7 ms·

The spin in this article is pretty interesting. 4chan has been a cesspool for years. The stuff highlighted in the article, the leaking nude photos of celeb, and

• breadbox 11y ago
  Sounds like what changed wasn't him or the events; it was the fact that the events were noticed by the world at large.
• exo762 11y ago
  > All of which made his decision to leave 4chan seem so confounding. "I've come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure," he wrote in his farewell post. What he really meant and why he was quitting were a mystery. Huge amount of pressure from outside to censor "the cesspool"? He, himself, has become a attack target. Something goes wrong -> "need" to censor 4chan arises -> people exert pressure on Moot. Repeat and repeat. And its not really about 4chan - it was mostly about Moot: just too much for singe person to handle. Nude pictures of celebs were not leaked by 4chan - it was leaked by 4chan user. 4chan was just a medium. Pics could be leaked anywhere with similar results (e.g. more attention to celebs in question). Harassment of game developers goes day and night on Tumblr, and nobody is doing anything about that. All other stuff you've mentioned are just things that happen in real life. Real life once again leaks to the Internet - stop the presses! As for harassment: its the REAL PROBLEM. But 4chan is guilty no more that Internet in general. Harassment campaigns are happening all the time and even lack of anonymity is not preventing such behaviour. Tim Hunt and Matt Taylor were ripped apart by crowds at Twitter, Tumblr, main stream media publications. People were driven to suicide by harassment on Facebook (and those cases landed in courts). There are shitty people who love being offended, being angry about some very subjective injustice; dignified agitation gives those people reason to breathe and makes them feel good. Internet brings those people together and helps them validate their own agitation and actions. Next they gang up. Its simple as that. Its a question of lack of empathy and echo-chambers enabling morons. Solution so far is only one - more privacy, less social networks. Avoiding the danger. Keeping political, professional and personal stuff separated.
  • mintplant 11y ago
    > Huge amount of pressure from outside to censor "the cesspool"? He, himself, has become a attack target. Something goes wrong -> "need" to censor 4chan arises -> people exert pressure on Moot. Repeat and repeat. According to the article, it wasn't so much attacks from outside to remove things that wore him down, as it was attacks from 4channers angry at removals.
    • exo762 11y ago
      "Single point of failure" means something very specific. System is told to have SPOF if there is a point, attacking which would cause disruption of operations. 4channers are ultimate benefactors of 4chan. Talking about SPOF in this context does not make much sense. 4channers were angry because moot has replaced all of moderators, totally changing moderation policies on the website. Their ability to pressure moot were and are limited to voting with legs (8chat) and bitching on boards.
      • calgoo 11y ago
        Hi is the single point of failure if he dies and 4chan goes down as no one else is able to control it.
      • astrange 11y ago
        More accurately, users are constantly angry because of conspiracy theories about website operation which they themselves made up. It can't be helped.
  • thelamest 11y ago
    You seem to be painting it as a choice between a libertarian free speech paradise and a totalitarian social justice hell, as if the problem was always and only in the offended.
  • sillygeese 11y ago
    > There are shitty people who love being offended, being angry about some very subjective injustice; dignified agitation gives those people reason to breathe and makes them feel good. Those people are psychopaths, and they're actually not even offended - they're just pretending to be. They just enjoy playing games, fucking with people, causing frustration/anger/arguing/confusion, etc.
• StavrosK 11y ago
  Do you have any details on the mass suicides? This is the first time I hear of that.
  • xyzzyz 11y ago
    I meant scores of people during 4chan existence, not at the same time.
  • com_kieffer 11y ago
    It's not mass suicides. It's individuals being egged on to "be an hero" and do it.
    • saalaa 11y ago
      To an hero.
      • 7Z7 11y ago
        Yes. "An hero".
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • lordsper 11y ago
      Weren't most of the suicides hoaxes? Like the "cut4bieber" hoax? I've never encountered one, but maybe that was "before my time".
• zxcvcxz 11y ago
  To be fair, early 4chan also did some good through project chanology. It's almost as if when you allow people to have freedom, they end up making bad decisions. You make a good argument against democracy.
  • xyzzyz 11y ago
    I don't think I'm making any argument against anything. There is a lot of good, interesting or valuable stuff that was created or originated at 4chan -- half of the internet culture for one thing, moot being chosen the TIME most influential person of 2009 another. Nevertheless, 4chan/b/ was always and still is a cesspool. I am not interested in discussing whether it's worth it to keep a place like this up, and if so, what should be the boundaries. I just wonder how exactly the climate around 4chan and moot has changed throughout the years, during which 4chan didn't change meaningfully.
    • hluska 11y ago
      Were you involved in 4chan in the early days? My experience with 4chan did change. As I mentioned in another post on this thread, I have aged significantly and that may be to blame. But /b/ in particular went from being a community where unrestrained creativity was rewarded to a community where unrestrained cruelty was. For me, the change was absolutely obvious, but again, I was in my mid twenties when 4chan launched and I'm 38 now...
