discussing me. I don't know if that's "every single one of your posts" or not, but it certainly sounds less dramatic when you realize that it's.. two.
> after I said I quit going to 4chan defending 4chan
Go back and read a second time. I didn't actually defend 4chan, and I certainly didn't and am not defending csam. I didn't say anything objectionably about you leaving, either; what I did respond to was your assertion that you're familiar with 4chan. All I really said is, hey, sounds like maybe you don't actually hang out there (which is fine!) --- just like GP was saying in the first place. I also tried to point out that the internet at large is basically unmoderated, and 4chan itself exists within that space. You could just as easily make the argument that the internet itself is dangerous and to be avoided.
You don't have to agree with me. You don't have to like me --- even if I wish you wouldn't make snap judgements about me based off of a few terse exchanges. What I would hope for, however, is that you could remain civil, rather than open fire with personal attacks. Especially here on HN.
I'll leave that one up to you; we can discuss further or not, but I'm not going to engage in an open flame war here.
> If you're going to say that I've never used the site, I've also established that I have.
So… you’ve no respect for your former self? You see how this works?
Nowhere did I defend cp. Those are your words about me, not my words about anything. And what about my username? Am I supposed to hide behind a throwaway for any sort of contentious take? Does that make me a man somehow?
> So… you’ve no respect for your former self? You see how this works?
You have the strangest arguments. I quit going to it once I saw CP. I don't even remember why I used to visit it occasionally, probably morbid curiosity, or maybe people on somethingawful linking posts on it. I definitely didn't frequent it and I'm sure I never posted on it.
I've seen comments that it's cleaned up a lot and has better moderation. That's good.
I stopped using 4chan 15 years ago when I realized that a huge portion of the people on there are not merely roleplaying nazis, but honestly hold the views they obscure behind the atmosphere of joking.
Up to date knowledge of their internal jargon and shibboleths doesn't discredit my view of the site, it's still right there and it doesn't take long to confirm that my worst opinions of it from 2008 are still valid now.
I never claimed that the site itself has opinions or goals. But its members do! and they emerge in the patterns of interaction and rhetoric eg its culture.
Probably largely the same people but cultures can change even if none of the membership does.
Anyway two points:
- The vicious racism was already enough of a consistent thing in the 2000s that I clocked it as essentially a movement at that point. They always claimed to be joking but even then it was clear that many of them were not. Regardless of what other political affiliations were commonly held there at that time. But I think you got it pretty close, they weren't that politically coherent back then, and certainly not leftist so much as just anti-bush/anti-republican.
- Gamergate was a permanent rearrangement, finally giving a coherent "them" to orient a reactionary antipolitical movement against. I think the sharp ramp up in aggressiveness and frankly violent imagery filtered a lot of people out, while simultaneously inviting people in, creating a new overlap with pre-existing and nascent reactionary groups like (self-identified I don't mean this as an insult per se) reddit incels.
So having kept an eye on it for a while now, I think it has meaningfully changed since 2008, even if a lot of the members are the same and many of the cultural signifiers are intact. Just for one it is much more coherent as an allegiance or identity, as you can see by the dozens of people coming out to passionately defend it in these comments.
> I stopped using 4chan 15 years ago when I realized that a huge portion of the people on there are not merely roleplaying nazis, but honestly hold the views they obscure behind the atmosphere of joking.
How is that not an integral component of equal access?
The sheep are not going to visit in this scenario because a free-for-all is comfortable for the wolves and not for the sheep. I think this is pretty straightforward with a moment of thought.
Here’s another thought: avowed Nazis are not, strictly speaking, stopped from participating in any pseudonymous forum, if they can keep their views on that subject to themselves. Why is this model less “open” or “egalitarian” than one where they’re allowed to barge into conversations and start spewing that stuff?
> The sheep are not going to visit in this scenario because a free-for-all is comfortable for the wolves and not for the sheep. I think this is pretty straightforward with a moment of thought.
Yes, of course. It did seem the clear intent behind your words. Arm the sheep and it may be a different matter, no? Or, as you say, the sheep could simply not show up if they don't like their odds. I'm really not making a value judgement on the situation, just saying that everyone is handed equal tools here.
