The problem I see with his retiring is one I've experienced on reddit as a moderator.
When someone higher than you "retires" or goes otherwise inactive, yet still retains the power they hold, they inevitably come back. It's guaranteed. Even if it's only for a day. That doesn't sound like a problem at first, but it's a HUGE problem. Why?
Because new policies, rules or ways of handling things get enacted or evolve and those new things don't make sense to them. They haven't been involved with the day to day issues are not familiar with the new challenges the community has been facing. They forget that in community driven sites, the problems are dynamic and evolving. They think the community is exactly the same as when they retired. Only, it's not.
So when they come back they do away with the rules or new policies because "they don't make sense" or they're not needed. It sets the community back, or even destroying the new community all together. Some of the volunteers below them may get frustrated and/or quit because they just witnessed all their hard work get wiped out. Getting undermined by an out-of-touch owner/mod doesn't help the morale for the remaining volunteers.
Hmm... I don't doubt that this happened to you, or that it does happen often, but as someone who was in charge of a fairly successful online community with tens of thousands of community members and upwards of a million posts, I'm happy to say that I never went back. I did the same as moot in this situation - I prepped the people who I wanted to take over and made the transition slowly until I was doing almost nothing myself. Then one day I made a post and I was gone.
I didn't revoke my own access, though I doubt that I still have it (this was about 8 years ago). Even if I did have access, I certainly wouldn't want to go back and start changing things. I cared deeply about my members and fully trusted my administrative team to do what they thought was best, and sometimes that meant putting aside my own beliefs and trying something different.
It all depends on the person that's retiring, I suppose, but I wanted to offer something to counter your experiences.
Even if I did have access, I certainly wouldn't want to go back and start changing things. I cared deeply about my members and fully trusted my administrative team to do what they thought was best, and sometimes that meant putting aside my own beliefs and trying something different.
Probably what the OP was referring to is precisely this. Apparently you were able to stand by your decision to not come back, but I have a feeling that the OP was referring to those people who actually think they can go away but actually do come back.
moot has always been pretty hands-off when it comes to managing the site; the current list of rules has been more or less the same for the entirety of the existence of 4chan. Some more board-specific issues arise from time to time and they tend to be resolved as they come up. They're almost always addressed by appealing to the existing set of rules or by making changes to the board technology itself; e.g. changing how post numbers are calculated so people aren't overly obsessed with "doubles"[1].
But admins and powerful mods have always been able to fuck with the boards in ways normal users can't, such as embedding auto-playing youtube links in posts or having fun with formatting. They've used this power sparingly in recent years and, despite what certain posters want everybody to believe, it hasn't caused any major controversies. I doubt very much moot is going to have a burning desire to come back and embed a stupid video in a board.
[1] Doubles are post numbers ending in repeating digits like "593987144." People's obsession with "dubs" on the random board /b/ have been met with several solutions, such as hiding the last three number from posters (593987XXX) or altering the generation code to skip doubles entirely (593987143 is followed directly by 593987145)
If you spend any time browsing the archives/ghost boards or the public ban list, seeing what content gets deleted and what people get banned over, I think you'd change your tune.
>admins and powerful mods have always been able to fuck with the boards in ways normal users can't, such as embedding auto-playing youtube links in posts
I remember the day /b/ had the Trollololol song on auto-loop.
This was actually the plot of Ran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ran_%28film%29). The lord retires and divides his territory amongst his sons, but retains his title. His sons resent that he carries himself as lord even after they have inherited the land and conflict ensues. It's an absolutely enthralling and gorgeous film.
A gorgeous film and one of my favorites. It's a retelling of Shakespeare's "King Lear" set in Japan by the great, great director Akira Kurosawa.
However, the King does not attempt to reclaim or exercise power; his children abuse him once he has surrendered it and is defenseless. It's a story about power and cruelty; the rashness of old age (and youth); the consequences of his prior life; trust, love and loyalty; and consequences.
Kurosawa actually denied that it was inspried by King Lear, but rather the similarities were pointed out to him afterwards. It was based on some Japanese folk story about a king with 3 good sons, that he flipped to 3 bad sons.
Thanks, and good to hear from someone else who appreciates Kurosawa.
It's hard to believe the similarities between Ran and King Lear are coincidence. It's not just the plot but many elements of the story, too. Also, Kurosawa based other films on Shakespeare plays.
Wikipedia, FWIW, says he started with a Japanese story and incorporated King Lear "after he had started pre-planning".
I saw something like that just a few months ago. A mod who'd gone offline decided to come back and was angry that nobody knew who he was and that we have our own private in-jokes and way of doing things. It was like having a friend come back from a year abroad and getting angry that we didn't wait for them to continue being friends.
It goes the other way too; many communities are now dead because heavy handed moderators who were seldomly the folks who grew said communities. Often, after the death of the original place, the same people can be found stomping on original though in the next popular place, because such people seek their power.
If there are people trying to clean up 4chan, they're probably simultaneously damaging it, because let's be honest, the lax rules, for better or worse, is what it really has going for it.
>the lax rules, for better or worse, is what it really has going for it.
Better. 4chan was the most culturally influential website out there. I don't know how much that's true today but it shaped the humor and language of the internet in a way nothing else did. It's good to have places where there are no rules, no sacred cows, no need to be polite and politically correct. In a sea of bland derivatives, it at least had a personality. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad this site and others are not like that, but it's good to have that somewhere. There is no denying how influential that site was over the last 10 years. The stuff we joke about today was born in the depths of 4chan a long time ago.
One thing I noticed that is really interesting, is that MANY 4chan memes that leaked into internet at wide, started at 2chan...
4channers that also frequent 2chan frequently end posting 2chan memes in 4chan, 4chan then modifies them as needed (ie: "westernizes" them), and then those memes might one day become widespread on the english internet.
This has the interesting side effect of syncing many memes between the english and japanese internet, while some other countries are very isolated in general (Brazillian memes for example are usually only Brazillian)
I think there's been quite a lot of interplay between these forum sites, in a way that is pretty hard to track. There's also a reasonable amount of 4chan's cultural/linguistic/meme output that is an adaptation of stuff from SomethingAwful's forums, especially in 4chan's earlier years.
There are probably two sides to this story. You might see someone as out of touch when what really bothers you is that you were second-guessed or that a limit was placed on your power. One situation, multiple descriptions.
This is not a surprising development, there has been speculation that Poole has been readying the site for sale in the past few months. He has taken action to sanitize the site by suppressing discussion of Gamergate and 8chan (mention of either was a bannable offense), and more recently a purge of /pol/ (that board had been a haven for conspiracy theorists and neo-nazis). The theory had been that he was making the board more attractive to a mainstream audience to attract potential buyers, however, this announcement, along with the new requirements for "volunteers" suggests that something else is at play.
I would speculate that recent decisions have been driven more by IRL peer pressure and a desire for social acceptance than any kind of business shark/ Homo Economicus reason.
My guess is because 4chan was being used as an organizing nexus for a bunch of people widely seen as abusive and misogynist, and he just no longer wanted the headache.
Years ago I worked on bianca.com (early community site; founded 1994, Webby 1997, closed in the dot-com bust), which had a similar unfettered-free-speech aspect to it. I feel a lot of sympathy here.
Committing to publishing everything is one of those positions that is very appealing to a young idealist. But it grinds you down over time. Partly because of the content: unless you're a reptile you are faced with a series of decisions about whether this really awful thing is too awful or just awful enough. And partly because of the people: most of them are lovely and some amazing things happen when people are free to be themselves. But some are terrible and plenty are just broken, and it's those you spend 90% of your time dealing with.
I saw one of the Bianca people recently and we talked a bit about 4chan and 8chan and how thoroughly grateful we were to have left those problems behind. No matter how appealing radical free speech is in theory, at the end of the day you're the person who has devoted your life to enabling awful people to say awful things. And with GamerGate, to go and do awful things as well. I imagine he's just tired of it.
> "My guess is because 4chan was being used as an organizing nexus for a bunch of people widely seen as abusive and misogynist, and he just no longer wanted the headache."
If I operated 4chan and wanted to get the racists out of my hair, the last thing I'd do is ban mention of other sites they could go to besides 4chan. If mentioning 8chan gets them to leave 4chan for 8chan, then that's a win for me, right?
My guess is that it was a combination of peer pressure and a measure against organized attacks against 4chan.
> "If I operated 4chan and wanted to get the racists out of my hair, the last thing I'd do is ban mention of other sites they could go to besides 4chan. If mentioning 8chan gets them to leave 4chan for 8chan, then that's a win for me, right?"
That's what ended up happening though. By barring discussion of GamerGate and 8chan, its supporters wound up on 8chan. After all, the really toxic GamerGaters were already well-organized on Twitter, and banning 8chan-related discussion is not going to stop the die-hard from hearing about 8chan through the grapevine.
You suppose that banning discussion of 8chan actually drove adoption of 8chan, which might be true. Was that really what moot was banking on though? That seems like an unlikely bet.
If I were moot and if I had wanted to get rid of these people, I would have flat out told them to go to 8chan. The "really toxic GamerGaters on twitter" likely comprise a minority of the people I would want to get rid of (I assume in all movements there is a silent majority. Most people who think something are too lazy to actually go out and talk about it), and the common mode of communication between all people who use my hypothetical site is my site.
That's fair, but then he shouldn't have been surprised when his site started hemorrhaging users who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed.
8chan will probably last much longer than 4chan precisely because Fredrick refuses to make those judgement calls about what is and isn't acceptable. He doesn't need to bear a heavy conscience about what kind of speech he is allowing, he just follows the law to the letter and lets people do their thing.
I leave you all with a fantastic speech the late Christopher Hitchens made about the freedom of speech and why there is no freedom of speech unless you extend that freedom towards people you disagree with, even the ones you find completely abhorrent.
>8chan will probably last much longer than 4chan precisely because Fredrick refuses to make those judgement calls about what is and isn't acceptable. He doesn't need to bear a heavy conscience about what kind of speech he is allowing, he just follows the law to the letter and lets people do their thing.
I honestly don't see how 8chan is different from 7chan, and I'm willing to bet that after the controversy is over 8chan's influence will die down much like 7chan's.
> Is this an accepted stat or is this a soundbite used by 8chan supporters?
The qualifier you missed is "who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed." There are some 60-80,000 daily users of 8chan right now, even in spite of the constant DDoSes the site has suffered over the past few weeks, and that number is only increasing; they had to come from somewhere. I've visited 4chan a few times since the split and have noticed quite a few people that seem out of place in imageboard culture, and in general a lot more of the whiny and shitposty elements that I left 4chan to get away from, so my guess is that as the older anons that craved the free atmosphere that had been slowly eroded from 4chan over the years left, they were replaced by newbies who were previously too scared to visit 4chan who figured things would be "safer" now (yes, there already existed communities like /r/4chan on reddit that consisted of people that liked "4chan humor" but were afraid of, say, stumbling across gore, and there are also a lot of people that lurk 4chan without posting that don't want to deal with trolls and arguments, who might be more likely to post now that a lot of the people they disagreed with left).
