4 ms·

FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later

by FabHK 3y ago

FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later Reddit, Twitter, Instagram; and web sites such as Thought Catalog, later Jezebel, xoJane, Rookie Mag, and the Daily Dot, then everydayfeminism.com, Salon, Vox. I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social media and even mainstream media, they originated on Tumblr and 4chan, respectively. I wonder whether one could quantify/measure it somehow.

kevindamm 3y ago
I would posit that the proportion of "originated from 4chan" notes on knowyourmeme.com are an indicator of its outsized influence.
- _3u10 3y ago
  4chan is the America of the internet, the only reason it has outsized influence is because ideas were allowed to incubate. Most memes and ideas went no where but some had a chance to multiply without getting stamped out by the censors.
- sen_armstrong 3y ago
  I wouldn't bet much on KYM's provenance research. Memes spread so far so fast on the information superhighway, those that started on some Korean photography forum or Russian anime newsgroup, you'd never know if you weren't there ... or know where to look. KYM often cites 4chan because it's popular, in English, and well-archived (ironic indeed) and KYM editors will take the earliest hit from the third-party archives as provenience, when the archive itself might be younger than the meme. You can find discrediting examples in the mid-2000s thread collection the internet archive recently released ("archive ten billion"): memes appear in the chanological record years before they anywhere Google knows of. But how can you know that's the real origin? Even "Know your memes" first appears in there as a /b/ catchphrase in April 2006, but you must notice that's also when the /b/ posts in the collection begin. Edit, another example: 4chan is also known as a Mongolian basket-weaving forum, among other things: corruptions descended from the meme of referring to anime as "Chinese cartoons". An old 4chan saying, as KYM finds? No, it came from that Russian anime newsgroup, ru.anime.chainik, after its parody FAQ from 2002 was translated by users of an associated LiveJournal group and added to a since-deleted Uncyclopedia article. Q: Что такое аниме? A: Китайские порнографические мультфильмы. The full FAQ is on the author's website, which is still online, shounen.ru/anime/tech/afaq.shtml But is it entirely original to that newsgroup? Some of those terms seem to have come from FIDO...
  - kevindamm 3y ago
    Thanks for your reply and examples, very informative. I agree it's an awful metric but seemed it might hold water when I first typed it. Full disclosure, I have never actually visited 4chan despite ample opportunity.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      This is exactly why it's so famous; everyone knows of it but is scared to visit (or admit they visit) so it's a perfect "source of anything". (This post originated on 4chan)
  - sdwr 3y ago
    "Underwater basket-weaving" was a derogatory term for impractical university classes back in the 70s (?) and Mongolian is a stand-in for mongoloid, which fell off the euphemism treadmill as a descriptor for people with Downs syndrome. So "Mongolian basket-weaving forum" means "place for r*, useless people"
  - sen_armstrong 3y ago
    a mirror of the uncyclopedia page https://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/Onime https://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/Onime the livejournal stuff is also still up https://ru-onime.livejournal.com/71601.html https://ru-onime.livejournal.com/71601.html (2005)
ryukoposting 3y ago
As someone who was exposed to 4chan at far too young of an age, I don't buy this. There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been. Granted, I avoided that board like the plague, but cursory glances never showed me any novel ideas being formulated. Even if there is real conversation of various political ideologies, it's drowned out by a sea of kids who think it's cool to say the N word online. 4chan is unique because of its combination of scale, relative lack of moderation, and relatively high anonymity. By nature, it's a place where political radicals would be able to shitpost freely en masse. 4chan was absolutely a vehicle for platforming radical politics, but the word "shitpost" is key - the average discourse on 4chan isn't at a level where ideological formulation can happen at a meaningful scale. Memes are the only exception. 4chan memes have, on multiple occasions, turned into widely-known (and sometimes widely-misunderstood) political imagery. That imagery routinely has no clear symbolism whatsoever, and is assigned all kinds of wacky meanings depending on you ask... which is what you'd expect from 4chan, I guess.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  4chan is the infinite racists on infinite typewriters analogy; that said, some ideas converge and crystallize and escape out of the shitposts. Greentext screenshots and images that are distributed outside of the cesspool and get mainstream appeal though e.g. Reddit. Survivorship bias, evolutionary somethings, and curation help the shit escape 4chan's confines. I can probably word that more eloquently when my brain isn't fried.
- filoleg 3y ago
  > There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been. Agreed, but to be fair, /pol/ was created with the officially stated goal of acting as a containment board. And tbh, that’s exactly what it still is to this day.
- causality0 3y ago
  It's absolutely baffling to me that despite the sheer amount of garbage, people still choose to post non-garbage content there at all. You sort through a hundred neo-nazi and race-baiting posts and then you find news that happened less than thirty seconds ago and won't be on CNN for two hours. I wish these "insiders" would find a better place share their information.
ethbr1 3y ago
> I wonder whether one could quantify/measure [where ideas originated and entered the mainstream] somehow. You could probably use something like genetic tracing, if you could come up with a way of fingerprinting free text semi-reliably. My expectation is there are probably "tell words" (i.e. not used elsewhere or for that purpose) in novel ideas, and you could likely observe these spreading over time, as the ideas carrying them did. One of the first things groups tend to do is specialize and redefine language / create jargon.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  A complication is that some of this jargon gets mangled over time. "Based and redpilled" is definite jargon associated with certain subcultures, but you won't see it in mainstream media other than articles about that exact phrase.

by FabHK 3y ago

kevindamm 3y ago

I would posit that the proportion of "originated from 4chan" notes on knowyourmeme.com are an indicator of its outsized influence.