> Here’s another thought: avowed Nazis are not, strictly speaking, stopped from participating in any pseudonymous forum, if they can keep their views on that subject to themselves. Why is this model less “open” or “egalitarian” than one where they’re allowed to barge into conversations and start spewing that stuff?
Well, the easy answer is that it's less open because it is moderated. Perhaps each is open in different, conflicting ways? I'm not really prepared to perform an analysis on the ethics of each, and please don't take my response as necessarily expressing a preference for the former. Insofar as I spend time on any social platform, it is mostly HN, and mostly because I find the conversation here generally more civil than elsewhere. So in practice, I do seem to express a preference for the latter.
Sea lion shit right here man. We can't stop you from chilling with the nazis if that's what you're gonna be into but we aren't going to believe that it's all in good fun.
Now that I'm home and had some time to look properly, I guess this[0] is what you mean?
That's.. not very nice =(. I also don't see how it applies here, even if you do assume bad faith --- who exactly am I pestering? I asked you one question, then I've been having a back-and-forth with emodendroket --- a simple one-for-one. I'll also have you note that they chose to engage me. I'm certainly not following people even cross-thread, let alone cross-platform, pestering them until I get a response and demanding they justify their personal preferences.
I'm trying to have a legitimate conversation; it was my belief that intellectual discussion was encouraged here. If you don't want to discuss, don't respond, it's pretty much that simple. I'm not going to chase you down. However, if you are going to engage, I would appreciate if you don't accuse me of trolling on the basis of a disagreement and some weak notion of bad faith.
Everyone has been on 4chan. That's a weak way to try to discredit people whose opinions you disagree with.
You act like you're being an anthropologist, but you're just apologizing for a culture we all know and which does demonstrable harm in the world. It's not "polarized opinions", it's celebrating terrible things. You know that, we know that.
Everyone has been on slashdot too, right? I mean come on, it's slashdot.
...except realistically, even though I'm in the age and interest group, I've been there like, a single-digit number of times --- which totally qualifies me as an expert on it, right?
> And someone from one of those groups, knowing that, is going to experience those jokes differently.
This is the absolutely critical point that people are either too privileged to have ever thought of, or too disingenuous to admit.
Yeah, I'm a relatively wealthy (by global standards) white guy of European descent. You can joke about genociding me and I'll laugh because it's a ridiculous thought.
People who grew up genuinely at risk of genocide, or who had recent ancestors killed, don't see that same joke that same way. Worse, the people making those jokes about populations that are currently being exterminated are just doing the old "hey I'm a nazi, ha ha just kidding, can't you take a joke" thing. Which, great, free speech. But at some point if you're goose stepping in jest on a daily basis, that's just who you are.
Kurt Vonnegut said it: we are what we pretend to be.
> This is the absolutely critical point that people are either too privileged to have ever thought of, or too disingenuous to admit.
...or fundamentally disagree with? Yes, you're describing something real. You're also setting a double standard. Is it possible to understand the premises but come to different conclusions?
> white guy of European descent. You can joke about genociding me and I'll laugh because it's a ridiculous thought.
Do you by any chance have any Italian ancestors? It took a large amount of lynchings, a significant public uproar and finally a threat of war from Europe for the US to finally elevate Italians to "white" . Americans ingrained need to be racist against everyone they could almost causing WWI (with all the interwoven alliances) is an interesting thought.
> Americans ingrained need to be racist against everyone
Have you ever been anywhere in the world which you found less racist than the USA? (Bonus points if it actually has a substantial population and racial/ethnic mix to test that, and it's not just theoretical.)
A lot of places have hidden hatred of groups which acts like racial hate, but doesn't appear that way to people from the USA where the divide (black/white) was so stark and visible. Turks/Armenians, Shia/Sunni, etc.
The USA isn't perfect, but I can't think of anywhere else that I could so unreservedly recommend to anyone around the world. Not Canada, not Germany, maybe the UK, sorta Singapore if you're not certain races, etc, etc.
> This is the absolutely critical point that people are either too privileged to have ever thought of, or too disingenuous to admit.
