8 ms·

Reddit is kindergarten compared to 4chan.

sudosysgen 6y ago
It is and it isn't. These kinds of people are just much more dilute on Reddit, and is much bigger than 4chan. On a bit of an off-topic, the progression of 4chan from where it was in ~2013 to where it is today is fascinating.
- dannyw 6y ago
  I'm fascinated by this topic. Do you have any writeups you'd recommend for further reading?
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    I don't really, I experienced it first-hand. This article seems okay though : https://lithub.com/from-anon-to-alt-right-the-dangerous-tricksters-of-4chan/ https://lithub.com/from-anon-to-alt-right-the-dangerous-tric...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - oldhatemach 6y ago
    Throwaway account here. Been browsing 4chan since I was 13. Have now essentially grown up with it. The site is now 17 years old, and I'm about to hit 30. I'll be there forever. I'm going to explain to you the current state of the site, as an unfiltered source, sort of like gonzo journalism. This comment will probably be buried (and possibly flagged and deleted due to the expletives used), but hey, maybe someone gets some insight, and I'm genuinely bored right now. I also hate dipshit tourists that claim they figured the website out because they did "research" on reddit. In principle, the website has always existed in a state of counter-culture, but it's actually one of the biggest producers of culture on the internet. And the userbase actively hates the rest of the internet for it. Particularly Reddit, which exists to shamelessly rip content while cleverly inserting ads through bought accounts and posts. They merely 'curate' content that's offensive to their bottom line, with complete disregard for the sanctity and rules for the community and site was originally built on. Hell, they don't even acknowledge Aaron Schwartz as one of the founders of the site anymore. This is a running narrative across most social media websites. When 4chan was young, Conservative Boomers ran mainstream TV-Addicted America. Fox News famously called the site an Internet Hate Machine. Boomers also didn't know how to use the internet, so the site remained fairly under the radar. But now with the advent of smartphones, everyone is online, so the site is no longer low profile. Democrats/Liberals also run things in the cultural mainstream. Unfortunately now, the counter culture swings the other way. 4chan's userbase is maturing, and the Libertarian idealism of yesteryear is slowly being eked out by genuine cynicism with a hint of conservatism. Fewer and fewer new users visit the site, unless of course they have no place to express their world views... What makes 4chan interesting as a concept is that its userbase is anonymous. Posts are judged by the content of their writing, not the identity of their user. Nobody cares that you're a woman, or black, or disabled. You're just a dumb nigger. The generation that grew up with 4chan was told not to post personal information about themselves online, because that could be harmful. But the modern Web 2.5 practically relishes this personal information. It's all about social networks and updates and trackers and datamining and exploitative advertising. Your personality matters. "You" matter. And you better tell us everything about yourself all the time so we can carefully cater and trick you into buying our useless shit. This is the founding principle in which practically 60% of Hacker News' userbase makes their money from. It's a trillion dollar industry, and like reddit, it cares more about its bottom line than any moral or political values. Anything deemed offensive is removed. Questioning the narrative is removed. Anything not politically aligned with the views of the website's owners or social ethos is removed. The court of public opinion is the rule of law. And the rule of law states that you must love mentally ill people with 40% suicide rates or blame white people for black-on-black violence or uphold a man that held a pregnant woman at gun point for drug money as a martyr. Follow these guiding truths or you will be gone. Please take a look at our sponsors and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. Naturally, this is totally at odds with a community that prides itself on calling you a dumb nigger. But the younger userbase of the modern internet grew up in these walled gardens, and its bleeding heart carefully constructed and babied liberal values stand at odds with 4chan. It's now having to wake up to a world outside of those places, and anything at odds with their world view is considered Nazism and Alt-Right terrorism. Unfortunately, the collateral damage of silencing their opposition and dissenting thought becomes -genuine- terrorism, because those silenced voices have no other recourse but to lash out. First they lash out on 4chan, and then in real life. 4chan becomes a whipping boy because its userbase primarily stands against censorship above else. They might call you a faggot, but they relish the thought of you having to see that word. They don't disappear you, they just insult you, and that in and of itself creates a budding camaraderie with the rest of the internet's miscreants and degenerates. Only on 4chan can you have people mad at transgender women while also browsing boards of shemales stroking each other's cocks. It's important to note that a lot of the site's rules have changed. No more raids or doxxes, or organized anything. But the site still persists, and in doing so continues to be a driving force in creative content on the internet.
