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> 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,

by 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?!

by Shank 8y ago

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?!