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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 fro

by 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.
- api 8y ago
  From what I can see /pol/ in particular is extremely popular and massively influential in the promotion of shockingly vile politics of a sort that until recently I've never encountered anywhere even close to the mainstream. It is my understanding that it was created as a containment board, but it's popularity and relative power has soured me on the whole site. Here's the problem: /pol/ gets so much traffic that I can't imagine that its visitors do not cover a fairly broad subset of 4chan's entire user base. This means that if I contribute to any of the other boards I am contributing in some way to the intellectual capital pool drawn upon by the sorts of people who hang out in /pol/. No thanks. I'm not the only person who feels this way. I've heard others say this kind of thing too. There's a lot of people who once visited the site who no longer do so. Boards like /pol/ seem to be killing 4chan as anything other than a more Internet-cool satellite of Stormfront.
  - rarec 8y ago
    No more so than you are contributing to the incredibly toxic subreddits like Redpill or the like by posting on any other reddit.
    - api 8y ago
      4chan is smaller and tighter. It's a different beast. Reddit is massive and those boards account for a small percentage of its activity.
  - hackermailman 8y ago
    2ch is similar, they have a very large Japanese nationalist/far right board that is popular. Doesn't stop people from using the rest of the site which is nothing like the racist political board.
  - phthr 8y ago
    I used to visit /lit/ and /ck/ until a bit more than a year ago. I don't anymore because the /pol/ scum made it their mission to pollute the other boards with their vitriol. I visited those boards a couple of weeks back and /pol/ has basically succeeded in killing those boards' culture. Lots of people have left and you are not one or two threads away from a vile racist comment. /pol/ has basically destroyed 4chan culture in all of the boards and all that's left there now are a bunch of disgusting racists.
pjc50 8y ago
Well, nobody's going to keep using a site they hate unless they have to. > ignore the crap you don't care about The problem is that plenty of people seem to use it for recruiting to make the world worse for non-users, whether by campaigns of organised harassment or disinformation, or other means.
- deft 8y ago
  First point: then why write an article about it? Get someone who knows what they're talking about. For your second point, how is that unique to 4chan? Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that.
  - i80and 8y ago
    ...what message boards are you using that every single one of them "does stuff like that"?
    - OnMyPhone 8y ago
      kiwifarms? not a message board though, but a forum.
    - deft 8y ago
      reddit, topic-specific boards I browsed years ago. You're just better at ignoring the bad parts of the sites you use. I see racism on here all the time, especially against asians for some reason.
  - aspaceman 8y ago
    > Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that I just went to /pol/. No -- every message board I've ever used does not do stuff like that. And how the hell are you okay with using one that does?
  - sleepybrett 8y ago
    .. then you might be part of the problem.
samuraijack 8y ago
Are we going to just ignore how bigoted and racist 4chan is in general?
- fein 8y ago
  Understanding why it is that way would probably be more useful than trying to get brownie points for your signaling. It's like that because people with your outlook have deplatformed so much discourse that 4chan is the last bastion of a truly free exchange of ideas. Voat comes in a close second. Calling something bigoted and racist is just an attempt to deflect and ignore the conversation. Offending people is generally the backbone of controversial discussion.
  - api 8y ago
    People (both individuals and as groups such as corporations) have freely decided that they do not want to donate their resources to providing a platform for people to advocate genocide or to systematically denigrate 50% or more of the population. What's wrong with that? If those are the ideas you wish to freely exchange you're welcome to set up your own site, but I am not going to pay for your bandwidth. Everyone "signals." Signaling is a fundamental aspect of social behavior. I don't care much about signaling and tend to ignore it as background noise. It's the real ideas that matter. The dominant ideas on Voat and /pol/ are political totalitarianism, dogmatic biological determinism, hatred for huge groups of people, and even advocacy of slavery and genocide. There are toxic "left" communities that advocate totalitarianism and are full of hate as well, but they don't seem quite as common or as popular.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    You must really hate 4chan (or, at least, the racist boards there) if you expect this level of nuance and understanding in discussion. It's certainly not within a million miles of what /b/ or /pol/ extend to anyone else.
    - fein 8y ago
