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The take on 4chan on here is super intriguing. I always felt that the current social media/doomscroll/memesharing landscape which has become so common worldwide
by shipscode 1y ago
The take on 4chan on here is super intriguing. I always felt that the current social media/doomscroll/memesharing landscape which has become so common worldwide is indiscernable and in some ways worse than 4chan. It feels like 4chan left it's homepage and went worldwide sometime in the early 2010s when iPhone-style phone use became more commonplace.
I remember that 4chan users had more honor than users on the internet today. One example would be 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts, driven by huge accounts on IG/Tiktok/etc, that hit normal people daily.
The modern social media landscape has become far more hectic, harmful, and downright scary than 4chan. Dodging explicit imagery is harder on Instagram's explore page than on 4chan, and the widespread popularization of OF creators has zero bounds across the socials. DOXXING is no longer frowned upon and now commonplace. And memes have become less unique and funny and more commoditized.
- gtirloni 1y agoIsn't that the path that most platforms follow once they get mildly popular?
- amadeuspagel 1y ago"Not your personal army" goes father then not doxxing. It's a rejection of any attempt to imagine a community of strangers, united by hatred of a scapegoat.
- shadowgovt 1y agoIf someone rallied a hate-mob on 4chan, though, how would people know? Since 4chan overtly resists it, it'd rapidly move off of there, but it's still a great place to find like-minded folks that'd follow someone to another server to go brigade someone.
- Klonoar 1y ago4chan has always claimed to resist it, but 4chan was never immune to being shuffled a specific way.
- snvzz 1y agoImmune is the extreme. "claimed to resist but hasn't been immune" is reduction to absurd.
- mikeyouse 1y agoRight, “not your personal army” was a quick way to decline to advance whatever doxx was being requested at that moment. Not an actual ethos. They regularly doxxed and swatted all sorts of people.
- bboygravity 1y agoSo "not your personal army" == don't be a journalist?
- anigbrowl 1y agoNo it was a stock response to proposals for board/site raids from people who had lost an argument or been banned and wanted to retaliate (but without offering comedy potential). Kinda like when corporate people discovered flash mobs and tried to use them for free marketing.
- watwut 1y agoNote that it is possible only because harassment, abuse and raids happened so frequently, it was a well know fact. Not exactly something that makes 4chan people into ethical or moral.
- jabroni_salad 1y agoA thing about the site is that comments not threaded or ranked. When the site started getting a reputation you had a lot of tourist beggars coming in fishing for free labor. NYPA is about getting those people to stop cluttering the place with garbage.
- smsm42 1y ago> united by hatred of a scapegoat. United by hatred of a scapegoat that they didn't choose on a random whim or due to some common agenda. Otherwise it's completely fine.
- foolfoolz 1y agomodern 4chan has a certain authentic charm to it. this is missing from most other places. you have to sift past loads of junk to get it, but you have to do that on any app to get the content you want. with no names, likes, virality, accounts, etc there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments. less companies trying to sell me stuff. less focus groups trying to tell me what to think. and with less censorship you end up seeing more creativity
- LeafItAlone 1y ago>there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments I’m not sure you’ve actually been to 4chan…
- selfselfgo 1y ago[dead]
- profmonocle 1y ago> 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts That's too generous. "Not your personal army" started because 4chan had a well-earned reputation for harassment - usually raiding other web sites, but often targeting individual people who caught their attention for one reason or another. The "not your personal army" slogan came about because people who were very aware of this reputation were showing up, hoping to make a web site or person they disliked the next target. That got annoying fast, hence they told those people to go away. It wasn't a moral stance against target harassment - far from it. It was a stance that the group mind will choose the next target when they feel like it - not because some rando is mad at their ex or something
- KennyBlanken 1y agoMultiple white supremacist mass shooter have been 4chan users and they cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo-violence-racism/ https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo... The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed-attacks-online-a-year-before-carrying-them-out-new-research-reveals-223955 https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed... The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4chan-investigating-pathways-alt-right/ https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux... "Not your personal army" but 4chan users would routinely dox, swat, and otherwise harass people all the time. I have no idea why people are whitewashing 4chan so hard.
- sph 1y agoHow many of these used Facebook, Twitter or Reddit? They are not mentioned in mainstream media because they are popular, but I assure you there are a lot of deranged people that never even posted on 4chan and just stuck to the “good” ones.
