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4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

65 points by artsandsci 8y ago

mabynogy 8y ago
/g is interesting especially /g/dpt (the daily programming thread). Today's thread: http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/66170997 http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/66170997
Shank 8y ago
> Yet this cannot last. At 15 years old, 4chan has reached adolescence. Up till now, trolls—children—have been in control. It’s not so funny anymore. After all, even the lost boys had to grow up. Just because one can write that it cannot last doesn't make it so. Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything. Facebook is 14 and Twitter is 12 and that doesn't say anything about them. They all have their own problems, but if this age metaphor is to work, then 4chan should be "more mature" than its younger siblings. It isn't. 4chan is also not going anywhere fast. Someone seems inclined to still pay for the servers, and until that time stops, it's probably going to say well and truly the same. That's just what you get when you have an anonymous imageboard. But, even if something happened and 4chan shutdown, you'd still have any number of chans that still exist as clones. It's trivial to find them. You can close the pool, but there are infinite pools to close.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zeperoni 8y ago
  Adding to this, it's not a static group of people on there growing old together. There is a a consistent group of adolescents reaching troll age and joining in.
  - tossandturn 8y ago
    Yeah, I was on 4chan as a 16yo-20yo regular lurker starting back in 2004; never an active poster, just commenting randomly and joining in conversations on various boards. It was a decent anonymous community, sometimes I'd wander over to /b/ and it would be like walking past an apartment building at night and seeing completely random (sometimes disturbing) things going on through all of the windows; lurking on /b/ was the online equivalent of being an active peeping tom in a neighborhood without curtains. When moot sold the domain a few years ago to a former 2chan admin, I noticed it barely changed. But I haven't really visited much since 2009 or so...
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  The more facebook and twitter and youtube censor their users, the more gravity will shift to 4chan, it's the law of conservation of speech on the internet.
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    Between 2003 and 2015, the worldwide internet penetration rose from 12% to 44%, that's 2.4 billion more internet users, but somehow there is a "conservation law of speech"?
  - Density 8y ago
    Yep! I'm one of the censorship refugees on /pol/.
- abhiminator 8y ago
  > Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything. Drawing parallels between the two exemplifies poor analogous journalism on the part of WIRED. > The internet makes sense in metaphors. (from the article) No, it does not. However, it helps immensely in crafting the opening salvo of a clickbait-y article to drive site views.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    > poor analogous journalism on the part of WIRED. Has Wired ever been known for good journalism? It's pretty much always been tabloid level: shallow articles on most subjects with pompous headlines.
- taneq 8y ago
  > Someone seems inclined to still pay for the servers It kind of seems like a tradeoff between creating a focal point where that kind of individual can congregate (keeping them away from 'normal people') and maintaining a cesspool where that kind of individual breeds. Depending on what's actually happening (and even figuring that out would be an interesting research project) other major sites might even be bankrolling it to help keep their own sites cleaner.
  - Anon1096 8y ago
    4chan is paid for by its users through the 4chan pass and through advertisers, both companies and individuals. It is most likely barely more than solvent or losing money. 4chan's funding isn't a secret that needs to be investigated.
- lainga 8y ago
  I got shades of the endless 2016-era "this means Trump is FINISHED" articles.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    By any reasonable standards he should have been, the mistake was expecting reasonable standards.
    - Density 8y ago
      You're so ridiculously out of touch thanks to lefty censorship, Jewish media and echo chambers.
      - dang 8y ago
        We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- qop 8y ago
  Who says it isn't mature? Is it immature because it doesn't fit your content expectations? Reminder that after 15 long years of chaos, it still exists. It's a very specific, essentially impenetrable market of 4chan users that can't really be pushed away except by catastrophic mismanagement. The features of the site have stabilized and reacted to user demands over the years, and though good boards (/prog/ :( and others) have been terminated, lovely discussion still happens. 4chan isn't selling your identity to data scientists. 4chan doesnt fail whale every few moments, 4chan doesn't have a huge amount of bot accounts relative to human users, though I'm sure there are some. People love to hate 4chan because there are deplorable users that use it, but it's just disingenuous and dishonest to make the claim that 4chan isn't a good product in terms of capturing their desired users. The fact that so many other chans exist is a testament to the success of the format. Reddit has an entire sub reddit /r/RedditAlternatives, which I think accomplishes the same thing: letting reddit know "the product is good, I just don't like YOU." The difference is that 4chan is a very strong anchor of all chan-related traffic, outside of Japan and Germany. "competitors" don't really pose an existential threat, but rather a topical, and therefore fallible threat of feature envy or fashionable content envy. Disclaimer: I haven't used 4ch since the /prog/ days, but I check in now and then, and lo and behold, it still exists.
  - tomatotomato37 8y ago
    >4chan isn't selling your identity to data scientists That's actually questionable now since Hiroshima bought the site. Some weird scripts were added that were heavily obfuscated and killed the CSS if you didn't let them run. Luckily the innate computer paranoia of /g/ meant this was caught and worked around in less than a day, but it's still pretty sleazy. Also Google captcha is needed to post, so there are the standard two Google scripts running too
    - qop 8y ago
      A little ad-tracking here and there isn't necessarily foul play. Sleazy, sure. That's not the same as unfettered, cataclysmic access to tens of millions of users personal lives. I think what makes the Facebook thing so awful too is that people have a rather reasonable expectation that private things remain private, whereas the average 4chan user maintains some degree of privacy by merit of not identifying themselves. If it really came to it and if there was a concerted effort to at least maintain some integrity of the identifiability of what got collected, most 4chan users wouldn't leave the platform if there was a basic ad-tracking layer built. 4chan needs money, they all know that. Sometimes you gotta play the game a little bit, if it was done right, they'd play. Disclaimer: I'm not a data scientist, so I'm not really an expert here...
