5 ms·

You sound like someone who's never looked at anything other than /b/ and /pol/

by jowsie 5y ago

dsr_ 5y ago
Pointing out that the garbage dump also has a nice re-use station and a recycling sorter doesn't make the parts of it on fire emit fewer noxious fumes.
leoc 5y ago
Sure: I don't have any strong opinions one way or the other about Not All 4chan so feel free to amend "4chan" to "the worst bits of 4chan" if you think that's more accurate. But IME when you hear someone say "no, that's just /b/" then it seems that usually you hear some other story pretty soon afterwards which suggests that it's not just /b/.
chownie 5y ago
If you look at any board with high enough traffic it pretty much resembles /b/ and /pol/. The thread on 4chan's technology board /g/ is currently filled with people going off on trans people, "cucks", liberals and communists. Honestly, having sporadically visited the site since 2006 it's pretty much a cess pool now. It was never great, but since the mid 2010's it's more the negative, waste of time to read kind of deal.
- ido66667 5y ago
  Most people I speak with generally agree that after 2016 (Trump) it became way worse.
justshowpost 5y ago
4chan is an undisputed bogeyman among certain groups, that's why
emsign 5y ago
It's because of the very design of the board software and the resulting user experience that every 4chan board (and those of its sister sites as well) becomes a cesspool of anti-social behavior once they go beyond a certain traffic threshold. The amount of negativity on any given board no matter the topic is actually proportional to the amount of threads per a given time. The reason for that is the purging of threads that won't get bumped enough combined with the sorting by engagement not by actual votes like on Hackernews for example. This creates a high incentive to post controversial and upsetting stuff that will ensure the survival of one's thread and rewards trolls and extremists who are particuarly successful in employing that behavior. On small boards threads can exist for hours or even days. Whereas on large boards most threads will only last a few minutes, UNLESS the OP and the first few replies follow certain behavior patterns that have been proven to be successful for the survival of threads on large Futaba Channel type image boards. If the OP and the first few replies set the right tone for the following replies to follow, they will keep that thread successfully afloat. The type of posts that will keep a thread alive on 4chan must be heavily transgressive, controversial, use in-group language and references that makes it easier to identify out-group "newf**s" etc, and be overall exciting and enagaging. It's tickling the short term reward system in the user's brains after all. This is how the mechanism of purging threads trains 4chan's user base to behave like the assholes of the internet. They are being manipulated by software design in an evolutionary matter. Nobody wants to spent time creating unsuccesful threads with little engagement that get deleted after just a few moments, it's frustrating, embarrassing and boring. So people who don't fit in either leave 4chan or adapt. That's why the site's "culture" and memes seems actually quite consistent and conforming (to only its own rules of course). I find that's a huge mindfuck and manipulation of behavior, while not intended by the original designers of these types of image board software, it's still a thing to be aware of how these sites control their user's behavior. It's funny how this actually contrasts with the self-perception of their users as being based and elitist. They're actually in a huge online re-education camp that keeps them hooked via small bursts of endorphin. The boards' topics have only in part to do with the toxicity of views and behaviors expressed on them. I propose the hypothesis that it's actually the limited amount of threads being kept at any single time that is a huge factor that increases evolutionary pressure on the user base. In result it's what rewards toxic behavior on sites like 4chan, and this board mechanism is responsible for training a subculture of young men to believe that this is acceptable or empowering behavior online. So they excert this learned behavior outside the mechanisms of image boards and also bring it into the real world and into politics where they are being used by political professional actors for campaigns of course since their previously trained behavior and thought patterns that get activated by those political manipulators are not based on reflection and introspection but on manipulation and getting rewards (in the form of "lulz". Thus "owning" your opponent takes the place of real intellectual political debates). Decreasing the amount of allowed threads and increasing the user traffic will both accelerate this behavioral re-education process in its users. 4chan and the like as a mass propaganda tool to manipulate a subset of the population is excellent! It's like an army boot camp for political trolls, if it didn't exist you'd have to invent and engineer it like 4chan.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ido66667 5y ago
  I think your analysis is true, but it's important to add that all websites that reward posts one way or another experience similar phenomena. The way posts are rewarded tends to select for a certain types of posts. Twitter, for example, generally rewards for engagement and enforces short posts, and I think that's why a culture of political gotchas, confrontation and aggressiveness and is so prevalent there. And I know for a fact this isn't just an attribute of English Twitter. While moderation removes right wing extremist politics, mostly only on English Twitter, this only imperfectly mitigates one manifestation of a reward structure that encourages users to behave aggressively to one another. And again, if you look at non-English Twitter, even this is missing and in general, behaviour is not much different than 4chan.
  - emsign 5y ago
    Yep, that's definitely something you can observe. I think we've had a rich history so far of experiencing different types of online community software (newsgroups, web comment sections, IRC, BB forums, myspace, tumblr, etc) and I think we can classify them by the effect they have on their users' interaction with one another. Shifts in overall online behavior (at least perceived by the general public and the old school press) can be attributed to a shift in software used, I think. Many of the old online communities still exist and often times the old conversations and interactions are still online. This would make for interesting and I think fruitful and enlightening material for social studies. Ask anyone who has participated in various online communities and they can tell you pretty well how moderation and other users influence the overall social conduct in the respective online spaces quite differently. Most people can at least tell you about specific shifts in their online community and it would be interesting to find out what decisions of the site owners or software developers created this shift, if at all. I think as a software user interface designer you have a responsibility to be aware of your creation's psychological and behavioral effects. Sadly only the big social media companies really invest in this research and weaponize it for profit maximization. But I think this knowledge should become more widely available and more people especially the users should be made aware of it. To me people on Twitter and on 4chan aren't free in the sense of the enlightenment: “Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.”

