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That's fair, but then he shouldn't have been surprised when his site started hemorrhaging users who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed.

That's fair, but then he shouldn't have been surprised when his site started hemorrhaging users who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed. 8chan will probably last much longer than 4chan precisely because Fredrick refuses to make those judgement calls about what is and isn't acceptable. He doesn't need to bear a heavy conscience about what kind of speech he is allowing, he just follows the law to the letter and lets people do their thing. I leave you all with a fantastic speech the late Christopher Hitchens made about the freedom of speech and why there is no freedom of speech unless you extend that freedom towards people you disagree with, even the ones you find completely abhorrent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY&feature=youtu.be&t=20m41s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY&feature=youtu.be...

x0x0 12y ago
That is, to be blunt, bullshit. Frederick doesn't let them do their thing; he actively enables it. That's significantly different. Comparisons to Hitchens are similarly misleading; there is a large difference between enabling vs not stopping. While I support eg the KKK or gamergate jerks' right to talk and organize, I'm damn well not helping pay for it.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  A guy that has been using 4chan and other anonymous messageboards since he was 12 acts and thinks like a 4chan user. What a shock. I know it's not the same to you, but if you look at the top 15 boards on 8chan, that list includes a board that Fredrick likely has no interest in (gay porn), boards full of users that he probably disagrees strongly with (/leftypol/, a left wing version of /pol/, and /christian/, iirc he is an athiest), and a community full of people that he personally cannot stand (/furry/). Maybe you wouldn't pay to provide a home for "gamergate jerks", but he doesn't seem to have a problem providing a home for a lot of people he dislikes or disagrees with. What is the difference between "enabling" and "not stopping" something? Is he "enabling" GamerGate because he supports it on his personal twitter account, or is he "enabling" it just for refusing to censor it on his site? Is he "enabling" /baphomet/ because he made some improvements to the site software that happened to fix a spam/flooding problem they had? Then is he not also "enabling" the /furry/ board that he developed a CAPTCHA option specifically for, due to the constant attacks of one dedicated spammer that board received? Or does "enabling" just mean "allowing something I dislike"?
  - pjc50 12y ago
    I would say "enabling" applies to all of those examples apart from supporting it on twitter, which counts as "supporting".
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    If you own a media site (or, let's say, a newspaper), you're very much responsible for what's on it. If you believe in free speech to the point that you'll publish anything anyone wants to say to your audience, then you're very much enabling them and responsible for anything that happens as a result of publishing that.
    - current_call 12y ago
      Image boards aren't like newspapers or blogs. All content is user generated.
      - vertex-four 12y ago
        You're still giving them a platform to do so - it doesn't matter the exact details of how much is user-generated and how much isn't. If you allowed anybody in the world to put an ad in your newspaper, for example, you would be responsible when ISIS use it as a recruitment or propaganda tool - they wouldn't have that reach otherwise. Same with imageboards, reddit, or HN.
        marvin 12y ago
        Same with VPS servers. Same with internet infrastructure; hubs, switches and fiber. Or ultimately any physical area in which people uttering heresy and atrocious opinions stay while uttering them (the latter point would ultimately be of concern to any owner of private property, or the state itself in the case of common public property). How are these distinct from imageboards, forums or reddit? This is a very slippery slope which implies censorship from the very beginning. Are you prepared to follow your reasoning all the way to its conclusion and stop people from having any platform for speaking their mind? Once you go there, you no longer have freedom of speech, which I agree with Hitchens et al. has to be protected even when it is uncomfortable. I agree that there is a very tricky ethical case when it comes to harrassment or terrorism, but I have no good ideas on how to resolve it. We should err on the side of not censoring stuff we don't like.