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  Holy shit, Twitter is just 3 years younger than 4chan?!
no_one_ever 8y ago
This is a really sensationalist article. I'm not going to ignore the parts of 4chan highlighted by the article, but there are some really good boards you can visit where the level of discussion is far superior than what you would find in most corners of today's popular forums. Personally I don't participate in any conversations, but I'll read the threads on the boards I find interesting. If anything, 4chan is an authentic reflection of the internet's user base. You'll find both gold and garbage depending on what you visit and frequent. It is unfair to broadly paint the site as only containing the worst of human nature. If you were to similarly depict other popular websites like Reddit in the same fashion, you would get something just as horrifying.
zhte415 8y ago
> There isn’t darkness without the light, it seems. So it’s probably fair to say 4channers are, at least a little bit, right: Their haven is the soul of the internet, the deep source of its sights and sounds, for worse and, occasionally, for better. I couldn't see much notable in the article, aside from a negative slew at the start, and some 'the other side of the coin' in the above quote. 15 years is noteworthy, however, and I'm surprised so short, as I started visiting it back in 2003/2004; it seemed about as busy then as today. 4chan hasn't changed much from an external perspective. Traffic has probably been at stable levels for years, while the price of traffic has fallen. I quite enjoy it's existence. There is a great diversity between message boards. Some are the reverse of b and pol highlighted in the article, as is the case on Reddit. Anonymous can be good. a la Hacker News's freedom of registration.
- stats-then-now 8y ago
  >Traffic has probably been at stable levels for years, while the price of traffic has fallen. Absolutely not! Please take this the wrong way, but I don't see how an old friend could have not noticed the MASSIVE increase in traffic (and the problems it brought). Here's some official 2005-2013 traffic statistics from the 10 years anniversary panel I compiled just to prove you wrong: https://i.4cdn.org/s4s/1527869817275.png https://i.4cdn.org/s4s/1527869817275.png Cheers.
  - zhte415 8y ago
    The stats - Incredible how anaecdotal observation and recall differs. Bias too: Perhaps I'm not viewing the site as a whole and new boards, increased linking, whatever, thanks for stats. Old friend - Certainly. The fact the idean of anon is default (though optional) means each post can be besed on it's on value / meritocrious as it carries no internet points of the 'owner'. Anarchy, but the negative that term often brings should not be carelessly and automatically applied.
    - stats-then-now 8y ago
      Yes, that's actually very interesting to me, since I've never heard that from anyone before. Do you happen to have a small secluded place for a homeboard? Are you /jp/ or something like that? I've noticed over the years that the bigger a board grows (see /b/, /pol/, /v/) the worst the quality and serious discussion gets, and the more funposting there is. Every year people complain that their boards are getting worse, part of it is just those people growing older, but the other part is the community becoming larger, different, and noticeably more mainstream.
izzydata 8y ago
As someone who has frequented 4chan for nearly 15 years I don't think you want 4chan to die for many reasons. If 4chan is gone then all of the time people spend there will be spent somewhere else. Maybe the internet is too far gone to be significantly impacted, but I'd rather not test it. Most of 4chan boards aren't really that bad though.
- bluetidepro 8y ago
  > Most of 4chan boards aren't really that bad though. This is an important note that I feel like not enough people understand. Too many people just think 4chan, and then think of all the messed up stuff on something like /b. There is lots of stuff on 4chan that is completely normal and not toxic/illegal. Although, I will admit that I usually just browse reddit, personally.
  - pscnv 8y ago
    There is nothing illegal in 4chan, and if there is, it gets removed quickly.
- chillingeffect 8y ago
  I've been there almost as long, and it's true most boards are boring. I like the diy and music boards, for example. But it seems you're "implying" that if we weren't there we'd be somewhere else the same or worse. I suggest there are many better places we could be. What we do there isn't a function of ourselves alone. We are a midpoint between ourselves and our environment. I would much rather go the playground and kick a soccer ball around or play basketball, but there isn't one around open after dark :( And I can't stand the egoic virtue-signaling/posturing on fb so I go to 4chan to get a more down-to-earth conversation experience. If i melt down on there, no one cares. My FB world is completely uptight and ready to ostracize on a hair trigger. Of course 4chan is also full of people faking badassery, but it's not attached to individual egos. That's what's amazing about anonymity that moot could never articulate: it doesn't make much sense to lie, because it doesn't really increase your standing because no one knows who you are! So people are much more honest and forthright. yes, that's often ugly, but it's better to know about than to fear it. Now the part that anonymity doesn't solve is that although the individual ego is dissolved, the way is paved for group egos to form. And as we've seen, especially on /pol/, these collective identities have flourished.
josefresco 8y ago
Indeed, nearly every evil of the internet begins, or picks up steam, on the site. To invoke yet another metaphor: It’s a breeding ground. (The fact that 4chan has been called so many things suggests a feeble attempt to make sense of chaos.) Many of the recruitment techniques of the so-called alt-right were piloted there; many white nationalists started out as 4channers. It’s unclear if or how one ages out of the site—but it is clear that it unleashes trolls on the real world. Sounds like a great place.
- taneq 8y ago
  They're ignoring the fact that much of current internet culture also originated there.
  - josefresco 8y ago
    Current Internet culture is toxic so yeah - I guess that makes sense. 4chan was all fun and games until it started effecting people IRL. Swastikas are only funny when there's no chance they'll infiltrate the real world. When nazis are being elected, it's not so funny anymore.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    Seems to be something people repeat for the 'anarchic creativity' narrative rather than an actual truth.
    - SiempreViernes 8y ago
      I think knowyourmeme can attribute quite a few memes to 4chan, and the traditional account is that both Anonymous and the alt-right was spawned there, so they certainly did contribute to internet culture. The question is really how many lolcatz do you need to balance out one radicalized incel?
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    Yes, I'm sure r/memeeconomy and other very serious and important people are grateful.
deft 8y ago
