4 ms·

The failed experiment that is 4chan was founded on this idea and its plainly clear that anonymity in a large community leads people to just spout the craziness

The failed experiment that is 4chan was founded on this idea and its plainly clear that anonymity in a large community leads people to just spout the craziness constantly and loudly because well researched and thoughtful comments are simply lost in the sea of crap and there are literally no downsides to constantly lying. You can thoroughly debunk a persons claims and they'll resort to insults or usually will stop responding and then proceed to post the same garbage within a day or even an hour. A minimum of pseudo anonymity that holds people accountable for what they say is an important part of enforcing a healthy community of people making good faith arguments.

dleslie 8y ago
It doesn't seem to me that 4chan has failed. https://www.rank2traffic.com/4chan.org https://www.rank2traffic.com/4chan.org
- Terr_ 8y ago
  Failed at discourse != Failed at traffic
  - Asooka 8y ago
    Let's not kid ourselves. 4chan was good for approximately 5 minutes one time in 2004.
  - Khaine 8y ago
    The chans have a disproportionate impact on current online communication. The memetic use of macro images large stems from chans. As well as the propensity for trolling has been massively driven by chans
livueta 8y ago
While the general thrust of this comment is accurate, especially if we only consider relatively recent 4chan, it does miss some of the subtleties of variation in anonymous-imageboard discourse quality. There are two primary differentiators between absolute cesspool and actually fairly decent boards, one of which the parent hints at: size and quality of moderation. First, size. Although I can't speak to "modern" (say, post-2012) 4chan due to lack of firsthand experience, prior to then many of the smaller boards were actually quite nice places for serious discussion of their subject matter. /out/ (outdoors), /m/ (mecha), /n/ (transportation), and even some of the text boards like /prog/ were all fairly high quality due to their strong, persistent board cultures that discouraged pointless shitposting and encouraged actual contribution and dialogue. In each case, the ratio of new contributors to old hands was low enough to allow these board cultures to perpetuate and maintain quality. For example, when a community is small enough that many participants will have personally witnessed the debunking of a set of claims, reposting the same crap will be minimally effective. This dynamic breaks down at size, and it's easy to see how increased traffic over the years leads to the erosion of communities that rely on their small size for their quality. That's where the other factor comes into play: quality of moderation. Despite being much larger and faster than the aforementioned slow boards, /a/ was quite good for a long period of time, largely thanks to very aggressive moderation. Low tolerance for off-topic content (especially anything with the scent of /pol/ on it) enforced a strong culture of topical, relatively thoughtful discourse. As one of the handful of places where you could discuss anime way too seriously without being hampered by those troublesome Naruto-watching non-elitists, old-/a/ produced a mind-boggling amount of in-depth textual analysis, especially of popular and controversial works like the F/SN VN. This was in large part due to the differences between the predominant pseudoanonymous forum-based model and the anonymous discussion model that aimed to address the deficiencies of the former. For example, a blight of old forums was circlejerking around the opinions of established members. Some guy, possibly a mod, would have a pet theory or position and everyone else had damn well better fall in line because he's got 20k posts and/or will ban anyone who disagrees. Crap like that wasn't universal, but it was a major issue with a lot of forum communities. Minus the persistent egos, discussion was allowed to progress. I think we let nostalgia blind us to a lot of the problems that afflicted old forum communities - the reasons that led folks to anonymous imageboards in the first place. Eventually, though, the pattern of strong moderation that enabled high-quality anonymous discussion fell by the wayside. What caused that, though? Having spoken with a variety of janitors over the years, the common thread