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"not just spam, but gore, cp, raids, etc." (I'm assuming cp means children) "The good news is that I've recently returned to 4chan as a regular, anonymous user

• puredemo 11y ago
  cp is photos of chris poole
• aerovistae 11y ago
  I like to see it from the outside, where you only get linked to the "best of." 4Chan can be extremely hilarious sometimes; some of the funniest content I've seen on the internet is from 4Chan. But spending any real time there looking for that content, waiting for it, that's a waste in my eyes.
  • valarauca1 11y ago
    A lot of it is the anonymous culture, the idea that discussions can be based soley on the contents of message not the poster's history. This creates good content and interesting discussion. Its just learning to adjust your signal to noise filters.
  • LLWM 11y ago
    If you see the appeal as only "looking for content," we are glad you stay out.
  • ionised 11y ago
    I hate the ubiquitous use of the word 'content' to describe absolutely anything on the internet now. As if it belongs behind some kind of gate with locks that we should all feel priveleged to have had access to.
    • aerovistae 11y ago
      Check out this definition, the second one on dictionary.com: content: something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts: Do you get it now? Is this still a problem? I think you probably just didn't know what the word meant.
• bdcravens 11y ago
  Both Reddit and 4chan have areas that provide value. Kinda like how every major city has drugs sex trafficking as well as an arts district and fine dining.
• ases 11y ago
  As someone who casually browses 4chan (at least some of the less major boards, certainly not /b/) I've got to say that I've never really seen any particularly awful content. Either it's not as ubiquitous as people think or the janitors are really, really good at their jobs. It's all very silly, of course. But the anonymous thing is fun and I've had some interesting debates where I can just test ideas and say whatever for the hell of it without worrying about any kind of repercussion in terms of my reputation. It's easier to go in guns blazing being wrong and learn something without feeling that it's personal when no one has a name.
  • austenallred 11y ago
    Most people think 4chan is /b/, because that's where all the worst stuff happens. Imagine if reddit had an "anything legal goes" subreddit - it would be pretty messed up. Other boards can be pretty tame.
    • dmerrick 11y ago
      Reddit actually does have a number of these. I'm not sure I want to link any, though.
      • Crito 11y ago
        Reddit has subreddits dedicated to the foulest stuff that you'll ever occasionally see on 4chan. That has historically included borderline illegal content, with literally illegal content mixed in. Reddit's reputation of being better than 4chan is entirely undeserved.
        • wingerlang 11y ago
          Why are people comparing reddit and 4chan anyway? They are two completely different sites.
          • austenallred 11y ago
• EarlPoncho 11y ago
  cp is chill people
• icebraining 11y ago
  Not everyone considers "deviant" a pejorative word :) 4chan is honesty where most everything else is façade. I enjoy the feel, even if not every day.
  • krapp 11y ago
    4chan isn't "honest". Anonymity without consequence might make honesty easier, but it makes deception easier as well.
    • icebraining 11y ago
      Oh, I didn't mean to imply I believe what I read or see on 4chan; it's more about the way people interact with each other. Like I said, it's more of a feeling than anything else.
      • arrrg 11y ago
        You mean people are super-abrasive and think that’s just normal? I don’t think that’s honesty, that’s being an asshole.
        • derefr 11y ago
          By "honesty", I think the GP meant that people get to act like assholes when they want to act like assholes, rather than feeling like they have to hold in their feelings based on how an outburst might affect their reputation. Those same people then go on to have perfectly friendly and nice conversations (or at least the bar-room-poking-fun equivalent) in other threads. To me, that seems pretty "honest": you get to see the full range of human emotion that should be statistically-likely for a large group of people to be experiencing at any given moment, rather than just the faces people want to present to the world. Assholish outbursts stick out because they're unusual compared to reputational society, but I don't think those outbursts are incentivized; they're just represented within the corpus at the same rate that people are actually feeling them, rather than hidden away and kept secret. (Though, there might be a bit of a reverse-causation where people visit 4chan when they're angry to let off steam, because they know it won't affect their reputation. That could explain away quite an increase in the representation of assholes.)
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• nickysielicki 11y ago
  I'm reminded of one of my favorite internet-related posts, The Great On-Line Equalizer. https://subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles2/X0095_The_Great_On-Line_Eq.html https://subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles2/X0095_The_Gr... Here's the tail end, I think it's relevant: The Internet is a perfect reflection of the world at large. It has everything in it except homeless people and that's only because they can't afford the monthly hookup charge. The Internet is scary to people because it TRULY makes everyone equal. All the people who are invisible in the normal world (the world run by the rich and powerful), all those people you can dismiss on the street as powerless and harmless -- ALL THOSE PEOPLE are now in your face. You can feel their hot breath on the Internet. It's called "humanity." America was invented to empower those people. It's just taken this long to find out how to do it. After all, the Net is just telephone lines, computer screens and satellite hook-ups. It's purely technical. Its only purpose is to bring the real world into focus. Anyone who opposes that should go back and read the Declaration of Independence. I don't visit 4chan but I believe there's definitely value to seeing people anonymously post their thoughts. Whether they're saying something true or whether they're just trying to get a reaction, to get a look at what people will say when they're totally unhindered by any social norms or repercussions is very interesting. The thoughts that people are normally afraid to share are usually wrong, but sometimes people are afraid to share ideas that are right, as well.
• JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > "The good news is that I've recently returned to 4chan as a regular, anonymous user, and I'm really enjoying it." > I've never visited the site, and really don't want to. So maybe I'm missing something, but why would you want to associate yourself with a place like that? > I see people post screenshots on Reddit sometimes and it seems pretty deviant. As depicted in some screenshots people post on Reddit. (One thing that helps: look at the background of the screenshot. By default, a blue background indicates a "safe for work" board, and that's well-known enough that people sometimes use the term "blue board".) And yeah, a subset of it is, including several entire boards. 4chan features the full gamut of what you could expect from the Internet, or humanity in general. The quote about Usenet and "a herd of performing elephants" applies quite well there. And like the broader Internet and culture in general, the quality of content varies massively. However, the bet of what 4chan has to offer includes some amazing content, much of it original, and only a small subset of that makes it to the outside world. A huge number of Internet memes start there. People create impressive original art, sometimes drawn on the fly and posted in response to others nearly in real-time. Despite the name "image board", people write and share huge walls of text there too. People tell stories ranging from side-splittingly hilarious to heartwarming. (Yes, really, 4chan can do "heartwarming" on occasion.) And much of the best content gets saved in screenshots, files, and wikis, and re-posted later. (Its transient nature has as much to do with its culture as its anonymity.) For one of many examples, the tabletop gaming board /tg/ has quite an impressive array of content. People develop campaigns and settings there, run games on the board, design games, produce interesting original writing, post stories of gaming adventures, and otherwise produce an astonishing amount of original content. You can go there if you run a game and you're looking for material or inspiration, or if you just want to laugh at a pile of nerdy jokes and enjoy some interesting stories. And note that /tg/ is considered a "safe for work" board, and the moderators do enforce that. Also see the TED talk from Christopher Poole ("moot"), which mentions several more interesting stories. 4chan does have a large amount of "background radiation" to ignore, and portions of its culture can be quite toxic. It's not in any way a curated collection of content. But parts of it can be awe-inspiring, useful, and fun.
• janny_throwaway 11y ago
  Unlike reddit, 4chan is not a popularity contest. There are no likes or upvotes that dictate what you see; everyone in a thread sees the same content. Furthermore, there are no persistent identities, so you have no way of gauging the value of someone's post other than by examining its content. I think this dynamic is what made 4chan such a creative force: the only way for a post to "live" longer than one thread was to make it memetic, remixable, broadly applicable. What I really like about 4chan nowadays is the pace. When a new episode of my favorite show is out, or when the Super Bowl is on, or when a presidential candidate says something stupid, I know there will be a thread about it. At times, it's almost like we're all in the same room together. Having browsed for 7 years now, it really does feel like home to me.
  • CuttlefishXXX 11y ago
    >Having browsed for 7 years now Most people I've talked to had their first exposure to 4chan (well, just /b/ really -- it takes some time to discover that there's more to 4chan) at an age of around 16, so I'm going to guess you're about 23 years old now. Am I right?
  • moron4hire 11y ago
    I don't think the lack of upvotes means there isn't still a popularity contest going on. There is still a lot of posting done just to try to get as big of a reaction as possible out of people. Some people even talk about their activity on 4chan through other side-channels, like IRC or even in-person. People brag about their exploits to other people. It may not have a number attached to it, but it's really nothing but a popularity contest.
    • hyperion2010 11y ago
      I have one word for you. Unidan.
      • ossreality 11y ago
        lol, I have one word for you: that means nothing.
• MichaelGG 11y ago
  Apart from the cp, which is very rare as an end user of /b/, I find it entertaining. There's a lot of crap to wade through, but some of the humorous content really is quite funny. 4chan seems to have contributors that really get the chaotic-feeling, disjoint sense of humor - whereas Reddit seems overwhelmed with puns and catchphrases (OK /b/'s obsession with "rolling" (looking at last digits of post number) is just as lame). I enjoy the "deviant" stuff, too, if only to marvel at the strange things people get up (and perhaps off) to. And why not, if it's an interesting experience? The raids are sometimes amazing examples of performance art (and fit the sense of humour rather well). As another user pointed out, viewing "best of" is probably a more efficient approach, and let's you avoid some of the crap. But there's something enjoyable about being there, in the moment something is happening.
• louithethrid 11y ago
  Because that is a few into what humanity is really made off. In that hellhole, you can not get high on any ideology. You can not delude yourself. Its the ugly mirror. You look into it to understand, to cut yourself on the shards to find out what you are made from. Sure you can distance yourself from this. But the human nature from whos understanding you distance yourself, is what makes up your team, its what might create your software. Not wanting to know, because its ugly, can get ugly in itself.
• JesperRavn 11y ago
  4chan (and it's successor 8chan) mix two tendencies. One is to post horrible or strange things for the sake of it. The other is to post things that have some validity or purpose, but would be censored in other places. Now clearly what things one puts in what categories are very subjective, but there are certainly people who claim to belong largely to one or the other group (as well as neither). But so far there hasn't been an approach to allow the second category but not the first, so people who have views that don't fit into the mainstream (mostly on the political right) tend to congregate at this sort of place.
• ascendant 11y ago
  As with most things, the truly terrible stuff is a minority of users. There are lots of areas on 4chan that are completely harmless and people just discussing mundane, boring stuff that they deem interesting.