How many of these anti-4chan articles are written by people that regularly use it? I'm guessing zero. 4chan is an interesting site and has better discussion from a broad userbase than reddit or here. Plenty of interesting projects were born out of 4chan, particularly /g/ but the other boards have created valuable things for humans in general, not just internet culture. The positives IMO come from the whole "FREE SPEECH" attitude, that also leads to the negatives. 4chan's soul is in trolling, memes and productive creativity. They go hand in hand. Try using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about. It's exactly like reddit, everyone says stay away from the defaults. In 4chan's case, stay away from /b/, /v/ and /pol/ and you're unlikely to see anything graphic or demeaning beyond general discussion boards... Projects I know that were born on 4chan: tox.im - /g/ TurtleCoin - /biz/ NetRunner - /g/ Others mentioned in the article, notably project chanology. Editing this comment just to say that my point wasn't that toxicity, racism and sexism are okay to just ignore... my point was we already ignore that everywhere else on the internet. Look at youtube or reddit comments. If you can't see how it's the same you're just better at ignoring it on your platform of choice. I'd say it's more concentrated on 4chan yes, and I've probably gotten pretty good at filtering it out myself. But this problem is all over the internet and writing a piece about how 4chan "needs to grow up" isn't much of a revelation. The whole internet needs to.
- llccbb 8y ago
  Has tox matured into a usable system? I last tried it about two years ago and had too many problems with setting it up to suggest it to friends. Looking for a good non-centralized encrypted video chat.
- rarec 8y ago
  There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason. Seems that they also contain any outside perspective on the site as well. /b/ and /pol/ are particularly egregious, but they're worth suffering to live if it means I can keep /g/ and /tg/. The open format of the site also, while it does contain a lot of posting, does have a curious cross contamination effect. You may learn about an entirely unrelated thing on accident, for good or ill.
  - 8y ago
local_yokel 8y ago
Summary: grouchy suburban dad who realizes he isn't cool anymore shakes fist at rebellious neighborhood kids, shouting that they need to grow up. Why is it that whenever a mainstream site like Wired pumps out an article looking down their noses at some "problematic" online community, it's immediately obvious that the author has never been part of said community and instead bases their overly simplistic views on an hour of research.
- 0x00000000 8y ago
  Purely optimized for clicks and shares. Also, any amount of perceived approval of something controversial will get a nuclear reaction from Twitter demanding the author's job or going to the advertisers saying "look at this stuff that they are okay with!"
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    It's on the font page of HN so clearly it works
  - mikec3010 8y ago
    >a nuclear reaction from Twitter Ironic isn't it? Author can't express a particular view about a website that became popular because it protects people from the consequences of expressing unpopular views.
AJRF 8y ago
> "The design remains proudly undesigned" I've always thought 4chan was beautifully designed. Its hyperfunctional in a way that wired.com designers will never know because they are too busy injecting ads into every inch of available space.
- Ono-Sendai 8y ago
  It's not that well designed. Replying to comments, for example, is not very intuitive.
- bluthru 8y ago
  I wish the comments would nest, even if it's just one level like Stack Exchange.
  - matheusmoreira 8y ago
    There are 4chan browser extensions which have this feature.
m0ck 8y ago
wow, this is an example of some horrible, horrible journalism. I could tell after first two paragraphs, that the author did not spend more than 15 minutes on the site itself and most of her "facts" come from lazily googled trivia. I spent more time, than I'd like to admit on this and similiar imageboards. I still visit it semi-regulary (only fitness board nowadays), but this description as place where only edgy teenagers go to bully other people is plain wrong and misdirecting. Will you be judging Reddit next, solely by /r/politics, or /r/The_Donald, which both are terrible communities? Because that's what you did, with mentioning only /b/ and /pol/ as the core of 4chan. My advice for the author: LURK MOAR :)
- fareesh 8y ago
  So many of these "journalists" are just filing stories with barely any research because there are no consequences. When you pick a topic like 4chan and you are criticized, absolutely nothing will happen to you. In fact, all you need to do is say "racists and misogynists are after me" and you will become the next story. There will invariably some subset of clowns who say hateful stuff on social media, and they will be held up as the norm. The media has also turned up their "if you criticize our work it means you hate a free press" sensitivity meter, so as such there will never be any consequences for poor quality journalism unless the problem is fixed at the editorial level. There is no incentive to do it though.
Nadya 8y ago
>4chan has never been a nice place. Most people don’t spend time there Imagine a place where people don't take things that seriously and things are just weird enough that the inside jokes keeps all the outsiders out and alienated. Everyone else is sitting around the virtual campfire telling jokes and sharing stories. 4chans all reaching (and not-just-/b/-and-/pol/) bad rep comes largely in thanks to people who obviously don't browse 4chan or have only taken a look at /pol/ or /b/. They took a passing glance, maybe for a day or two, saw nothing but inane bullshit, and (justifiably) moved on with their lives. 4chan has a lot of shit, I don't deny that and I don't blame anyone for not having the desire to wade knee deep in it. Although wading through only the deep end of it skews perspectives heavily. Notice how this article purposefully cherrypicks boards like /pol/, /h/, and /y/ instead of the less egregious boards /g/ (technology), /o/ (automobiles), /his/ (history), or /co/ (comics). One would leave with the idea that 4chan is nothing but a place for hentai and alt-right hate groups. Even among itself /b/ and /pol/ are disliked among the site. They're considered containment boards that prevent other boards being shit up. But one wouldn't understand the concept of a "containment board" if one doesn't browse 4chan. In fact - most articles about 4chan don't even use the term "containment board" because the authors never lurk long enough to discover the term. >There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online Are they talking about pre-Usenet days? I don't remember a time online when trolls didn't really exist. >And because each message board is limited to 10 pages of posts, most messages get bumped off the server within a day, if not hours. It’s pretty much unusable for the uninitiated. This is by design. Hence "Lurk more." Imagine trying to jump into an hour old conversation having heard only the past 10 seconds of it. Nothing you have to say at that moment could have any relevance to the conversation because you still don't know what the conversation is even about. Now imagine that conversation has been going on for 15 years and you've only just showed up an hour ago. Oh - it's also in a language you can only half understand and can't speak yet. Nothing you could say is important, you're missing any useful information, can't identify greentext and copypasta from actual opinions and information. The concept of lurking before contributing to a discussion is seemingly lost in a post-Usennet, post-forum internet. >And Gamergate, the smear campaign against female game developers? Audibly laughed. They're still sticking with that? Gamergate has, and you can count yourself, has "harassed" far more males than females. Almost all journalists - and almost all peddling bullshit. Saying someone is spewing bullshit isn't harassment. Although I do love how Elon Musk became an alt-right, anti-Semitic, GamerGator because he dared speak out against the media.
