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As someone who unashamedly frequents 4chan it saddens me to see this sort of view. I'm neither for or against 8chan's banning but I think there's a lot of misun
by ShinTakuya 7y ago
As someone who unashamedly frequents 4chan it saddens me to see this sort of view. I'm neither for or against 8chan's banning but I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of the *chan cultures.
The problem with most of the internet is that there are so many psychological incentives to repress unpopular opinions and to fit in with the hive mind. Reddit is the pinnacle of that where your opinion is literally shown or hidden based on its popularity. Now this is good for lazy content consumption since most of the time the popular content is what you want to see. But it's also very dangerous. Very very dangerous. Not only because it discourages changes in thinking but also because malicious entities can literally manipulate what you're thinking.
So yes, I may not always like what I read on 4chan. It may act as a platform for mentally ill people. But a lot of greatness also comes from it too. I mean it's no coincidence that a disproportionate amount of internet memes originate there. But a lot of thoughtful discourse also occurs there, often inciting interesting arguments where elsewhere on the internet it'd be buried by downvotes or deleted by moderators.
- sjwright 7y agoThe antidote to social media ad populum isn't social media anarchy. They're both bad, but they're not equally bad. It's like asking if you'd rather eat your own poop or a handful of one inch nails. As unpalatable as the former certainly is, the latter is unambiguously worse.
- ShinTakuya 7y agoI never claimed it was a solution. I just said it helps you to avoid it. If it were the solution I wouldn't be on Hacker News right now. Although I strongly disagree regarding 4chan being unambiguously worse. Maybe if you're talking about just /b/ and /pol/ I'd agree but the site is so much more than that. For instance, the game development community there much more human and helpful than most other communities I've participated in. But there's a hundreds of other micro communities that are really great if you know where to find them.
- api 7y agoThere are tons of non-gamified and non-surveillance-capitalist forums out there about all kinds of topics. I realize not everything and everyone on the chans is toxic, but there is quite a lot of toxic presence there. I think the chans were cool and interesting back in the early-mid 2000s but since then they've been taken over by not-actually-ironic trolls, political propagandists and astroturfers, and other nasties. Since the forums are anonymous there's no real way to police it or even tell who you're talking to or whether they're a "real person" or a sock puppet of some kind. I distinctly remember what to me felt like the chans' shark-jumping moment: Ebola Chan. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ebola-chan https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ebola-chan When that appeared along with a thread full of seemingly not actually ironic comments like "maybe Ebola will de-populate Africa," I felt that the chans were done.
- ShinTakuya 7y agoThere's plenty of actual racism around, which of course I don't like, but most of this is limited to /b/ and /pol/ which are not representative of the entire site. They just happen to get in the spotlight more because of how controversial they can be. A lot of people on 4chan view these boards as a sort of filter to scare away outsiders. The majority of the site isn't nearly that edgy and largely discuss the various relevant topics for each respective board.