- seanw444 1y agoOr the countless people that like and use 4chan, and would never remotely consider perpetrating such a heinous act.
- graemep 1y agoI see dog whistle (if its sufficiently subtle to qualify) racism every time I look at my FB feed, along with lots of ragebait and idiocy.
- seanw444 1y agoYeah I don't think the 4chan demographic is substantially different from the "normie" social media. It's just that everyone speaks more openly about what they already believe there, including the crazies.
- PixelForg 1y agoMy main problem with 4chan is how they talk, like the language they use. They really don't care about anyone's feelings and show a lack of empathy. Unfortunately this has been spreading to other social media as well. Imagine how good a place it could have been if people over there talked like people on HN.
- HaZeust 1y agoHN is 4chan in many ways - the smart, civilized people just come here. Whereas the smart people that are willing to act disabled go there.
- sph 1y agoHN is older 4chan. On the imageboard, you have the constant feeling you are arguing against 12 year olds.
- NewUser76312 1y agoHa, not even close. Not anonymous, upvoting and vote manipulation mechanics, and a very soft and liberal political bend, I'm leaning. I like it though, good to have some opposites to view so you don't get stuck in a bubble.
- 14 1y agoAs a parent I have seen first hand some of the bullying teens face on some of the mainstream platforms. Kids being bullied in an instant on snap where things are spread around at lightning speed for one example. But I have also seen some bad things happen on 4chan. People releasing nudes of their exes or posts where users submit clothed pictures of girls they want to see photoshopped naked and a person does so. Or the rekt threads with gore content blocked on most other sites. I guess my feeling is that no matter the site you will always get bad actors.
- rincebrain 1y agoThe memetic speedrun that's so common now on social media has some roots there, to be sure, but I think a lot of it was parallel evolution combined with cribbing things that were already polished from years of metaphorical rock tumbling on 4chan, in the best ifunny.com style. The ubiquitous expectations for modern humor among younger and even middle-aged people rely a lot more on knowing not just the joke but the culture and context it evolved in, and that sort of thing very much dominated bubbles of terminally online people before many people became terminally online and there was an expectation that everyone would know what you meant if you sent an image macro as the entire reply to an email. You can find example after example from not that long ago of people who are not so terminally online being completely perplexed, on TV and otherwise, and memes like "what the fuck is he saying" "let's get you to bed grandpa" about the cultural disconnect. Unfortunately, this sort of attention minmaxing without enough deliberation and learning around it produces people who are uncritical of what they consume and just want the next hit.
- Ferret7446 1y ago4chan will always be superior than modern social media to me, for one very simple reason: all posts are anonymous and there is no voting/ranking. Each and every post must stand alone and be judged alone. You do not know if it was posted by someone you hate or adore. It doesn't get hidden or promoted based on what a bubble voted. You see the post and you must judge it alone.
- sph 1y agoAgreed. I would go so far as to say all the ills of modern social media are because of ranked platforms, such as upvote/downvote-based, or like-based. They turn into echo chambers, that promote witty one-liners over nuance, and any sort of controversial position is effectively censored. That said, HN functions decently well, though in some ways it is even worse in the censoring the outliers.
- bananalychee 1y agoHN has a good model for technical discussions, and the fact that it's a forum with a limited scope whose audience mostly consists of technology professionals probably helps a lot in filtering low-effort posting (not to downplay the role of moderation). But when it comes to emotional topics like anything political, it clearly devolves into what you described. That makes me wonder if there are forums out there that focus on current events in politics or economics and successfully filter emotionally-charged posts; the few commentators on X who manage to stay detached are the only people keeping me on algo-driven social media.
- lurk2 1y agoThis used to be a selling point for me when I was younger, but increasingly I find myself not wanting to deal with poorly-moderated platforms. I can’t tell if it’s because the transgressive vulgarity that these platforms enable has lost its novelty as I’ve gotten older or because the median user has less to contribute. Every time I try to browse 4chan these days I find that half the posts are repulsive, basically pornographic representations of the world, and the other half is the product of psychosis (that is, the people making the posts likely need to be institutionalized). There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation, and a lot of people who are actively detrimental to a conversation. It used to be that you would put up with the craziest ones for the benefit of finding novel and overlooked ideas, but as the internet has become more accessible, the former group now outnumbers the latter. I would be inclined to think that the problem is that I just grew out of the shock value, but I see the same trend on almost every other platform, too.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]