4chan, a popular hub for offensive posts, shows signs of distress
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
I think it's really dishonest to represent 4chan as "ground zero for orchestrated harassment" and "[a site where] some of its users created a set of code words to help users make racist and bigoted slurs".
It's like saying Earth is a place where people have their organs stolen and sold and where babies die. It is technically correct, of course, but it's very disingenuous to describe it that way to outsiders.
I would go on and talk about what I think 4chan really stands for, but I assume most people on HN are pretty familiar with the site, so just know that I am in the camp that likes how it is (or used to be?) a last bastion of freedom and anonymity (not Tor-like, but where the UX is designed to not have profiles and usernames) and free discourse on the internet.
The main thing I want to mention is that having money problems is absolutely nothing new to 4chan. Moot's comments have traditionally been along the lines of "4chan will always consume all available bandwidth". The nature of the site limits it to either leery advertisers, or people like JList (where 4channers are almost exactly their target audience). So advertising has always been hard for 4chan.
Personally, I think the 4chan pass is the key way to move forward for 4chan, or solicit donations more openly (perhaps a progress bar that shows % of monthly fees that have been paid?).
Funding 4chan is definitely a hard problem, but it has existed for more than a decade, and has been mostly well-handled for that entire period. Time will tell, though.
Well, noisy discourse, shitposting, and doubles threads. Actually, not really discourse at all. Mostly just heresy.
I know having that kind of space online as I was coming-of-age was huge for me, it gave me somewhere to experiment with opinions without consequences. Somewhere to say truly, truly disgusting things. And I did, a lot. But over time, it became clear where I was just being offensive and experimenting with "naughty" ideas, where I was trolling, and where I genuinely disagreed with the norm.
That free experimentation with opinions and language is a lot harder to find these days, but it really shaped and honed my ability to even form arguments, my ability to explain my position to people who don't agree with me, and my ability to listen to positions I find offensive.
Not all discourse needs be Discourse, full of profundity and consequence; experimentation, freedom, and privacy are core to the human developmental and creative processes.
Well yes, but the question is, do you value that developmental benefit enough to pay for it? The real problem here isn't "freedom", it's business: how can 4chan pay for itself?
Which is not to say that your comment is not valid. Society needs a release valve where people can feel free to vent their creativity along with the darkness in their souls. Imageboards are really great for that, as the ephemeral anonymous nature lets the good ideas survive and the bad ideas fade forever into the aether. Without the fear of consequences or prejudice, the human spirit is unbound to create stuff. Naturally, 90% of everything created is crap.
It's just a terrible place to learn socialization. And a few too many do that.
What you revile here with such colorful language is nothing but many developmentally delayed people you likely bully in real life (and certainly, if not you, others do) for not learning social graces and conforming to society at the rate you do forming a community and insisting that they be treated with rather than oppressed by society at large, or they'll tear the place down.
You don't like it, because you were on the oppressing side, and oppressing them is easier than dealing with their very real underlying issues and trying to meaningfully integrate them in to society.
So your suggestion is to eliminate a community that plays a healthy role for normally developing people and a meeting ground for them, presumably in hopes that they'll go back to quietly being oppressed.
> It's just a terrible place to learn socialization. And a few too many do that.
Frankly, I doubt you offered them a better alternative.
I have offered an alternative wiki farm, and specifically a wiki about tropes in media. The last time we had to deal with a developmentally disabled person on there, we ended up calling his parents to ask for help. You know, so we could treat him like a real human being and not just a ban evader.
Perhaps I read it wrong: feel free to provide another interpretation of the quoted text. I'd genuinely like to be wrong here, but it reads like you're engaged in culturally approved oppression of the invisibly disabled.
Ed: In particular, you identify a group of developmentally stalled people who didnt receive the help they needed to be properly socialized, and then immediately call them "deplorables" because they acted out.
I think that says it all: these are people you willingly other instead of embrace because they offend your cultured sebsibilities, and the culture you're in tells you to revile rather than help. That's the definition of culturally sanctioned oppression.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but openly racist and sexist people are deplorable.
> openly racist and sexist people are deplorable
I mean, I obviously disagree. I think it matters a lot why they're doing those things, as opposed to that they're doing them. If it's because they're mentally disabled and we've failed to teach them socially appropriate behaviors as they matured, how is that their failing rather than ours?
Your lack of concern for that possibility -- that we're just discarding the disabled because they didn't develop under their own power in to normal adults -- is what troubles me about your stance.