You are also too privileged to think anyone might not be offended by those words, or even allow them the chance to speak for themselves. The banning of r/2balkan4u was a great exercise in the White Man's Burden of freeing the poor helpless "minorities" from Balkan inside jokes
Words can hurt, but that does not mean the formulation of the words is the transgression. Words only hurt when they speak to truth and what underlies a truth that hurts is where you find the transgression. It is your choice whether or not you choose to help work towards ending the transgression. Going about your day pretending something doesn't exist doesn't accomplish anything.
If you need to subscribe to that model to hide from yourself from the fact that you don't actually care, it is your life to live, but it is not a model that works beyond one's self. The disingenuity is out there for everyone else.
I disagree. Words can certainly be transgressive given certain company or context. Being sensitive to the feelings of others doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to fighting against hatred and injustice.
The fact that trigger warnings exist and are in use in many places is evidence of the existence of this model.
There is only so much time in the day. Every minute spent in idle chit-chat where one might blurt out the wrong thing is time not spent dealing with the actual problem. Indeed, it is a mutually exclusive situation. It is not possible to do both at the same time.
There is no denying the existence of the model, but it is used to try and hide from oneself that one doesn't actually care and would rather take the fun road of talking about it instead. Which is fine. It is your life to live and if that is what it takes to get through the day, so be it. It is not the altruistic behaviour you are trying to make it out to be, however.
I'm not arguing for or against any model of behaviour. Like I said above these are choices that people are free to weigh up and do as they see best.
I'm simply responding to "There is no model where reminding someone of the existence of something is a transgression" but we seem to have reached an agreement that there is.
We have always acknowledged that people will set up walls to hide from themselves. It is not clear how you think that equates to a transgression. It is likely a fundamental aspect of the human experience.
It can be seen as a transgression because you're knowingly choosing words that will cause someone distress.
In my experience people are normally careful about what kind of jokes they make around someone who has suffered a traumatic experience, an "there's a time and a place" kind of thing.
I believe many people would find it transgressive to make jokes about public transport around someone whose child had recently been killed by a bus.
You can see this even in popular culture. I'd give the famous "Don't mention the war" episode of Fawlty Towers as an example.
I think it's part of the human experience to exhibit sensitivity towards others and to reflect that in your language.
> It can be seen as a transgression because you're knowingly choosing words that will cause someone distress.
Who? On internet forums, there is only you. Any words you write are done so to stroke your own thought processes. There is no expectation of anyone else being on the line. In fact, most comments you write will never be read by anyone. And even when something does reply, there is no belief that it must be human. It could just as easily be a GPT model, and that's fine. It wouldn't change the experience.
Again, forum usage is solitary activity. If there are other humans involved behind the scenes to make the software work, that is merely an implementation detail that is not of concern to the user. Any care for the words you choose is only for your own benefit, and as it pertains to the discussion, most likely because you don't want to accept some truth about yourself.
Not true. As a member of one of the largest, mainstream segments of America, I constantly feel attacked while browsing 4chan. Your choice to engage is entirely based on your ability to filter and rationalize
Huh. I don't hang out on 4chan but I've spent time there, for instance as a would-be draw, ah, 'friend'.
Doesn't matter who you are, you constantly ARE attacked while browsing 4chan. That's kind of the point. Nobody gets to be the in crowd and protected: the closest I've seen of that is for instance literal Trump and Putin, and I don't believe for a second they are truly exempt: the more certain /pol/sters try to make them be protected, the more it backfires with 4chan.
Whether it is in ANY WAY USEFUL to go to a place where everybody hates you and you hate them right back and that's what the community is, that's another question. Looking back on my relation to such things, part of the reason I drifted off was that I found things to care about or be interested in, didn't matter what, and having any arbitrary interest was as good as 4chan, at dealing with the worthlessness and ennui.
4chan is a really good place to spend time if you haven't killed yourself yet.
If you can connect with pretty much anything else in the universe, the other thing has a pretty easy time showing its appeal compared to 4chan. For instance, I got into MLP fandom, bronies. That came off 4chan, a great example of how channers can be redirected into anything else no matter how inappropriate, just as a relief from being channers.
