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I understand that many on HN want to defend 4chan. While I am a firm believer in free speech what I find fascinating is that they paint offensive and disgusting

I understand that many on HN want to defend 4chan. While I am a firm believer in free speech what I find fascinating is that they paint offensive and disgusting content as humorous and worth debating. That being said, the board disappearing or losing popularity to the point of unusability is significant in a couple of ways to me. The first is that the wild west of the internet is coming to a close. Everything is being watched and "safe havens"/"rotting pools" are threats to an organized leadership. The second is that these kinds of groups have staying power outside a name. Can they migrate to new ownership or will they stay? I personally believe that 4chan will slow to a crawl and eventually viewership will die out. The third is about trust. 4chan is not anonymous unless you are behind trusted proxies and/or share ip addresses with harmless strangers. However, since the data is stored on the site, they have free reign over what they can do with your content. As a result, 4chan is only a "safe haven" because it is notoriously caustic. A fourth thing I found interesting was that the solutions to the 4chan problem were financially motivated rather than technically. Selling passes or threatening slowdowns sounds like a bullying. Im confident there are ways to offload parts such as using torrents as the post/image/video database rather than keep it. Turning 4chan into a "protocol" rather than a "website". But Im not suprised the site will be put in this position. Its basically a place for people to look im the mirror and wank off. It will probably not evolve to anything more than a place of contreversy because thats what makes it successful. Theres so much goo that can come out of free speech but the only things 4chan attracts are insecure rodents that want to pretend they are bigger than they are.

orionblastar 10y ago
I don't know how to defend 4Chan, but not everything is racist or offensive on it. Reddit was like 4Chan for a while until they started to ban users and subreddits, and the users hated it. Free Speech means that even offensive and racist and sexists things can be said, if you censor that stuff then you don't have freedom of speech. The Feminist, SJW, etc movements want a safe space on the Internet and that includes censoring and banning people. They will get companies not to advertise on a site that they don't like. Reddit had to do that to get more advertisers, 4Chan might have to do that too, but they are losing revenue and haven't done it yet. Sure I'm against sexist, racist, offensive stuff. I used to be a troll on some sites, and a mock conservative using Poe's Law that people thought I was a real one. In a way I am still a troll on some sites, just not as bad as the ones on 4Chan and others. I remember Republicanville was founded to compete with the Daily Kos, but a lot of racists got on there and ruined it, and it shut down. It was because The Daily Kos had a censorship and banning policy and Republicanville did not.
- formula1 10y ago
  Many people want safe spaces not just far left movements. Do you think I want to go to a news site and the first thing I see is a post about white power? Freedom of speech is very hard to do without offending people which I imagine is better off being solved technically.
  - orionblastar 10y ago
    Problem is if we censor even one group then it is not free speech. I don't like racists or any other hate group. Some SJWs/Feminist attack men like the Twitter hashtag #killallmen and it does not get censored. That's sexist no matter what gender does it. There are technically solutions for it, like spam filtering, they can use racist words to filter online posts and hide them so nobody but the post that made them can see them, etc. Even like HN have a flag option to flag suspected posts. If you look at civil rights, it has equality for all races, genders, color of skin, etc. We have equality, but why does it not work? Yeah I don't want to go to a news site and read a post about white power either. I'd respond to them that it isn't my viewpoint, I believe in equality. Which would make them angry and post back attacking me. So news media companies have editors that control what stories they post, but it may or may not be a true story. It may be written for ratings to get more advertisers.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      While we're talking about technical solutions, I would like to tell you the story of the "Trolldrossel" (German for "troll throttle"). German hacker culture has a prominent pundit called Fefe [1], whose blog [2] is probably one of the most frequented blogs in Germany. He digs up interesting news items and offers light-hearted political and technological commentary, but he does not have a comment section. A few years back, Linus Neumann [3] built a version of Fefe's Blog [4] with a comment section, originally as an April Fool's joke IIRC. There was no moderation at all, and naturally, all the worst commenters flocked to it. They left it running because, as it turned out, the comment sections on the blogs where Linus contributed were now much more civilised. A few years into the project, they realized that they couldn't run the site without any moderation, but with no intent to monetize it in any way, they could not rely on manual moderation. Instead, Linus invented the "Trolldrossel": He modified the captcha such that it would randomly reject the correct solution, with the probability correlated to the badness of the comment. So if you wanted to post a civilized comment, you would only have to solve one captcha. But if your comment included racist keywords, you would have to retry 5-10 times. That method proved surprisingly successful in deterring the worst trolls, but the comment sections were still horrible. At least, they got a nice talk [4] out of it, including the interesting finding that the quality of a comment can be predicted very well by its compression ratio. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner [2] https://blog.fefe.de/ https://blog.fefe.de/ [3] one of the speakers of the Chaos Computer Club; see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Neumann https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Neumann [4] http::/blog.refefe.de (now defunct, but you can get a glimpse at http://realternativlos.org/31/; http://realternativlos.org/31/; the site now contains background information about the project, unfortunately only in German)
odessacubbage 10y ago
>While I am a firm believer in free speech what I find fascinating is that they paint offensive and disgusting content as humorous and worth debating. plenty of people seem to believe in free speech until it's used in a manner they don't like, you have to take the good with the bad. >A fourth thing I found interesting was that the solutions to the 4chan problem were financially motivated rather than technically. hiroyuki has a history of proclaiming dire financials in order to scare users into giving him more money it has long been alleged that he did similar with 2ch and niconico before selling the data of pass users, which is why he is no longer involved with either site. http://roninworksjapan.tumblr.com/post/151338674506/hiroykis-same-old-trick http://roninworksjapan.tumblr.com/post/151338674506/hiroykis... i'd argue that 4chan hasn't been free speech friendly for a number of years and has been dying primarily from poor moderation.
- formula1 10y ago
  I figured as much. This whole thing sounds very sketchy. Whats next is wether or not the users on 4chan will accept it. I imagine for how audacious they have been in the past that there will be some sort of push back. But I get the impression that a mass migration is inconvienient and with no leadership there wont be enough interest in new places

