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> Poole's 4chan is an anonymous, ephemeral imageboard that is often given the title "cesspool of the Internet." The site is broken up into boards of various top
by devenblake 5y ago
> Poole's 4chan is an anonymous, ephemeral imageboard that is often given the title "cesspool of the Internet." The site is broken up into boards of various topics, and some of the more lawless boards are home to all of the worst characters on the Internet, like school shooters, child pornographers, and racists. It's also the birthplace of a lot of Internet culture, like Rickrolling, lolcats, and, more recently, Pepe the frog memes and the alt-right. The site gave rise to the Internet hacktivist group Anonymous and is often used as a dumping ground for various hacks like the Nintendo Gigaleak. Poole sold 4chan back in 2015, a year before joining Google.
I don't think it's fair to say this without clarifying that a lot of the Q and other deranged stuff started happening after moot left. Nor is Pepe really a recent meme (somewhere I have Pepes saved from like the mid '00s), nor is Anonymous really a group (but that's questionable and a debate that isn't really relevant)... I know there's very little expectations when it comes to reporting on web subcultures but come on, this is common knowledge (maybe that's why it isn't clarified?).
- beaconstudios 5y agoyou'd think this would be common knowledge given 4chan is literally an open website, but I always hear these mythologised recountings of it like it's some kind of mysterious inaccessible cult. It's just reddit for people who hate reddit.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago"Reddit without the good manners"
- HerbMcM 5y agoAnyone admitting that they browse 4chan risks losing social cachet. Risk is too great either in an internet forum or news articles. The recent Q documentary on HBO was refreshing in that the person doing it actually knew how to explain things even if it feels like it's filler though. Then again that's someone on HBO who's been given permission to be edgy (try pausing some of the posts in the first few minutes).
- Rompect 5y agoI wish there was a mainstream site which has 4chan anonymity and fast pace + reddit thread format. Both become hardly usable with either elitism, censorship and people who think upvotes matter or an absolute cancer to follow conversations in threads.
- JeremyBanks 5y agoWithout censorship... so you want a place with nazis? 'cause that's what happens.
- leetcrew 5y agoassuming this is in good faith, please take a look at this list of banned subreddits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities#Banned_subreddits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti... though the world is probably better off without a lot of those, they are not all literal nazi subs.
- whymauri 5y agoGP is probably referring to Voat, which was a Reddit alternative with less censorship that went down the gutter within a year.
- jandrese 5y agoIt won't be 100% Nazis. You'll also have the spammers, pedos, and assorted wingnuts. Trolls can always take over unmoderated forums because while they can drive the reasonable users out by reducing the signal to noise ratio down to a useless level, the reasonable users have no power drive them out. It's a completely imbalanced power dynamic. All forums need some sort of moderation or they will always collapse once they grow beyond a fairly modest threshold.
- leetcrew 5y ago"reasonable users" is doing a lot of work here. not everyone desires the same level of discourse you do on every site they visit. /b/ has just about the bare minimum level of moderation needed to comply with US law and a lot of people seem to enjoy using it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- whymauri 5y ago>like it's some kind of mysterious inaccessible cult. It's pretty interesting, because as long as I've been conscious on the Internet it's always been posed as an 'inaccessible cult.' Probably due to all the inside jokes, I guess?
- superflit 5y agoThe 'inaccessible cult.' is about the structure of the board. First time you go there is a Chaotic mess that feels you went back to 90's. Then in shock you start to see the subs like /pol/ then you click and bam More chaos. Threads and threads you are more lost. Then you click catalog and set order Reply-by-count. Then it does start to make sense. You read people talking in two ways. On the text and on the image attached. It is full-duplex com. In the 90's I used to read my Mainstream media + Pravda (the other side) jornal. Now I read the local MSM and 4chan (the other side ) jornal.
- the_lonely_road 5y agoI made it to the site finally and but I got wrecked by step 2. Where is /pol? There is no politics section listed under Boards except "Politically Incorrect" which can't be what you mean as I was immediately hit with the full n-word and wish I had used an incognito browser... Do many HN users actually frequent this website or should I be reinstalling my OS right about now??
- tudelo 5y agoIt's exactly the reason people complain about anonymous image boards. But that's what it is. Even the "SFW" boards are filled with stuff that you might find distasteful or downright wrong. You are safe... don't worry. Unless you started downloading stuff from random users on 4chan. But if you did that i'm not sure we can help you!
- lightspot21 5y agoyep - that's /pol/ - it stands for Politically Incorrect 4chan's indeed a cesspool, and /pol/, /b/, among some others are the worst. In fact, they're called "containment boards" for this very reason.
