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I don't really understand the romanticization of 4chan - it seems mostly like people yelling at each other, trying to be offensive/shocking, and memes. It's li

• malvosenior 8y ago
  Most memes on Reddit originated on 4chan.
• Sargos 8y ago
  I feel like you just haven't spent much time there. Lots of interesting discussions are to be had on a vast number of topics. Much of Internet culture originated there as well. I feel like 4chan has shown just how needed an anonymous forum is to experimentation and community.
  • deleted 8y ago
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• sl1ck731 8y ago
  It shows people want the worst kind of discourse. You might not like it but if such a sizable community does its a shame it can't live on its own. Not everyone gets online to peruse HN or even learn anything at all and there isn't anything wrong with that.
  • setr 8y ago
    Well no, it shows that people are willing to accept some worthless discourse; but that doesn’t mean it all is. It’s the same as when you spend an hour trafing memes with your friends — its utterly worthless, but that doesn’t mean all of your conversation looks like that. But anyone else who wanders in blindly might only see the meme trading and think that’s all you do. In the context of 4chan, its just wandering into the wrong board (eg /b/), or the wrong thread, and thinking that was the only thing that happened round these parts. Like the whole hacker and gore thing came out of a single subcommunity, but became the public face of 4chan; but none of the other boards cared about it (although bots would randomly start getting through captcha and spam gore/loli porn, which most users simply hid or ignored. Some people praised the bots for keeping out the riffraff (those unwilling or unable to ignore things they dislike), but otherwise, they were far more an idea people had about 4chan and its users than the userbase actually did or supported
• str33t_punk 8y ago
  The romanticism comes from the fact that 4chan has been incredibly influential in internet history. Chaos is a ladder, as they say in GOT, and some of the best content out there has come from 4chan. The lack of identity and point system also brings out some of the most interesting conversation. I recommend checking out /mu or /lit (/b, /pol/, and /r9k are all containment boards). If you contrast the conversation on /mu and /lit with similar reddit boards (r/music - or even spin offs like r/hiphopheads - and r/books) you will find much more interesting and original content. I find the point system on reddit lends itself much closer to a 'hivemind' where everyone ends up conforming to the same opinion, which makes things boring
  • skurpaduhurrr 8y ago
    Same goes for HN. Even with throwaways, the point system serves as this “corrective” barometer, that you’re expected to notice, even care about, and supposed to strive toward. But perhaps most pathetically, even the moderators are brainwashed by it, as if the positivity trends of some mob are the smartest ruler to obey. So, what if I disagree with the mob, and what if I’m right? Well, the eigenstate of schroedinger’s cat tells us that there’s some degree of probablity that excuses us from ever taking that bet, so you can eat this hellban and lap up the antikarma like it’s the secretions of your wildest fantasy. Enjoy the vacuum of the echochamber. In space, no one can hear you scream.
    • jodrellblank 8y ago
      So, what if I disagree with the mob, and what if I’m right? Exercise your freedom to go somewhere else, some not-privately-run-webiste? Why, if you dislike the site so much, come back and post emo whiny vitriol?
      • smokeyj 8y ago
        The principle still stands. Why care about points? Wasn’t that the motivating factor to remove displaying comment points on HN in the first place? Facilitating hive mentality? If everyone agrees with a comment it probably adds no value. If everyone disagrees it probably adds no value. Maybe interesting discussions should be sorted by controversial, but I don’t think that would be a “safe space”.
• porpoisely 8y ago
  I disagree. Anonymous environments bring out the best kind of discourse with the occasional annoyances. There is a reason why most people agree that reddit's golden age was around the 2008-2012is period. Before all the censorship and propaganda. In my opinion, censored environments bring out the worst kind of discourse. Look at social media of today.
  • windo11 8y ago
    Just a reminder that during reddit's so-called "golden age", it was the largest hub for underage pornography on the internet.
    • adrianN 8y ago
      That depends or your definition of pornography. AFAIK nothing on /r/jailbait was technically illegal.
      • enraged_camel 8y ago
        >>That depends or your definition of pornography Let’s not split hairs here. There is a reason we have a saying: “X is like porn; you know it when you see it.”
        • adrianN 8y ago
          Different people know it when they see different things. Not too long ago showing ankles was considered basically porn.
        • Eremotherium 8y ago
          That saying goes back to supreme court justice Potter Stewart and it's something a lot of people would disagree with as it posits a fake universal standard for things like offensiveness and obscenity.
      • windo11 8y ago
        Underage "softcore" pornography. It's still reprehensible and indefensible, and it was one of the largest nsfw subs at the time.
• kbenson 8y ago
  I think you're just noticing the more egregious examples which garner a lot of attention. Quite a lot of original content that didn't have any other common place used to originate on 4chan. Eventually a lot of it shifted to Reddit as Reddit came into being and gained in popularity, but there's a reason that some content (such as very short science fiction stories, or humorous explanations of DND sessions in "greentext") is archived in the form of screen capture images, and that's because one of the few places you could find this with a wide audience was on 4chan. I've only ever been on 4chan a handful of times, and yes, the boards that people expect to be a clusterfuck are indeed a clusterfuck, but if you pay attention it's hard to discount the influence 4chan had on internet culture in benign ways as well.