> I honestly don't see how 8chan is different from 7chan, and I'm willing to bet that after the controversy is over 8chan's influence will die down much like 7chan's.
As someone who was around for both splits, they are completely different. 7chan was an exclusive community for "oldfags" (non-imageboard users, please don't shit on me for using that word, that is the actual term they called themselves) that attempted to insulate itself from the "newfags" and "gaiafags" they believed moot was allowing to ruin 4chan. They tried to do this by being highly elitist, and banning anyone even mentioning 4chan or its memes or for not being able to keep up with the latest mod shenanigans (because apparently snacks was the most important element of 4chan to them). The site died a slow death because it didn't really have any important unique communities to offer over 4chan, and because most people got tired of the comically overbearing moderation and eventually settled for the (at the time) much more lenient 4chan.
Now that 4chan is the site with the overbearing moderation, 8chan is an inclusive community for people displaced from 4chan (mostly gamergate and /pol/), for fringe communities that previously lived in "general threads" that could now create their own boards with their own moderation (much of /vg/, parts of /a/, /lgbt/, etc), and for those that never had a home there to begin with (/furry/ is a pretty huge one that, for better or for worse, is one of the largest drivers of fresh blood into the site). Even if the boards like /v/ and /a/ with direct equivalents on 4chan died out (which they are not showing any signs of doing, even though they are admittedly smaller than the 4chan boards they split from), there is still a more than sufficient critical mass of people in the communities that have no other home on the internet that could keep the site going.
8chan is also for those like yours truly, that remember how nice 4chan used to be in the lenient days before you had to watch everything you said for fear of upsetting a mod or janitor strictly following rules that the majority of the community disagreed with, or just deleting things allowed by the rules because they personally disliked them. The days when mods didn't up-end boards they didn't even use, like what has happened to /u/, /jp/, /pol/ and /new/, and /r9k/ over the years, on a whim. The days when it wasn't tragically common for downright respectable users to have to frequently ban evade just to participate. Once I'd had a whiff of the fresh air of hands-off moderation and posters that mostly ignore things they don't like instead of whining about them ad nauseum, I realized how much 8chan reminded me of my favorite days on 4chan, and I'll never go back.
Will 8chan "beat" 4chan? I hope not. I'm happy to let 4chan serve as the "containment site" for the (IMO) most annoying parts of the community. But 8chan doesn't need to beat 4chan. It can do its own thing. Ironically, it's a bit like Hacker News vs. Reddit in that respect.
---
Adding a response to malbiniak, because I've, uh, "hit the post limit" (cough):
>Within the first minute of his talk at XOXO back in 2012, he mentioned 4chan being about anonymity and ephemerality, not a blanket endorsement for freedom of all type of speech.
I know, he has said that many times, but his users didn't see things that way, and that is really the crux of this debacle: the disconnect between what moot and the rest of the 4chan staff thought 4chan was about, and what the community thought.
>there is still a more than sufficient critical mass of people in the communities that have no other home on the internet that could keep the site going.
This comment is exactly where my head is at and has been my connection with 4chan.
I had a very rough time in my teens, and my mother and I moved to new cities or towns every year or two. It was hard to keep friends and consider a place home. 4chan was the constant in my life where I could always escape to be comfortable and amongst people who shared my hobbies while experiencing free-speech without the repercussions of identity. No other site offers this like 4chan does, and I've seen plenty of other chans over the years, so, I'm skeptical about 8ch.
I know a lot of people who feel the same way. I'm scared for the future of what I consider my home.
I totally understand where you're coming from. 4chan was my refuge for a very long time through some tough times in my life, and 8chan is the only alternative I've used that captures the feeling of 4chan. I tried many other english "chans" over the years (7chan, 99chan, 420chan, the wakachan/iichan "network", the easymodo/warosu ghost boards, SAoVQ, etc), yet I didn't stick around with any of them. They had their own unique communities, sometimes with greater average "quality", if you can measure such a thing, but nothing could match the excitement and energy of 4chan. I think this is because even the notable ones tried to distance themselves from the "4chan mentality" and community, and attracted different but much less significant audiences in the process. And who could blame them: why would you go to a blatant and insignificant 4chan clone that didn't have anything different to offer?
8chan was once just like that, a ghost town of a somewhat more modern AnonIB clone that wasn't really going anywhere. It owes its success entirely to the fiasco of Gamergate discussion being banned from 4chan, which caused a (literally) overnight exodus of a significant minority of 4chan who wanted to discuss it, along with those who (like me, in spite of the fact that I sometimes defend it on HN) were mostly appalled by the blatant abuse of power. These people weren't trying to "get away from" 4chan or its culture, they were forced to leave. They weren't curmudgeony "oldfags" or the like trying to enforce some new cultural norms in their secret club to increase the "quality", they were 4chan.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the site is now thriving as a community "for people who loved 4chan, by people who loved 4chan." And that's what's I love about it. It's just like 4chan, with a lot of the same people and ideas, but now, the community is running the show, not some guy trying to distance himself from "his creation" and a team of mods that often don't even use the boards they're supposed to protect enforcing arbitrary rules from afar.
Give it a shot. For all the negative attention that boards like /gamergate/ and /baphomet/ receive, they're in their own worlds. The rest of the site is very welcoming towards anyone that understands "4chan culture" and isn't obnoxious about it. Also, webms with sound.
Ever heard the phrase "my right to extend my arm stops at your nose"? Online harassment and freedom of speech are similarly related.
It may be a slippery slope, but it's an important one to navigate. Throwing your hands up and saying "well all these horrible manchildren would just organize somewhere else to harass people, so I might as well let them do it here!" isn't bravery, it's opportunism.
As far as 8chan outlasting 4chan? Unlikely unless the owner realizes he's sitting on a ticking time bomb of federal criminal cases.
> Ever heard the phrase "my right to extend my arm stops at your nose"?
Great idea. Easy to misapply, because with speech people are very bad at knowing where their nose actually is. Having hurt feelings from something someone said? Not being hit in the nose, but I know plenty of people disagree.
I agree, the two are very different. However, a number of people consider their own negative emotions to be a good reason to restrict the speech of others.
There's a reason that flag-burning hit the SCOTUS.
Those articles are just repeating the accusation without evidence. Also, I'm not sure why anyone would give any credence to information from those sources in the first place.
I am astounded by the viciousness and mendacity of those who are determined to undermine 8chan at any cost. These people are essentially fighting for total corporate control of every corner of the internet, just because 8chan doesn't promote their pet issue.
> Those articles are just repeating the accusation without evidence
Except for all the evidence that's in the article, like the newspaper link with quotes from the police chief. But hey, if you ignore all the evidence, there's no evidence!
> Also, I'm not sure why anyone would give any credence to information from those sources in the first place.
Probably because they lie a lot less than GamerGaters seem to.
If 8chan didn't keep calling the police on people, I think it would probably get a lot less heat. You can't claim to be all for free speech, then say it's okay to call the police on somebody who said something you didn't like.
>If 8chan didn't keep calling the police on people
8chan is actually not a person, and no evidence has been presented that a user of the site has done any such thing. I have noticed a couple of posters in this thread posting a gish-gallop of links (mostly from discredited sources) purporting to prove something, but one sees upon inspection that they in fact do nothing of the sort.
Man, not 24 hours ago you tried to convince us all that an article did not contain certain information, when any literate person could see that it did. You're not only a liar, you're a bad liar; your only strategy is making bold, false claims and hoping that everyone is too lazy to follow up on them. Why should we believe anything that you say?
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I think the epistemic closure among the remaining GamerGate partisans is exactly like the sort of thing you see at the core of plenty of movements. MRAs, climate change deniers, biblical fundamentalists, hardcore marxists, truthers, conspiracy theorists, et cetera, ad nauseam.
Promoting a worldview is a tricky thing. To be really good at it, you have to believe, and the more unorthodox your worldview, the harder you have to work to maintain that worldview in the face of widespread resistance. The easy thing is to refuse to even consider anything to the contrary, to only talk with people who share your views.
This pattern happens over and over in tech, too; it's not like we're exempt. Look at the dot-com bubble, for example. It was an article of faith that the Internet would change everything. That it turned out to be true eventually didn't matter; enough people took leave of their senses that we wasted billions.
Let's be real here, the incidences of SWAT teams showing up at people's houses have mostly been used to argue that action should be taken against people who say negative things online. Hell, we've even had demands that everyone in the gaming community should be forced to use their real name to end harassment, which is just about the worst thing you could do if you cared about SWATting but very handy for punishing people who hold the wrong views.
Members of the anti-GG and social justice crowds have carried out similarly stupid and counterproductive acts of aggression and bullying. They still all deserve a voice and home.
SWATing is horrible, but IMHO you should be placing more of the blame on our fucked up militarized police system that lets bored teenagers send an armored car full of soldiers, armed to the teeth and ready to kill to anyone's house with a single phone call. If it takes a few SWATings for the public to realize that this is completely unacceptable, so be it.
>Members of the anti-GG and social justice crowds have carried out similarly stupid and counterproductive acts of aggression and bullying.
It's not directly relevant to the topic, but if you really believe this you should better educate yourself with regard to what has been done in the name of gamergate.
>IMHO you should be placing more of the blame on our fucked up militarized police system that lets bored teenagers send an armored car full of soldiers, armed to the teeth and ready to kill to anyone's house with a single phone call. If it takes a few SWATings for the public to realize that this is completely unacceptable, so be it.
SWATing has been an ongoing thing for quite a while, with a few cases making their way into mainstream news. Perpetrators (when caught) are prosecuted quite heavily. Waving off SWATing as not the fault of places which allow and encourage harassment in the form of doxing just because the military industrial complex exists seems like blaming auto manufacturers for drunk drivers.
I've actually had arguments with people who believe drunk driving is the fault of "the system" for not making transit instant and free for everyone. So blaming auto manufacturers is the sort of thing people actually believe.
> "I've actually had arguments with people who believe drunk driving is the fault of "the system" for not making transit instant and free for everyone."
"Fault" is a concept that I believes always lies with the person who is actually committing the crime, but I think the general idea isn't outlandish.
Say I've got a problem of drunks leaving the bars at night and pissing on the sidewalk. I can make it illegal, arrest anyone who does it, and when the complaints continue to roll in I can point out you can't make people not break the law. It is nobody's fault but their own, surely I cannot be responsible for another man's bladder.