matheusmoreira 8y ago
>Not that you’d want to be there. The most popular boards on 4chan are typically /pol/, a place for what they say is “politically incorrect” (read: racism, misogyny, homophobia) So this is what the article is about. /pol/ offended some journalist's sensibilities. I bet they're laughing at him right now.
- kadenshep 8y ago
  Yeah, the author is just totally #triggered. Gay people are an abomination? That's just my opinion bro. Brown people definitely have lower IQ than white people; thems just the facts. Women are objectively inferior in every way but I can't get one because they love to date assholes, and not me, an intelligent nice guy who's definitely sane and well balanced. Stop being such a snowflake and support fuzzy peaches. Because this needs to be said, since the above statements are extremely ubiquitous on /pol/, I am mocking OP for condensing all the nastiness on /pol/ to somehow being only personally affrontable to the journalist who wrote the article. The journalist is right to call out 4chan for allowing this shit to spread.
  - matheusmoreira 8y ago
    Why do people have to stop it from spreading? If it's so obviously wrong, then nobody will believe it anyway. Why do people need to be protected from "politically incorrect" viewpoints? I believe people aren't lemmings who must be steered towards the "right" ideology. I'd rather be exposed to everything, and I will choose what I want to believe on my own. These reactionary calls to ban speech you don't like just makes your own position seem weak. Makes it look like you're afraid of what they have to say because it might be right. Nothing is above debate. For your information, those people are the absolute minority, even in 4chan. Nobody enjoys having their thread derailed due to politics. "Keep /pol/ in /pol/".
    - kadenshep 8y ago
      > If it's so obviously wrong, then nobody will believe it anyway. That's not objectively true. You have extremely obvious historical examples at your disposal that completely negate what you just said, assuming you've been exposed to some equivalency of U.S. middle school level world history. To provide some more immediate examples relevant to the rhetoric on /pol/, we face issues with people not vaccinating, believing in deep state conspiracy theories, etc. Don't even bother with that talking point because you're either just ignorant about what's being discussed or being disingenuous. >These reactionary calls to ban speech you don't like just makes your own position seem weak. No, it makes my position look sane and practical. That's kind of a dishonest statement to make. It's not because I don't like it, again, it's because the typoe of rhetortic on /pol/ (that is supported quantifiably by thread bumping and the frequency with which those talking points come up) is insane and antithetical to a decent, functioning society. >Nothing is above debate. Plenty of things are below the debate threshold. Everything I just listed being some examples of those. >those people are the absolute minority No they're not. Shit was so prevalent it caused some nutcase to storm a pizza place and threaten innocent pizza loving patrons. In short, spare me the fuzzy peaches ("free speech") parade you're trying to put on. Because you know it's not an honest talking point and it certainly isn't a principle that leads to some higher plane of intellectual debate. It does quite the opposite.
myf01d 8y ago
4chan is the last and only bastion of free speech on the internet. I know most here still think it's about trolling/racism/sharing shocking images, but I've seen there the most interesting discussions that cannot be found anywhere else. I agree that /pol/ is full retards, but there is also /his/, /g/, /sci/ and /mu/
forgottenpass 8y ago
When did new immigrants to the internet stop learning about the things we long-considered to be emergent phenomena of social interaction on the Internet? Eternal September eventually became known as a breaking point where what "is" and what "ought" will never be the same again. It seemed like we resigned to mapping/understanding the ways conversation breaks down so we could practice good mental hygiene of recognizing it, and stopping ourselves from accidentally getting sucked into it. Why did we loose the collective wisdom of social systems at scale? tl;dr: Who am I to blame for the fact WIRED of all places is writing hot takes about social dynamics of the internet like a Dad that just got their first smartphone?
cortexio 8y ago
I'm glad 4chan is still here. To me, it feels like it's the only thing that's still from the internet for the internet. A site that doesn't want to make a profit from you. It's purpose is to share information.
ImSkeptical 8y ago
I was just listening to an interview with Elon Musk where he discussed the importance of reasoning from first principles as opposed to by analogy. The author of this wired article would benefit from taking that lesson to heart. The Wired article is reasoning "by analogy". 4chan is like a teenager, or the soul of the internet, or the id of the internet, or whatever. Then, the author draws spurious conclusions based on those analogies. If 4chan is like a teenager, and it is fifteen years old, then surely it should be time for it to start getting more mature - right? On the other hand, if you reason from first principles you see that the reporter's conclusions are nonsense. If you start with some basic assumptions - like that the culture of a web community is influenced by the mechanics of that community, you can conclude that 4chan is unlikely to change. 4chan is unlikely to change, not because it is in some psychological period of arrested development the way some human teens may be, 4chan is unlikely to change because the mechanics of how the board work are unlikely to change. The behaviors on 4chan are better explained by the mechanics of the community than by psychological analogies. No registration. No persistent identities (or at least rarely used and abstruse persistent identities). No sorting of threads or replies. No persistence of threads or comments. Threads live or die based on the responses they attract and not any measure of quality. The mechanics of 4chan, or any web community, influence how the users behave and not the age of the community. That's because 4chan is a web community and not a human teenager.
danmg 8y ago
In related news Wired Magazine is 25 years old and doesn't understand 'kids these days.'
forgottenpass 8y ago
There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online To put this in context, Eternal September was in 93, and Slashdot was started in 97. But apparently moot imported trolls from Japan in the early 2000s?... or something? I didn't really bother trying to understand.