It's always gonna be there at the end of the line, when there's nothing else but death. But then, there are actually plenty of other things, 4chan is only one angle a person can take. It's not entirely about choice, though. As choice erodes, 4chan beckons (while flipping you off).
Yup. Go measure how often someone is accused of being a groomer pedo, simply because they're trans or have trans kids, vs how often someone is accused of being a groomer pedo, simply benzoate they're cis or have cis kids. The ratio is not 50:50. It isn't even 95:5.
I really value places where discussion can happen without gatekeeping. The worst is 2FA or a phone number IMHO, however nothing compares to being able to jump straight into the pool. IRC is one such place and 4chan is another. Even the HN crowd appears to agree[1].
For everything else there is documentation, experimentation, social clubs and entertainment.
1. There is a 'account system' for reputation, but it is trivial to auto generate throwaway accounts for 'hot takes' or counter group-think. There are even simple mirror websites that allow for browsing without hiding flagged posts. No Edit:[I don't think any] attempts have been made to reign this behavior in, likely for good reason. Perhaps it keeps the discourse interesting and encourages lateral thinking?
I would call the tone of 4chan (insulting everything and anyone) to be gatekeeping, specifically against those who wish to have more moderation/"nicer" discourse.
IMO gatekeeping (by the community) is a good/necessary thing for spaces to not become completely gutted/become kicked out of what was formerly your space.
Not arguing that, but generating smurfs on HN is pretty trivial compared to a few social media platforms I can think of. Luckily there isn't much money to be made from doing it here, unless you want to play the long game and try and push an investment agenda, but again, that isn't really hot-take territory and more like creating many false identities over a long time.
Still, HN could make a couple of changes to email verification and make smurfing much less trivial. I think it is good they don't
You can have a freedom or order, but not both at the same time. Most social networks decided for the order, suppressing freedom. Freedom brings some positives and many negatives, that's life I guess.
It's a deliberate gatekeeping mechanism. 4chan isn't a monolith, either. Some communities are tucked well enough away that it isn't _as_ needed. Furthermore, it isn't hate of "others" so much as it's a hate of all.
You will never find a more self-loathing bunch, in fact! However, there are several recurring threads, some older than Reddit, dedicated to self improvement and escaping neetdom. There are also threads openly embracing it.
Yes. It's anonymous, so no one knows who you are. It's unfiltered, so anyone can post. Some community members can be assholes, but that doesn't change those two basic ground rules.
Those problems you list are present on every online forum and are orthogonal to being free and egalitarian.
4chan is the perfect example of what society looks like when nobody plays control nazi with a zen stick! The people that can't stand it are more fucked up than the ones on it. They just don't know it yet or bothered to look.
None of those things prevent you from using the site or limit any of its features (accessibility), and your voice is exactly as loud as everyone else's and their judgment of you is only a judgment of what you've just said (egalitarian.)
Just listing a bunch of unrelated shit that upsets you isn't responsive to the comment you're replying to.
There's definitely smart people on 4chan, but accessibility only exists insofar as there's enough of a culture to punch through the noise floor. Mentally filtering posts only gets you so far, if there's any sort of counterculture then discussion becomes impossible as people actively attempt to derail the thread, see any thread about Rust in the past couple of years for an example.
If you're lucky there won't be a counterculture, but the culture of the board won't always be conductive to discussion. I stopped browsing /g/ years ago but I remember a distinct decline in the quality of discussion around Linux and FOSS topics as the board shifted to more towards more general consumer technology, FOSS threads naturally became lower effort and more memetic* as a result to compete with the influx of new users who didn't care about this subculture. When Linus Torvalds announced that he would try to be more polite it gave some ammo to the anti-Linux culture and things deteriorated more. There was a particularly pertinent post around the attitude of NixOS users on /g/ that reflects this period pretty well I think.
* This sort of trend isn't unique to 4chan of course, the quality of discussion on hobby subreddits tends to decline when mods start allowing memes and low effort posts. Even if discussion continues it's never the primary focus and becomes harder to find.
> but the culture of the board won't always be conductive to discussion.