Alternatively I can recognize the futile nature of attempting to correct this behavior with laws alone, and do something like install public toilets in problem areas.
Designing a society to accommodate people such that they are less likely to break the law does not mean that I am assuming responsibility for their actions, nor assigning fault to myself when people break the law.
This particular person believed that going out and getting drunk was a basic human right, and that having to be responsible for your own transportation infringed on that right. Less of the pragmatic concessions and more of the bizarre notions of fault.
>It's not directly relevant to the topic, but if you really believe this you should better educate yourself with regard to what has been done in the name of gamergate.
No, really, gamergate supporters like Milo Yiannopoulos have also been doxxed, sent death threats to, sent threatening packages to, had their family members harassed, etc. The social justice movement contains honest supporters of diversity in tech, and psychotic scumbags like Shanley Kane. There are idiotic assholes on both "sides," and you shouldn't let them discount the entirety of the movements they "support."
I'm in no way excusing SWATing, but I absolutely think the outrage it generates should be directed towards our militarized police system. The drunk driving analogy is stupid because the benefits that cars provide to society outweigh the negatives of drunk drivers, but there is no good reason for an anonymous tip to warrant armed soldiers breaking into your house in the night, usually making no indication that they are policemen and not just thugs and robbers, and shooting you dead if you so much as move the wrong way in your confusion. It's a profoundly dangerous and easy to abuse system, and it needs to change.
>No, really, gamergate supporters like Milo Yiannopoulos have also been doxxed
I don't think someone searching his twitter feed for a phone number he himself posted for self promotion falls under the same category as taking selfies outside someone's place of work.
>The drunk driving analogy is stupid because the benefits that cars provide to society outweigh the negatives of drunk drivers, but there is no good reason for an anonymous tip to warrant armed soldiers breaking into your house in the night, usually making no indication that they are policemen and not just thugs and robbers, and shooting you dead if you so much as move the wrong way in your confusion. It's a profoundly dangerous and easy to abuse system, and it needs to change.
You're right, the system does need to change. And I would even agree that is linked to the issues of online harassment. However, that is not the cause of online harassment, nor would improvements to police reaction policies put a stop to doxing.
>I don't think someone searching his twitter feed for a phone number he himself posted for self promotion
The parent commenter was referring to an incident when Shanley Kane tweeted Yiannopoulos' personal phone number, which was not intended to be public. He subsequently received a deluge of messages (does this qualify as "harassment"?) Such behavior is commonplace amongst the SJW set, and not so much among their opponents, contrary to the mainstream perception.
He posted his number privately in order to facilitate an interview regarding the topic at hand. I'd argue publishing that is far more egregious than taking a selfie outside someones publicly listed place of work.
Either way they are both shitty behaviours, don't really think we need to take a one vs the other.
I think the implied threat to personal safety is more jarring than obnoxious phone calls, but this is so far off topic it belongs elsewhere.
The kinds of harassment we've seen come out of one man's personal crusade against an ex-girlfriend are disgusting, and it's incumbent upon all of us to discourage it.
A guy that has been using 4chan and other anonymous messageboards since he was 12 acts and thinks like a 4chan user. What a shock.
I know it's not the same to you, but if you look at the top 15 boards on 8chan, that list includes a board that Fredrick likely has no interest in (gay porn), boards full of users that he probably disagrees strongly with (/leftypol/, a left wing version of /pol/, and /christian/, iirc he is an athiest), and a community full of people that he personally cannot stand (/furry/). Maybe you wouldn't pay to provide a home for "gamergate jerks", but he doesn't seem to have a problem providing a home for a lot of people he dislikes or disagrees with.
What is the difference between "enabling" and "not stopping" something? Is he "enabling" GamerGate because he supports it on his personal twitter account, or is he "enabling" it just for refusing to censor it on his site? Is he "enabling" /baphomet/ because he made some improvements to the site software that happened to fix a spam/flooding problem they had? Then is he not also "enabling" the /furry/ board that he developed a CAPTCHA option specifically for, due to the constant attacks of one dedicated spammer that board received? Or does "enabling" just mean "allowing something I dislike"?
If you own a media site (or, let's say, a newspaper), you're very much responsible for what's on it. If you believe in free speech to the point that you'll publish anything anyone wants to say to your audience, then you're very much enabling them and responsible for anything that happens as a result of publishing that.
If you want to create an analogy, I think chans are more like user
group meetings that happen in public spaces (e.g. a public park). Nobody
would kick members out of the park because they heard that they're
pro-ISIS (that's just their opinion). However, display of illegal
content or illegal actions would get members removed via someone calling
the cops. Off topic comments that detract from the spirit of the group
could also get members suspended or kicked out of the group
permanently.
Is it up to park police to monitor the user groups? Sure, but they
cannot take action unless it violates the law.
You're still giving them a platform to do so - it doesn't matter the exact details of how much is user-generated and how much isn't.
If you allowed anybody in the world to put an ad in your newspaper, for example, you would be responsible when ISIS use it as a recruitment or propaganda tool - they wouldn't have that reach otherwise. Same with imageboards, reddit, or HN.
Same with VPS servers. Same with internet infrastructure; hubs, switches and fiber. Or ultimately any physical area in which people uttering heresy and atrocious opinions stay while uttering them (the latter point would ultimately be of concern to any owner of private property, or the state itself in the case of common public property).
How are these distinct from imageboards, forums or reddit? This is a very slippery slope which implies censorship from the very beginning. Are you prepared to follow your reasoning all the way to its conclusion and stop people from having any platform for speaking their mind? Once you go there, you no longer have freedom of speech, which I agree with Hitchens et al. has to be protected even when it is uncomfortable.
I agree that there is a very tricky ethical case when it comes to harrassment or terrorism, but I have no good ideas on how to resolve it. We should err on the side of not censoring stuff we don't like.
> Are you prepared to follow your reasoning all the way to its conclusion and stop people from having any platform for speaking their mind?
No, that's not the conclusion. The conclusion is that the providers are responsible for it and are definitely enabling it, but sometimes that's better than the alternative. Not everything's black and white, unfortunately.
I'm not entirely certain that unrestricted use of a popular destination is the same thing as unrestricted use of a transport, though, to try and figure out a place where the line should be put. If you have an audience and allow people to reach that audience with dangerous and harmful ideas, that's likely worse than giving them the transport to build their own audience.
Alright, so we're separating infrastructure into two types. There's "transport" infrastructure that allows people who already know each other to communicate and there's "audience" infrastructure that provides a way to present ideas to a group of strangers.
Holding providers of "audience" infrastructure accountable means that the only unorthodox groups that can communicate as effectively as the orthodoxy are groups with members that can provide "audience" infrastructure. Now the unorthodox suffer a disadvantage. The purpose of this system is to prevent dangerous and harmful ideas from being spread. This is still censorship.
You're confusing censorship with freedom of association and freedom to chose your customers. If an ISP won't take the KKK's money, that is not censorship. Censorship would be if the government banned every ISP from serving the KKK whether or not they wanted to.
Requiring all ISPs (or forums or whatever) to accept and retransmit the KKK's propaganda is just as much a limit on freedom as banning the stuff.
If I configure my home router to use OpenDNS, such that my children cannot access internet pornography or extremist forums (such as 4chan or 8chan for example), that is a form of censorship, yes? It is a form of censorship that the government is not involved in. It is legal, and it is well within my rights to do. Hell, I'd go so far as to say it is the appropriate thing to do. It's still censorship though. I don't know what else I'd call it.
Alternatively, when an American cable news channel bleeps profanity or blurs nudity, isn't that a form of censorship?
I'm really confused with where the "censorship is only something a government can do" idea came from.
Some sort of conflation between the ideas of "censorship" and "violation of first amendment rights" I suppose.
I gave a government example, as that's what we were talking about. Censorship just requires power, and government power is the most important and obvious kind because governments are monopolies over large numbers of people. But yes, you also, having power over your kids, can censor what they see.
But if every individual ISP refuses to host the KKK because they'd just rather not do business with bigots, then that's not censorship. It's just freedom of association.
If the 8chan guy tomorrow decided to shut down and nobody else wanted to host the pedophiles, that isn't censorship. They can buy a piece of land and make a pedophile clubhouse. They can buy a printer, make pedophilia leaflets, and distribute them in the town square. But if nobody wants to help them do that, it isn't censorship, because nobody is exercising power over the pedophiles, just over themselves.
But if every individual ISP refuses to host the KKK because they'd just rather not do business with bigots, then that's not censorship. It's just freedom of association.
No, that is censorship.
transitive verb
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable <censor the news>; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable <censor out indecent passages>http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring
That's a ridiculous interpretation. People don't have an obligation to uncritically pass on any and all messages. That a publisher only publishes certain books is not censorship of all the other books. That you promote your own views without simultaneously mentioning all other views is not censorship.
Freedom of speech means that you can put up your own lawn signs in your lawn. It doesn't mean that you get to put your lawn signs in other people's yards. It certainly doesn't mean that they are obligated to print and put up your signs in their yard.
That's a ridiculous interpretation.
It's the correct interpretation.
People don't have an obligation to uncritically pass on any and all messages.
True.
That a publisher only publishes certain books is not censorship of all the other books.
True.
That you promote your own views without simultaneously mentioning all other views is not censorship.
True.
Freedom of speech means that you can put up your own lawn signs in your lawn. It doesn't mean that you get to put your lawn signs in other people's yards. It certainly doesn't mean that they are obligated to print and put up your signs in their yard.
True.
These are all true, but irrelevant. Refusing to help spread a message is different than trying to stop other people help spread a message. I've been repeating this for a while now. If you're still confused, try rereading our discussion until you see the difference.
Ah yes, the only possible reason somebody could disagree is failure to understand your perfect words.
If my neighbor puts up your signs, I am allowed to express my opinions to him. If he decides to take down the signs, that is still not censorship. I'm even allowed to decide to not talk to him if he leaves them up. Exercising my right to freedom of speech and freedom of association is not censorship. It can't be, because otherwise the right to free speech ends up being self-contradictory.
If I can say anything I want, but I have no infrastructure, then I can't communicate my ideas effectively. People who provide neutral infrastructure allow others to exercise their right to free speech. People who oppose neutral providers want to make communication difficult for people they disagree with.
Removing neutral infrastructure is restricting free speech through social conventions instead of through government. It's still censorship.
It is definitely not censorship. Nobody is under any obligation to help, say, pedophiles, promote their ideas. To say otherwise is to deny freedom of action and freedom of association.
If you have an ideological attachment to the existence of neutral providers, nobody can stop you from creating one. But as 8chan is discovering, people are free to criticize them for who they are helping and what effects that has.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. If people are free to speak, I am also free to speak out against them. If people support particular speakers, I am also free to speak out against those supporters, and to shun them.
