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It used to be a diverse place without much to tie all the boards and users together save for a shared commitment to counter-culture. Then GamerGate and Donald T
by flmontpetit 1y ago
It used to be a diverse place without much to tie all the boards and users together save for a shared commitment to counter-culture. Then GamerGate and Donald Trump happened. "Every board is /pol/" was one of the most frequent replies you would see for a while until all the halfway decent people left.
/g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.
- kelipso 1y agoYeah, after 2015 it became impossible to go to any of the boards if you weren’t a pol poster. They made it their mission to spread their vile shit everywhere.
- zppln 1y agoMeh, /pol/ leaks but people also gets called out for it all the time. Overall I'd say containment style moderation like the one 4chan has works pretty well if you're looking to host "discussion" of a wide varity of topics.
- kelipso 1y agoIt’s not a terrible theory. You could argue that other websites banning their containment communities caused a spillover effect into the wider internet as well.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- johnnyjeans 1y ago/g/ genuinely was one of the worst boards on the website, but there were a handful of lurkers who made good posts in some of the general threads. the site as a whole was still was a diverse place up until yesterday, with only a few boards being unusably bad, and it was getting increasingly better. it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.
- flmontpetit 1y agoI guess the thing that really changed is our tolerance for bad actors. As far as I'm concerned even a 99% signal-to-noise ratio is unacceptable if the 1% represents a contingent of determinedly obnoxious and hateful people, and 4chan was never anywhere close to 99% signal.
- johnnyjeans 1y agoNah, the board culture really did change in the last 7 years. In a past that's not too distant nobody was obsessed with trans folk. That's not to say there weren't vulgarities and unpleasantries, but there was definitely a substantial IQ drop somewhere around 2018 and 2019. I haven't seen the "Install Gentoo" meme in a while, the old board culture was basically replaced with cringe fringe zoomerisms.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _345 1y agoive always wondered, is there a way to use technology on a board style wesbite to enforce a higher quality culture? i toyed with the idea of requiring an org email similar to Blind except it could be a school email too, the hope being that after verification you are fully anon still just now with write privileges and that it would somehow lead to better quality discussions and engagements
- ethbr1 1y agoAka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only) Social network culture is a multipart problem: 1. You need quality posters 2. You need to provide value to those posters 3. You need to remove low-quality posts attracted by site growth Any system that creates the above will be successful. The rub is that the humans behind (1) are free agents, with little incentive to stick to the site once (2) fails. Hence rapid Digg-style collapses from site owners who don't realize how tenuous their community quality is.
- arkh 1y agoLet me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays (at least in Western societies). Counter-culture is not always a good thing.
- johnnyjeans 1y agoThere is no counter-culture anymore, not really. Society is virtually balkanized.
- DrillShopper 1y ago> Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays No it's not. It's as mainstream as you get. One of the two major parties ran explicitly on a platform of transphobia ("keep men out of women's bathroom", "your daughter is being beaten up in sports by a man"). You can't call it counter-culture anymore.
- ethbr1 1y agoI think it's difficult to label "majority" culture when most things are split 50/50. Counter-culture feels like it requires at least an 80/20 or so.
- krapp 1y agoTransphobia has been a majority cultural view throughout every culture based on the Abrahamic religions and their strict patriarchal hierarchies. Even given that the nature of gender roles change over time, and concepts like "homosexuality", "heterosexuality" and "transgender" being modern inventions, transgressing those roles has almost always been taboo.
- Calinterman 1y agoGamergate and Donald Trump was a 4-6 year period depending on where you put the needle. There were 10 years before it and now close to 5 years after it. The people who continue to hammer about it are just announcing that they don't understand the site and are complaining about ancient history. The most popular board right now is the video game generals board, and second place belongs to the regular video games board.
- AgentME 1y agoThe site was markedly different before and after those events. /pol/ didn't exist before those events and aggressive alt-right rants didn't constantly leak into every other board from it (and get treated with kid gloves or be allowed by mods, who were specifically instructed to do so).
- flmontpetit 1y agoFrog in boiling water moment. Most of us have had enough experience with the platform before, during and after this period to know that it's not going back to what it was.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]