is that the ability to trivially ban evade via mobile connection (especially ipv6) DHCP pools basically destroyed the mod team's ability to quash bad actors. Ban evasion was always a problem, but prior to the emergence of phoneposting it took a lot more effort and was easier to combat. Banning known proxies and tor exit nodes is a pain, but banning mobile carrier IP ranges is a non-starter. This led to a general sense of resignation, which in turn translated to less-aggressive moderation and a decline in quality. What I'm really getting at is that discarding the lessons learned about what makes an anonymous discussion system good or not just because the overall experiment didn't pan out is unfortunate, and that all hope isn't necessarily lost. For instance, an anonymous community with a barrier to entry (say, a SA/metafilter-type entry fee, where your ability to post anonymously is contingent upon not getting your paid account banned) could address the issues of size and moderation while maintaining the freedom-of-expression benefits of the anonymous model. The hard part there is bootstrapping - nobody wants to pay to participate in a yet-unpopulated community whose moderation model/community culture isn't a guaranteed personal fit, but opening it up initially to develop a userbase exposes it to the Gab/Voat problem.
antt 8y ago
4chan has better discussions that reddit and hackernews put together. The point is that they aren't stored anywhere and disappeared once they were finished. Over here I've been told that I can't have more than one account to post things I don't want associated with me in public. Give that I have a more than even chance I will work in some regime that takes offense to many things I might say, e.g. that I theoretically support LGBT rights, I just don't talk about anything remotely controversial.
- Larrikin 8y ago
  4chan only has better discussion when you are absolutely new to a topic, since the userbase tends to be on the younger side and they are happy to reshare the information they just learned. The basics are constantly presented over and over again. But people with real knowledge eventually grow tired of sharing that information with a userbase that is happy to discuss which programming language has the best Hello World, whether Good Eats or Food Wishes is better for someone that has grown tired of ramen noodles, how to get into starting strength, which JR pass to buy on a first trip to Japan, etc. The discussions don't seem shallow when the topics are new but they hardly ever get in depth because of the fact that the posts are fleeting outside of information contained in the sticky. There is very little point in having anything besides shallow discussion because it is ultimately a waste of time to constantly rehash the actual relevant and deep information you just posted a couple days. This is when the users are in more or less well behaved forums. You go into some of the more trolly boards and the conversation just degrades even further. Reddit has its own issues with people posting stuff just for likes and refusing to disagree for fear of losing internet points, but the actual content on the site is far superior to 4chan at this point, even though they started off by basically stealing all the interesting meme content from 4chan. There is actual useful information all throughout Reddit, even though I don't particularly like the community as a whole. I would really like to hear why you think either site comes close to the discussion on hackernews however. This is easily the most civil and well moderated large site I've been on in a long while.
  - antt 8y ago
    Back in my MSc I had to code a ray tracer for a black hole. all the lovely GR tensors implemented in C and the like. Someone in sci pointed me to the gsl and how to install it on the local lab machine in Suse. Then they critiqued the way I was running the rays. I ended up getting 100% on that coursework. 4 chan is like a piggie bank. You get out of it what you put in.
ZoomZoomZoom 8y ago
Total anonymity may lead to this anarchy, but having a persona that's not tied to your everyday life, your social status and appearance, but to your status in a specific web-based society or a sphere of your interests, this is what helped moving meaningful discussion forward. What really devastated so much of the pre-social-network internet is erosion of this practice, in my opinion.