65 points by artsandsci 8y ago

/g is interesting especially /g/dpt (the daily programming thread). Today's thread: http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/66170997 http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/66170997

Shank 8y ago

> Yet this cannot last. At 15 years old, 4chan has reached adolescence. Up till now, trolls—children—have been in control. It’s not so funny anymore. After all, even the lost boys had to grow up. Just because one can write that it cannot last doesn't make it so. Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything. Facebook is 14 and Twitter is 12 and that doesn't say anything about them. They all have their own problems, but if this age metaphor is to work, then 4chan should be "more mature" than its younger siblings. It isn't. 4chan is also not going anywhere fast. Someone seems inclined to still pay for the servers, and until that time stops, it's probably going to say well and truly the same. That's just what you get when you have an anonymous imageboard. But, even if something happened and 4chan shutdown, you'd still have any number of chans that still exist as clones. It's trivial to find them. You can close the pool, but there are infinite pools to close.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
zeperoni 8y ago
Adding to this, it's not a static group of people on there growing old together. There is a a consistent group of adolescents reaching troll age and joining in.
- tossandturn 8y ago
  Yeah, I was on 4chan as a 16yo-20yo regular lurker starting back in 2004; never an active poster, just commenting randomly and joining in conversations on various boards. It was a decent anonymous community, sometimes I'd wander over to /b/ and it would be like walking past an apartment building at night and seeing completely random (sometimes disturbing) things going on through all of the windows; lurking on /b/ was the online equivalent of being an active peeping tom in a neighborhood without curtains. When moot sold the domain a few years ago to a former 2chan admin, I noticed it barely changed. But I haven't really visited much since 2009 or so...
creaghpatr 8y ago
The more facebook and twitter and youtube censor their users, the more gravity will shift to 4chan, it's the law of conservation of speech on the internet.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Between 2003 and 2015, the worldwide internet penetration rose from 12% to 44%, that's 2.4 billion more internet users, but somehow there is a "conservation law of speech"?
- Density 8y ago
  Yep! I'm one of the censorship refugees on /pol/.
abhiminator 8y ago
> Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything. Drawing parallels between the two exemplifies poor analogous journalism on the part of WIRED. > The internet makes sense in metaphors. (from the article) No, it does not. However, it helps immensely in crafting the opening salvo of a clickbait-y article to drive site views.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  > poor analogous journalism on the part of WIRED. Has Wired ever been known for good journalism? It's pretty much always been tabloid level: shallow articles on most subjects with pompous headlines.
taneq 8y ago
> Someone seems inclined to still pay for the servers It kind of seems like a tradeoff between creating a focal point where that kind of individual can congregate (keeping them away from 'normal people') and maintaining a cesspool where that kind of individual breeds. Depending on what's actually happening (and even figuring that out would be an interesting research project) other major sites might even be bankrolling it to help keep their own sites cleaner.
- Anon1096 8y ago
  4chan is paid for by its users through the 4chan pass and through advertisers, both companies and individuals. It is most likely barely more than solvent or losing money. 4chan's funding isn't a secret that needs to be investigated.
lainga 8y ago
I got shades of the endless 2016-era "this means Trump is FINISHED" articles.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  By any reasonable standards he should have been, the mistake was expecting reasonable standards.
  - Density 8y ago
    You're so ridiculously out of touch thanks to lefty censorship, Jewish media and echo chambers.
    - dang 8y ago
      We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
qop 8y ago
Who says it isn't mature? Is it immature because it doesn't fit your content expectations? Reminder that after 15 long years of chaos, it still exists. It's a very specific, essentially impenetrable market of 4chan users that can't really be pushed away except by catastrophic mismanagement. The features of the site have stabilized and reacted to user demands over the years, and though good boards (/prog/ :( and others) have been terminated, lovely discussion still happens. 4chan isn't selling your identity to data scientists. 4chan doesnt fail whale every few moments, 4chan doesn't have a huge amount of bot accounts relative to human users, though I'm sure there are some. People love to hate 4chan because there are deplorable users that use it, but it's just disingenuous and dishonest to make the claim that 4chan isn't a good product in terms of capturing their desired users. The fact that so many other chans exist is a testament to the success of the format. Reddit has an entire sub reddit /r/RedditAlternatives, which I think accomplishes the same thing: letting reddit know "the product is good, I just don't like YOU." The difference is that 4chan is a very strong anchor of all chan-related traffic, outside of Japan and Germany. "competitors" don't really pose an existential threat, but rather a topical, and therefore fallible threat of feature envy or fashionable content envy. Disclaimer: I haven't used 4ch since the /prog/ days, but I check in now and then, and lo and behold, it still exists.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  >4chan isn't selling your identity to data scientists That's actually questionable now since Hiroshima bought the site. Some weird scripts were added that were heavily obfuscated and killed the CSS if you didn't let them run. Luckily the innate computer paranoia of /g/ meant this was caught and worked around in less than a day, but it's still pretty sleazy. Also Google captcha is needed to post, so there are the standard two Google scripts running too
  - qop 8y ago
    A little ad-tracking here and there isn't necessarily foul play. Sleazy, sure. That's not the same as unfettered, cataclysmic access to tens of millions of users personal lives. I think what makes the Facebook thing so awful too is that people have a rather reasonable expectation that private things remain private, whereas the average 4chan user maintains some degree of privacy by merit of not identifying themselves. If it really came to it and if there was a concerted effort to at least maintain some integrity of the identifiability of what got collected, most 4chan users wouldn't leave the platform if there was a basic ad-tracking layer built. 4chan needs money, they all know that. Sometimes you gotta play the game a little bit, if it was done right, they'd play. Disclaimer: I'm not a data scientist, so I'm not really an expert here...
xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Holy shit, Twitter is just 3 years younger than 4chan?!