      • zxcvcxz 11y ago
        I believe the NSA (and other organizations) are responsible for this. I believe there is a force actively preventing people on the internet from organizing political protests/ideas so that they can maintain a status quo. Even when political protests do happen, they're protests allowed by these organizations to give people a false sense of accomplishing something. The "RadFems" are a big part of the problem, but so are the "racists". Most of the people who do the dirty work are "useful idiots" who have no idea what's going on.
        • 11y ago
• jordigh 11y ago
  > like someone posting photos of girl they just murdered This one is mentioned in the article.
• hluska 11y ago
  I used to really enjoy /b/ - sure, there was always a lot of shit on there, but it was also the centre of absolutely unrestrained creativity. From memes so funny that they still crack me up, to sorting algorithms so novel that they changed the way I thought about solving problems. As I see it, two things happened: - I aged. I was in my mid-twenties when 4chan launched. Now, I'm in my late thirties. You won't understand how much the years 25 - 40 will change you until you've been through those years. - The community's standards changed. Back in the day, unrestrained creativity was rewarded. The last time I was on /b/, unrestrained cruelty was rewarded. I can't picture Gamergate happening in ~ 2008... --- The second point is likely a function of the first.
  • Karunamon 11y ago
    I've also been on /b/ since the early days, but I can't agree with your assessment. "Old /b/" was the place where posting pictures of animals being tortured (if the words "zippo cat" or "crush cat" mean anything to you - and yes, both of those things are exactly what they sound like) was a common occurrence. Cruelty was never seen as a negative as long as the community found the results sufficiently funny, shocking, or funny because they were shocking (via other people's reactions). To coin a phrase: /b/ was never good. If GamerGate were a thing that couldn't happen back in the early days, it's only because rallying behind a cause (regardless of what you think of its validity) that's "serious" rather than one that generates laughs would have never happened - it's got nothing to do with the acerbic nature of the community. Chanology was the first real break from that.
    • Vaskivo 11y ago
      I think these kinds of events became "bigger" and more noticeable because of the evolution of the web. First people just pointed and laugh. Then, as more not-so-private information became available, people were able to figure out where the target lived, worked, name and family. Things escalated to prank calls, ordering pizza to their homes or simply showing up at their door to point and laugh. But then came the social media boom. Facebook, Twitter, and every detail of a person's life was there for the pickings. Gathering information about a "target" got really, really easy. And it became easier to mock/attack too. You have an embarassing video, I'll put it in youtube and show it with all your frinds. I'll bombard your twitter with jokes, hate and all-around trolling. You could simply shut-down a person's online social life (which importance has been growing in the last years). What once was hard-work, now is easy. And with that, anyone can be an accomplished troll. I don't know about Gamergate, but if the Fappening had happened 5 years earlier, it probably wouldn't be as big as it got (media wise)
• Kapura 11y ago
  It's one thing if it's a single crazy posting photos of a murder victim, it's another if it's an ongoing war with the community over unacceptable content. Fappening/gamergate stuff was getting posted and deleted probably hundreds of times a day across several boards, then threads would pop up asking why moot and the moderation team were being fascists. It's the difference between a spoiled apple every few barrels and a truckload of rotting fruit. I can't imagine why ANYBODY, even somebody who embraces the positives of the pure id of the internet, would want to fight that fight alone. I also think that it's not quite true that 4chan hasn't changed during his tenure; as the population of certain boards have changed the nature and quality of their content has also seen a shift. /b/ once held that sweet spot of being able to generate and propagate large numbers of memes, but it has since grown much larger and appeals more to lowest common denominator type stuff. Meanwhile, smaller boards hit those critical population densities and begin to resemble /b/ of old.
• khalilravanna 11y ago
  I don't think there's much spin on the article to be honest. The article is mostly giving backstory on moot and 4chan or talking about "reprehensible" things that happened/originated on the site. > The article calls these "the good times", though. Actually the "good times" quote is the author referring to moot's "Summer of Chris", or his time away from the site. > The stuff highlighted in the article...is really mild compared to all the nasty stuff that happened before, like someone posting photos of girl they just murdered From the article: "Though Poole does find some 4chan posts 'reprehensible' — like when a murderer posted photos of his victim on the site..." > If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure. I think the site did change over the years. And I think the article even tries to make this point. I think the idea is that the sort of fappening/gamergate stuff wasn't there in the beginning. While the site has always been full of tastelessness and cruelty, I think it was the acts like this that drew a lot of attention and forced moot to confront 4chan's users. And that confrontation created the conflict and stress that finally drove moot away from the site.
  • pdkl95 11y ago
    > I think the site did change over the years. The site has changed, even though the site has always had people posting terrible stuff. If we call "c" the force of the people "crap" on the site, you could say there has been a gradual increase in c_{root-mean-square}, even though c_{peak-to-peak} hasn't changed much. This is probably an inevitable outcome of any unmoderated forum in the long-term. Small kernels of confrontation, hatred, and faction/tribalism are going to push away the more moderate posters, eventually concentrating the problem. edit: fixed leftover-word-from-previous-draft error
• worklogin 11y ago
  Wait, in GamerGate it was the activist journalists who were writing skewed articles that were the bad actors, wasn't it?
  • nyolfen 11y ago
    if you consider debatably 'skewed articles' as more considerable evidence of 'bad actors' than harassment campaigns, then yes