_3u10 3y ago
4chan is the America of the internet, the only reason it has outsized influence is because ideas were allowed to incubate. Most memes and ideas went no where but some had a chance to multiply without getting stamped out by the censors.
sen_armstrong 3y ago
I wouldn't bet much on KYM's provenance research. Memes spread so far so fast on the information superhighway, those that started on some Korean photography forum or Russian anime newsgroup, you'd never know if you weren't there ... or know where to look. KYM often cites 4chan because it's popular, in English, and well-archived (ironic indeed) and KYM editors will take the earliest hit from the third-party archives as provenience, when the archive itself might be younger than the meme. You can find discrediting examples in the mid-2000s thread collection the internet archive recently released ("archive ten billion"): memes appear in the chanological record years before they anywhere Google knows of. But how can you know that's the real origin? Even "Know your memes" first appears in there as a /b/ catchphrase in April 2006, but you must notice that's also when the /b/ posts in the collection begin. Edit, another example: 4chan is also known as a Mongolian basket-weaving forum, among other things: corruptions descended from the meme of referring to anime as "Chinese cartoons". An old 4chan saying, as KYM finds? No, it came from that Russian anime newsgroup, ru.anime.chainik, after its parody FAQ from 2002 was translated by users of an associated LiveJournal group and added to a since-deleted Uncyclopedia article. Q: Что такое аниме? A: Китайские порнографические мультфильмы. The full FAQ is on the author's website, which is still online, shounen.ru/anime/tech/afaq.shtml But is it entirely original to that newsgroup? Some of those terms seem to have come from FIDO...
- kevindamm 3y ago
  Thanks for your reply and examples, very informative. I agree it's an awful metric but seemed it might hold water when I first typed it. Full disclosure, I have never actually visited 4chan despite ample opportunity.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    This is exactly why it's so famous; everyone knows of it but is scared to visit (or admit they visit) so it's a perfect "source of anything". (This post originated on 4chan)
- sdwr 3y ago
  "Underwater basket-weaving" was a derogatory term for impractical university classes back in the 70s (?) and Mongolian is a stand-in for mongoloid, which fell off the euphemism treadmill as a descriptor for people with Downs syndrome. So "Mongolian basket-weaving forum" means "place for r*, useless people"
- sen_armstrong 3y ago
  a mirror of the uncyclopedia page https://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/Onime https://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/Onime the livejournal stuff is also still up https://ru-onime.livejournal.com/71601.html https://ru-onime.livejournal.com/71601.html (2005)

ryukoposting 3y ago

As someone who was exposed to 4chan at far too young of an age, I don't buy this. There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been. Granted, I avoided that board like the plague, but cursory glances never showed me any novel ideas being formulated. Even if there is real conversation of various political ideologies, it's drowned out by a sea of kids who think it's cool to say the N word online. 4chan is unique because of its combination of scale, relative lack of moderation, and relatively high anonymity. By nature, it's a place where political radicals would be able to shitpost freely en masse. 4chan was absolutely a vehicle for platforming radical politics, but the word "shitpost" is key - the average discourse on 4chan isn't at a level where ideological formulation can happen at a meaningful scale. Memes are the only exception. 4chan memes have, on multiple occasions, turned into widely-known (and sometimes widely-misunderstood) political imagery. That imagery routinely has no clear symbolism whatsoever, and is assigned all kinds of wacky meanings depending on you ask... which is what you'd expect from 4chan, I guess.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
4chan is the infinite racists on infinite typewriters analogy; that said, some ideas converge and crystallize and escape out of the shitposts. Greentext screenshots and images that are distributed outside of the cesspool and get mainstream appeal though e.g. Reddit. Survivorship bias, evolutionary somethings, and curation help the shit escape 4chan's confines. I can probably word that more eloquently when my brain isn't fried.
filoleg 3y ago
> There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been. Agreed, but to be fair, /pol/ was created with the officially stated goal of acting as a containment board. And tbh, that’s exactly what it still is to this day.
causality0 3y ago
It's absolutely baffling to me that despite the sheer amount of garbage, people still choose to post non-garbage content there at all. You sort through a hundred neo-nazi and race-baiting posts and then you find news that happened less than thirty seconds ago and won't be on CNN for two hours. I wish these "insiders" would find a better place share their information.

ethbr1 3y ago

> I wonder whether one could quantify/measure [where ideas originated and entered the mainstream] somehow. You could probably use something like genetic tracing, if you could come up with a way of fingerprinting free text semi-reliably. My expectation is there are probably "tell words" (i.e. not used elsewhere or for that purpose) in novel ideas, and you could likely observe these spreading over time, as the ideas carrying them did. One of the first things groups tend to do is specialize and redefine language / create jargon.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
A complication is that some of this jargon gets mangled over time. "Based and redpilled" is definite jargon associated with certain subcultures, but you won't see it in mainstream media other than articles about that exact phrase.