A friendly nitpick: the word 'conductive' is a physics term. The term which means 'tending to cause or bring something about' is conducive, with no t, and is pronounced 'cundoosiv'.
I think 4chan's "solution" to the moderation problem is more or less the way it will end up being at most places which have a long-term (approaching two decades) survival rate.
Absolutely nobody can agree on what should and should not be moderated to some perfect degree, and here the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, it's the enemy of sanity. It always starts off with some easy low-hanging fruit, and then it ends up with people rage-quitting because some moderator has taken the "wrong" stance on discussions about Israel and Palestine, something small like that. The more control, the more that needs to be controlled. It just invites people to filter ever-finer, based on the narcissism of small differences.
Ideally, offer some kind of client-side filtration. Let the user maintain it, let them run into the Scunthorpe Problem for themselves. Rate-limit the spam, and be robust about that, but everything else is up to the individual. And frankly, the people who have selected fragility as a kind of lifestyle rarely have much to offer a community anyway.
I say this as an Old who has watched communities arise, develop, and fold over decades, on platform after platform, protocol after protocol. Most deaths are the kind of slow-motion suicide that in humans would be reflected in lousy lifestyle choices. And one I see so, so very often is becoming intensely rulebound so that everyone will behave. It never works.
When I try to think of a real world village analogue of 4chan, the only thing that fits is hazing. To people who participate in hazing, it builds character and brings people together. To everyone else, hazing is horrifying as it has led to enough suicides over the years.
Except an environment that is highly toxic does not attract decent people with good community intentions. While you have learned a lot about LLMs and generative AI for instance, it is extremely unlikely you have learned from the most well informed sources. It's definitely a community, but nobody can reasonably argue 4chan is a community that creates the best/most useful content.
I don't know about that, there's info there that's unavailable anywhere else. I've on a few occasions found that an anon I was interacting with was the primary author on a project I was contributing to or had written a paper on the subject. It's a very diverse bunch.
> While you have learned a lot about LLMs and generative AI for instance, it is extremely unlikely you have learned from the most well informed sources.
4chan is certainly not the best source compared to, say, scientific papers or technical conferences, but is there any evidence it's any worse than Reddit? A lot of the work pushing Stable Diffusion forward came out of 4chan IIRC. I believe the most popular UI (automatic1111) came out of 4chan.
> While you have learned a lot about LLMs and generative AI for instance, it is extremely unlikely you have learned from the most well informed sources.
You are talking about tools that can be abused to make infinite porn. I am not sure anyone wants to know how much time 4chan users invested into learning about them just to be able to modify and fine tune their models.
People hugely underestimate how big of a factor motivation is when it comes to research and building things. Some are motivated by money, some are motivated by the feeling of being needed and helping others. And then there's some boys who're really dedicated to figuring out how to fake nudes. The reason why they do it is unimportant, what matter is the amount of time they spend on tinkering with it. In the end they still acquire skills.
Interesting choice of words. Why would it be an "abuse" of a tool that can be adjusted to generate nearly anything, to use it for a relatively specific subset of anything?
Would you also consider it an "abuse" if they were, say, attempting to generate new works in the style of michaelangelo or picasso instead?
You really need to reevaluate where a lot of the tooling and focus is on by the community. It's a ton of porn and 4chan is really big in the space and absolutely creates some of the best content.
That's far from the only point, though. Motivation is almost moot. (not mootykins, either!).
Something developing this way is brought forward best by intensely disagreeable nerds with too much time on their hands, exploring in an undisciplined but persistent way.
I think 'the most well informed sources' in many things will NOT be the consensus opinion, but vanguard thought trying to get somewhere else beyond the sum total of what's currently known. This is fundamental to science and truth generally.
Disagreeableness is overwhelmingly a quality of such thinking, in the technical psychological sense: agreeableness leads to complying and ceasing to seek alternate thoughts/points.
I run Airwindows and have recently put out a Console system based on applying the absolute minimum alterations to the mantissas of floating point words, just to see what I'd get. That's internal algorithms, volume, and I added panning, doing nearly everything with bit-shifts for this purpose. Got a very interesting sound out of full mixes done this way.