Suppose a world where there are your vocal cords, pens, and printing presses. The sort of world that existed when these "free speech" ideas where first being seriously considered.
Should you be under fire if you sell a printing press to an unsavory bunch of people?
How many levels of "providing a platform" can we go through before we no longer vilify people? We do business with companies (our ISPs) who do business with companies (other ISPs) who does business with a company (8chan's ISP) who does business with a company (8chan's host) who does business with a company (8chan) which is used by extremists. How deep does this go?
Alternate question: Should we bust newspapers for pimping?
Certainly enabling them. On the other hand, preventing the Government from disallowing them from free speech might be worth that.
That's a different thing from giving them a platform to talk on, though. From a natural rights viewpoint, the KKK should be allowed to say whatever they want, but nobody has to give them a platform to talk on.
I think there's a big difference between defending a principle, which is what the ACLU does, and active support of awfulness. The ACLU is just making sure the government won't stop the KKK from printing leaflets if they want to. The ACLU definitely isn't printing and distributing anything the KKK asks.
I more or less agree. I often ask this particular question because I find that many people disagree with us, or have not given the matter any serious thought.
Within the first minute of his talk at XOXO back in 2012, he mentioned 4chan being about anonymity and ephemerality, not a blanket endorsement for freedom of all type of speech.
If you haven't heard it, it's worth a listen (20:59).
Therefore universal censorship should be instituted in every medium to make all communication conform precisely to my own opinions, sensitivities, and preferences.
Maybe you are just trolling, or maybe you actually believe in what you say. I know I used to believe the "it's above games journalism" point of view, as I found it had plenty of merit.
In case it's the second one, I have to tell you something: it really isn't about truth in games journalism. I know a lot of people think it is, but it truly isn't. Gamergate's sword are its misogynistic views and its coordinated attacks, while it's shield is the "games journalism" angle. If you truly believe you can separate one from the other, trust me, you can't.
The number of people who disagree with GamerGate, who are willing to deeply go into their reasons why, is very very tiny in my experience. Usually all you get is "gamergate is about harassing women", a link to an instance where trolls have done precisely that, and nothing further. Absolutely nothing to directly rebut the constant refrain that most people in the movement are there to crap on female developers.
If you have some deeper insights, I'd love for you to share them here. I find GG to be unfairly maligned - and given the fact that they've picked a fight with primarily huge, monied interests with mass media connections, I can see why. It doesn't even need to rise to the level of massive conspiracy.
I agree with the stated purposes of GG: games journalism needs some serious balancing. For instance, that mailing list in which both journalists and producers are members is an example of a line that should exist and yet doesn't. Hech, even "game developer literally in bed with producers" is something that, properly approached (not the case AT ALL, of course), could have been a valid point.
And yet, what is GG known for? They are being openly misogynistic, attacking anyone who dares speaking against them in a pretty serious way. Anita Sarkeesian and Felicia Day, to name two famous women, were doxxed and harrassed just for speaking openly.
And just like you cannot say "X and Y belong to Anonymous, but Z doesn't", you cannot say "The misogynists are using GG as an excuse, but they are not true GGers", because they are GG (the same way that you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic).
So my point would be: If a group is full of jerks that are flocking towards a group erroneously, are they really in the wrong group?
And yet, what is GG known for? They are being openly misogynistic, attacking anyone who dares speaking against them in a pretty serious way.
Okay, so first off, "attacking" does not imply misogyny. Attacking a woman for any reason that's not directly related to her gender is not misogyny. Period point blank.
Secondly, "What GG is known for" is the perception, the thing I take issue with, "What GG actually does" is something else.
I find it somewhat telling that you (not sure if you did this on purpose or not) characterize the community's response to being called misogynists as "attacking", and you characterize the people throwing the accusations as "speaking against". I'm not sure that any reasonable person would respond with anything but derision at being pre-emptively labeled in this way. Are people not allowed to defend themselves?
What I'm looking for here are facts. It appears, and please correct me with something I can actually verify on my own if I'm wrong here, that basically three people are saying "i'm being attacked because X", without actually backing up that accusation.
The cycle appears to be:
* Person writes incisive article or otherwise does something skeevy (GJP email list)
* Community goes "WTF?"
* Person characterizes this response as harassment.
I see no evidence, none, other than the words of the people concerned (which for obvious reasons, is insufficient evidence), that GG is mass harassing them. THIS IS THE MISSING PIECE OF THE PUZZLE FOR ME. Every time I try to follow the evidence trail, it ends at, in effect "I say I'm being harassed, so I am", with a side order of "The extremists in a group define a group".
I do not accept either of those explanations as true or logical.
And as a follow up, even if we acknowledge the existence of that mass harassment, what effort does the rest of the GG community, the people that are actually part of the revolt for the purposes of journalistic impropriety, need to do that they have not already done?
Loudly state they don't support harassment? Already done. [1].
Form a group to ensure harassers are removed from their ranks? Already done. [2]
Try to assemble a code of conduct for people to follow? Already done. [3].
What else needs to happen?
The problem with your standard is that you allow any group to be trivially discredited by the existence of a minority of troublemakers, either real or invented by the discreditors. The same kind of thing happened to Occupy Wall Street, the difference here is that this is the internet, and we should be able to logically separate troublemakers from non troublemakers.
You don't want be convinced, and you won't allow it to happen. It's extremely obvious. No one is going to waste their time attempting to correct you. You have to correct yourself. Or don't.
Who were Anita Sarkeesian and Felicia Day doxxed by? Maybe they did it themselves, or their friends did it. Have you got any evidence at all that this is not what happened. After all damseling-in-distress is very lucrative these days.
Edit: Downvoters, where is your evidence, where is your evidence, where is your evidence, where is your evidence?
This double standard absolutely boggles my mind, especially in the company of the people who usually inhabit this website.
What evidence is there that prominent GG detractors are receiving harassment for their views? Exactly the same amount of evidence that prominent GG supporters are receiving harassment for their views, yet for some reason, this standard is only applied against some people and not others.
I want to know what that reason is, I want someone reasonable to explain that to me, and I hope beyond all hope it doesn't boil down to "because some of those people have media connections and some don't".
especially in the company of the people who usually inhabit this website.
It gets easier to understand when you realize most of us were bullied as kids. It becomes a natural instinct to herd together and protect our own. It's less because some of those people have media connections and more because those media connections happen to be people they consider friends and loved ones. At that point, emotional bias takes over.
Or, to put it another way, if somebody told you your mother was a murderer, would you believe him, no matter what evidence he presented? Even if he had a video of the event, it would be easier for you to believe that the tape had been doctored than for you to believe this person you loved could do something so terrible. At least it would be for me.
I'm not excusing it, mind you, just explaining it.
Thank you MrDom, I partially agree with you, some antiGGers that are in full force here at HN
really don't want to hear the truth and gang up against those who
challenge the damsel-in-distress that the likes of Sarkeesian (who's a
front for Jonathan Mcintosh), Chelsea Van Valkenburg (who currently
calls herself Zoe Quinn) and that odious John Walker Flynt guy (who
calls himself Brianna Wu right now) dish out. As you have seen very
clearly, nobody has been able to provide a shred of evidence in
defence of Sarkeesian (Mcintosh), Van Valkenburg and Flynt. And they knew that
they have been unable to do so.
Given how central HN is to Silicon Valley, I suspect that at least
some of the participants in this discussion are more than innocent (if
naive) bystanders and actively sabotage any investigation into the
licentious relationship between games companies and game journalists:
whenever anyone dares to mention that something untoward has been
going on, they automatiaclly and habitually scream: misogyny,
harrassment, bullying. And it works well on the mainstream level: the
damsel-in-distress trope sells really well with normal guys. But it
doesn't work with everyone, like myself ... leading to angry
downvoting.
I actually had to look up what doxxing is! I realized I had never gotten a proper definition. Doxxing refers to the practice of investigating and revealing a target subject’s personally identifiable information, such as home address, workplace information and credit card numbers, without consent.
I suppose you could argue that exposing frauds is a form of doxxing, but so could whistleblowing. I think there is a line to be drawn[0], but their names? How do you talk about the key players in a scandal if you can't use their names?
[0]: That guy who took a picture of Zoe's work place and posted it on twitter was over the line, for example. Then again, Zoe posted Mike Cernovich's address on twitter and encouraged her followers to swat him.
I think it's not worth talking about them at all - IMO the journalist reaction to the scandal is most interesting. There's still no disclaimer on Nathan Grayson's articles and guys like Devin are playing 'See No Evil'.
But when we must talk about them, we can use their public names and get along fine. Getting their former identities doesn't help people who want to clean up journalism, it just helps dig up background dirt.
In what sense is using people's real names problematic? When I'm
calling the US president Barak Obama I'm doxxing him? Maybe it's a
generational thing: when I was a child we still had this thing called
telephone book, where you could look up every adults address and phone
number.
All this shows the ridiculousness of the charges the Van Valkenburg and Flyns of this world are making, then the gullibility of their followers.
Thank you Karunamon. The fact that GGers who inquire into Silicon Valley power structures get demonised while anti-GGers get celebrated shows that distribution of power, and gives indirect evidence that the GGers are onto something that those in power are desperate to cover up.
No, they're primarily picking fights with individuals and systematically distracting everyone from the actual corruption of monied interests. Every so-called ethics issue that GamerGate has highlighted has been a hugely overblown misinterpretation, while several major ethical issues, such as the attempt to tightly control what YouTubers could and could not say about Shadows of Mordor, were ignored by GamerGate.
Major industry organizations have been forced to step up their efforts to protect innocent developers from GamerGate.
I oppose GameGate because:
* Every issue they've brought up has, without exception, been a minor quibble at best and an outright fabrication on the part of GamerGate at worst
* GamerGate has, as a movement, systematically refused to decry the harassment or take any kind of practical steps to curb it
* GamerGate uses charities as cover for their actions, and then DDOS the charities when the charities refuse to be used like that.
* GamerGate is still, as a movement, entirely obsessed with three specific women
* GamerGate uses anonymity for plausible deniability of its celebration of things like developer's dogs dying (multiple instances), SWATing (multiple instances), bomb threats (multiple instances).
> the attempt to tightly control what YouTubers could and could not say about Shadows of Mordor
That story was broken by TotalBiscuit, a prominent YouTube game reviewer who's generally considered to be part of Gamergate by its opponents and has been under attack by them for supporting it for months. (I believe they're currently trying to get his Steam curator privileges pulled for supporting it.) The gaming press didn't even report on it until over a week after it'd already blown up in Gamergate circles, the PR company behind it had apologized and promised not to do it again, and the Youtubers who took the deal had been scrutinized. Even then, I think TB was the main driving force behind them reporting on it.