- newacct583 5y ago> It's just reddit for people who hate reddit. That's true on a technical level only. But culture matters. Attitudes like yours were why 4chan was such a surprise to the rest of us. The culture that we all thought was just "ironic" and "edgy" with its casual racism turned out to be... kinda actually racist when right wingers decided to weaponize xenophobia and bigotry. The groupthink of a bunch of almost-exclusively-male incels turned out to be hiding genuine misogyny once they had an enemy to point themselves at in gamergate. Culture matters. Being an "open website" just describes how it happens, not why.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mhh__ 5y ago> It's just reddit for people who hate reddit. Isn't that hackernews
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoit's also hacker news for people who hate hacker news
- beaconstudios 5y agoNo hacker news is just reddit with a disdain for low effort jokes and a more technical/verbose focus. Most of the lame part of reddit culture is still here.
- pix64 5y ago> > It's just reddit for people who hate reddit. It's just reddit for people who hate
- beaconstudios 5y agoSure there is some of that, but there are people who hate on reddit too. Like reddit, there's also plenty of normal boards like origami, fitness, sports etc. It just gets associated with /pol/ which is a containment board for a reason.
- weeblewobble 5y agoI haven't been on there in a long time, but I remember it being really really hard to use, especially for newcomers. Tons of random crap, no ranking or voting system to bubble up things that are worth reading, lots of gore (and worse), inside jokes, spam. That's why people think of it as mysterious and inaccessible.
- LinuxBender 5y agoI think it's also worth adding that the memes didn't even really start on 4chan. They mostly started on ytmnd and then 4chans beta site started on servers that belonged to ytmnd/max. 4chan did however lower the bar to entry for sharing memes. Making gifs/mp3's for ytmnd was a put-off to many.
- pavel_lishin 5y ago> I know there's very little expectations when it comes to reporting on web subcultures but come on, this is common knowledge To you and I, maybe! But even arstechnica's readership may not be aware of all this stuff.
- base698 5y agoBecause articles are meant to sell ads through sensationalism not to inform? Propaganda to teach that anything free is dirty/salacious to keep people in their walled gardens.
- Lammy 5y agoNeeds moar yellow van https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128IR21ZQa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128IR21ZQa0
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway823882 5y agoThe only thing common about knowledge or sense is that most people don't have it
- neartheplain 5y agoIt's worth noting that the Pepe meme has continued to evolve, and is no longer associated solely or primarily with 4chan. The streamer community in particular has adopted, rehabiliated, and popularized Pepe as a mascot and chat emote. For example, here's Pepe and the "poggers" meme in a recent stream from Pokimane, a streamer with over 7 million followers who made Forbes' 2021 30 under 30 list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETBUJkVMnpc&t=70s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETBUJkVMnpc&t=70s
- Ataraxy 5y agoIt was a big thing on Twitch long before any of the negative associations were made with it via media.
- throwaway3699 5y agoYup. The GPs viewpoint could only have been discovered without firsthand knowledge of the situation.
- watwut 5y agoThe original author of Pepe put some work into deassociating it from Pepe The Meme. He hated the while thing.
- cl0ne 5y agoYeah, I talked with Matt about it at a party around the time he was going into lawsuits with Alex Jones and some alt-right people. He's a really nice dude. He hadn't been very familiar with 4chan before Pepe became a meme and was bummed that Pepe was being branded a hate symbol since he's writing children's books now. #savepepe
- coliveira 5y agoWhy do you think this is not relevant? Everything that came out of 4chan is not a surprise, it was accepted there from the very beginning. It just took proportions that nobody would expect.
- nemothekid 5y agoThe reason I think it isn't relevant is I think 4chan would be different if moot stuck around. moot had a sort of dictatorship power that allowed him to kill trends - for example GamerGate "died" on 4chan (leading to 8chan and friends) because moot decided one day that GamerGate was done on 4chan. I can't say for sure what 4chan would look like but I felt moot had a more tasteful and less ideological driven approach to running 4chan. There was an article in Motherboard[1] how /pol/ is being idealogically driven due to moderation choices. I don't believe moot would have allowed such an ideologically driven moderation changes to continue for so long. (IIRC, moot had deleted /pol/ twice, once as /n/ which he removed for being too much like stormfront). [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-turn-4chan-into-the-internets-racist-engine https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...
- devenblake 5y agoI meant the Anonymous group/movement/"which group?"/whatever debate is a bag of beans to be spilled another time.
- bigth 5y agoQuality of reporting on arstechnica has notably gone down over the years, while bias has visibly gone up.
- makomk 5y agoMedia reporting on anything involving 4chan has always been terrible. I remember a story about, I think, Emma Watson that turned out to be literally fake news - as in, it came from an already documented fake news site run by a known serial hoaxer, was laundered into legitimacy by increasingly reputable publications, and eventually ended up being reported as true everywhere including places like the BBC.
- Blikkentrekker 5y agoMedia reporting on almost anything is terrible. It's only obvious when one be somewhat well-versed about the subject themselves. Media reporting on internet communities, or places that I physically live in that I've seen are invariably very inaccurate.