dleslie 8y ago

It doesn't seem to me that 4chan has failed. https://www.rank2traffic.com/4chan.org https://www.rank2traffic.com/4chan.org

Terr_ 8y ago
Failed at discourse != Failed at traffic
- Asooka 8y ago
  Let's not kid ourselves. 4chan was good for approximately 5 minutes one time in 2004.
- Khaine 8y ago
  The chans have a disproportionate impact on current online communication. The memetic use of macro images large stems from chans. As well as the propensity for trolling has been massively driven by chans

livueta 8y ago

While the general thrust of this comment is accurate, especially if we only consider relatively recent 4chan, it does miss some of the subtleties of variation in anonymous-imageboard discourse quality. There are two primary differentiators between absolute cesspool and actually fairly decent boards, one of which the parent hints at: size and quality of moderation. First, size. Although I can't speak to "modern" (say, post-2012) 4chan due to lack of firsthand experience, prior to then many of the smaller boards were actually quite nice places for serious discussion of their subject matter. /out/ (outdoors), /m/ (mecha), /n/ (transportation), and even some of the text boards like /prog/ were all fairly high quality due to their strong, persistent board cultures that discouraged pointless shitposting and encouraged actual contribution and dialogue. In each case, the ratio of new contributors to old hands was low enough to allow these board cultures to perpetuate and maintain quality. For example, when a community is small enough that many participants will have personally witnessed the debunking of a set of claims, reposting the same crap will be minimally effective. This dynamic breaks down at size, and it's easy to see how increased traffic over the years leads to the erosion of communities that rely on their small size for their quality. That's where the other factor comes into play: quality of moderation. Despite being much larger and faster than the aforementioned slow boards, /a/ was quite good for a long period of time, largely thanks to very aggressive moderation. Low tolerance for off-topic content (especially anything with the scent of /pol/ on it) enforced a strong culture of topical, relatively thoughtful discourse. As one of the handful of places where you could discuss anime way too seriously without being hampered by those troublesome Naruto-watching non-elitists, old-/a/ produced a mind-boggling amount of in-depth textual analysis, especially of popular and controversial works like the F/SN VN. This was in large part due to the differences between the predominant pseudoanonymous forum-based model and the anonymous discussion model that aimed to address the deficiencies of the former. For example, a blight of old forums was circlejerking around the opinions of established members. Some guy, possibly a mod, would have a pet theory or position and everyone else had damn well better fall in line because he's got 20k posts and/or will ban anyone who disagrees. Crap like that wasn't universal, but it was a major issue with a lot of forum communities. Minus the persistent egos, discussion was allowed to progress. I think we let nostalgia blind us to a lot of the problems that afflicted old forum communities - the reasons that led folks to anonymous imageboards in the first place. Eventually, though, the pattern of strong moderation that enabled high-quality anonymous discussion fell by the wayside. What caused that, though? Having spoken with a variety of janitors over the years, the common thread is that the ability to trivially ban evade via mobile connection (especially ipv6) DHCP pools basically destroyed the mod team's ability to quash bad actors. Ban evasion was always a problem, but prior to the emergence of phoneposting it took a lot more effort and was easier to combat. Banning known proxies and tor exit nodes is a pain, but banning mobile carrier IP ranges is a non-starter. This led to a general sense of resignation, which in turn translated to less-aggressive moderation and a decline in quality. What I'm really getting at is that discarding the lessons learned about what makes an anonymous discussion system good or not just because the overall experiment didn't pan out is unfortunate, and that all hope isn't necessarily lost. For instance, an anonymous community with a barrier to entry (say, a SA/metafilter-type entry fee, where your ability to post anonymously is contingent upon not getting your paid account banned) could address the issues of size and moderation while maintaining the freedom-of-expression benefits of the anonymous model. The hard part there is bootstrapping - nobody wants to pay to participate in a yet-unpopulated community whose moderation model/community culture isn't a guaranteed personal fit, but opening it up initially to develop a userbase exposes it to the Gab/Voat problem.

antt 8y ago

4chan has better discussions that reddit and hackernews put together. The point is that they aren't stored anywhere and disappeared once they were finished. Over here I've been told that I can't have more than one account to post things I don't want associated with me in public. Give that I have a more than even chance I will work in some regime that takes offense to many things I might say, e.g. that I theoretically support LGBT rights, I just don't talk about anything remotely controversial.

Larrikin 8y ago
4chan only has better discussion when you are absolutely new to a topic, since the userbase tends to be on the younger side and they are happy to reshare the information they just learned. The basics are constantly presented over and over again. But people with real knowledge eventually grow tired of sharing that information with a userbase that is happy to discuss which programming language has the best Hello World, whether Good Eats or Food Wishes is better for someone that has grown tired of ramen noodles, how to get into starting strength, which JR pass to buy on a first trip to Japan, etc. The discussions don't seem shallow when the topics are new but they hardly ever get in depth because of the fact that the posts are fleeting outside of information contained in the sticky. There is very little point in having anything besides shallow discussion because it is ultimately a waste of time to constantly rehash the actual relevant and deep information you just posted a couple days. This is when the users are in more or less well behaved forums. You go into some of the more trolly boards and the conversation just degrades even further. Reddit has its own issues with people posting stuff just for likes and refusing to disagree for fear of losing internet points, but the actual content on the site is far superior to 4chan at this point, even though they started off by basically stealing all the interesting meme content from 4chan. There is actual useful information all throughout Reddit, even though I don't particularly like the community as a whole. I would really like to hear why you think either site comes close to the discussion on hackernews however. This is easily the most civil and well moderated large site I've been on in a long while.
- antt 8y ago
  Back in my MSc I had to code a ray tracer for a black hole. all the lovely GR tensors implemented in C and the like. Someone in sci pointed me to the gsl and how to install it on the local lab machine in Suse. Then they critiqued the way I was running the rays. I ended up getting 100% on that coursework. 4 chan is like a piggie bank. You get out of it what you put in.

ZoomZoomZoom 8y ago

Total anonymity may lead to this anarchy, but having a persona that's not tied to your everyday life, your social status and appearance, but to your status in a specific web-based society or a sphere of your interests, this is what helped moving meaningful discussion forward. What really devastated so much of the pre-social-network internet is erosion of this practice, in my opinion.