      I spend most of my time on /pol/. Best memes. /b/ has gone to shit in the last few years, /r9k/ can be hilarious although disturbing.
qop 8y ago
/prog/ used to have an incredible amount of good discussion about programming. The perfect blend of memery to break the monotony with the perfect amount of puzzles and challenges and debate to keep it stimulating. RIP
- ihsw2 8y ago
  /g/ still has daily programming threads
  - qop 8y ago
    I'm aware, thanks! :) Several reasons I don't use /g/: * I don't want to look at images. * I don't want to search for the threads I want, they should all be in one board, that's the whole point. * The fact that /prog/ was killed in the first place when a textboard like it couldn't POSSIBLY be accounting for much bandwidth anyways is proof enough that 4chan wanted to appeal to a wider range of users. I took the hint. * Finally, the type of users that use /g/ are not the people I want to have discussions with anyways, even if it's programming-related. Lots of /prog/ users only used /prog/, back before it was killed.
    - stats-then-now 8y ago
      world4ch had its own culture, but the lack of the Temporary Solution™ made it mostly noise and very very slow outside of spam. /prog/ was sometimes fun, but I could never really spend much time there before getting bored. There's only so many times you can see SICP snake and fizzbuzz haskell before getting tired of it. I'm sad the text boards are gone, but looking back after they went read-only I couldn't find much I actually wanted to read again, and I can't really blame moot for not wanting to deal with a slow spam-filled relic any longer.
      - qop 8y ago
        I don't blame him for not dealing with it, I blame him for not fixing it with the https+captcha the rest of the site got. I find some interesting stuff in the readonly. Fibonacci buttsort is always good, sicp stuff is nice to remember. Idk, it's a nice nostalgia for me.
aspaceman 8y ago
> using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about. Can you even imagine using 4chan as a woman or a black man? Like not only in real life do you have to deal with people being racist as hell, but hey here's this forum that's entirely shameless about it too. You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them. The only people who can go to 4chan and just ignore the toxic stuff are the people who aren't affected by the toxic stuff.
- jimmies 8y ago
  Although I am not black, I am Asian, and can be described by a word started with C (/csg/ if you lurk /g/), and more accurately G. I would be offended if someone calls me that in real life. On 4chan though, I myself really don't get offended in any way. Someone explained it this way: you're only supposed to be offended if someone calls you a n* f* in a setting that not everyone is. On 4chan, everyone is already a n* f* so it kinda levels the playing field. I get it that others minority people might not share the same view.
  - aspaceman 8y ago
    > you're only supposed to be offended Folks have the right to be offended whenever they want to be. If you aren't offended, then that's your decision and you're free to make it. But ultimately I still believe you should respect the opinions of those who are offended. If they hate 4chan, I'm not going to argue with them about it. There's a lot of folks in this thread claiming that if you're offended by speech on 4chan, then it's really you who has the problem and that's mainly who I'm trying to address.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      People have a right to be offended and the offender has a right not to care. I certainly don't endorse 4chan culture but it's different from what you think.
      - 8y ago
optimuspaul 8y ago
Free speech is great and all, but I prefer to spend my time with people that have the wisdom to keep some thoughts to themselves, or maybe not have the thoughts in the first place. I'll probably never go on 4chan because I don't have the time or desire to have to sort through it all, not just because it is a cesspool of human indecency.
- mikec3010 8y ago
  "Some thoughts" == the ones you (or most people) find offensive. So you keep repeating that and raising the censorship bar until nobody is offended anymore. And what you have is a whitewashed, sanitized forum with less creativity, originality, and free association. That's not what everyone wants. Some people want the uncensored version.
  - optimuspaul 8y ago
    Don't mistake my comment as a call for censorship. It's a call for civility and decency. we can have creativity, originality and free association without hate, bigotry, and racism. Your straw men have no power here.
    - mikec3010 8y ago
      "A call for".. How do you call for that on an unmoderated platform? Or do you think they should have a mod sit there and curate it for your tastes? Or automated software that keeps everything PC? I'm curious how "calling for " is in any way different than praying?
      - kadenshep 8y ago
        Yeah I don't think disallowing neo nazi talking points to spread like wildfire is "PC." I think that's just being sane and practical.
implr 8y ago
/pol/ has grown a lot louder and prominent in the past few years though, to the point where even many seasoned 4chan posters are annoyed by them. "go back to /pol/" is a complaint you can now see on almost every board.