no_one_ever 8y ago

This is a really sensationalist article. I'm not going to ignore the parts of 4chan highlighted by the article, but there are some really good boards you can visit where the level of discussion is far superior than what you would find in most corners of today's popular forums. Personally I don't participate in any conversations, but I'll read the threads on the boards I find interesting. If anything, 4chan is an authentic reflection of the internet's user base. You'll find both gold and garbage depending on what you visit and frequent. It is unfair to broadly paint the site as only containing the worst of human nature. If you were to similarly depict other popular websites like Reddit in the same fashion, you would get something just as horrifying.

zhte415 8y ago

> There isn’t darkness without the light, it seems. So it’s probably fair to say 4channers are, at least a little bit, right: Their haven is the soul of the internet, the deep source of its sights and sounds, for worse and, occasionally, for better. I couldn't see much notable in the article, aside from a negative slew at the start, and some 'the other side of the coin' in the above quote. 15 years is noteworthy, however, and I'm surprised so short, as I started visiting it back in 2003/2004; it seemed about as busy then as today. 4chan hasn't changed much from an external perspective. Traffic has probably been at stable levels for years, while the price of traffic has fallen. I quite enjoy it's existence. There is a great diversity between message boards. Some are the reverse of b and pol highlighted in the article, as is the case on Reddit. Anonymous can be good. a la Hacker News's freedom of registration.

stats-then-now 8y ago
>Traffic has probably been at stable levels for years, while the price of traffic has fallen. Absolutely not! Please take this the wrong way, but I don't see how an old friend could have not noticed the MASSIVE increase in traffic (and the problems it brought). Here's some official 2005-2013 traffic statistics from the 10 years anniversary panel I compiled just to prove you wrong: https://i.4cdn.org/s4s/1527869817275.png https://i.4cdn.org/s4s/1527869817275.png Cheers.
- zhte415 8y ago
  The stats - Incredible how anaecdotal observation and recall differs. Bias too: Perhaps I'm not viewing the site as a whole and new boards, increased linking, whatever, thanks for stats. Old friend - Certainly. The fact the idean of anon is default (though optional) means each post can be besed on it's on value / meritocrious as it carries no internet points of the 'owner'. Anarchy, but the negative that term often brings should not be carelessly and automatically applied.
  - stats-then-now 8y ago
    Yes, that's actually very interesting to me, since I've never heard that from anyone before. Do you happen to have a small secluded place for a homeboard? Are you /jp/ or something like that? I've noticed over the years that the bigger a board grows (see /b/, /pol/, /v/) the worst the quality and serious discussion gets, and the more funposting there is. Every year people complain that their boards are getting worse, part of it is just those people growing older, but the other part is the community becoming larger, different, and noticeably more mainstream.

izzydata 8y ago

As someone who has frequented 4chan for nearly 15 years I don't think you want 4chan to die for many reasons. If 4chan is gone then all of the time people spend there will be spent somewhere else. Maybe the internet is too far gone to be significantly impacted, but I'd rather not test it. Most of 4chan boards aren't really that bad though.

bluetidepro 8y ago
> Most of 4chan boards aren't really that bad though. This is an important note that I feel like not enough people understand. Too many people just think 4chan, and then think of all the messed up stuff on something like /b. There is lots of stuff on 4chan that is completely normal and not toxic/illegal. Although, I will admit that I usually just browse reddit, personally.
- pscnv 8y ago
  There is nothing illegal in 4chan, and if there is, it gets removed quickly.
chillingeffect 8y ago
I've been there almost as long, and it's true most boards are boring. I like the diy and music boards, for example. But it seems you're "implying" that if we weren't there we'd be somewhere else the same or worse. I suggest there are many better places we could be. What we do there isn't a function of ourselves alone. We are a midpoint between ourselves and our environment. I would much rather go the playground and kick a soccer ball around or play basketball, but there isn't one around open after dark :( And I can't stand the egoic virtue-signaling/posturing on fb so I go to 4chan to get a more down-to-earth conversation experience. If i melt down on there, no one cares. My FB world is completely uptight and ready to ostracize on a hair trigger. Of course 4chan is also full of people faking badassery, but it's not attached to individual egos. That's what's amazing about anonymity that moot could never articulate: it doesn't make much sense to lie, because it doesn't really increase your standing because no one knows who you are! So people are much more honest and forthright. yes, that's often ugly, but it's better to know about than to fear it. Now the part that anonymity doesn't solve is that although the individual ego is dissolved, the way is paved for group egos to form. And as we've seen, especially on /pol/, these collective identities have flourished.

josefresco 8y ago

Indeed, nearly every evil of the internet begins, or picks up steam, on the site. To invoke yet another metaphor: It’s a breeding ground. (The fact that 4chan has been called so many things suggests a feeble attempt to make sense of chaos.) Many of the recruitment techniques of the so-called alt-right were piloted there; many white nationalists started out as 4channers. It’s unclear if or how one ages out of the site—but it is clear that it unleashes trolls on the real world. Sounds like a great place.

taneq 8y ago
They're ignoring the fact that much of current internet culture also originated there.
- josefresco 8y ago
  Current Internet culture is toxic so yeah - I guess that makes sense. 4chan was all fun and games until it started effecting people IRL. Swastikas are only funny when there's no chance they'll infiltrate the real world. When nazis are being elected, it's not so funny anymore.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  Seems to be something people repeat for the 'anarchic creativity' narrative rather than an actual truth.
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    I think knowyourmeme can attribute quite a few memes to 4chan, and the traditional account is that both Anonymous and the alt-right was spawned there, so they certainly did contribute to internet culture. The question is really how many lolcatz do you need to balance out one radicalized incel?
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Yes, I'm sure r/memeeconomy and other very serious and important people are grateful.