orionblastar 10y ago

I don't know how to defend 4Chan, but not everything is racist or offensive on it. Reddit was like 4Chan for a while until they started to ban users and subreddits, and the users hated it. Free Speech means that even offensive and racist and sexists things can be said, if you censor that stuff then you don't have freedom of speech. The Feminist, SJW, etc movements want a safe space on the Internet and that includes censoring and banning people. They will get companies not to advertise on a site that they don't like. Reddit had to do that to get more advertisers, 4Chan might have to do that too, but they are losing revenue and haven't done it yet. Sure I'm against sexist, racist, offensive stuff. I used to be a troll on some sites, and a mock conservative using Poe's Law that people thought I was a real one. In a way I am still a troll on some sites, just not as bad as the ones on 4Chan and others. I remember Republicanville was founded to compete with the Daily Kos, but a lot of racists got on there and ruined it, and it shut down. It was because The Daily Kos had a censorship and banning policy and Republicanville did not.

formula1 10y ago
Many people want safe spaces not just far left movements. Do you think I want to go to a news site and the first thing I see is a post about white power? Freedom of speech is very hard to do without offending people which I imagine is better off being solved technically.
- orionblastar 10y ago
  Problem is if we censor even one group then it is not free speech. I don't like racists or any other hate group. Some SJWs/Feminist attack men like the Twitter hashtag #killallmen and it does not get censored. That's sexist no matter what gender does it. There are technically solutions for it, like spam filtering, they can use racist words to filter online posts and hide them so nobody but the post that made them can see them, etc. Even like HN have a flag option to flag suspected posts. If you look at civil rights, it has equality for all races, genders, color of skin, etc. We have equality, but why does it not work? Yeah I don't want to go to a news site and read a post about white power either. I'd respond to them that it isn't my viewpoint, I believe in equality. Which would make them angry and post back attacking me. So news media companies have editors that control what stories they post, but it may or may not be a true story. It may be written for ratings to get more advertisers.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    While we're talking about technical solutions, I would like to tell you the story of the "Trolldrossel" (German for "troll throttle"). German hacker culture has a prominent pundit called Fefe [1], whose blog [2] is probably one of the most frequented blogs in Germany. He digs up interesting news items and offers light-hearted political and technological commentary, but he does not have a comment section. A few years back, Linus Neumann [3] built a version of Fefe's Blog [4] with a comment section, originally as an April Fool's joke IIRC. There was no moderation at all, and naturally, all the worst commenters flocked to it. They left it running because, as it turned out, the comment sections on the blogs where Linus contributed were now much more civilised. A few years into the project, they realized that they couldn't run the site without any moderation, but with no intent to monetize it in any way, they could not rely on manual moderation. Instead, Linus invented the "Trolldrossel": He modified the captcha such that it would randomly reject the correct solution, with the probability correlated to the badness of the comment. So if you wanted to post a civilized comment, you would only have to solve one captcha. But if your comment included racist keywords, you would have to retry 5-10 times. That method proved surprisingly successful in deterring the worst trolls, but the comment sections were still horrible. At least, they got a nice talk [4] out of it, including the interesting finding that the quality of a comment can be predicted very well by its compression ratio. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner [2] https://blog.fefe.de/ https://blog.fefe.de/ [3] one of the speakers of the Chaos Computer Club; see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Neumann https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Neumann [4] http::/blog.refefe.de (now defunct, but you can get a glimpse at http://realternativlos.org/31/; http://realternativlos.org/31/; the site now contains background information about the project, unfortunately only in German)

odessacubbage 10y ago

>While I am a firm believer in free speech what I find fascinating is that they paint offensive and disgusting content as humorous and worth debating. plenty of people seem to believe in free speech until it's used in a manner they don't like, you have to take the good with the bad. >A fourth thing I found interesting was that the solutions to the 4chan problem were financially motivated rather than technically. hiroyuki has a history of proclaiming dire financials in order to scare users into giving him more money it has long been alleged that he did similar with 2ch and niconico before selling the data of pass users, which is why he is no longer involved with either site. http://roninworksjapan.tumblr.com/post/151338674506/hiroykis-same-old-trick http://roninworksjapan.tumblr.com/post/151338674506/hiroykis... i'd argue that 4chan hasn't been free speech friendly for a number of years and has been dying primarily from poor moderation.

formula1 10y ago
I figured as much. This whole thing sounds very sketchy. Whats next is wether or not the users on 4chan will accept it. I imagine for how audacious they have been in the past that there will be some sort of push back. But I get the impression that a mass migration is inconvienient and with no leadership there wont be enough interest in new places