4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager | Hacker News Reader

4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

wired.com

65 pointsartsandsci134 comments

How many of these anti-4chan articles are written by people that regularly use it? I'm guessing zero. 4chan is an interesting site and has better discussion from a broad userbase than reddit or here. Plenty of interesting projects were born out of 4chan, particularly /g/ but the other boards have created valuable things for humans in general, not just internet culture. The positives IMO come from the whole "FREE SPEECH" attitude, that also leads to the negatives. 4chan's soul is in trolling, memes and productive creativity. They go hand in hand.

Try using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about. It's exactly like reddit, everyone says stay away from the defaults. In 4chan's case, stay away from /b/, /v/ and /pol/ and you're unlikely to see anything graphic or demeaning beyond general discussion boards...

Projects I know that were born on 4chan: tox.im - /g/ TurtleCoin - /biz/ NetRunner - /g/ Others mentioned in the article, notably project chanology.

Editing this comment just to say that my point wasn't that toxicity, racism and sexism are okay to just ignore... my point was we already ignore that everywhere else on the internet. Look at youtube or reddit comments. If you can't see how it's the same you're just better at ignoring it on your platform of choice. I'd say it's more concentrated on 4chan yes, and I've probably gotten pretty good at filtering it out myself. But this problem is all over the internet and writing a piece about how 4chan "needs to grow up" isn't much of a revelation. The whole internet needs to.

> using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about.

Can you even imagine using 4chan as a woman or a black man? Like not only in real life do you have to deal with people being racist as hell, but hey here's this forum that's entirely shameless about it too.

You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them.

The only people who can go to 4chan and just ignore the toxic stuff are the people who aren't affected by the toxic stuff.

Black occasional user here who recently turned 30.

I used 4chan heavily when I was in college and early 20s. Back then most of the hate in /pol/ was directed at religion in general and scientology in particular and /r9k/ hadn't quite became a cesspool of incels. But as I got older I started to see the change. It became too "safe" (for lack of a better word) for people with social stigma to express their frustrations as anger and eventually misogyny and racism. I mostly stick to /tg/ and a few of the porn boards now but I'm hyper aware of who my peers might be. I know the simple answer is to "ignore the stuff you don't like" but that shit leaks everywhere and I still run across the occasional racist comment when I visit, even when I try to stick to the places that aren't literal cancer.

Although I am not black, I am Asian, and can be described by a word started with C (/csg/ if you lurk /g/), and more accurately G. I would be offended if someone calls me that in real life.

On 4chan though, I myself really don't get offended in any way. Someone explained it this way: you're only supposed to be offended if someone calls you a n* f* in a setting that not everyone is. On 4chan, everyone is already a n* f* so it kinda levels the playing field.

I get it that others minority people might not share the same view.

> you're only supposed to be offended

Folks have the right to be offended whenever they want to be.

If you aren't offended, then that's your decision and you're free to make it. But ultimately I still believe you should respect the opinions of those who are offended. If they hate 4chan, I'm not going to argue with them about it.

There's a lot of folks in this thread claiming that if you're offended by speech on 4chan, then it's really you who has the problem and that's mainly who I'm trying to address.

People have a right to be offended and the offender has a right not to care. I certainly don't endorse 4chan culture but it's different from what you think.

What is it that you think "I think" 4chan's culture is?

I am saying that 4chan is not a safe place if you are black or most minorities. Period. I don't care what 4chan's culture is because it doesn't matter for the sake of this point.

And what everyone else is saying is that you're wrong. Just like the article writer who thinks they know everything about 4chan without going on it, you presume a lot about the site that just isn't true. Calling names on 4chan isn't really an insult. It's just the way everyone talks to each other. And race or gender isn't really relevant, and you'll get called racial slurs no matter your background.

I know what you're saying, and I'm telling you that you're incorrect. 4chan is not a safe space for anyone, minorities are not special in this regard.