The whole narrative about Gamergate ignoring it started a while after the gaming press finally reported on it, so about two weeks after GG got those responsible to apologise and back down from their decision. (By which point there wasn't much new GG discussion of it because they'd won and it was old news.)
You know what's really funny? If it really was about three specific women, as you say, then misogyny is automatically ruled out. What is it? Hate of three "specific" women? Or is it hate of all women? Hahaha, you lot are your own worst enemy. BTW we just disagree with them but apparently that is hate these days.
Um, a narrow focus on three women doesn't exclude the possibility that they're generally misogynistic. (And it's an error to reduce "misogyny" to a conscious hatred of women, that's one definition of the word, but not what the word usually means.)
But you go right on saying that, person who made an account to post this one comment.
>GamerGate has, as a movement, systematically refused to decry the harassment or take any kind of practical steps to curb it
As somebody that has watched GG from the outside out of fascination, I don't think this point is true and I think think it points to a broader problem online that I feel is becoming increasingly troubling - a failure to recognize that trolls are attracted to conflict and not necessarily representative of anyone on either side of an issue.
What practical steps to curb the actions of anonymous internet trolls would you have considered sufficient?
Actually policing the movement and coming up with a coherent manifesto would be a good start. There's a lot more they'd have to do, but they've consistently refused to even consider trying it.
This is kind of what I mean. This seems like shifting goal posts to me. They had the whole harassment patrol thing on Twitter which I found sort of silly, personally, but I don't know how that would be described other than an effort of some sort. I certainly wouldn't call it an abject refusal to even try.
Like I said, I think it's a larger problem of shitty behavior on the internet in general, and I don't think anyone has a real solution at this point. I find it unfortunate that people use that behavior as an excuse to talk past each other.
I specifically said celebrating those things; Brianna Wu's dog died of natural causes. It's immensely hard to tie the events to specific people, and by design GamerGate is too slippery to pin an individual's membership or non-membership. But there is undoubtedly involvement by people who solicit an association with the GamerGate movement.
If your anonymous imageboard thread gets regularly co-opted by trolls, maybe they're the real movement and you're the outsider.
I note that you have not provided a single bit of evidence for GG
killing dogs, SWATing and bomb threats. Instead you like to Guardian,
WaPo HuffPo etc, desparate publications that are well-known
uncritically to print everything that confirms their readership's
prejudices.
Indeed you link to Sarkeesian's (or rather Jonathan Mcintosh) Twitter
as evidence ... don't you think even random people might find such a
source ... how can I put it delicately ... somewhat partial?
Indeed you admit "It's immensely hard to tie the events to specific
people". So if it's hard, why do you do it? Given this
methodological misinformation that you've carried out, I wonder if you
are somebody who has something to hide, has skeletons in his cubboard
and throws shade at anyone who challenges the official, mainstream
narrative.
Let me close by challenging you again: please present concreat,
actionable evidence, usable in a court of justice, that the alleged
threats against Sarkeesian, Chelsea Van Valkenburg (aka Zoe Quinn) and
John Walker Flynt (aka Brianna Wu) were carried out by who had a
substantial GG affiliation.
What, the New York Times wasn't objective enough for you? [1] You prefer the Washington Post? [2]
See, here's the thing: because of the way that GamerGate works, anyone who says that they're part of GamerGate is a part of GamerGate. To use just one example, the shooting threat in Utah was by someone explicitly claiming a link to GamerGate.
(And I never said that GG killed dogs, I said they celebrated the dogs being killed. Which is obvious if you read 8chan at the time.)
Regarding "What, the New York Times wasn't objective enough for you?":
You really don't understand (or pretend you don't understand) how
modern newspapers work.
1. Newspapers have ideological bias. In terms of domestic news, it's a
liberal newspaper, so would automatically add a sexist anti-male
spin.
2. Journalists are under heavy deadline pressure and badly
paid. Typically most stories in a newspaper like the NYT are
slightly edited press releases from some PR agency. The corrupt
games journalists who are trying to cover up their wrong doings
know this and produce press releases that smear GG, knowing that
mainstream news outlets like the NYT will uncritically print them.
You only need to look at the Wikipedia article for Chelsea Van
Valkenburg (who currently calls herself Zoe Quinn) to see a prime
example of a PR-agency hit-piece. Having worked in PR and
journalism, I can smell the PR-style writing from a million miles.
3. Newspapers like the NYT are doing financially very badly and are
desparate for page-views. And the damsel-in-distress narrative
reliably generates such page-views. That's why the likes of
Sarkeesian, Chelsea Van Valkenburg (aka Zoe Quinn) and John Walker
Flynt (aka Brianna Wu) use them, and that's why the NYTs of this
world print them.
Rest assured that the NYT writer responsible for editing the press
release you linked to has done no fact-checking of substance.
As to "because of the way that GamerGate works": I'm afraid it's the other way round. Since there is no organisation, no formal membership, everybody can claim to be GG; moreover, Sarkeesian, Chelsea Van Valkenburg (aka Zoe Quinn) and John Walker
Flynt (aka Brianna Wu) et al and their friends have strong financial incentives to run false flag operations, see their Kickstarters and Patreons and media adulation. So the only reasonable default assumption must be that they are running false flags. This default assumption should only be reversed in the presence of concrete, actionable evidence that would work in a court of law. So far none of this has been forthcoming.
I would also like to point out that the police clearly doesn't take these claims seriously, for otherwise we'd probably have seen some people being arrested or charged. After all anonymity on the internet is hard these days, and beyond the abilities of most.
People have elaborated on it for months. It's so thoroughly discredited in every way that if you don't see it now, you're not going to. Consider it "unfairly maligned" if you want - no one cares any more.
> People have elaborated on it for months. It's so thoroughly discredited in every way that if you don't see it now, you're not going to. Consider it "unfairly maligned" if you want - no one cares any more.
Hey, let's apply the same standard of evidence you've been demanding from others to your post! Can you provide evidence that's admissible in a court of justice that support the core points of the article?
The evidence is in the article. He displays emails in their entirety that talk about members of the press colluding on coverage. That's admissible in a court of law.
Here are more emails[0].
It's put up or shut up time. Either you're going to provide a thorough counter of the evidence provided or everybody will know exactly what you are: a liar.
Applying the same standard of evidence to my others does in no way, shape or form solve your problem of providing evidence that's admissible in a court of justice that support the core points of the article? Since the Sarkeesians, Van Valkenburgs and
Flynts of this world started out with claiming GG harrassment (and are profiting handsomely from it), it behooves them and their supporters to come up with evidence first.
Yeah, and in the adult world we call that article "making a mountain out of a molehill" and "fabricating evidence by selective reading".
What's the conclusion? That video game journalists are secretly colluding to push an agenda? That's just about the most penny-ante conspiracy theory imaginable. That the evidence is selectively excerpting emails from a professional mailing list (that from what I've been able to discover wasn't exactly a secret) is pretty petty.
Enlighten us, then. What parts do you think were fabricated? If you can provide proof (and by that I mean logical proof or physical proof) then I will change my mind. I just haven't seen any yet.
You're quick to dismiss but you games and tech "journalists" collude, push agendas and fail to recuse yourselves from conflicts of interest all the while seeing nothing wrong with that. https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/556905004632920064
Games "journalism" has always been a stones throw away from advertising and you all don't have an ethical bone in you. Basic journalistic values such as skeptical inquiry, critical thinking or independent judgment are foreign concepts.
It's also the perception I have, mostly as a kind of observation of where the harassment seems to go (admittedly personal observation, not at all studying it systematically). I've spent a good amount of time mocking the gamergate set under my real name and nobody's done much to me. Trolling them is even a bit fun; it's sometimes a little unsporting, but sometimes it's amusing [1]. In related news, I'm a white male. Yet a number of my female colleagues have gotten torrents of abuse for much less criticism than I'm doing. That milieu seems to really smell red meat when someone who's a woman in tech says something they perceive as offending them. There is also a weird obsession with tracking down previous romantic/sexual partners of women who come across their radar, either for its own sake, or in hopes that the ex-boyfriend can be goaded into saying something negative. Whereas I can call them whatever I want with impunity. None of the gamergaters seem interested in tracking down a history of my sexual partners!
Besides being gendered, the other bit I've noticed is that it seems very anglosphere. We had a brief discussion in class here (Denmark) about gamergate, which I was initially very cautious about because I didn't want to be leading, but it ended up mostly fizzling because afaict students just viewed it as foreign and not their problem. They didn't seem to view it as an active debate here that they should be for or against, but rather some weird debate in America that they could only shrug about (weird debates in America that you can only shrug about are a dime a dozen). Well, maybe America plus some tagging along from CA/UK/AU. That perception is probably strengthened by the fact that the high-profile "pro-gamergate" articles have come from right-wing Anglo-American media outlets like Breitbart Media, whose politics start from a position that's pretty weird/foreign by local standards.
[1] There was a period when a bunch of people had a conspiracy theory about how DiGRA (http://www.digra.org/), a small and mostly ineffectual professional society for academics studying games, was taking over games. Being vaguely on the fringe of that organization provided good opportunities for trollish hashtagging (I attended a DiGRA conference once, which I believe made me a member for 1 year as a result of paying the conference registration fee). It was fun to imagine ourselves as all-powerful conspirators directing the future of games, when almost no game developers have even heard of the conference (much less read its papers), and the organization's powers are such that releasing a timely call for papers once a year remains an aspirational goal.
Yet a number of my female colleagues have gotten torrents of abuse for much less criticism than I'm doing.
Women get more attention in general, both negative and positive, both online and off. You spent your time trolling GG, I spent my time arguing for GG. Both of us were largely ignored. There are quite a few women arguing in support of GG and they also get a large amount of attention (positive from GG, negative from antiGG). It's human nature to pay attention to women.
... it seems very anglosphere.
Considering all of the companies involved are American, this doesn't surprise me. I don't even think the UK would bother with it much if it weren't for Milo. It just doesn't affect anybody outside of American culture, thank god.
There was a period when a bunch of people had a conspiracy theory about how DiGRA ... was taking over games.
HAHAHAHA, oh man. I've never heard of DiGRA until just now, but that's hilarious. You should put DiGRA Illuminati on your business card.
I think what yarrel meant, is that GamerGate was always about misogynistic views and attacks, as has been described in a number of articles about its origins.
>You will not post or request personal information ("dox") or calls to invasion ("raids"). Inciting or participating in cross-board (intra-4chan) raids is also not permitted.
The official reason was along the lines of "I don't want to host another Project Chanology," but it probably had more to do with the fact that moot was closely involved with at least one Gawker Media employee[1] and spoke at XOXO[2] alongside numerous companies and organizations that the Gamergate movement is adversarial towards.