  - dannyw 6y ago
    Thanks to oldhatemach for the writeup. I appreciate it.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      oldhatemachs write-up is inaccurate. 4chan isn't what it is because it's a magical place of anonymity where your opinions are considered in a vacuum. 4chan is what it is because, as time goes on, the website attracted the people that were getting banned from pseudonymous websites. As these kinds of people accumulated and accumulated, the website became progressively more toxic in every way, which drove out people who didn't enjoy that, which gave the most toxic members hegemony. It's also not true that 4chan has stopped doxxes and raids. Just yesterday /pol/ was full of people that were scouring everything they could to doxx the security guard involved in the shooting. 4chan was also counterraiding the leftist bunkerchan to have revenge on them making a meme about the facial features of the kind of people that enjoy /pol/. And it's also wrong that 4chan is a paragon of free speech. It used to be, but as the userbase started harboring more and more fascists, and as more and more of them became janitors, they started censoring leftist posters unless they refrained from, well, anything that makes a Chan a Chan. 4chan in general is also highly resistant to evidence that goes against their narrative, and won't shy away from accusing the authors of any study they disagree with of being part of a Jewish conspiracy. Most of all, the biggest meme in that post was calling /pol/ "slightly grown up from their libertarian idealism, [...] now with a hint of conservatism". /pol/ is openly fascist. As in, Julius Evola, Swastika, Black Sun, genocide, kind of fascist. People who spend their time talking about the day of the rope being censored isn't what drove them to violent tendencies, what drove them to violent tendencies is a mix of being socially recluse, racist, white males, egged on by literal Nazis who saw the opportunity to radicalized them, all of that in a community so repulsive to anyone else that few enjoy being there. It's not even that creative either. The main mascot of /pol/ was stolen from some random webcomic, the wojak came from Krautchan, and so on. It's just slight memes from someone else's art and a few puns. It's not a main creative force of the internet, far from it. Those are the dynamics behind 4chan becoming what it is. Purely anonymous websites in a pseudonymous majority will inevitably become a disaster. That poster is someone who was carried down the rabbit hole and can't realize just how extreme and wrong their opinions are, who can't realize what their values became, trying to convince themselves their worldview and website isn't as insane as it is.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Reddit tends to be a lot less nuts than 4chan, but when Reddit gets locked into a thing a lot of people follow the trend.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  "Gamergate"[1] broke a lot of brains all across the internet in 2014 and for several years later. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Izkata 6y ago
    That whole article needs to be taken with a very heavy dose of skepticism. The whole controversy was essentially consumers vs media, and wikipedia only takes "verified sources" - that is, media - so it's heavily biased.
    - morelisp 6y ago
      Case in point...
      - sincerely 6y ago
        Idk, it does speak to a potential flaw in wikipedia. What happens in a situation where, for whatever reason, the "authoritative sources" are reporting falsehoods? (Not meant to be a comment on gamergate specifically)
        thinkingemote 6y ago
        Wikipedia say that they do not intend to be unbiased. It's enough to report on something as a fact if a number of independent news articles reports them as true. Wikipedia doesn't (and shouldnt) do original research. These policies are great for the vast majority of current affairs but fail in a few edge cases where news reports align together on the same message. For current news and culture war stuff, consider the articles to be re written in the future when memoirs, PhD theses, documentaries and historians look at what happened.
        morelisp 6y ago

It is and it isn't. These kinds of people are just much more dilute on Reddit, and is much bigger than 4chan. On a bit of an off-topic, the progression of 4chan from where it was in ~2013 to where it is today is fascinating.

dannyw 6y ago
I'm fascinated by this topic. Do you have any writeups you'd recommend for further reading?
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  I don't really, I experienced it first-hand. This article seems okay though : https://lithub.com/from-anon-to-alt-right-the-dangerous-tricksters-of-4chan/ https://lithub.com/from-anon-to-alt-right-the-dangerous-tric...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- oldhatemach 6y ago
  Throwaway account here. Been browsing 4chan since I was 13. Have now essentially grown up with it. The site is now 17 years old, and I'm about to hit 30. I'll be there forever. I'm going to explain to you the current state of the site, as an unfiltered source, sort of like gonzo journalism. This comment will probably be buried (and possibly flagged and deleted due to the expletives used), but hey, maybe someone gets some insight, and I'm genuinely bored right now. I also hate dipshit tourists that claim they figured the website out because they did "research" on reddit. In principle, the website has always existed in a state of counter-culture, but it's actually one of the biggest producers of culture on the internet. And the userbase actively hates the rest of the internet for it. Particularly Reddit, which exists to shamelessly rip content while cleverly inserting ads through bought accounts and posts. They merely 'curate' content that's offensive to their bottom line, with complete disregard for the sanctity and rules for the community and site was originally built on. Hell, they don't even acknowledge Aaron Schwartz as one of the founders of the site anymore. This is a running narrative across most social media websites. When 4chan was young, Conservative Boomers ran mainstream TV-Addicted America. Fox News famously called the site an Internet Hate Machine. Boomers also didn't know how to use the internet, so the site remained fairly under the radar. But now with the advent of smartphones, everyone is online, so the site is no longer low profile. Democrats/Liberals also run things in the cultural mainstream. Unfortunately now, the counter culture swings the other way. 4chan's userbase is maturing, and the Libertarian idealism of yesteryear is slowly being eked out by genuine cynicism with a hint of conservatism. Fewer and fewer new users visit the site, unless of course they have no place to express their world views... What makes 4chan interesting as a concept is that its userbase is anonymous. Posts are judged by the content of their