You sound like someone who's never looked at anything other than /b/ and /pol/

by jowsie 5y ago

You sound like someone who's never looked at anything other than /b/ and /pol/

dsr_ 5y ago

Pointing out that the garbage dump also has a nice re-use station and a recycling sorter doesn't make the parts of it on fire emit fewer noxious fumes.

leoc 5y ago

Sure: I don't have any strong opinions one way or the other about Not All 4chan so feel free to amend "4chan" to "the worst bits of 4chan" if you think that's more accurate. But IME when you hear someone say "no, that's just /b/" then it seems that usually you hear some other story pretty soon afterwards which suggests that it's not just /b/.

chownie 5y ago

If you look at any board with high enough traffic it pretty much resembles /b/ and /pol/. The thread on 4chan's technology board /g/ is currently filled with people going off on trans people, "cucks", liberals and communists. Honestly, having sporadically visited the site since 2006 it's pretty much a cess pool now. It was never great, but since the mid 2010's it's more the negative, waste of time to read kind of deal.

ido66667 5y ago
Most people I speak with generally agree that after 2016 (Trump) it became way worse.

justshowpost 5y ago

4chan is an undisputed bogeyman among certain groups, that's why

emsign 5y ago

It's because of the very design of the board software and the resulting user experience that every 4chan board (and those of its sister sites as well) becomes a cesspool of anti-social behavior once they go beyond a certain traffic threshold. The amount of negativity on any given board no matter the topic is actually proportional to the amount of threads per a given time. The reason for that is the purging of threads that won't get bumped enough combined with the sorting by engagement not by actual votes like on Hackernews for example. This creates a high incentive to post controversial and upsetting stuff that will ensure the survival of one's thread and rewards trolls and extremists who are particuarly successful in employing that behavior. On small boards threads can exist for hours or even days. Whereas on large boards most threads will only last a few minutes, UNLESS the OP and the first few replies follow certain behavior patterns that have been proven to be successful for the survival of threads on large Futaba Channel type image boards. If the OP and the first few replies set the right tone for the following replies to follow, they will keep that thread successfully afloat. The type of posts that will keep a thread alive on 4chan must be heavily transgressive, controversial, use in-group language and references that makes it easier to identify out-group "newf**s" etc, and be overall exciting and enagaging. It's tickling the short term reward system in the user's brains after all. This is how the mechanism of purging threads trains 4chan's user base to behave like the assholes of the internet. They are being manipulated by software design in an evolutionary matter. Nobody wants to spent time creating unsuccesful threads with little engagement that get deleted after just a few moments, it's frustrating, embarrassing and boring. So people who don't fit in either leave 4chan or adapt. That's why the site's "culture" and memes seems actually quite consistent and conforming (to only its own rules of course). I find that's a huge mindfuck and manipulation of behavior, while not intended by the original designers of these types of image board software, it's still a thing to be aware of how these sites control their user's behavior. It's funny how this actually contrasts with the self-perception of their users as being based and elitist. They're actually in a huge online re-education camp that keeps them hooked via small bursts of endorphin. The boards' topics have only in part to do with the toxicity of views and behaviors expressed on them. I propose the hypothesis that it's actually the limited amount of threads being kept at any single time that is a huge factor that increases evolutionary pressure on the user base. In result it's what rewards toxic behavior on sites like 4chan, and this board mechanism is responsible for training a subculture of young men to believe that this is acceptable or empowering behavior online. So they excert this learned behavior outside the mechanisms of image boards and also bring it into the real world and into politics where they are being used by political professional actors for campaigns of course since their previously trained behavior and thought patterns that get activated by those political manipulators are not based on reflection and introspection but on manipulation and getting rewards (in the form of "lulz". Thus "owning" your opponent takes the place of real intellectual political debates). Decreasing the amount of allowed threads and increasing the user traffic will both accelerate this behavioral re-education process in its users. 4chan and the like as a mass propaganda tool to manipulate a subset of the population is excellent! It's like an army boot camp for political trolls, if it didn't exist you'd have to invent and engineer it like 4chan.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ido66667 5y ago
I think your analysis is true, but it's important to add that all websites that reward posts one way or another experience similar phenomena. The way posts are rewarded tends to select for a certain types of posts. Twitter, for example, generally rewards for engagement and enforces short posts, and I think that's why a culture of political gotchas, confrontation and aggressiveness and is so prevalent there. And I know for a fact this isn't just an attribute of English Twitter. While moderation removes right wing extremist politics, mostly only on English Twitter, this only imperfectly mitigates one manifestation of a reward structure that encourages users to behave aggressively to one another. And again, if you look at non-English Twitter, even this is missing and in general, behaviour is not much different than 4chan.
- emsign 5y ago
  Yep, that's definitely something you can observe. I think we've had a rich history so far of experiencing different types of online community software (newsgroups, web comment sections, IRC, BB forums, myspace, tumblr, etc) and I think we can classify them by the effect they have on their users' interaction with one another. Shifts in overall online behavior (at least perceived by the general public and the old school press) can be attributed to a shift in software used, I think. Many of the old online communities still exist and often times the old conversations and interactions are still online. This would make for interesting and I think fruitful and enlightening material for social studies. Ask anyone who has participated in various online communities and they can tell you pretty well how moderation and other users influence the overall social conduct in the respective online spaces quite differently. Most people can at least tell you about specific shifts in their online community and it would be interesting to find out what decisions of the site owners or software developers created this shift, if at all. I think as a software user interface designer you have a responsibility to be aware of your creation's psychological and behavioral effects. Sadly only the big social media companies really invest in this research and weaponize it for profit maximization. But I think this knowledge should become more widely available and more people especially the users should be made aware of it. To me people on Twitter and on 4chan aren't free in the sense of the enlightenment: “Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another.”