A safe place? It’s not like they can slap you over tcp/ip. I think you take the internet too seriously, and are disrespectful of other people’s opinions.

My perspective (21/M/Black Canadian): the people who say we can just ignore it are right. That’s because you pretty much have to learn to deal with it as an avid internet user (even on more ‘vanilla’ sites like YouTube).

The part that affects me isn’t the word itself, and I don’t personally feel offended by a stranger using it. It’s just over time when you see so much vitriol directed towards your race even in places where it should be irrelevant (like gaming), I noticed I began to think that pretty much all white people were consumed by a hatred of blacks (why else would I see the n word being used so often?). It's hard to remind yourself about how big the internet is, maybe it's just the particular communities you visit, etc.

Edit: since this a throwaway anyway, I did develop a distaste for associating with white people for a period of time. In my mind, they were two faced and probably wouldn't hesitate to call people like me n*gger online.

Thanks for offering your perspective on this. I obviously can't speak to what it's like personally - I'm only going off of others' experience and my own intuition for what it would feel like.

> The part that affects me isn’t the word itself, and I don’t personally feel offended by a stranger using it. ...

This is kind of the point I'm trying to make further down the thread. There's a lot of folks saying that 4chan's use of this language is a form of community and culture, rather than meant as actual offense. But I don't think that makes it okay for exactly the point you make here.

I don't know but people call each other worse things than that here, even if they are all white. I wont even repeat the things they say.

Do not think that whites are all like those people.

Where is this idea coming from that black or women are somehow special cases that need to be handled with care [0]? I know the answer is "America", but plenty of people around the world have been killed, enslaved, displaced, humiliated and any number of things. And every one of them, whether they are from Scandinavia or Africa, will get insulted and ignore it or leave.

Some of the best memes come from India and they get plenty of abuse on the site...

[0]: https://youtu.be/qCj6YNIpqmA?t=123

> Where is this idea coming from that black or women are somehow special cases that need to be handled with care

All people should be handled with care. It's basic empathy. History gives you context that can assist in empathizing with black people and women.

> plenty of people around the world have been killed, enslaved, displaced, humiliated and any number of things

Part of the reason slavery matters so much in the United States is because there are still vestiges of it in all of our political / social / and cultural lives. It's been a part of the U.S. from the beginning and the country has done a piss-poor job of rectifying the situation.

Your comment lacks any perspective on history which in turn affects how we treat fellow people.

If you look at my comment history I've made this exact point about politics. I agree with you. 4chan as a whole isn't any more racist than any other forum. The boards are separated by topics just like reddit for example. My purpose behind my comment was simply saying if you avoid the parts you don't like (exactly how you do on the internet in general, stormfront is a thing), you don't experience that toxicity. I rarely see racism on the boards I browse. And I'd say I see a lot more racism on average on reddit.

I see what you mean. But minorities always just "ignore it" - but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect them. It's how folks are frequently taught to cope. Even if you're staying in more of the "safe" boards, I imagine you're always worried that someone you're interacting with doesn't.

Why would anyone posting on an anonymous imageboard be worried about people making negative comments towards them, anonymously? Your fellow anonymous users only know about you what you choose to share in your posts, and unlike reddit or HN, you don't have a persistent identity.

Because it tells you that's what "society" thinks of you. And that will affect your day-to-day life.

It affects folks in the same way learning that a lot of folks on Reddit/HN like to Haskell. "Oh hey I didn't know Haskell was so popular"

But "you" are not "you" when you post on an anonymous imageboard. Most boards don't even have poster IDs, so you can't even distinguish individuals with multiple posts in the same thread. You're just seeing a bunch of posts from random people who could even be replying to themselves, and you have no way of knowing, unless you obsessively check the "unique IPs in this thread" number as new posts flow in.