- Crito 12y ago
  What is the line between "enabling" and "not stopping"? When the ACLU spends money defending the KKK's first amendment rights in court, are they enabling the KKK, or merely not stopping them?
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    Certainly enabling them. On the other hand, preventing the Government from disallowing them from free speech might be worth that. That's a different thing from giving them a platform to talk on, though. From a natural rights viewpoint, the KKK should be allowed to say whatever they want, but nobody has to give them a platform to talk on.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    I think there's a big difference between defending a principle, which is what the ACLU does, and active support of awfulness. The ACLU is just making sure the government won't stop the KKK from printing leaflets if they want to. The ACLU definitely isn't printing and distributing anything the KKK asks.
    - Crito 12y ago
      I more or less agree. I often ask this particular question because I find that many people disagree with us, or have not given the matter any serious thought.
nemothekid 12y ago
>he shouldn't have been surprised when his site started hemorrhaging users who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed. Is this an accepted stat or is this a soundbite used by 8chan supporters? I've seen this repeated often, but it doesn't seem true. According to the archive stats (https://archive.moe/vg/statistics/activity/ https://archive.moe/vg/statistics/activity/, https://archive.moe/a/statistics/activity/ https://archive.moe/a/statistics/activity/, https://archive.moe/v/statistics/activity/ https://archive.moe/v/statistics/activity/) - 4chan's traffic and activity has been stable. >8chan will probably last much longer than 4chan precisely because Fredrick refuses to make those judgement calls about what is and isn't acceptable. He doesn't need to bear a heavy conscience about what kind of speech he is allowing, he just follows the law to the letter and lets people do their thing. I honestly don't see how 8chan is different from 7chan, and I'm willing to bet that after the controversy is over 8chan's influence will die down much like 7chan's.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  I could imagine Digg management having a similar conversation about Reddit. Not saying you're not totally right. You probably are. But underestimating competitors is how they win.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  > Is this an accepted stat or is this a soundbite used by 8chan supporters? The qualifier you missed is "who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed." There are some 60-80,000 daily users of 8chan right now, even in spite of the constant DDoSes the site has suffered over the past few weeks, and that number is only increasing; they had to come from somewhere. I've visited 4chan a few times since the split and have noticed quite a few people that seem out of place in imageboard culture, and in general a lot more of the whiny and shitposty elements that I left 4chan to get away from, so my guess is that as the older anons that craved the free atmosphere that had been slowly eroded from 4chan over the years left, they were replaced by newbies who were previously too scared to visit 4chan who figured things would be "safer" now (yes, there already existed communities like /r/4chan on reddit that consisted of people that liked "4chan humor" but were afraid of, say, stumbling across gore, and there are also a lot of people that lurk 4chan without posting that don't want to deal with trolls and arguments, who might be more likely to post now that a lot of the people they disagreed with left). > I honestly don't see how 8chan is different from 7chan, and I'm willing to bet that after the controversy is over 8chan's influence will die down much like 7chan's. As someone who was around for both splits, they are completely different. 7chan was an exclusive community for "oldfags" (non-imageboard users, please don't shit on me for using that word, that is the actual term they called themselves) that attempted to insulate itself from the "newfags" and "gaiafags" they believed moot was allowing to ruin 4chan. They tried to do this by being highly elitist, and banning anyone even mentioning 4chan or its memes or for not being able to keep up with the latest mod shenanigans (because apparently snacks was the most important element of 4chan to them). The site died a slow death because it didn't really have any important unique communities to offer over 4chan, and because most people got tired of the comically overbearing moderation and eventually settled