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I am glad this is being generally realized and people are no longer pretending the status quo is fine. It's the first step toward changing things.

by api 7y ago

shadowgovt 7y ago
I don't know. Given that the free internet gave us the likes of 4chan, things are changing in the other direction for a reason. It's kind of unclear to me whether the pendulum is ready to swing back towards lack of oversight again.
- shantly 7y ago
  Anonymous people saying shitty things on 4chan is nothing compared to surveillance capitalism. If anyone regulates 4chan out of existence and declares victory, they’ve missed the point.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    What is the point they will have missed?
    - antepodius 7y ago
      One argument might be that /pol/ might arguably be able to radicalise one or two people a year into a mass shooting, but that's not as bad as a worldwide technological panopticon. (It's not really a dichotomy, of course.)
      - anigbrowl 7y ago
        radicalise one or two people a year into a mass shooting You undermine your point with such obvious counterfactuals. This is not in any way an endorsement of the panopticon - which is exactly what /pol/ wants, just with itself in middle.
        antepodius 7y ago
        I don't know what you mean by that, sorry. Could you elaborate? I could read that as you either being charitable, or the opposite, towards /pol/.
    - Ygg2 7y ago
      That trading liberty for safety usually yields neither.
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        Modern interpretations of that quote are way off the bead from the historical origin and intent of the original speaker. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... It's not unlike people misattributing the quote about the net, censorship, and damage to mean the internet, When it actually referred to USENET (a system that was, essentially, censored by collective action of internet service providers ceasing to store and forward its messages, some because they perceived it as obsolete, some because they believe they would have personal responsibility, morally if not legally, for the way people use the channel). The simplistic interpretation of the Franklin quote breaks down very quickly when one observes that most of the Founding Fathers agreed significantly with Locke's social contract theory, which is very much relinquishing individual, personal liberties for collective safety.
        mc3 7y ago
        Thanks! Here is the meat: WITTES: He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it. SIEGEL: So far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation. WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means. However this misunderstanding alone is not a reason on it's own to dismiss Ygg2's statement.
- api 7y ago
  Chan culture is one of three things that I personally list as having killed the creative Internet, with the other two being gamified / addictive social media and spam. Chan culture is itself a form of addictive gamified social media too, albeit of a much more niche variety. It popularized memes and snark as a cheap zero effort way to get attention and as a "thought stopper." I started hating chan culture way back in the 'oughts before any of this Nazi alt-right edgelord BS, but none of it surprises me. I saw the way cheap shitty memes and repetitive jokes were overtaking substance everywhere and that the chans were the origin of the cancer. I still struggle to describe the essence of the chans but I know it when I see it. There is this odd cognitive style and of course jargon and buzzwords. It's almost like a very weird cult... like how people who have had contact with them say you can smell a scientologist.
- asteli 7y ago
  I think there's an argument that the consolidated internet caused 4chan to morph from a benign imageboard to the relative monster it is today. 4chan didn't start as a cancer, it became that way when all the 'normies' left for reddit|facebook|twitter.
  - api 7y ago
    I see the chans today as inseparable from the social silos. There's a two way dynamic in play. The chans are to social media what the gaming discords are to the games they shadow. It's where people go to cook up strategies to play the social attention game, and it's also an echo chamber where new memes and such are cooked up. The whole thing needs to be nuked from orbit.
  - tomatotomato37 7y ago
    It's actually kinda the opposite, 4chan traffic more than doubled[0] (with a matching decrease in quality) after gamergate and the election, and there is a general consensus that it's going to get worse when the next election ramps up [0]https://s2.desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1543/01/1543019932974.png https://s2.desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1543/01/154...
- denkmoon 7y ago
  That the free internet gave us the likes of 4chan is exactly why we should defend it.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Can you explain why?
    - denkmoon 7y ago
      It is (was?) a place of free exchange of ideas, without ego. You have no updoots to collect, nobody can be downdooted for not conforming to groupthink. Anyone who tries to establish an identity on the site is lambasted for not respecting the anonymous nature of the discussion. There will always be a place for truly anonymous discourse. For a time, that was 4chan.
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        And what has been the result of that anonymous discourse?
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        soulofmischief 7y ago
        A lot of wonderful, wonderful things. Anonymous has roots in 4chan. A lot of amazing political activism has sprung from 4chan. And it was the seed for the entire meme culture which permeates the internet. At its peak, 4chan along with half a dozen other forums entirely contained the fountain of creativity from which the modern internet drew its inspiration. I have been visiting 4chan since elementary school, now well in my twenties, so I have seen the changes over the years. What exists today is a shell of what once was. moot, the resident admin, left some years ago and placed the forum in the hands of a third party with conflicted interests and no interest in proper moderation. It's also worth mentioning that /b/, the board everyone is most familiar with outside of 4chan, is the one where you hear about all the illegal racist stuff getting posted. Before /pol/ was hijacked into a nazi version of /b/, it was actually a wonderful place for political discussion. And there are dozens of other topic-specific boards which harbor some very thought-provoking discussion.