deft 8y ago

How many of these anti-4chan articles are written by people that regularly use it? I'm guessing zero. 4chan is an interesting site and has better discussion from a broad userbase than reddit or here. Plenty of interesting projects were born out of 4chan, particularly /g/ but the other boards have created valuable things for humans in general, not just internet culture. The positives IMO come from the whole "FREE SPEECH" attitude, that also leads to the negatives. 4chan's soul is in trolling, memes and productive creativity. They go hand in hand. Try using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about. It's exactly like reddit, everyone says stay away from the defaults. In 4chan's case, stay away from /b/, /v/ and /pol/ and you're unlikely to see anything graphic or demeaning beyond general discussion boards... Projects I know that were born on 4chan: tox.im - /g/ TurtleCoin - /biz/ NetRunner - /g/ Others mentioned in the article, notably project chanology. Editing this comment just to say that my point wasn't that toxicity, racism and sexism are okay to just ignore... my point was we already ignore that everywhere else on the internet. Look at youtube or reddit comments. If you can't see how it's the same you're just better at ignoring it on your platform of choice. I'd say it's more concentrated on 4chan yes, and I've probably gotten pretty good at filtering it out myself. But this problem is all over the internet and writing a piece about how 4chan "needs to grow up" isn't much of a revelation. The whole internet needs to.

llccbb 8y ago
Has tox matured into a usable system? I last tried it about two years ago and had too many problems with setting it up to suggest it to friends. Looking for a good non-centralized encrypted video chat.
rarec 8y ago
There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason. Seems that they also contain any outside perspective on the site as well. /b/ and /pol/ are particularly egregious, but they're worth suffering to live if it means I can keep /g/ and /tg/. The open format of the site also, while it does contain a lot of posting, does have a curious cross contamination effect. You may learn about an entirely unrelated thing on accident, for good or ill.
- 8y ago

local_yokel 8y ago

Summary: grouchy suburban dad who realizes he isn't cool anymore shakes fist at rebellious neighborhood kids, shouting that they need to grow up. Why is it that whenever a mainstream site like Wired pumps out an article looking down their noses at some "problematic" online community, it's immediately obvious that the author has never been part of said community and instead bases their overly simplistic views on an hour of research.

0x00000000 8y ago
Purely optimized for clicks and shares. Also, any amount of perceived approval of something controversial will get a nuclear reaction from Twitter demanding the author's job or going to the advertisers saying "look at this stuff that they are okay with!"
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  It's on the font page of HN so clearly it works
- mikec3010 8y ago
  >a nuclear reaction from Twitter Ironic isn't it? Author can't express a particular view about a website that became popular because it protects people from the consequences of expressing unpopular views.

AJRF 8y ago

> "The design remains proudly undesigned" I've always thought 4chan was beautifully designed. Its hyperfunctional in a way that wired.com designers will never know because they are too busy injecting ads into every inch of available space.

Ono-Sendai 8y ago
It's not that well designed. Replying to comments, for example, is not very intuitive.
bluthru 8y ago
I wish the comments would nest, even if it's just one level like Stack Exchange.
- matheusmoreira 8y ago
  There are 4chan browser extensions which have this feature.

m0ck 8y ago

wow, this is an example of some horrible, horrible journalism. I could tell after first two paragraphs, that the author did not spend more than 15 minutes on the site itself and most of her "facts" come from lazily googled trivia. I spent more time, than I'd like to admit on this and similiar imageboards. I still visit it semi-regulary (only fitness board nowadays), but this description as place where only edgy teenagers go to bully other people is plain wrong and misdirecting. Will you be judging Reddit next, solely by /r/politics, or /r/The_Donald, which both are terrible communities? Because that's what you did, with mentioning only /b/ and /pol/ as the core of 4chan. My advice for the author: LURK MOAR :)

fareesh 8y ago
So many of these "journalists" are just filing stories with barely any research because there are no consequences. When you pick a topic like 4chan and you are criticized, absolutely nothing will happen to you. In fact, all you need to do is say "racists and misogynists are after me" and you will become the next story. There will invariably some subset of clowns who say hateful stuff on social media, and they will be held up as the norm. The media has also turned up their "if you criticize our work it means you hate a free press" sensitivity meter, so as such there will never be any consequences for poor quality journalism unless the problem is fixed at the editorial level. There is no incentive to do it though.

Nadya 8y ago

>4chan has never been a nice place. Most people don’t spend time there Imagine a place where people don't take things that seriously and things are just weird enough that the inside jokes keeps all the outsiders out and alienated. Everyone else is sitting around the virtual campfire telling jokes and sharing stories. 4chans all reaching (and not-just-/b/-and-/pol/) bad rep comes largely in thanks to people who obviously don't browse 4chan or have only taken a look at /pol/ or /b/. They took a passing glance, maybe for a day or two, saw nothing but inane bullshit, and (justifiably) moved on with their lives. 4chan has a lot of shit, I don't deny that and I don't blame anyone for not having the desire to wade knee deep in it. Although wading through only the deep end of it skews perspectives heavily. Notice how this article purposefully cherrypicks boards like /pol/, /h/, and /y/ instead of the less egregious boards /g/ (technology), /o/ (automobiles), /his/ (history), or /co/ (comics). One would leave with the idea that 4chan is nothing but a place for hentai and alt-right hate groups. Even among itself /b/ and /pol/ are disliked among the site. They're considered containment boards that prevent other boards being shit up. But one wouldn't understand the concept of a "containment board" if one doesn't browse 4chan. In fact - most articles about 4chan don't even use the term "containment board" because the authors never lurk long enough to discover the term. >There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online Are they talking about pre-Usenet days? I don't remember a time online when trolls didn't really exist. >And because each message board is limited to 10 pages of posts, most messages get bumped off the server within a day, if not hours. It’s pretty much unusable for the uninitiated. This is by design. Hence "Lurk more." Imagine trying to jump into an hour old conversation having heard only the past 10 seconds of it. Nothing you have to say at that moment could have any relevance to the conversation because you still don't know what the conversation is even about. Now imagine that conversation has been going on for 15 years and you've only just showed up an hour ago. Oh - it's also in a language you can only half understand and can't speak yet. Nothing you could say is important, you're missing any useful information, can't identify greentext and copypasta from actual opinions and information. The concept of lurking before contributing to a discussion is seemingly lost in a post-Usennet, post-forum internet. >And Gamergate, the smear campaign against female game developers? Audibly laughed. They're still sticking with that? Gamergate has, and you can count yourself, has "harassed" far more males than females. Almost all journalists - and almost all peddling bullshit. Saying someone is spewing bullshit isn't harassment. Although I do love how Elon Musk became an alt-right, anti-Semitic, GamerGator because he dared speak out against the media.