I am as nice as pie, and putting videos on YouTube where I must talk about 'shifting of bits' because Youtube will always think I said 'bitch' and draw conclusions about my video from what it thinks I keep saying. And yet, at the same time, I am intensely disagreeable, because I'm persistently exploring ideas in digital sound that STARKLY contradict what's taught as common knowledge.
I'm not doing this on 4chan, but if I was, it would be every bit as supportive a community to my unusual directions as the 'normal world' is, if not more so. I wouldn't be one bit surprised to know that 4chan had pockets of research or content creation that are leading the world. It wouldn't be the first time 4chan led the world, for good or ill.
Ok, so mostly ill :) but that is because influential is not the same as useful. And the ability of 4chan to put any idea or content into effective practice is grossly stunted as 4chan cannot govern, or organize worth a damn by real-world standards. But it's probably the most likely source for whatever is going to be moving the world twenty years from now, compared to normal sources. It will just immediately lose control of anything that achieves escape velocity.
Think 'petri dish', or perhaps 'rainforest swamp'?
from the perspective of average redditors, intelligence is obedience to social norms. obedience is their highest virtue, and the more intelligent you are, the better at obeying you can be.
My only interaction with 4chan is when one day I discovered a /d/ thread devoted entirely to insulting me. I had never posted on it before, never posted after.
So, I think there is some additional gatekeeping: ability to ignore the fact that the one day the community decided to personally make me a target of their vitriol. :(
This was my experience on Twitter for telling someone they were getting angry, and starting an online mob, at someone who was clearly in the middle of a psychological breakdown. This persons feed went from normal tech stuff for almost the past year replete with good spelling and sentence structure to a sudden flood of reactionary and misogynistic content, 90% of which the structure of sentences barely made sense. While I'm not a mental health professional one of my best friends at the time was a schizophrenic - the behavior is pretty telltale.
This woman captured the image of me with my dog and posted it for her feed calling me a slue of slurs and various labels. I spent the next few days in bed and was afraid to leave my house. I had to delete my Twitter, scrub the internet of that image, and get a new email address because her followers would not stop trying to contact me to continue what I could already see them saying on that Twitter thread. It took Twitter over a week to remove the thread, even though it clearly doxxed me and violated their policies barring inciting harassment.
Personally, I think some people just wake up and choose violence, and other minds can't help but dabble. Sorry this happened to you.
I just found the original Google alert from 2011 and it was actually dis.4chan.org/read/prog/ - maybe I misremembered dis as /d? And it was actually in /prog? I don’t use 4chan so not sure the url templating scheme. The URL now 404s fortunately.
> I've learned much of what I know about LLMs and generative AI on /g/.
I was about to say "I keep hearing this" but then realized you are the same person I heard it from last time. Every time I go to /g/ I find it hard to believe you can distill actual useful information from there. Maybe it's just me who don't know how to navigate it.
Generally the technique is to be wrong about something and then get the vibe for the territory from people correcting you. I've found it's really helped me focus on where the innovation is being done and to stay on top of a very quickly moving field. Obviously YMMV, using 4chan is a skill.
To give a concrete example, a few months ago I was trying to parse through what's necessary to train LoRAs and how best to format a dataset for doing so. Google/Youtube/Reddit weren't giving me good results, and asking on 4chan I was pretty immediately linked a lengthy rentry that had a setup guide for the relevant tools as well as anon's notes on their exploration of the space. It helped me get up an running in a couple hours and avoid a lot of trial and error. Generally the quality is far better than your average medium post. I think largely because people write medium posts for clout and clicks, anonymous rentrys exist out of the goodness of people's hearts and for no ulterior motive.
> The toxicity/chaos of the place is probably the main thing that enables it to continue to be a village
How so, are you thinking?
After reading OP, my guess is that maybe you're suggesting it's the way the toxicity/chaos keeps too many people from joining, that helps keep it a village? Helps keep it smaller, or less rate of newcomers, since so many find it distasteful?
But maybe you mean something else? What are you thinking about how the toxicity/chaos might be the main thing that enables it to continue as a village? How might it do that?
