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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 pa

by 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.
  - api 8y ago
    That was what I observed too. Never been a big user of the site but I used to stop by from time to time. A year or two ago it was brigaded by fascists and now it's dead. Can't stand it for more than 10 seconds.
krapp 8y ago
>There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason. I don't think there actually are, in practice. How do you have any sort of "containment" on an anonymous forum? There's nothing at all stopping /b/ and /pol/ from stepping into any other board and either playing along or not. The only containment there is a state of mind.
- verylittlemeat 8y ago
  They do work though. Typically a board like /g/ is on topic and containment boards are used to shame offtopic users. That might sound unconvincing and "a state of mind" but social dynamics do work. If there is 1 /pol// shitposter in a thread they will be called out as bait or told to go back to their containment board. It's a useful rhetorical tool on 4chan and it works better than any literal rule because it comes organically from the board's culture.

by rarec 8y ago

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.
- api 8y ago
  That was what I observed too. Never been a big user of the site but I used to stop by from time to time. A year or two ago it was brigaded by fascists and now it's dead. Can't stand it for more than 10 seconds.

krapp 8y ago

>There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason. I don't think there actually are, in practice. How do you have any sort of "containment" on an anonymous forum? There's nothing at all stopping /b/ and /pol/ from stepping into any other board and either playing along or not. The only containment there is a state of mind.

verylittlemeat 8y ago
They do work though. Typically a board like /g/ is on topic and containment boards are used to shame offtopic users. That might sound unconvincing and "a state of mind" but social dynamics do work. If there is 1 /pol// shitposter in a thread they will be called out as bait or told to go back to their containment board. It's a useful rhetorical tool on 4chan and it works better than any literal rule because it comes organically from the board's culture.