3 ms·
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
by 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 agoA 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...
- tomatotomato37 8y agoI think there was talk of the scripts actually running exploits, so they were more than a bit sleazy; that being said I believe they came with the new ads so it wasn't a conscious addition by the new owner as much as shitty ad companies Overall though I believe most of the money comes from the 4chan pass system over whatever ads end up getting run