for the (at the time) much more lenient 4chan. Now that 4chan is the site with the overbearing moderation, 8chan is an inclusive community for people displaced from 4chan (mostly gamergate and /pol/), for fringe communities that previously lived in "general threads" that could now create their own boards with their own moderation (much of /vg/, parts of /a/, /lgbt/, etc), and for those that never had a home there to begin with (/furry/ is a pretty huge one that, for better or for worse, is one of the largest drivers of fresh blood into the site). Even if the boards like /v/ and /a/ with direct equivalents on 4chan died out (which they are not showing any signs of doing, even though they are admittedly smaller than the 4chan boards they split from), there is still a more than sufficient critical mass of people in the communities that have no other home on the internet that could keep the site going. 8chan is also for those like yours truly, that remember how nice 4chan used to be in the lenient days before you had to watch everything you said for fear of upsetting a mod or janitor strictly following rules that the majority of the community disagreed with, or just deleting things allowed by the rules because they personally disliked them. The days when mods didn't up-end boards they didn't even use, like what has happened to /u/, /jp/, /pol/ and /new/, and /r9k/ over the years, on a whim. The days when it wasn't tragically common for downright respectable users to have to frequently ban evade just to participate. Once I'd had a whiff of the fresh air of hands-off moderation and posters that mostly ignore things they don't like instead of whining about them ad nauseum, I realized how much 8chan reminded me of my favorite days on 4chan, and I'll never go back. Will 8chan "beat" 4chan? I hope not. I'm happy to let 4chan serve as the "containment site" for the (IMO) most annoying parts of the community. But 8chan doesn't need to beat 4chan. It can do its own thing. Ironically, it's a bit like Hacker News vs. Reddit in that respect. --- Adding a response to malbiniak, because I've, uh, "hit the post limit" (cough): >Within the first minute of his talk at XOXO back in 2012, he mentioned 4chan being about anonymity and ephemerality, not a blanket endorsement for freedom of all type of speech. I know, he has said that many times, but his users didn't see things that way, and that is really the crux of this debacle: the disconnect between what moot and the rest of the 4chan staff thought 4chan was about, and what the community thought.
jeffcox 12y ago
Ever heard the phrase "my right to extend my arm stops at your nose"? Online harassment and freedom of speech are similarly related. It may be a slippery slope, but it's an important one to navigate. Throwing your hands up and saying "well all these horrible manchildren would just organize somewhere else to harass people, so I might as well let them do it here!" isn't bravery, it's opportunism. As far as 8chan outlasting 4chan? Unlikely unless the owner realizes he's sitting on a ticking time bomb of federal criminal cases.
- Kalium 12y ago
  > Ever heard the phrase "my right to extend my arm stops at your nose"? Great idea. Easy to misapply, because with speech people are very bad at knowing where their nose actually is. Having hurt feelings from something someone said? Not being hit in the nose, but I know plenty of people disagree.
  - steveklabnik 12y ago
    Let's be real here, SWAT teams showing up at your house is far different than 'having hurt feelings from something someone said.'
    - Kalium 12y ago
      I agree, the two are very different. However, a number of people consider their own negative emotions to be a good reason to restrict the speech of others. There's a reason that flag-burning hit the SCOTUS.
    - ANTSANTS 12y ago
      Members of the anti-GG and social justice crowds have carried out similarly stupid and counterproductive acts of aggression and bullying. They still all deserve a voice and home. SWATing is horrible, but IMHO you should be placing more of the blame on our fucked up militarized police system that lets bored teenagers send an armored car full of soldiers, armed to the teeth and ready to kill to anyone's house with a single phone call. If it takes a few SWATings for the public to realize that this is completely unacceptable, so be it.
malbiniak 12y ago
Within the first minute of his talk at XOXO back in 2012, he mentioned 4chan being about anonymity and ephemerality, not a blanket endorsement for freedom of all type of speech. If you haven't heard it, it's worth a listen (20:59). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxRNRi7bOSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxRNRi7bOSI