by deft 8y ago

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.

api 8y ago
From what I can see /pol/ in particular is extremely popular and massively influential in the promotion of shockingly vile politics of a sort that until recently I've never encountered anywhere even close to the mainstream. It is my understanding that it was created as a containment board, but it's popularity and relative power has soured me on the whole site. Here's the problem: /pol/ gets so much traffic that I can't imagine that its visitors do not cover a fairly broad subset of 4chan's entire user base. This means that if I contribute to any of the other boards I am contributing in some way to the intellectual capital pool drawn upon by the sorts of people who hang out in /pol/. No thanks. I'm not the only person who feels this way. I've heard others say this kind of thing too. There's a lot of people who once visited the site who no longer do so. Boards like /pol/ seem to be killing 4chan as anything other than a more Internet-cool satellite of Stormfront.
- rarec 8y ago
  No more so than you are contributing to the incredibly toxic subreddits like Redpill or the like by posting on any other reddit.
  - api 8y ago
    4chan is smaller and tighter. It's a different beast. Reddit is massive and those boards account for a small percentage of its activity.
- hackermailman 8y ago
  2ch is similar, they have a very large Japanese nationalist/far right board that is popular. Doesn't stop people from using the rest of the site which is nothing like the racist political board.
- phthr 8y ago
  I used to visit /lit/ and /ck/ until a bit more than a year ago. I don't anymore because the /pol/ scum made it their mission to pollute the other boards with their vitriol. I visited those boards a couple of weeks back and /pol/ has basically succeeded in killing those boards' culture. Lots of people have left and you are not one or two threads away from a vile racist comment. /pol/ has basically destroyed 4chan culture in all of the boards and all that's left there now are a bunch of disgusting racists.

pjc50 8y ago

Well, nobody's going to keep using a site they hate unless they have to. > ignore the crap you don't care about The problem is that plenty of people seem to use it for recruiting to make the world worse for non-users, whether by campaigns of organised harassment or disinformation, or other means.

deft 8y ago
First point: then why write an article about it? Get someone who knows what they're talking about. For your second point, how is that unique to 4chan? Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that.
- i80and 8y ago
  ...what message boards are you using that every single one of them "does stuff like that"?
  - OnMyPhone 8y ago
    kiwifarms? not a message board though, but a forum.
  - deft 8y ago
    reddit, topic-specific boards I browsed years ago. You're just better at ignoring the bad parts of the sites you use. I see racism on here all the time, especially against asians for some reason.
- aspaceman 8y ago
  > Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that I just went to /pol/. No -- every message board I've ever used does not do stuff like that. And how the hell are you okay with using one that does?
- sleepybrett 8y ago
  .. then you might be part of the problem.

samuraijack 8y ago

Are we going to just ignore how bigoted and racist 4chan is in general?

fein 8y ago
Understanding why it is that way would probably be more useful than trying to get brownie points for your signaling. It's like that because people with your outlook have deplatformed so much discourse that 4chan is the last bastion of a truly free exchange of ideas. Voat comes in a close second. Calling something bigoted and racist is just an attempt to deflect and ignore the conversation. Offending people is generally the backbone of controversial discussion.
- api 8y ago
  People (both individuals and as groups such as corporations) have freely decided that they do not want to donate their resources to providing a platform for people to advocate genocide or to systematically denigrate 50% or more of the population. What's wrong with that? If those are the ideas you wish to freely exchange you're welcome to set up your own site, but I am not going to pay for your bandwidth. Everyone "signals." Signaling is a fundamental aspect of social behavior. I don't care much about signaling and tend to ignore it as background noise. It's the real ideas that matter. The dominant ideas on Voat and /pol/ are political totalitarianism, dogmatic biological determinism, hatred for huge groups of people, and even advocacy of slavery and genocide. There are toxic "left" communities that advocate totalitarianism and are full of hate as well, but they don't seem quite as common or as popular.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  You must really hate 4chan (or, at least, the racist boards there) if you expect this level of nuance and understanding in discussion. It's certainly not within a million miles of what /b/ or /pol/ extend to anyone else.
  - fein 8y ago
    I spend most of my time on /pol/. Best memes. /b/ has gone to shit in the last few years, /r9k/ can be hilarious although disturbing.