I've claimed that I think you're acting a certain way, but that's not a personal attack: it's a specific claim about how you're acting (and how it impacts others) based on specific and cited things you've said. Calling you out for your behavior isn't "attacking" you, even if it's uncomfortable for you or violates your social expectations.
> I don't really care about your views now, because you're obviously a lost cause.
Yes, I suspected that you would refuse to engage with someone who disagreed with your view and called you out on your behavior, because it would force you to confront the reality of how your actions impact people rather than the social fable you tell yourself about them. Notice how you call me a "lost cause", but clearly never even talked to me in this exchange. You just said the socially approved phrases at me. I think the reason you haven't actually addressed my specific points is because at some level, you know you can't. That what you're doing really is oppression targeted at a disabled group you've been socialized to find "deplorable" rather than "unfortunate".
It's just much easier to deny your bad behavior and fit in.
But I sincerely hope you'll at least try for your own benefit. I think having to explain why poorly raised mentally disabled people saying racist things are deplorable rather than unfortunate, without merely assuming your conclusion is right would teach you a lot about yourself. You don't even have to show me: just spend 5 minutes typing it out for yourself. Why not be sure you're right instead of merely assuming Im wrong?
Good luck on your commit. (:
That you're not even able to admit that much is telling, lol
Also their system is buggy, and half the time it would tell me I was banned for one reason or another even though using the Pass is supposed to bypass that and it was some other person being banned on that IP and nothing I had done.
Basically, the benefits I had paid for were spotty in their effectiveness, so I didn't bother renewing.
Also I stopped posting as much because /pol/ started ruining every board.
I don't think I've heard of anything from 4chan that wasn't being done on Usenet 20 years ago.
Usenet still exists. It's fast, simple to use, costs from cheap to free, has at least one infamously Libertarian/troll friendly provider, posts can be utterly anonymous via remailers, and it could handle in its sleep the volume of traffic, text posts and binary files 4chan gets.
If people on 4chan prefer to keep the site on the web - which is historically a terrible place for free/offensive speech, since the main feature web forums provided over Usenet was their moderation capability and control by a single entity/individual/opinion - they could pay for it.
If its own users don't care enough about it to keep it going, there's no reason for it to exist at all.
But many other boards are full of hate.
/k/ and /pol/ is full of racists.
/r9k/ and /v/ is full of misogynists.
and many boards are filled with homophobes.
Nicest board I visit was /ck/
Laughably biased and wrong. Not even close to attempting an accurate description the situation.
(Originally it started about "ethics in video game journalism", but it took about two minutes for them to pivot to attacking women.)
This, alone, was taken as proof positive that gaming journalism (and the gaming industry in general) was in the pocket of corrupt feminist interests, and founded an entire movement based on rooting out and exposing examples of same.
The story somehow became that Quinn was openly sleeping with half the games journalism industry in exchange for good reviews of her games. Now that the facts are out, the smarter Gamergaters try to downplay the Quinn episode or pretend that it never happened, inventing an alternate, less embarrassing origin story about ethics in games journalism. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to be buying it.
The response of the games industry to the fact of more women games is a cultural choice on their part, not some forced physical reaction to the mere fact. Hence the distinction between "women in gaming" and the "industry response to more women in gaming".
It's entirely possible to like that more women are involved with gaming while not liking how industry leaders have chosen to respond to that fact. I find it strange that so many people don't seem to get the distinction, and suspect that it's willful on their part, because they agree with those cultural choices and don't want to have to defend them.
This isn't just about women in gaming, it's about making gaming more accessible in general. Shooter games where all you do is blast things in the face can be fun, and I loved the hell out of the most recent DOOM, but even given that I do enjoy other kinds of games. There's a need for variety.
When everything is "shoot monsters/zombies/Nazis" in the face then gaming becomes boring and tired. It's like a world where the only kind of film was zombie/horror. It would suck.
Gaming as a medium is easily as capable as telling a story and conveying emotion as film, and that games aren't as emotionally diverse as film is a huge problem.
Representation in gaming is important and when done right it's not even an issue, it's not even obvious. The last instalment of Wolfenstein, a game not exactly known for depth of story, had multiple women characters, one of which had a physical disability, plus a character with a severe mental disability.
Maybe they were trying to tick all the boxes, I don't know, but it felt more believable and authentic than the usual Gears of War style bunch-of-generic-burly-dudes-plus-token-(sexy)-woman. This was an underground organization in the middle of World War II and you can't be picky about who you get. Their talents aren't necessarily physical.