I am glad this is being generally realized and people are no longer pretending the status quo is fine. It's the first step toward changing things.

by api 7y ago

I am glad this is being generally realized and people are no longer pretending the status quo is fine. It's the first step toward changing things.

shadowgovt 7y ago

I don't know. Given that the free internet gave us the likes of 4chan, things are changing in the other direction for a reason. It's kind of unclear to me whether the pendulum is ready to swing back towards lack of oversight again.

shantly 7y ago
Anonymous people saying shitty things on 4chan is nothing compared to surveillance capitalism. If anyone regulates 4chan out of existence and declares victory, they’ve missed the point.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  What is the point they will have missed?
  - antepodius 7y ago
    One argument might be that /pol/ might arguably be able to radicalise one or two people a year into a mass shooting, but that's not as bad as a worldwide technological panopticon. (It's not really a dichotomy, of course.)
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      radicalise one or two people a year into a mass shooting You undermine your point with such obvious counterfactuals. This is not in any way an endorsement of the panopticon - which is exactly what /pol/ wants, just with itself in middle.
      - antepodius 7y ago
        I don't know what you mean by that, sorry. Could you elaborate? I could read that as you either being charitable, or the opposite, towards /pol/.
  - Ygg2 7y ago
    That trading liberty for safety usually yields neither.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      Modern interpretations of that quote are way off the bead from the historical origin and intent of the original speaker. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... It's not unlike people misattributing the quote about the net, censorship, and damage to mean the internet, When it actually referred to USENET (a system that was, essentially, censored by collective action of internet service providers ceasing to store and forward its messages, some because they perceived it as obsolete, some because they believe they would have personal responsibility, morally if not legally, for the way people use the channel). The simplistic interpretation of the Franklin quote breaks down very quickly when one observes that most of the Founding Fathers agreed significantly with Locke's social contract theory, which is very much relinquishing individual, personal liberties for collective safety.
      - mc3 7y ago
        Thanks! Here is the meat: WITTES: He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it. SIEGEL: So far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation. WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means. However this misunderstanding alone is not a reason on it's own to dismiss Ygg2's statement.
api 7y ago
Chan culture is one of three things that I personally list as having killed the creative Internet, with the other two being gamified / addictive social media and spam. Chan culture is itself a form of addictive gamified social media too, albeit of a much more niche variety. It popularized memes and snark as a cheap zero effort way to get attention and as a "thought stopper." I started hating chan culture way back in the 'oughts before any of this Nazi alt-right edgelord BS, but none of it surprises me. I saw the way cheap shitty memes and repetitive jokes were overtaking substance everywhere and that the chans were the origin of the cancer. I still struggle to describe the essence of the chans but I know it when I see it. There is this odd cognitive style and of course jargon and buzzwords. It's almost like a very weird cult... like how people who have had contact with them say you can smell a scientologist.
asteli 7y ago
I think there's an argument that the consolidated internet caused 4chan to morph from a benign imageboard to the relative monster it is today. 4chan didn't start as a cancer, it became that way when all the 'normies' left for reddit|facebook|twitter.
- api 7y ago
  I see the chans today as inseparable from the social silos. There's a two way dynamic in play. The chans are to social media what the gaming discords are to the games they shadow. It's where people go to cook up strategies to play the social attention game, and it's also an echo chamber where new memes and such are cooked up. The whole thing needs to be nuked from orbit.
- tomatotomato37 7y ago
  It's actually kinda the opposite, 4chan traffic more than doubled[0] (with a matching decrease in quality) after gamergate and the election, and there is a general consensus that it's going to get worse when the next election ramps up [0]https://s2.desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1543/01/1543019932974.png https://s2.desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1543/01/154...
denkmoon 7y ago
That the free internet gave us the likes of 4chan is exactly why we should defend it.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Can you explain why?
  - denkmoon 7y ago
    It is (was?) a place of free exchange of ideas, without ego. You have no updoots to collect, nobody can be downdooted for not conforming to groupthink. Anyone who tries to establish an identity on the site is lambasted for not respecting the anonymous nature of the discussion. There will always be a place for truly anonymous discourse. For a time, that was 4chan.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      And what has been the result of that anonymous discourse?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - soulofmischief 7y ago
        A lot of wonderful, wonderful things. Anonymous has roots in 4chan. A lot of amazing political activism has sprung from 4chan. And it was the seed for the entire meme culture which permeates the internet. At its peak, 4chan along with half a dozen other forums entirely contained the fountain of creativity from which the modern internet drew its inspiration. I have been visiting 4chan since elementary school, now well in my twenties, so I have seen the changes over the years. What exists today is a shell of what once was. moot, the resident admin, left some years ago and placed the forum in the hands of a third party with conflicted interests and no interest in proper moderation. It's also worth mentioning that /b/, the board everyone is most familiar with outside of 4chan, is the one where you hear about all the illegal racist stuff getting posted. Before /pol/ was hijacked into a nazi version of /b/, it was actually a wonderful place for political discussion. And there are dozens of other topic-specific boards which harbor some very thought-provoking discussion.