x0x0 12y ago

That is, to be blunt, bullshit. Frederick doesn't let them do their thing; he actively enables it. That's significantly different. Comparisons to Hitchens are similarly misleading; there is a large difference between enabling vs not stopping. While I support eg the KKK or gamergate jerks' right to talk and organize, I'm damn well not helping pay for it.

ANTSANTS 12y ago
A guy that has been using 4chan and other anonymous messageboards since he was 12 acts and thinks like a 4chan user. What a shock. I know it's not the same to you, but if you look at the top 15 boards on 8chan, that list includes a board that Fredrick likely has no interest in (gay porn), boards full of users that he probably disagrees strongly with (/leftypol/, a left wing version of /pol/, and /christian/, iirc he is an athiest), and a community full of people that he personally cannot stand (/furry/). Maybe you wouldn't pay to provide a home for "gamergate jerks", but he doesn't seem to have a problem providing a home for a lot of people he dislikes or disagrees with. What is the difference between "enabling" and "not stopping" something? Is he "enabling" GamerGate because he supports it on his personal twitter account, or is he "enabling" it just for refusing to censor it on his site? Is he "enabling" /baphomet/ because he made some improvements to the site software that happened to fix a spam/flooding problem they had? Then is he not also "enabling" the /furry/ board that he developed a CAPTCHA option specifically for, due to the constant attacks of one dedicated spammer that board received? Or does "enabling" just mean "allowing something I dislike"?
- pjc50 12y ago
  I would say "enabling" applies to all of those examples apart from supporting it on twitter, which counts as "supporting".
- vertex-four 12y ago
  If you own a media site (or, let's say, a newspaper), you're very much responsible for what's on it. If you believe in free speech to the point that you'll publish anything anyone wants to say to your audience, then you're very much enabling them and responsible for anything that happens as a result of publishing that.
  - current_call 12y ago
    Image boards aren't like newspapers or blogs. All content is user generated.
    - vertex-four 12y ago
      You're still giving them a platform to do so - it doesn't matter the exact details of how much is user-generated and how much isn't. If you allowed anybody in the world to put an ad in your newspaper, for example, you would be responsible when ISIS use it as a recruitment or propaganda tool - they wouldn't have that reach otherwise. Same with imageboards, reddit, or HN.
      - marvin 12y ago
        Same with VPS servers. Same with internet infrastructure; hubs, switches and fiber. Or ultimately any physical area in which people uttering heresy and atrocious opinions stay while uttering them (the latter point would ultimately be of concern to any owner of private property, or the state itself in the case of common public property). How are these distinct from imageboards, forums or reddit? This is a very slippery slope which implies censorship from the very beginning. Are you prepared to follow your reasoning all the way to its conclusion and stop people from having any platform for speaking their mind? Once you go there, you no longer have freedom of speech, which I agree with Hitchens et al. has to be protected even when it is uncomfortable. I agree that there is a very tricky ethical case when it comes to harrassment or terrorism, but I have no good ideas on how to resolve it. We should err on the side of not censoring stuff we don't like.
Crito 12y ago
What is the line between "enabling" and "not stopping"? When the ACLU spends money defending the KKK's first amendment rights in court, are they enabling the KKK, or merely not stopping them?
- vertex-four 12y ago
  Certainly enabling them. On the other hand, preventing the Government from disallowing them from free speech might be worth that. That's a different thing from giving them a platform to talk on, though. From a natural rights viewpoint, the KKK should be allowed to say whatever they want, but nobody has to give them a platform to talk on.
- wpietri 12y ago
  I think there's a big difference between defending a principle, which is what the ACLU does, and active support of awfulness. The ACLU is just making sure the government won't stop the KKK from printing leaflets if they want to. The ACLU definitely isn't printing and distributing anything the KKK asks.
  - Crito 12y ago
    I more or less agree. I often ask this particular question because I find that many people disagree with us, or have not given the matter any serious thought.

nemothekid 12y ago

>he shouldn't have been surprised when his site started hemorrhaging users who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed. Is this an accepted stat or is this a soundbite used by 8chan supporters? I've seen this repeated often, but it doesn't seem true. According to the archive stats (https://archive.moe/vg/statistics/activity/ https://archive.moe/vg/statistics/activity/, https://archive.moe/a/statistics/activity/ https://archive.moe/a/statistics/activity/, https://archive.moe/v/statistics/activity/ https://archive.moe/v/statistics/activity/) - 4chan's traffic and activity has been stable. >8chan will probably last much longer than 4chan precisely because Fredrick refuses to make those judgement calls about what is and isn't acceptable. He doesn't need to bear a heavy conscience about what kind of speech he is allowing, he just follows the law to the letter and lets people do their thing. I honestly don't see how 8chan is different from 7chan, and I'm willing to bet that after the controversy is over 8chan's influence will die down much like 7chan's.