EDIT: Downvote all you like. I'm not making any judgement pro or anti Gamergate in this post, I'm just pointing out a rather large conflict of interest.
I don't know why this is downvoted. Moot is involved with somebody at Gawker Media. If he is getting social pressure about "sexist" or "misogynistic" content, like pervycreeper claims, it's not out of line to suggest she could be a huge influence on his behavior.
There's nothing naive and presumptuous about it in the least, it's an ethical violation that wouldn't fly by most professional standards and there are vast tracts of legal obligations most people adhere to which define those boundaries, no matter what a small group of hacks suppose.
fortunately the more responsible publications have already updated their policies and looked inwardly to prevent fucking up so publicly and obviously again. (We can hope at the least they won't soapbox to their readership that they are assholes for calling them out!).
Thank you for refusing to engage. You make the rest of us look so damned good. You disagree, but you won't say why? You say we're wrong, but won't say why? That's a good way to encourage open debate.
BTW: this guy is a journalist for TechCrunch. I only mention it because it explains why he doesn't want to actually debate the topic.
Actually, I write for NBC News mainly. I only do columns now and then for TC. Neither of those things has any bearing on me 'refusing to engage.' I really just don't care to (though I didn't want the TC allegation to go unanswered, not that anyone's listening). But I know you'll choose to believe what best advances your existing prejudice. Be my guest.
But I know you'll choose to believe what best advances your existing prejudice.
I choose to believe what I can prove. You provide nothing of substance. Empty words and air. You work for ABC news and not TC. Ok, great. What does that have to do with Moot?
The initial scandal was that Nathan Grayson had been friends with the relatively unknown developer of Depression Quest for a long time, to the point of getting thanked in the credits of the game. He then plugged it, here:
...without disclosing the relationship. Which could have been resolved with a simple apology and adding disclosure to the articles, but several major game sites instead responded with such a storm of ridiculous charges that game journalism was instantly sullied even more than it already was.
Because of this, GamerGate has been poorly covered in most game sites and rags like TechCrunch, so it's not surprising that you hadn't heard of this.
Direct link: https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/ Yes, this is what first implicated Grayson. I'd say its primary purpose was to get people to avoid her, but any interested parties can read the whole thing.
I would say not disclosing something that's clearly a potential conflict of interest is scandalous. That Devin, a writer for TechCrunch disagrees is... interesting. Illustrative.
It's pretty sad how all it took was time and a thin coat of feminist paint for HN to forget how corrupt and morally bankrupt these clickbait "journalists" are.
That would be grounds for banning advertisment, not mention. As it stands, at least as of a couple months ago, even using the words "gamergate" or "8chan" earned you a three day automatic global ban.
Discussion of Gamergate has been taken down in some form from every major communications platform other than (to my limited knowledge) 8chan and twitter. Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and 4chan have all removed content related to GamerGate
I would state this slightly differently: discussion considered to be abusive by the moderators/admins of their sites has been taken down in some form from every major communications platform. In some cases, that discussion involves GamerGate.
It is possible to construct a conspiracy theory in which GamerGate is being censored, but given the existence of (say) http://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/, it's hard for me to believe that Reddit as an entity is removing all GamerGate discussion.
Also to fuel the conspiracy theory we have a recent ABC Nightline piece[0] which has 28,404 downvotes and 1,028 upvotes about the contentious issue. Also heavily censored comments where some of the removed comments only criticize the content of it and don't attack any specific persons in it. While comments like "4:05 That is nightmare fuel. How is it possible for a person to look so grotesque?" still aren't censored.
In no way am I stating an opinion, just adding something I observed to your comment:
For about a day, comments anywhere on Reddit matching `[zZ]o[eë] ?[qQ]uinn` resulted in what appeared to be an automatic global shadowban. I verified this by asking "who is Zoe Quinn?" on a throwaway. When people say totally nonpermitted discussion they might mean something like that.
Not really. Perfectly polite non-offensive discussions of GamerGate and related topics were removed. Also completely polite dissent in comments from under multiple articles (on guardian and verge for example). KotakuInAction was only reddit thread allowed to stay - and was not allowed to mention gamergate initially.
Deletion comment of widely popular reviewer who screen-capped it and then tweeted to his followers was head scratching moment. Same happened to british journalist who was harassed in relation to the controversy. She commented under guardian article and her comment was deleted. She was kinda angry afterwards.
The existence of KiA doesn't prove that GG isn't being censored. It's containment, you can't talk about GG in any normal subreddit like /r/games or /r/gaming.
That and KiA was recently threatened a ban from the admins for their boycott campaigns against companies. Admins have said that you cannot link to a public representative of a company as it would constitute doxing.
It appears that the classification of any discussion at all, short of total condemnation was considered by many places to be "abusive". I have never in my life seen such aggressive comment-filtering, almost everywhere, as related to this topic.
It is a reaction to "sea lioning" where GG seems to be injected into every possible discussion and once flagged as off topic and removed the conspiracy theory of "censorship" is fueled.
Talking about GamerGate on any forum will get you the craziest vote brigading you've ever seen. My original post went from 8 upvotes to -1 in less than a day.
God forbid you use the hashtag on Twitter. It's like summoning demons from all sides of the argument.
I think GG and 8chan are the least of 4chan's problems if they were trying to sell. Constant loli, gore, and racist threads would be a far bigger turn off to a potential buyer. GG and 8chan threads were just banned because of his personal beliefs.
Yeah, i'm not sure how you would monetize a place like 4chan. Most high paying ads would likely shun it like the plague, so as to not have their brands forever socially tainted.
pure speculation, but I'm pretty sure brands which are already socially tainted by the general public (e.g. adult entertainment) would gladly take up 4chan for ad space and visibility.
They tend to get similar advertisers to sites like the pirate bay. At one point, they had duckduckgo advertisements but I was so cynical that I assumed it was just crap like the rest of the ads... never clicked on it.
Hasn't happened in a long time. I haven't seen CP on /b/ in probably 2-3 years. Granted, I'm not on it much these days, but it went from being something you'd see constantly to something you see rarely, if ever.
It's the legal loophole around CP at 4chan (luckily only at /b/). It's not clearly illegal so it doesn't get banned, but it's also obviously just drawn CP.
I'm not sure that selling 4chan is even possible. Despite the best efforts of its founder, it apparently isn't profitable, and no legitimate company with deep pockets will touch it because of its content. With 4chan being essentially worthless (because no one will buy it), the "something else" that is in play is probably his desire, in his late twenties, to do something that generates cash. He has likely leveraged his notoriety as the founder of 4chan into some other, more legitimate opportunity.
I'm excited to see what moot does next; seems like he's preparing for a big-ish transition in his life, after Draw Quest & 4chan. Maybe I'm wrong, but it will certainly be interesting to see what's next.
I founded 4chan eleven and a half years ago at the age of 15, and after more than a decade of service, I've decided it's time for me to move on.
4chan has faced numerous challenges over the years, including how to continuously satisfy a community of millions, and ensure the site has the human, technical, and financial resources to continue operating. But the biggest hurdle it's had to overcome is myself. As 4chan's sole administrator, decision maker, and keeper of most of its institutional knowledge, I've come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure.
I've spent the past two years working behind the scenes to address these challenges, and to provide 4chan with the foundation it needs to survive me by bolstering its finances, strengthening its infrastructure, and expanding and empowering its team of volunteers. And for the most part, I've succeeded. The site isn't in danger of going under financially any time soon, and it's as fast and stable as ever thanks to continued development and recent server upgrades. Team 4chan is also at its largest, and while I've still been calling the shots, I've delegated many of my responsibilities to a handful of trusted volunteers, most of whom have served the site for years.
That foundation will now be put to the ultimate test, as today I'm retiring as 4chan's administrator. From a user's perspective, nothing should change. A few senior volunteers—including 4chan's lead developer, managing moderator, and server administrator—have stepped up to ensure a smooth transition over the coming weeks.
I'll need time away to decompress and reflect, but I look forward to one day returning to 4chan as its Admin Emeritus or just another Anonymous, and also writing more about my experience running 4chan on my personal blog. The journey has been marked by highs and lows, surprises and disappointments, but ultimately immense satisfaction. I'm humbled to have had the privilege of both founding and presiding over what is easily one of the greatest communities to ever grace the Web. It was truly an honor to serve as 4chan's founding administrator, and I look forward to seeing what the next decade holds for the site.
On to the next chapter,
–moot
mootnote: I plan to dedicate this Friday afternoon (ET) to host a livestreamed Q&A session, where I'll hold court with the community one last time. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube page, and keep an eye out for a global message the day of. As always, I welcome and read all of my e-mails, and you may contact me personally at moot@4chan.org.
Eleven and a half years, in numbers:
42,176,061,890 Total pageviews
1,771,091,423 Total posts
1,071,189,182 Total visitors
620,125,147 Monthly pageviews
21,128,887 Daily pageviews
20,360,487 Monthly visitors
1,223,807 Daily visitors
2,838 Terabytes per month
105 Volunteers
63 Boards
1 Administrator
reddit is significantly smaller bandwidth-wise than 4chan. reddit doesn't host images. I don't remember exactly but when I left 4 years ago it was only single digit terabytes of outbound bandwidth.
"I founded 4chan eleven and a half years ago at the age of 15, and after more than a decade of service, I've decided it's time for me to move on."
That makes him 25 now.... and just to think, he's in a position to move on from founding, creating and running one of the web's most successful messaging boards.
Nobody actually knows. People have been banned for violations of the stated rules on each board despite not actually violating them, people have been left alone for flagrant violations of said rules. Board features like names, macros, and so on are toggled on and off more or less on a whim.
To say that 4chan's enforcement is inconsistent would be an understatement. But, the chaos is a feature, not a bug. Something to keep in mind.
But for everyone else, this is one of the reasons I think seriously that 8chan is the next big thing, it's basically Reddit, but for image boards. Mod abuse (real or perceived) will result in community fragmentation but on the same site, rather than exodus to other sites.
I think reddit has shown us quite conclusively that the "create-your-own-niche" paradigm simply leads to a series of over-specialized echo chambers with perpetually rising levels of groupthink and self-reinforcing, self-congratulatory posting. In other words I think reddit's architecture amplifies shitposting rather than mitigating it.
4chan isn't really different. Instead of taking your ball to another subreddit where you can now bully everyone who disagrees with you, 4chan just screams at you until you submit to the will of the board or you take your ball to some other website.
Reddit and 4chan are both pretty big echo chambers, it's just the way they (the users) maintain it that's different.
>Instead of taking your ball to another subreddit where you can now bully everyone who disagrees with you, 4chan just screams at you until you submit to the will of the board or you take your ball to some other website.