4chan isn't a village, though, not in the way the author describes. Important characteristics of a "village" as defined in this piece are that you can develop systems of trust through reputation (by interacting with the same people over time) which leads to incentivizing pro-social behavior (there are consequences for acting like a jerk).
The author is specifically talking about places where you go to interact with people who share your interests and _aren't_ jerks.
I would argue that 4chan develops a reputation as a community-as-a-whole, and pro-social (if you can call it that) behavior is encouraged (in some ways) because of the "good of the community".
People on 4chan are jerks if viewed from an outsider. But 4chan regulars probably think nothing of it
There's a real time experiment happening right now on 4chan. What happens when echo chambers meet and cant censor each other. Left and right are clashing and they cant ignore one another or run away. They're having to talk to each other for the first time in years probably. This is what the internet was like before the siloed communities of social media platforms and their harsh censorship and moderation.
But 4chan is precisely the kind of “train station” Viktor is talking about. You’re talking to an ever-changing population of anons. The tiny communities that form over this layer sometimes, around generals or because of anons recognising each other, don’t last very long.
I've gotten actual sources and explanations I used for my master's from /h/. I don't even go on anything there except /hdg/. Surprisingly helpful bunch.
It's kind of like Burning Man in that regard. If you're overly sensitive and can't handle something that is in no way a first class resort experience, and where you have to bring all your own food and water, you're not going to have a good time.
My impression of 2ch and 4chan is that the anonymous-by-default nature means we bring less of our own personalities to those boards, and the lack of individuality made them village-like.
The fact there isn't any kind of karma system might also have something to do with it.
Yeah, this is the main problem. The offensive shibboleths you can train yourself to ignore, but there’s no getting around filtering past hundreds of low effort comments per insightful one.
True. 4chan is FAR superior to any other community, including (perhaps, especially) HN. It will still be there after everything else is long gone.
I believe the lack of magic internet points and very hands off moderation is the key. Also, I think it's some kind of addiction to raw unfiltered truth. It's not a place for people who get offended, you have to grow past that and have a thick skin. Say it like it is.
> Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's value to that that people miss.
Let's be real - what people miss is being able to act like racist edgelords on the internet without consequence, and they confuse that freedom with something profound, when it's just a deeply ingrained culture of immaturity. But apart from that one aspect, there's nothing to the accessibility of 4chan that isn't available elsewhere, certainly not quality of conversation.
I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all seemed to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on everything. There was the occasional Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, but back then, even they tread _very_ carefully - they would deviate maybe a little bit from the maintstream opinion but not much, at least not looking back on it.
I didn't see things the way the news saw them on almost anything. At the time, I thought I must be the only one who disagreed on so many points - after all, if anybody thought like I thought, there would have to be at least some newspaper somewhere that was printing it. But there wasn't.
Then the internet came along, and people could chat and argue with each other without a newspaper or magazine or TV editor getting in between. I found out that there were a lot of people who thought the way I did. A lot of people who disagreed with the dominant news media viewpoint that was 90% identical.
I think there was an initial rush of people who took voicing that disagreement to a bit of an extreme when the internet was new, but that's sort of subsided now - there are full grown adults with college degrees and jobs and mortgages who've been on the internet their whole lives and can't _remember_ when all media was as tightly controlled as Reddit's /r/politics subreddit.
Now the push back is becoming more serious, less "edgy" and more potentially disruptive and even a threat to the people who've made their livings and fortunes censoring debate - it should come as no surprise that there's such a push to get the genie back into the bottle.
> I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all seemed to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on everything.
This was the era of satantic panic[1], D&D being controversial due to devil worship, and when democrats and republicans joined hand in hand to try and outlaw vulgarity.
The 80s was absurdly conservative.
A regular talking point on 90s TV newscasts was about if it is ok for a man to kill another man who (romantically) hits on him. That was an actual topic the country was divided over.
1990s America, also not a bastion of radial left thinking.
If that's the way you remember it (I don't remember it that way, but to each their own) then an unfettered medium like 4chan is still a positive break from a handful of stodgy old ideologues controlling the conversation.
(I even disagree with both the left and the right on some things).
Censorship of music and art was a bipartisan push.