• deleted 8y ago
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• typon 8y ago
  People are so enamoured by 4chan precisely because it isn't like reddit. Reddit, Facebook or any social media platform that rewards users with up votes, karma, reputation, likes or whatever creates a system in which people want to please others and develop reputations they have to uphold. 4chan is free from those chains and people are able to freely throw ideas into the mix. This is why 4chan has been so instrumental in coming up thousands of memes that define internet culture today. Reddit, Facebook and others are usually consumers of those memes rather than generators. I know this is a massive generalization, but that's been my impression being on digg, reddit, Twitter and 4chan for 10 years now. The problem is that a lot of the original 4chan users either moved on or just grew up and at the same time 4chan got over taken by alt-light type folks. I still think the basic idea of 4chan has a lot to offer that maybe could be replicated on an other platform, with a fresh set of people.
  • misterdoubt 8y ago
    Funny images and phrases, yes. Anything more substantive than that... quite rarely.
    • dcbadacd 8y ago
      Pretty sure there was a math proof posted on 4chan originally.
      • jdhn 8y ago
        There was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292061
      • lewilewilewi 8y ago
        Yep - someone posted an original proof of the lower bound for the Haruhi problem http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem
      • misterdoubt 8y ago
        I wouldn't say never.
• aquabeagle 8y ago
  I find it weird how many people are ok with 4chan but freak out about Gab.
  • dymk 8y ago
    Not enough porn.
• komali2 8y ago
  It's a disgusting place full of pretty much the worse the internet has to offer, but it was for a while a haven for people who simply weren't accepted by any other social group in the world, to no "fault" of their own. Be it a shitty situation at home (tons of foster kids on there in the old days), broke ass young adults, suicidally depressed, autistic, whatever, whoever just could not fit in, they had humans they could interact with, which is demonstrably imperative to human health. Bad actors would do bad shit there due to the very nature of the site. Probably, the misfits could have found some other, healthier, place to congregate. But they didn't, and so 4chan was important, to many people. It's a shame it got weaponized by bad actors. There was once a day when such attempts would be met with "4chan is not your personal army." Unfortunately, the bad actors got smart enough to figure out how to turn them into an army anyway. Beyond that, I believe it's important for social / cultural / political structures I disagree with to exist in small "gardens," left to their own devices - both as a living example of "yup, x or y doesn't work, go to 4chan to see what it results in," but also because sometimes it does work, and it's important to keep those traditions alive.
  • gjs278 8y ago
    4chan boards are fine. there’s nothing wrong with the free expression of ideas. you can respond back to any incorrect idea all you want.
    • KozmoNau7 8y ago
      You can certainly post thoughtful comments, but they will invariably be shouted down by shitposts and outright abuse. It's not worth it, because the 4chan hivemind doesn't want it. The boards are too hectic and posting moves too fast.
  • claudiawerner 8y ago
    I really can't get behind the idea that it's a disgusting place, even now. There are some parts that I was hesitant to use because it would drag me into arguments with right-wingers, but there were many other parts that were just really, really good. The kind of discussion that prevailed was often insightful (if usually short). On /mu/ and /lit/, the kind of people you don't want to be engaging with usually keep to their own threads, because they know their input is worthless in better threads. It is possible for me to have a good discussion about Marx (for instance) on /lit/ with minimal interference. This is an amazing feat considering how 4chan doesn't have the "walling" features that subreddits provide. That's often a bad thing but it's sometimes a good thing too.
• throwaway4389 8y ago
  From the outside, looking in, people tend to mistake 4chan for /b/, (and more recently /pol/). It’s similar to if someone decided to write off reddit, just because of the content on /r/funny. For one, I think /a/ - 4chan’s anime board is still the largest, English speaking, Japanese culture board out there. There have been animators, authors and directors on /a/, albeit answering questions in broken English. And /a/, unlike /b/, or /pol/, tends to not put up shock crap and humor. Many of the smaller boards are also like this (with the exception of probably /tv/ and more recently /fit/) The format itself, when not overrun edgy teenagers, is like nothing else. Every post is given equal representation. It's designed to be ephemeral and there's tends to be a lot less community politics. I won't argue that the format lends itself to a bastion of quality - it's a lot of wading through waste to find something good. It's the double edge sword of not having a "karma" system. But when its good - it's good, and when it's weird it _weird_. I think the problem with 4chan has had recently was moderation. moot made all the rules and was the final arbiter in all things 4chan. What that meant was only moot could really ban a discussion topic without it being overreach by mods. moot coming out and saying “naruto is allowed on /a/“ or “gamer gate doesn’t belong on /v/“ was the only real mediating force that could transform the community. If an anonymous mod did it, it would always be met with a meme mocking mods (“he does it for free”) When moot was more active, defending everything you said with “free speech” wasn’t really a thing either. Mods could ban you whenever they wanted for mostly whatever they wanted and bans tended to be more public. This mod power had a special hidden power - it was harder to take over the community around some singular meme. Eventually a mod would ban because he was tired of seeing X, and that was the end of that (similar to what happened to gamer gate - even during gamer gate people of people complained that games journalism didn’t belong on 8 of the 10 threads on /v/) I secretly wish for moot to come back and roll heads just to make things interesting. Currently I think a lot of threads get derailed because bait-politics gets injected into almost everything. Threads get derailed because of "someone who is tangentially related to the subject being discussed is a woman and/or minority and if you support X that means you hate America" type of posts. And I also just wish he'd pop by and tell us how he's doing. I hope he's happy now.
  • phowon 8y ago
    Outsiders to 4chan would probably also be surprised at the site-wide outpouring of genuine sadness, nostalgia and gratitude when moot announced that he was stepping down.
• deleted 8y ago
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• c3534l 8y ago
  4chan was the punk rock of websites in an era of increasing corporatization of the internet. It was an incubator for internet culture before other websites took that mantle and ran with it (Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and even Facebook now fill a similar role).
• huffmsa 8y ago
  That's exactly what it is / was. But like with startup investing, banging enough turds together eventually produces a few diamonds.