That's precisely the difference that I was referring to when I said that 4chan is more of a melting pot. Either people fit in and stay, or they don't fit in and leave.
By contrast, reddit (and I guess 8chan which I've never visited) operates on a "something for everyone" model which I find more irksome with each passing day. I'm sure it's a great model if you're trying to sell ads, but in terms of UX I think it's the pits.
Combine with the lack of anonymity and prominent karma scores, and you've got a recipe for constant regurgitation of lowest-common-denominator memes, shitposting, and cults of personalty.
That's why reddit is quickly becoming one of my least favourite websites.
I'd say that is hardly the case, there are plenty of specialized boards that allow folks with similar interest and passions to pursue those in ways that may not be possible outside of a specialized community. I'm sure you have some subreddits in mind when you make that statement, but to call fault to specialized communities for creating somewhat elitist attitudes and centralized opinions ignores the fact that less-than-specialized communities tend to have the same issues, though focusing even further away from the specialized interests addressed in specific subreddits.
Look, when everyone gets to be king of their own sandcastle, you obviously end up with a larger number of smaller castles. But the not-so-obvious consequence is that because people implicitly know they can just start making their own sand castle, it foments divisiveness because all of a sudden everyone "knows" they can do a better job moderating/curating/whatever, and they're sick of seeing $content_type in what they've come to see as their personal newsfeed.
IMHO the "benevolent dictator" style works better. People on 4chan complain, sure, largely as a consequence of no upvotes and complete anonymity from other users. But they also mostly just "make it work" when it comes to classifying content. On the tech board /g/, there's a surprisingly diverse stream of content that makes its way through. Because there's only one /g/ it all fits into one melting pot and the community is more vibrant and diverse as a result.
I think the same happens here on HN. A lot of different people with different tastes frequent this site. If it was simply "news for startup founders" or "javascript framework news" it would be a lot less interesting.
People on 4chan don't just complain, entire board subcultures have completely vanished along with the people in them. For example, /u/ used to be the unofficial lesbian advice and discussion board, and there was an entire community there co-existing happily with the porn posters and seekers. Got wiped out overnight by a new mod who decided the board should be solely for yuri porn, pissing off everyone in the process - and now the /u/ culture of that time is dead, with no record it ever even existed. (moot added a proper board for LGBT discussions a few years later for unrelated reasons.)
It is (was) moot's website. Other people aren't the ones who set the rules.
Since the design of the site has official topics for each board, you do have to set limits on what's relevant and make new boards when something new comes up. And it's not always possible to make new boards if you don't have mods for them.
In this case, mixing 2D and 3D can be dangerous. It's also a little unfair in that the yaoi board wouldn't be usable for the same thing.
> it foments divisiveness because all of a sudden everyone "knows" they can do a better job moderating/curating/whatever
That is a legitimate force, but it's canceled out by the fact that when you create your own sandcastle, no one comes to to visit it.
You can start your own subreddit, but it will be dead until you build an actual community there and that takes a ton of effort. In the meantime, it provides you no value—all the links on it are ones you yourself added, there's no discussion, etc.
I think the difference between Reddit and 8chan, the difference, is the lack of a voting system. Consider that Reddit, after any post has three more downvotes than upvotes (score of -2), by default, that post will be hidden. Most Reddit users browse not logged in (according to their own stats), and of those that are, most have this "threshold" option still turned on, and it leads to more echo chambering since views that are unpopular will simply go unseen. Another plague is that people will go through your comment history and attempt to use that to discredit you.
On any *chan style imageboard, this isn't a thing. You can hide posts that you don't like, but by design, all posts are equal. If someone posts something you don't like, your options are to ignore it or respond to it, but it's there, in the open, for all to see.
This, I think, is the better system, combined with the default anonymous posting style of these boards that completely ensures that any post is judged on its merits, rather than the identity of its poster. That's not say that board culture doesn't exist, it does, but it exists purely socially, rather than being a feature of the software. The things I've seen happening on YouTube and G+ and Facebook have convinced me that existence of a coherent identity has zero impact on people's behavior.
>Another plague is that people will go through your comment history and attempt to use that to discredit you.
I don't know that accountability is a bad thing. If you're so ashamed of what you're saying that you don't want people bringing it up later, don't say it. Or use an alt.
This can balance out the fact that it's an anonymous anything-goes site. Yes, people can say pretty much whatever they want but if they know they will get shamed for it later, it might prevent them sharing the worst stuff.
Not that I've seen. As far as the site goes, the rule appears to be "unless it's literally illegal or breaking the site, I'm leaving it alone", and everything else is in the hands of the subredd- sorry, sub-board mods.
I think this is the only legitimate stance to take when it comes to a UGC site that allows people to set up their own communities. The staff of each board should be responsible for their own moral compasses, with a minimum of interference by the folks upstairs unless it becomes absolutely necessary.
The existence of a doxxing board is distressing, but it's not against any law in the USA. I don't want it there, but I want hotwheels making decisions like that even less. I feel the same way about things like /r/beatingwomen (exactly what it says in the title) or /r/picsofdeadkids on Reddit.
You are also 100% incorrect about "only legitimate stance." Hotwheels needs to be clear about what his guidelines are; as long as it's clear what rules the communities operate under, and as long as people are free to decide whether or not they wish to create a community, it's certainly legitimate to have more restrictive rules.
"UGC site" is a red herring. I am creating UGC right now in the form of this post.
I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts that actual calls to swat people have been deleted on that board. But, I can't say for sure because I don't hang out there, and the events of GamerGate have me applying a shakerfull of salt to any negative press surrounding 8chan.
And as far as "incorrect", that is your opinion and it is your own, I have a differing one. I like the idea of a site where the admin has assured that they will not interfere with you unless they have to.
Really, did you miss the qualifier "that allows people to set up their own communities"?
And since I've hit the posting limit:
That is your opinion @zorpner, and nothing I can say will change it. We disagree, vehemently, on the whole "silence is complicity" thing.
@bryantd:
Because freedom of speech is a guiding principle, a human right, not just a law, and that guiding principle is a higher priority than people talking about societally-disapproved-of-things. The price of following that principle is that people can and will talk about things that some or even most people don't like.
The idea of cracking down on people discussing things because you personally find it distasteful is, to me, incredibly offensive. I don't like the idea of neo nazis or places where people post pictures of dead children, but I also don't think someone should have the ability to come in and say "No, you can't talk about that."
@bryantd again:
Ah, gotcha. In that case, no, I don't think there is a strictly different moral obligation in play.
I get that curated spaces are a thing, and I don't have an issue with those, but the problem I see a lot is that there are N stated rules in a space, but N+X unwritten rules and breaking them gets you in trouble, and oftentimes you don't know what you did wrong. This leads to the superficial projection of freedom of speech and an open community, but in reality, that is not what's happening. I.e. deception. And in an atmosphere of deception, censorship follows. Censorship, to me, being a greater evil than whatever someone could possibly be talking about.
That's the "why", because the moral obligation of free expression, IMO, is a few levels higher than most others.
Heck, even here on HN, this is a problem (though not NEAR as much as some other sites, thanks to Dang and PG and the rest). But still, we have shadowbans and post timeouts and opaque algorithms that kill posts before anyone has had a chance to read them.
I'm not asking why you think freedom of speech is a guiding principle and a human right. I get that and I agree that freedom of speech is incredibly important. I have spent a lot of mental time over the last few years thinking about that belief in relationship to my feeling that it's bad to cause pain.
This is not a simple problem.
However, it's also irrelevant to my question: why do you think that the admin of 8chan has a different moral obligation vis a vis free speech than the admin of Hacker News? You said that allowing people to set up their own communities was important, and I sincerely don't know why that makes a difference here.
It's OK with me if you misspoke, and you think that Hacker News should operate under the same principles as 8chan.
> I have spent a lot of mental time over the last few years thinking about that belief in relationship to my feeling that it's bad to cause pain.
I submit that the two are not in conflict. The first is a principle that all people should have this right. The second is moral guidance on the subjective application of that right.
People can use their rights for good or for ill. The key thing is that people have that right. It's not a right if someone else's subjective moral judgments can take it away.
> This is not a simple problem.
That depends. Why do you think there is complexity? At a guess, you think others should live by your principles, and so you are conflicted when they do not.
That is a poor guess. I think it's complex precisely because I don't think everyone should be forced to live by the same principles, and because I recognize that some principles conflict. People have been arguing about value pluralism for a while now, so I feel like I'm in pretty good company here.
If free speech wasn't fundamentally important to me, I wouldn't think it was a complex problem, I'd be happy to limit speech.
I like the idea of a site where the admin has assured that they will not interfere with you unless they have to.
If an admin chooses not to interfere, that does not absolve them from the responsibility of what happens on their site. If they had the power to remove it, and did not, they share in the blame for the consequences.
Are phone companies liable when criminals use their products to talk on the phone? Are the developers of encryption liable for ISIS encrypting their calls?
Call me when CNN and Fox News get sued for lying, and when Sony gets prosecuted for starting trivial lawsuits to stifle free speech.
First off, I'm talking about culpability, not liability. Conflating morality and legality (not to mention censorship and providing a platform) makes your entire post nonsensical.
And in the context of culpability, it's obvious that such a relationship only exists when the individual with the power to prevent bad action is aware of the action. So in this case, where Hotwheels is not only a participant in the relevant boards on 8chan but has expressed approval of what's happening, it's easy to hold him culpable (and probably liable as well, for what it's worth).
People who wish to discuss their neo-nazism can go open their own forum wherever they wish, at their own expense -- once the government stops them, we have a problem (assuming they're not actively violating any laws, etc). No one is obligated to host that content, and people who choose to host or continue to host that content are active participants in that behavior. Silence is not complicity -- knowing, and choosing to be silent, clearly is.
Of course, no hosting provider would be obligated to take their money to host them, and any that did would presumably be seen as active participants in their behaviour if they continued to do so, and the same with upstream providers of internet connectivity. So unless someone is willing to take a stand and host that content even if they're seen as complicit for doing so, then no they can't open their own forum anywhere on the internet.
Which wouldn't be so bad if neo-Nazis were the only ones affected, but sadly they're one of the groups least likely to be driven off the internet this way.
There's a pretty substantial difference between "I like the idea of a site..." and "only legitimate stance to take."
Can you explain why you think granting the ability to create a sub-board generates a different moral obligation, in your opinion, than granting the ability to create a new post?
Localism, or some generalization of that; it also feels like there's a kind of "principle of least privilege" here. Moderation should happen at the most local level where it's practical, with a community enforcing its own rules according to its own culture. Once you're offering a platform for people to build distinct communities on, you're assuming the position of an infrastructure provider or a government, and you have some of the obligations that go along with that.
