Comment by NathanKP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NathanKP | Hacker News Reader

Here is the comment I submitted to the article on Danah Boyd's blog:

I disagree that 4chan is a community of hackers for one simple reason: to me a hacker is someone who gets things done. 4chan and other sites that focus on memes are attention diverters, full of people who jump from one lol to the next.

In contrast a hacker is someone who is willing to focus time and attention on one thing until he excels in it. The 4chan mindset is not a long term, viable one, because the lulz distract from any real good that can be done. Sure you can pick through the porn, rubbish, and hate in 4chan and come up with examples of great things being done, but if you look at real hackers, such as the internet entrepreneurs that are creating web startups at http://news.ycombinator.com you see many great things being created with little rubbish, not a few great things mixed into volumes of lulz.

I don't look to 4chan to create long term internet change. They are great for creating laughs, but the next Facebook, the next Twitter, the next great internet technology will not arise from them. It will arise from true hackers who still hack in the traditional sense, by writing code and coming up with innovative technological ideas.

You could say: a 4channer is someone who is willing to focus time and attention on getting lulz until he excels at it. (See: Time 100 poll.)

Sure, the lulz is a distraction from doing real good, but so was phreaking. It turns out that the skills used in both lulz-getting and phreaking can be used for good as well as evil. (See: Project Chanology, Dusty the cat.)

They're not hackers in the same sense that many of us are. But that wasn't how the term was used in the article, so big deal.

The disturbing thing about this, is that "skills used in...lulz-getting" are also useful for political manipulation and black ops propaganda.

I think both this article (and others like it), and your comment, are giving the users of 4chan/b/ way more credit than is deserved.

Any useful output that comes out of 4chan could be achieved in a much more intelligent and efficient way. At best they're taking a brute force approach, throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. People who are easily impressed by the results are ignoring the noise.

I also worry that the amount of child porn that's regularly posted on /b/ could come back to haunt Mr. Poole if he tries to us his fame to launch a real career.

Project Chanology is pretty much a failure. Sure they got together and did some funny things, but scientology is still around. Dusty the cat was nice, but as I said, that is just one small thing amid tons of rubbish.

To say that 4chan is a way to do good is like saying that rolling dice is a good way to get the answer to an addition problem. Sure, you will occasionally get a good answer, but it would be much better to use a decent technique to get good results consistently.

I think 4chan gets too much credit for the few good things they do. They are like an application of the monkeys pounding away on typewriters theory. Eventually those monkeys might produce a few interesting words, but most of it is just going to be a mess. Likewise, 4chan may occasionally produce some good results, but in my mind any good they do is far outweighed by the bad.

Clearly, the term hacker is broad and holds connotations that vary from person to person. Personally, though, I don't view 4chan as a community of true hackers, just a community of clowns that occasionally does some good, but a lot of bad as well.

To say that 4chan is a way to do good...

He didn't say 4chan was a way to do good. He said 4chan can do good or it can do evil, but the real point is to get lulz (regardless of good or evil).

Project Chanology wasn't a failure if you look at it on a "how many people know what Scientology really is" level. The "raids" were widely reported, at least at first, and really pushed some of the info into the minds of the general populace.

Oh comeon, the Church of Scientology had enough power to take on the IRS and become tax exempt. Surely it is impossible to kill an organization powerful enough to take on the IRS. But Chanology accomplished its goal of spreading the word and harming Scientology's public image enough to put a huge dent in the supply of would-be-converts.

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