So maybe you can explain more about their "response" because I'm not sure I understand your take at all.
> This isn't just about women in gaming, it's about making gaming more accessible in general. Shooter games where all you do is blast things in the face can be fun, and I loved the hell out of the most recent DOOM, but even given that I do enjoy other kinds of games. There's a need for variety.
I think we can agree on that: the topic of GamerGate is industry behavior, which wasn't just responding to women in the market, but trying in a broader sense to present the medium as more mature (ie, actually being art) and accessible (ie, more segments of the general population are involved). The women joining are just one of the most visible new segments (...because of the traditionally low number of women...) that industry executives are trying to entice to join in. (Let me know if we don't agree here, but I think we at least both agree on those facts.)
The GamerGate response is that the people traditionally associated with gaming are reacting to feeling "unhomed", from industry actions like that many major studios have publicly denounced what they like about gaming (...the unrealism of character portrayal and experience...) and called them sexist for their preferences, when just as many women seem to prefer unrealistic guys as guys prefer unrealistic women, ie, that the preference speaks to a widespread, deeper human escapism and lust for fantasy, rather than how they view the other gender. Given that a lot of gamers are traditionally from social groups which are bullied by other social groups, they're particularly sensitive to being called names just for engaging in a widespread, very normal fantasy.
The GamerGate response is really the underlying fear of having their culture appropriated and no longer receiving things that cater to their tastes because mainstream culture became involved, and forced everything to conform to their mainstream value signaling and norms. (Such as no more sexy women in unrealistic armor, even though no one is complaining about unrealistically muscled men in unrealistic armor being main characters.)
I'm personally sympathetic to both sides: opening the medium to a wider audience, having more sophisticated, mature games made, and exploring the medium as a form of art is very, very, VERY good for gaming and culture at large, but we should acknowledge that the gaming subculture was previously a refuge for traditionally low status, relatively powerless people, and should take care not to annihilate their subculture and safe space in the process. I think in many ways, both sides have refused to acknowledge that the other side has a valid point, and that what's really needed is a compromise. We can advance the medium without having to erase the more unrealistic, fantasy driven parts of it.
Drawing seems to do fine as art even though there's drawn, highly unrealistic porn. Video games can similarly advance as a medium without having to erase the "undesirable" content.
:) It's clever sleight of mouth to counterpose "benign" with "offensive," implying that offensive isn't benign. Sticks and stones.
As a visitor for over a decade, I can say almost all of 4chan is benign as it's recipes, endless blather about anime and video games, fashion and music. Typical teenage stuff.
The big difference between 4chan and most other places is the threshold for banning. In most forums, e.g. HN, if you speak against the forum, you get banned. On 4chan, you just get ignored and people get exposed and steeled against your ignorant behavior.
It's really the logical conclusion of "not in my backyard" style management. If you keep pushing people out of your neighborhood, they'll end up somewhere and that place is 4chan. And typically people grow up and out of it.
This article is testing peoples' reactions to a possible "victory for cleanliness" in the HRC victory. I imagine the center-right (which call themselves Democrats) will enjoy a good bit of muscle-flexing and creative interpretation of "freedom of speech" in the next 4-8 years.
Finally, getting condemned by the Anti-Defamation League is not difficult. http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League
Which makes total sense, since 4chan-derived memes have apparently broken into the mainstream against all odds, to the point where actual US presidential candidates (CNN's favored candidate, come to think of it) are declaring war on goddamn Pepe for excessively challenging their narrative control. The incredibly Darwinian environment is to memes what Chinese farms are for influenza, and we are beginning to see the real-world effects.
In any event a few entities at varying levels of seriousness have inquired about the possibility of purchasing 4chan and received no response, so it's unclear what's actually going on.
The post are all that count. You can't vote someone up or down, like on HN just because you agree or disagree. You don't have to think about your personal reputation when you post and how much upvotes you get.
Simply plain information.
Yes there is a whole bunch of BS going on, if you visit stuff like /r9k/ and /pol/, full of nazis who think hate-speach is the essence of free speach. But the topic boards like /fit/ or /fa/ or /ck/ have really good distilled informations.
As for the expression of unpopular opinion, I feel that a society that is able to handle it's members freely expressing the most offensive viewpoints is infinitely more robust than one where these things are left to simmer just below the surface.
It's never going to be anyone's money factory, which I guess is what "CNN Money" would be concerned about.