Allowing posts on a single board doesn't carry that obligation, because that's not what you're offering; the individual posts aren't and aren't meant to be communities with their own culture. I would still say that moderators have a moral obligation to be open, accountable, and representative of the community they moderate (even if it's a community they didn't want or ask for), and HN does a particularly poor job in this regard (lobste.rs demonstrates that it's possible to run a site like this with an open moderator log).
OK, thanks -- that clarifies for me! And yeah; right now, for example, it's kind of awkward having this conversation because you've hit a post limit of some kind, which I gotta assume is a moderation thing. Irksome, since I think it's a good discussion.
FWIW, I agree strongly that unclear rules are bad. You should know what parameters you're operating under. I think there's some space for judgement calls, because it's really hard to write rules that cover all possible cases, but I also think it's significantly better to make those exceptions rather than SOP.
Sincere thanks for taking the time to explain. I will not burden you further with having to edit your posts to reply to me, and certainly feel free to drop me an email if you'd like.
Fredrick Brennan, the admin of 8chan.co/8ch.net, was born with osteogenesis imperfecta; he's spent his entire life in a wheelchair. He has endured broken bones over 120 times in his life. He is three feet tall. His arms are severely deformed and barely usable without enduring extreme pain. He was surviving in NYC without a personal care assistant on less than 1k per month. Despite these obstacles, he somehow managed to bootstrap his own project. He was on the verge of suicide before his site suddenly became successful last year.
His site fully complies with US law. He immediately removes illegal content as soon as he is made aware of it. He is happy to work with law enforcement whenever necessary.
He is beyond reprimand. As someone who is presumably an able-bodied white man with moderately wealthy parents, you're making your libelous and oppressive comment from a privileged position. You are also perpetuating a hate campaign against the differently-abled.
This hate campaign has included the following attacks:
- Ceaseless coordinated attempts to take his site down via false accusations to his hosting provider that he is supposedly hosting CP.
- Similar attempts to socially engineer his registrar into disabling his domain.
- Incredibly powerful DDOS attacks lasting weeks at a time, the most recent of which even took down his business partner 2ch.net for three days straight, which is the favorite site of approximately 20% of Japan. Imagine if reddit was brought down for 3 days because someone was angry about something that was uploaded to imgur.
- Attempts to destroy his livelihood and drive him back to the precipice of suicide by bullying sites like Patreon into pulling his funding; the goal being to leave him stranded, penniless, and homeless in the Philippines without a personal care assistant.
Separately, these are colossal nuisances. Together, they amount to a murder attempt by a ruthless, bigoted hate mob.
Perhaps the entrepreneurs amongst us don't like it when someone who the brutality of society would miscast as an ugly little man makes a site that isn't afraid of showing it's ugly side and garners moderate success in, if not financial but at least social acceptance and 'bootstrap' paradigms.
Frederick is an inspirational bloke and all these people casting aspersions on his character whilst lamenting m00t's departure for his cultural boldness, despite disagreeing with the content is pure hypocrisy.
Especially given the non-inclusive hate mob moniker attributed to GG by a genuinely terrible cabal of shoddy journalists and their transparent smears.
I believe common sense will prevail in all of this and there will be no victory fanfares or v-days - quietly the press will mature, the trolls will get bored and good websites and reporters will get justified clicks.
Why is he a horrible person? Because he was sick of participating on an imageboard where admins arbitrarily decide what does/doesn't get discussed, sometimes based on their personal beliefs?
Yes, that is the most likely reason for someone to think that he is a horrible person. Seriously, if you are interested in an answer you should just ask the question without answering it yourself with your strawman fantasy.
Funny because although I'm paraphrasing a little, it's precisely the reason why Brennan started 4chan. And he has more or less stated this multiple times in writing and through livestream. Christ, you can ask him this and he'll say that.
But I'm guessing blindly believing rampantly biased media surrounding the subject is more your style, right?
I don't know anything about the operator of 8chan. I was objecting to the way that you were asking your question. The form of Why? Because [some unjustifiable reason you made up that is one of many possible]? doesn't serve as a reasonable argument and it doesn't add anything to the discussion other than the slightly passive aggressive tone it has.
If you actually want to call it paraphrasing, I'll go ahead and say that it's an outright misrepresentation of the post you responded to, since it contained nothing to suggest that.
> But I'm guessing blindly believing rampantly biased media surrounding the subject is more your style, right?
Yes, there was a temporary domain seizure. Something like this impacts a lot of new *chan sites for the same reason (somebody posts something illegal on a corner of some board, reports it to authorities, entire site gets flattened).
Huh? There are countless examples of this happening. I can think of a dozen off the top of my head...
Of course it's not easy, but it shouldn't be easy. Mods spend a lot of time building up their communities. It should take an equal amount of work to create a competing subreddit.
Ha ha. 4chan is about as "deepweb" as http://fbi.gov. If you don't think all of its traffic is logged by law enforcement, then you are mistaken.
As for its moderation policy: NSFW content is actually prohibited on the majority of the site, including most of the high traffic boards. All of 4chan is not /b/.
/out/(doors) and /diy/ contain tolerably interesting content. The tech board contains somewhat more mixed quality.
Being anon, there's not much pimping for karma or upvotes or likes or whatever all over the rest of the web, making it refreshingly honest and realistic. You'll be disappointed if you're in the mood for headlines like "You'll never guess the top 5 things that happen after this headline ends in a rhetorical question?" clickbait sites or if you were expecting the prose of the New Yorker, but its not bad, mostly.
There is more to 4chan than /b/ /hc/ and /pol/, although media trying to do a hatchet job obviously disagree. The eternal "best camping knife" debate on /out/ is not going to generate clickbait headlines on mainstream media site unlike pretty much everything posted on /pol/, at least /pol/ in the old pre-censorship days.
I went to Startup School in New York last year and saw moot there. While outside between presentations, someone in the crowd called out "Chris, Chris Poole!" and some other memes at him. He seemed really put off by it and hightailed it out of there. I'd imagine he gets that often and could understand how that could be draining.
I would add that in the last couple years, the mood has gone from "4chan is a toilet" to "4chan is hurting people" to "CHRIS POOLE, OWNER OF 4CHAN, MUST BE PERSONALLY HELD ACCOUNTABLE." The tide has turned, he is probably being ostracized in social settings, and he is getting out while the getting's good.
That's something that I haven't seen mentioned yet: The last few years, Moot has appeared to have nothing but contempt for the people who post on his site. I imagine a decade of being marinated in the worst the internet has to offer would do that to anybody.
He did create that cesspit and allowed it to thrive and attract the dredges of society. Not until 6 or 7 years into the site did he decide to crack down on the cp posted there. He definitely deserves ridicule.
Does he deserve ridicule for creating one of the few big internet communities where free speech means something? I think he deserves some credit for enduring all these years of enduring the hate of anybody offended by something posted on 4chan.
He would, if he'd stood by it. But honestly, after everything that's gone down on 4chan over the years, he decides that gamergate is the line in the sand where he starts banning? That not only undermines any commitment to free speech, it puts the things he previously permitted in a different light - he believes in actively censoring certain legal discussion topics, but he allowed xyz?
moot created the cesspit that is 4chan's social culture like an agar filled petri dish creates microorganisms.
it's a funny concept to me that people should be held personally accountable for the possibly unlawful actions that people within their system take.
It saddens me that the proprietor of any site which prioritizes the users' freedom to be personally liable for their own actions are always painted broadly by the darkest actions taken by their user base.
"Moot>4chan>CP+Gore", or "Bitcoin>Silkroad>Drugs/Assassination" seems to be the most wildly echoed opinions, while totally ignoring all the positive points of any such system.
It's a shame, and will probably lead to all such systems being eradicated eventually.
I do think he deserves ridicule, but not for that. He stood up for the ideals of free, anonymous speech. He believed in it. But he eventually buckled under the weight of it. He was a hero for holding out as long as he did, but all heroes fall. What he's become now is worthy of ridicule.
1. it's impossible to satisfy this poster and their parent at the same time.
2. but both of them will hate you either way.
This leads to an important customer service technique I've learned, which is that if you slightly inconvenience the most difficult people they'll just leave and you'll be left with less demanding customers who will actually appreciate you.
If 4chan was a traditional for profit business, I would agree with you. That's not what 4chan is, though. Moot's given talks on the value of anonymous conversation. His view was that it's the only way to have truly free speech, free of racial, social or sexual bias. Where ideas and ideas alone are exchanged. I imagine his opinion on that has changed over the years. That's fine. But in the process, he alienated the very people he created the site for, his core audience.
Ridicule is a natural response to perceived betrayal.
PS: the downvote brigading here is getting out of hand.
I realize Chris is tired of dealing with the headaches of managing 4chan. But if he has effectively outsourced management of the site, why not continue to hold the title of president or whatever?
I wonder how much of his cachet he gives up by doing this (even though he still owns the property). Given his influence on the internet due to 4chan, moot can probably raise money for his next project with relative ease. Can Christopher Poole?
Hah, good point. That might be the only one that actually works.
However, it has an advantage in that it's rarely the start of a sentence (usually it will be The iPhone), and anyone using a Mac will have it autocorrect.
Somewhere in late 2014 there was a thread on the /int/ board joking about how moot was apparently having a relationship with a known "SJW" as they call it. Coincidentally, /pol/, the most ass annihilating board for politically correct types was ruined after the relationship leak, chaptas were removed and keywords were replaced with the political opposites.
After this, the /v/ board started calling moot a "cuckold", to elaborate, cuck has been a meme for the last few months on /v/ due to the huge rise of affairs and relationship problems in SGDQ 2014. Moot was ridiculed based on speculation from /int/, but most of all for ruining a controversial board dedicated to news and politics.
GG was never banned on 4chan, GG threads were deleted on /v/ since it was considered spam, the GG threads continued to strive on /vg/, the "video game general" board.
In the end Moot restored /pol/ after harassment from 4channers, which may be the reason moot is retiring.
When someone higher than you "retires" or goes otherwise inactive, yet still retains the power they hold, they inevitably come back. It's guaranteed. Even if it's only for a day. That doesn't sound like a problem at first, but it's a HUGE problem. Why?
Because new policies, rules or ways of handling things get enacted or evolve and those new things don't make sense to them. They haven't been involved with the day to day issues are not familiar with the new challenges the community has been facing. They forget that in community driven sites, the problems are dynamic and evolving. They think the community is exactly the same as when they retired. Only, it's not.
So when they come back they do away with the rules or new policies because "they don't make sense" or they're not needed. It sets the community back, or even destroying the new community all together. Some of the volunteers below them may get frustrated and/or quit because they just witnessed all their hard work get wiped out. Getting undermined by an out-of-touch owner/mod doesn't help the morale for the remaining volunteers.