qop 8y ago

/prog/ used to have an incredible amount of good discussion about programming. The perfect blend of memery to break the monotony with the perfect amount of puzzles and challenges and debate to keep it stimulating. RIP

ihsw2 8y ago
/g/ still has daily programming threads
- qop 8y ago
  I'm aware, thanks! :) Several reasons I don't use /g/: * I don't want to look at images. * I don't want to search for the threads I want, they should all be in one board, that's the whole point. * The fact that /prog/ was killed in the first place when a textboard like it couldn't POSSIBLY be accounting for much bandwidth anyways is proof enough that 4chan wanted to appeal to a wider range of users. I took the hint. * Finally, the type of users that use /g/ are not the people I want to have discussions with anyways, even if it's programming-related. Lots of /prog/ users only used /prog/, back before it was killed.
  - stats-then-now 8y ago
    world4ch had its own culture, but the lack of the Temporary Solution™ made it mostly noise and very very slow outside of spam. /prog/ was sometimes fun, but I could never really spend much time there before getting bored. There's only so many times you can see SICP snake and fizzbuzz haskell before getting tired of it. I'm sad the text boards are gone, but looking back after they went read-only I couldn't find much I actually wanted to read again, and I can't really blame moot for not wanting to deal with a slow spam-filled relic any longer.
    - qop 8y ago
      I don't blame him for not dealing with it, I blame him for not fixing it with the https+captcha the rest of the site got. I find some interesting stuff in the readonly. Fibonacci buttsort is always good, sicp stuff is nice to remember. Idk, it's a nice nostalgia for me.

aspaceman 8y ago

> using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about. Can you even imagine using 4chan as a woman or a black man? Like not only in real life do you have to deal with people being racist as hell, but hey here's this forum that's entirely shameless about it too. You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them. The only people who can go to 4chan and just ignore the toxic stuff are the people who aren't affected by the toxic stuff.

jimmies 8y ago
Although I am not black, I am Asian, and can be described by a word started with C (/csg/ if you lurk /g/), and more accurately G. I would be offended if someone calls me that in real life. On 4chan though, I myself really don't get offended in any way. Someone explained it this way: you're only supposed to be offended if someone calls you a n* f* in a setting that not everyone is. On 4chan, everyone is already a n* f* so it kinda levels the playing field. I get it that others minority people might not share the same view.
- aspaceman 8y ago
  > you're only supposed to be offended Folks have the right to be offended whenever they want to be. If you aren't offended, then that's your decision and you're free to make it. But ultimately I still believe you should respect the opinions of those who are offended. If they hate 4chan, I'm not going to argue with them about it. There's a lot of folks in this thread claiming that if you're offended by speech on 4chan, then it's really you who has the problem and that's mainly who I'm trying to address.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    People have a right to be offended and the offender has a right not to care. I certainly don't endorse 4chan culture but it's different from what you think.
    - 8y ago

optimuspaul 8y ago

Free speech is great and all, but I prefer to spend my time with people that have the wisdom to keep some thoughts to themselves, or maybe not have the thoughts in the first place. I'll probably never go on 4chan because I don't have the time or desire to have to sort through it all, not just because it is a cesspool of human indecency.

mikec3010 8y ago
"Some thoughts" == the ones you (or most people) find offensive. So you keep repeating that and raising the censorship bar until nobody is offended anymore. And what you have is a whitewashed, sanitized forum with less creativity, originality, and free association. That's not what everyone wants. Some people want the uncensored version.
- optimuspaul 8y ago
  Don't mistake my comment as a call for censorship. It's a call for civility and decency. we can have creativity, originality and free association without hate, bigotry, and racism. Your straw men have no power here.
  - mikec3010 8y ago
    "A call for".. How do you call for that on an unmoderated platform? Or do you think they should have a mod sit there and curate it for your tastes? Or automated software that keeps everything PC? I'm curious how "calling for " is in any way different than praying?
    - kadenshep 8y ago
      Yeah I don't think disallowing neo nazi talking points to spread like wildfire is "PC." I think that's just being sane and practical.

implr 8y ago

/pol/ has grown a lot louder and prominent in the past few years though, to the point where even many seasoned 4chan posters are annoyed by them. "go back to /pol/" is a complaint you can now see on almost every board.