writing, not the identity of their user. Nobody cares that you're a woman, or black, or disabled. You're just a dumb nigger. The generation that grew up with 4chan was told not to post personal information about themselves online, because that could be harmful. But the modern Web 2.5 practically relishes this personal information. It's all about social networks and updates and trackers and datamining and exploitative advertising. Your personality matters. "You" matter. And you better tell us everything about yourself all the time so we can carefully cater and trick you into buying our useless shit. This is the founding principle in which practically 60% of Hacker News' userbase makes their money from. It's a trillion dollar industry, and like reddit, it cares more about its bottom line than any moral or political values. Anything deemed offensive is removed. Questioning the narrative is removed. Anything not politically aligned with the views of the website's owners or social ethos is removed. The court of public opinion is the rule of law. And the rule of law states that you must love mentally ill people with 40% suicide rates or blame white people for black-on-black violence or uphold a man that held a pregnant woman at gun point for drug money as a martyr. Follow these guiding truths or you will be gone. Please take a look at our sponsors and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe. Naturally, this is totally at odds with a community that prides itself on calling you a dumb nigger. But the younger userbase of the modern internet grew up in these walled gardens, and its bleeding heart carefully constructed and babied liberal values stand at odds with 4chan. It's now having to wake up to a world outside of those places, and anything at odds with their world view is considered Nazism and Alt-Right terrorism. Unfortunately, the collateral damage of silencing their opposition and dissenting thought becomes -genuine- terrorism, because those silenced voices have no other recourse but to lash out. First they lash out on 4chan, and then in real life. 4chan becomes a whipping boy because its userbase primarily stands against censorship above else. They might call you a faggot, but they relish the thought of you having to see that word. They don't disappear you, they just insult you, and that in and of itself creates a budding camaraderie with the rest of the internet's miscreants and degenerates. Only on 4chan can you have people mad at transgender women while also browsing boards of shemales stroking each other's cocks. It's important to note that a lot of the site's rules have changed. No more raids or doxxes, or organized anything. But the site still persists, and in doing so continues to be a driving force in creative content on the internet.
- dannyw 6y ago
  Thanks to oldhatemach for the writeup. I appreciate it.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    oldhatemachs write-up is inaccurate. 4chan isn't what it is because it's a magical place of anonymity where your opinions are considered in a vacuum. 4chan is what it is because, as time goes on, the website attracted the people that were getting banned from pseudonymous websites. As these kinds of people accumulated and accumulated, the website became progressively more toxic in every way, which drove out people who didn't enjoy that, which gave the most toxic members hegemony. It's also not true that 4chan has stopped doxxes and raids. Just yesterday /pol/ was full of people that were scouring everything they could to doxx the security guard involved in the shooting. 4chan was also counterraiding the leftist bunkerchan to have revenge on them making a meme about the facial features of the kind of people that enjoy /pol/. And it's also wrong that 4chan is a paragon of free speech. It used to be, but as the userbase started harboring more and more fascists, and as more and more of them became janitors, they started censoring leftist posters unless they refrained from, well, anything that makes a Chan a Chan. 4chan in general is also highly resistant to evidence that goes against their narrative, and won't shy away from accusing the authors of any study they disagree with of being part of a Jewish conspiracy. Most of all, the biggest meme in that post was calling /pol/ "slightly grown up from their libertarian idealism, [...] now with a hint of conservatism". /pol/ is openly fascist. As in, Julius Evola, Swastika, Black Sun, genocide, kind of fascist. People who spend their time talking about the day of the rope being censored isn't what drove them to violent tendencies, what drove them to violent tendencies is a mix of being socially recluse, racist, white males, egged on by literal Nazis who saw the opportunity to radicalized them, all of that in a community so repulsive to anyone else that few enjoy being there. It's not even that creative either. The main mascot of /pol/ was stolen from some random webcomic, the wojak came from Krautchan, and so on. It's just slight memes from someone else's art and a few puns. It's not a main creative force of the internet, far from it. Those are the dynamics behind 4chan becoming what it is. Purely anonymous websites in a pseudonymous majority will inevitably become a disaster. That poster is someone who was carried down the rabbit hole and can't realize just how extreme and wrong their opinions are, who can't realize what their values became, trying to convince themselves their worldview and website isn't as insane as it is.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Reddit tends to be a lot less nuts than 4chan, but when Reddit gets locked into a thing a lot of people follow the trend.
heavyset_go 6y ago
"Gamergate"[1] broke a lot of brains all across the internet in 2014 and for several years later. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Izkata 6y ago
  That whole article needs to be taken with a very heavy dose of skepticism. The whole controversy was essentially consumers vs media, and wikipedia only takes "verified sources" - that is, media - so it's heavily biased.
  - morelisp 6y ago
    Case in point...
    - sincerely 6y ago
      Idk, it does speak to a potential flaw in wikipedia. What happens in a situation where, for whatever reason, the "authoritative sources" are reporting falsehoods? (Not meant to be a comment on gamergate specifically)
      - thinkingemote 6y ago
        Wikipedia say that they do not intend to be unbiased. It's enough to report on something as a fact if a number of independent news articles reports them as true. Wikipedia doesn't (and shouldnt) do original research. These policies are great for the vast majority of current affairs but fail in a few edge cases where news reports align together on the same message. For current news and culture war stuff, consider the articles to be re written in the future when memoirs, PhD theses, documentaries and historians look at what happened.
      - morelisp 6y ago