My entire point was that the entire country was more conservative, a point I was demonstrating by showing a time when Democrats and Republicans joining hand in hand to censor music from black musicians. (They also tried to censor violent video games, and the entire internet!)
> Um... you do know that Tipper Gore was and still is an adamant leftist,
I don't mean to argue that you should go on 4chan or whatever, but as someone who's been on the site on and off for 15 years now I don't even see the hateful stuff really, it just slides past my brain. I think you're wrong about the level of humanity that exists on 4chan, but if it's not for you that's totally fine. 4chan runs the gamut, that's what I'm trying to get across, the good comes with the bad. There's a cost associated, there are tradeoffs, but to paint it the way you have is not matched to the reality of the situation. There are incredibly kind, thoughtful and well intentioned people on there, and I think the anonymity and lack of consequence is one of the things that enables that. What's more, I have a high degree of confidence they're genuine, there's no point in chasing clout on an anonymous messageboard.
You misunderstand my point. Kind, considerate, thoughtful and well intentioned people can be found anywhere online. Bringing them up as an example of the unique nature and power of 4chan's community is disingenuous. 4chan is unique in its tolerance for hate speech, but with any other kind of speech, it's no more or less free than elsewhere.
As someone who only frequent one of the tamer niche interest board where there are seldom trolls posting slur/gore/porn, my view may be biased, but I would argue that the anonymity that allowed hate speech also enables people to be more candid in their posts and therefore leading to a sense of community.
As long as I don't put anything personally identifiable in each post, the chances of them being linked together to point back to my real identity is miniscule, so I can share stuff I would normally want to keep private.
I have bonded over deeply personal trauma with anons that I will never knowingly meet again but also know they are out there on the same board as me. I've commiserated over health concerns that I wouldn't share on social media in fear of seeming unprofessional nor with friends to avoid making them worry.
Hell, I made a throwaway just to post this since I don't want people to look at my profile and go "that guy is a 4chan user" since that could be an issue professionally, yet nothing I said here is a hate speech. That's an example of how anonymity allows for more honest speech in ways most sites elsewhere don't offer.
I personally disagree with the parent but you are misrepresenting their argument. The person you are responding to is referring to the thesis of the article which is 'as a community grows and strangers saturate the regular encounters, so declines the ability of that community to exist in a meaningful way'. They are using 4chan as an example of this thesis in action since the community of 4chan has a self-imposed growth limit due to the nature of its culture (most people couldn't handle it).
I beg to differ. There are genuine, profound, even Socratic conversations which freely happen on various threads that essentially can not occur elsewhere on the clearnet. No idea is invalid, no topic taboo, and each thread and each post must stand alone on their own merit. This is all on top of a large number of deep and wide recurring hobby generals that are both beginner friendly and highly technical.
It is more free than any website you can think of off the top of your head.
You're right that 4chan has a high level of tolerance for hatespeech, but that's a secondary, derived characteristic from the anonymity and free speech absolutism. There's a level of humanity enabled by that that you don't see elsewhere.
Another aspect I would note is honesty. Because there is no long game, interactions are much more raw. A lot of social meta game like dogwhistling, virtue signaling, sockpuppeting largely loses its meaning and is jarringly obvious when someone brings it verbatim from other communities. The experience is closer to shooting shit with friends than a council meeting of HN or a talent show of Reddit.
Kind of reminds of Urbit where Yarvin has hinted that some of the political controversy and inscrutable design were on purpose to keep away leftists. That also goes along with Peter Thiel's (who funded Yarvin) efforts since college to build and nurture rightwing-only networks of techies.
Agree with it or not, it does make some sense I guess.
Entryism has been a fairly effective strategy for subverting conservative institutions, and I don't think McCarthy style communist hunting was actually in the long run an effective solution. It just ended up creating martyrs and justified a persecution narrative that bolstered the left-wing cause.
The logical solution for the right is to form institutions with such a "stink" from a leftist point of view, that nobody wants to associate with them for fear of permanently tarnishing their reputation.
I just mention it here because it's probably something that doesn't occur to most people, and maybe it should be something we think about more. I think 4chan has a very interesting property in that the gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth (depending on the board) post being full of slurs. Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's value to that that people miss.