That being said, the board disappearing or losing popularity to the point of unusability is significant in a couple of ways to me.
The first is that the wild west of the internet is coming to a close. Everything is being watched and "safe havens"/"rotting pools" are threats to an organized leadership.
The second is that these kinds of groups have staying power outside a name. Can they migrate to new ownership or will they stay? I personally believe that 4chan will slow to a crawl and eventually viewership will die out.
The third is about trust. 4chan is not anonymous unless you are behind trusted proxies and/or share ip addresses with harmless strangers. However, since the data is stored on the site, they have free reign over what they can do with your content. As a result, 4chan is only a "safe haven" because it is notoriously caustic.
A fourth thing I found interesting was that the solutions to the 4chan problem were financially motivated rather than technically. Selling passes or threatening slowdowns sounds like a bullying. Im confident there are ways to offload parts such as using torrents as the post/image/video database rather than keep it. Turning 4chan into a "protocol" rather than a "website".
But Im not suprised the site will be put in this position. Its basically a place for people to look im the mirror and wank off. It will probably not evolve to anything more than a place of contreversy because thats what makes it successful. Theres so much goo that can come out of free speech but the only things 4chan attracts are insecure rodents that want to pretend they are bigger than they are.
The Feminist, SJW, etc movements want a safe space on the Internet and that includes censoring and banning people. They will get companies not to advertise on a site that they don't like. Reddit had to do that to get more advertisers, 4Chan might have to do that too, but they are losing revenue and haven't done it yet.
Sure I'm against sexist, racist, offensive stuff. I used to be a troll on some sites, and a mock conservative using Poe's Law that people thought I was a real one. In a way I am still a troll on some sites, just not as bad as the ones on 4Chan and others.
I remember Republicanville was founded to compete with the Daily Kos, but a lot of racists got on there and ruined it, and it shut down. It was because The Daily Kos had a censorship and banning policy and Republicanville did not.
There are technically solutions for it, like spam filtering, they can use racist words to filter online posts and hide them so nobody but the post that made them can see them, etc. Even like HN have a flag option to flag suspected posts.
If you look at civil rights, it has equality for all races, genders, color of skin, etc. We have equality, but why does it not work?
Yeah I don't want to go to a news site and read a post about white power either. I'd respond to them that it isn't my viewpoint, I believe in equality. Which would make them angry and post back attacking me. So news media companies have editors that control what stories they post, but it may or may not be a true story. It may be written for ratings to get more advertisers.
German hacker culture has a prominent pundit called Fefe [1], whose blog [2] is probably one of the most frequented blogs in Germany. He digs up interesting news items and offers light-hearted political and technological commentary, but he does not have a comment section.
A few years back, Linus Neumann [3] built a version of Fefe's Blog [4] with a comment section, originally as an April Fool's joke IIRC. There was no moderation at all, and naturally, all the worst commenters flocked to it. They left it running because, as it turned out, the comment sections on the blogs where Linus contributed were now much more civilised.
A few years into the project, they realized that they couldn't run the site without any moderation, but with no intent to monetize it in any way, they could not rely on manual moderation. Instead, Linus invented the "Trolldrossel": He modified the captcha such that it would randomly reject the correct solution, with the probability correlated to the badness of the comment. So if you wanted to post a civilized comment, you would only have to solve one captcha. But if your comment included racist keywords, you would have to retry 5-10 times. That method proved surprisingly successful in deterring the worst trolls, but the comment sections were still horrible.
At least, they got a nice talk [4] out of it, including the interesting finding that the quality of a comment can be predicted very well by its compression ratio.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_von_Leitner
[3] one of the speakers of the Chaos Computer Club; see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Neumann
[4] http::/blog.refefe.de (now defunct, but you can get a glimpse at http://realternativlos.org/31/; the site now contains background information about the project, unfortunately only in German)
plenty of people seem to believe in free speech until it's used in a manner they don't like, you have to take the good with the bad.
>A fourth thing I found interesting was that the solutions to the 4chan problem were financially motivated rather than technically.
hiroyuki has a history of proclaiming dire financials in order to scare users into giving him more money
it has long been alleged that he did similar with 2ch and niconico before selling the data of pass users, which is why he is no longer involved with either site.
http://roninworksjapan.tumblr.com/post/151338674506/hiroykis...
i'd argue that 4chan hasn't been free speech friendly for a number of years and has been dying primarily from poor moderation.