matheusmoreira 8y ago

>Not that you’d want to be there. The most popular boards on 4chan are typically /pol/, a place for what they say is “politically incorrect” (read: racism, misogyny, homophobia) So this is what the article is about. /pol/ offended some journalist's sensibilities. I bet they're laughing at him right now.

kadenshep 8y ago
Yeah, the author is just totally #triggered. Gay people are an abomination? That's just my opinion bro. Brown people definitely have lower IQ than white people; thems just the facts. Women are objectively inferior in every way but I can't get one because they love to date assholes, and not me, an intelligent nice guy who's definitely sane and well balanced. Stop being such a snowflake and support fuzzy peaches. Because this needs to be said, since the above statements are extremely ubiquitous on /pol/, I am mocking OP for condensing all the nastiness on /pol/ to somehow being only personally affrontable to the journalist who wrote the article. The journalist is right to call out 4chan for allowing this shit to spread.
- matheusmoreira 8y ago
  Why do people have to stop it from spreading? If it's so obviously wrong, then nobody will believe it anyway. Why do people need to be protected from "politically incorrect" viewpoints? I believe people aren't lemmings who must be steered towards the "right" ideology. I'd rather be exposed to everything, and I will choose what I want to believe on my own. These reactionary calls to ban speech you don't like just makes your own position seem weak. Makes it look like you're afraid of what they have to say because it might be right. Nothing is above debate. For your information, those people are the absolute minority, even in 4chan. Nobody enjoys having their thread derailed due to politics. "Keep /pol/ in /pol/".
  - kadenshep 8y ago
    > If it's so obviously wrong, then nobody will believe it anyway. That's not objectively true. You have extremely obvious historical examples at your disposal that completely negate what you just said, assuming you've been exposed to some equivalency of U.S. middle school level world history. To provide some more immediate examples relevant to the rhetoric on /pol/, we face issues with people not vaccinating, believing in deep state conspiracy theories, etc. Don't even bother with that talking point because you're either just ignorant about what's being discussed or being disingenuous. >These reactionary calls to ban speech you don't like just makes your own position seem weak. No, it makes my position look sane and practical. That's kind of a dishonest statement to make. It's not because I don't like it, again, it's because the typoe of rhetortic on /pol/ (that is supported quantifiably by thread bumping and the frequency with which those talking points come up) is insane and antithetical to a decent, functioning society. >Nothing is above debate. Plenty of things are below the debate threshold. Everything I just listed being some examples of those. >those people are the absolute minority No they're not. Shit was so prevalent it caused some nutcase to storm a pizza place and threaten innocent pizza loving patrons. In short, spare me the fuzzy peaches ("free speech") parade you're trying to put on. Because you know it's not an honest talking point and it certainly isn't a principle that leads to some higher plane of intellectual debate. It does quite the opposite.

myf01d 8y ago

4chan is the last and only bastion of free speech on the internet. I know most here still think it's about trolling/racism/sharing shocking images, but I've seen there the most interesting discussions that cannot be found anywhere else. I agree that /pol/ is full retards, but there is also /his/, /g/, /sci/ and /mu/

forgottenpass 8y ago

When did new immigrants to the internet stop learning about the things we long-considered to be emergent phenomena of social interaction on the Internet? Eternal September eventually became known as a breaking point where what "is" and what "ought" will never be the same again. It seemed like we resigned to mapping/understanding the ways conversation breaks down so we could practice good mental hygiene of recognizing it, and stopping ourselves from accidentally getting sucked into it. Why did we loose the collective wisdom of social systems at scale? tl;dr: Who am I to blame for the fact WIRED of all places is writing hot takes about social dynamics of the internet like a Dad that just got their first smartphone?

cortexio 8y ago

I'm glad 4chan is still here. To me, it feels like it's the only thing that's still from the internet for the internet. A site that doesn't want to make a profit from you. It's purpose is to share information.

ImSkeptical 8y ago

I was just listening to an interview with Elon Musk where he discussed the importance of reasoning from first principles as opposed to by analogy. The author of this wired article would benefit from taking that lesson to heart. The Wired article is reasoning "by analogy". 4chan is like a teenager, or the soul of the internet, or the id of the internet, or whatever. Then, the author draws spurious conclusions based on those analogies. If 4chan is like a teenager, and it is fifteen years old, then surely it should be time for it to start getting more mature - right? On the other hand, if you reason from first principles you see that the reporter's conclusions are nonsense. If you start with some basic assumptions - like that the culture of a web community is influenced by the mechanics of that community, you can conclude that 4chan is unlikely to change. 4chan is unlikely to change, not because it is in some psychological period of arrested development the way some human teens may be, 4chan is unlikely to change because the mechanics of how the board work are unlikely to change. The behaviors on 4chan are better explained by the mechanics of the community than by psychological analogies. No registration. No persistent identities (or at least rarely used and abstruse persistent identities). No sorting of threads or replies. No persistence of threads or comments. Threads live or die based on the responses they attract and not any measure of quality. The mechanics of 4chan, or any web community, influence how the users behave and not the age of the community. That's because 4chan is a web community and not a human teenager.

danmg 8y ago

In related news Wired Magazine is 25 years old and doesn't understand 'kids these days.'

forgottenpass 8y ago

There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online To put this in context, Eternal September was in 93, and Slashdot was started in 97. But apparently moot imported trolls from Japan in the early 2000s?... or something? I didn't really bother trying to understand.