sillysaurus3 12y ago
I could imagine Digg management having a similar conversation about Reddit. Not saying you're not totally right. You probably are. But underestimating competitors is how they win.
ANTSANTS 12y ago
> Is this an accepted stat or is this a soundbite used by 8chan supporters? The qualifier you missed is "who were there entirely for the freedom of speech they enjoyed." There are some 60-80,000 daily users of 8chan right now, even in spite of the constant DDoSes the site has suffered over the past few weeks, and that number is only increasing; they had to come from somewhere. I've visited 4chan a few times since the split and have noticed quite a few people that seem out of place in imageboard culture, and in general a lot more of the whiny and shitposty elements that I left 4chan to get away from, so my guess is that as the older anons that craved the free atmosphere that had been slowly eroded from 4chan over the years left, they were replaced by newbies who were previously too scared to visit 4chan who figured things would be "safer" now (yes, there already existed communities like /r/4chan on reddit that consisted of people that liked "4chan humor" but were afraid of, say, stumbling across gore, and there are also a lot of people that lurk 4chan without posting that don't want to deal with trolls and arguments, who might be more likely to post now that a lot of the people they disagreed with left). > I honestly don't see how 8chan is different from 7chan, and I'm willing to bet that after the controversy is over 8chan's influence will die down much like 7chan's. As someone who was around for both splits, they are completely different. 7chan was an exclusive community for "oldfags" (non-imageboard users, please don't shit on me for using that word, that is the actual term they called themselves) that attempted to insulate itself from the "newfags" and "gaiafags" they believed moot was allowing to ruin 4chan. They tried to do this by being highly elitist, and banning anyone even mentioning 4chan or its memes or for not being able to keep up with the latest mod shenanigans (because apparently snacks was the most important element of 4chan to them). The site died a slow death because it didn't really have any important unique communities to offer over 4chan, and because most people got tired of the comically overbearing moderation and eventually settled for the (at the time) much more lenient 4chan. Now that 4chan is the site with the overbearing moderation, 8chan is an inclusive community for people displaced from 4chan (mostly gamergate and /pol/), for fringe communities that previously lived in "general threads" that could now create their own boards with their own moderation (much of /vg/, parts of /a/, /lgbt/, etc), and for those that never had a home there to begin with (/furry/ is a pretty huge one that, for better or for worse, is one of the largest drivers of fresh blood into the site). Even if the boards like /v/ and /a/ with direct equivalents on 4chan died out (which they are not showing any signs of doing, even though they are admittedly smaller than the 4chan boards they split from), there is still a more than sufficient critical mass of people in the communities that have no other home on the internet that could keep the site going. 8chan is also for those like yours truly, that remember how nice 4chan used to be in the lenient days before you had to watch everything you said for fear of upsetting a mod or janitor strictly following rules that the majority of the community disagreed with, or just deleting things allowed by the rules because they personally disliked them. The days when mods didn't up-end boards they didn't even use, like what has happened to /u/, /jp/, /pol/ and /new/, and /r9k/ over the years, on a whim. The days when it wasn't tragically common for downright respectable users to have to frequently ban evade just to participate. Once I'd had a whiff of the fresh air of hands-off moderation and posters that mostly ignore things they don't like instead of whining about them ad nauseum, I realized how much 8chan reminded me of my favorite days on 4chan, and I'll never go back. Will 8chan "beat" 4chan? I hope not. I'm happy to let 4chan serve as the "containment site" for the (IMO) most annoying parts of the community. But 8chan doesn't need to beat 4chan. It can do its own thing. Ironically, it's a bit like Hacker News vs. Reddit in that respect. --- Adding a response to malbiniak, because I've, uh, "hit the post limit" (cough): >Within the first minute of his talk at XOXO back in 2012, he mentioned 4chan being about anonymity and ephemerality, not a blanket endorsement for freedom of all type of speech. I know, he has said that many times, but his users didn't see things that way, and that is really the crux of this debacle: the disconnect between what moot and the rest of the 4chan staff thought 4chan was about, and what the community thought.

jeffcox 12y ago

Ever heard the phrase "my right to extend my arm stops at your nose"? Online harassment and freedom of speech are similarly related. It may be a slippery slope, but it's an important one to navigate. Throwing your hands up and saying "well all these horrible manchildren would just organize somewhere else to harass people, so I might as well let them do it here!" isn't bravery, it's opportunism. As far as 8chan outlasting 4chan? Unlikely unless the owner realizes he's sitting on a ticking time bomb of federal criminal cases.

Kalium 12y ago
> Ever heard the phrase "my right to extend my arm stops at your nose"? Great idea. Easy to misapply, because with speech people are very bad at knowing where their nose actually is. Having hurt feelings from something someone said? Not being hit in the nose, but I know plenty of people disagree.
- steveklabnik 12y ago
  Let's be real here, SWAT teams showing up at your house is far different than 'having hurt feelings from something someone said.'
  - Kalium 12y ago
    I agree, the two are very different. However, a number of people consider their own negative emotions to be a good reason to restrict the speech of others. There's a reason that flag-burning hit the SCOTUS.
  - ANTSANTS 12y ago
    Members of the anti-GG and social justice crowds have carried out similarly stupid and counterproductive acts of aggression and bullying. They still all deserve a voice and home. SWATing is horrible, but IMHO you should be placing more of the blame on our fucked up militarized police system that lets bored teenagers send an armored car full of soldiers, armed to the teeth and ready to kill to anyone's house with a single phone call. If it takes a few SWATings for the public to realize that this is completely unacceptable, so be it.

malbiniak 12y ago

Within the first minute of his talk at XOXO back in 2012, he mentioned 4chan being about anonymity and ephemerality, not a blanket endorsement for freedom of all type of speech. If you haven't heard it, it's worth a listen (20:59). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxRNRi7bOSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxRNRi7bOSI