I post on HN with my real name, but you use a pseudonym. Nevertheless, your pseudonym has a posting history and karma number attached to it, so anything you post will "stick with you" in a persistent manner. Discussions somewhat resemble real-life discussion because one can track who's saying what, what everyone's said in the past, and so forth. If I flame you, my post probably gets deleted and I might even get banned, because that's how this community has decided to moderate itself.

Anonymous imageboards like 4chan are wholly different beasts altogether. If I post something foolish here on HN, perhaps talking out of my ass, saying something incorrect, I'd get downvotes and comments telling me why I'm wrong. You might even remember my handle as "that one guy who said the dumb incorrect thing one time" next time you see it. on 4chan, when you make a dumb post and everyone dogpiles on you, calling you out for your idiocy and calling you bad names, you can just close the tab and move on in your life. People aren't attacking YOU, they're attacking Post #418317258, and its author has closed the tab and permanently disassociated himself from it.

>But minorities always just "ignore it" - but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect them.

Everyone has to go to school, the park, etc, and I pay the same tax so having an environment that is pleasant for everyone is a required property. I can't ignore someone shouting to me insulting slurs for who I am. But no one has to go to 4chan, if someone feels offended they can just not visit it.

I would quote "Shit my dad says" on this: "Don't focus on the one guy who hates you. You don't go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog shit."

Given the Alexa ranking of 4chan lots of women and non white people use the site so no need to imagine it because it's happening.

Yes I am aware. It's a rhetorical device. As in, "you're forgetting about all the women and black people who use 4chan" - because they do use the site, and their opinions about being called the n-word or "bitches" or being asked to show their breasts matter as well.

I don't think the overlap between 4chan users and people that install the Alexa toolbar is large enough for those statistics to be accurate

On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.

Right.

But let's go /pol/ for a hot sec. Oh hey! Ctrl-F says there's 5 occurrences of the n-word (Hard -r too!).

I'm not black, but I imagine that just ignoring stuff like that really gets to you after awhile. Here is a forum where people actively demean others based on the color of their skin, and not only is it normal, but if you're going to visit you need to make sure no one knows that they're actually black. So should they just pretend to be white?

/pol/ is also filled with black nationalists, like NOI/Farrakhan supporters. That's the enigma of 4chan is literally everybody from every group is posting there instead of censorship that ensures only one ideology. By 'ignore what doesn't interest you', I assume that means don't visit the containment boards filled with rampant racism and trolling, you won't find holocaust denial or persistent racist threads on the other boards. It's the same how newsgroups work or discord chat channels work, some are moderated better than others.

I also feel this is the reason that 8ch spinoff went down in quality so quickly. The infinite boards concept caused users to split off when their views were challenged instead of being forced to defend them on the common board

And because there are black nationalists, the experience of white users of the site and black users of the site are exactly the same?

I am simply saying that if you're black, you're affected by the discourse on 4chan much differently than you would be if you are white. A few black nationalists is a lot different than the sea of n-word use, and it affects folks much, much differently.

Not every black user of 4chan is North American though, I assume it doesn't affect them because they post there regularily. Israelis also routinely post there despite it being a cesspool of anti-semitism. Again it's akin to discord chat groups. There's racist chat groups run by neo-nazis and there's moderated groups that ban for racism.

There was also that Shia LeBouf incident, where black and hispanic members of /pol/ from NYC showed up to disrupt his political performance art thing he was live streaming. These people exist, contrary to our political assumptions, the world is a stange place.

But you do.

> You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them.

They can't? Almost no matter who you are, somebody somewhere is musing about your death, if you can't handle that in words, I doubt you could live much, regardless of your identifiable characteristics.

> if you can't handle that in words, I doubt you could live much, regardless of your identifiable characteristics.

I really cannot wrap my mind around the lack of empathy required to say "if you can't handle it" to people being called racist slurs. I presume you have never been called a racist slur. I presume you have never been demonized for your skin color - how can you even begin to know what that's like?

Ignoring the hatred that people on 4chan have for black people is not trivial - obviously this is more affecting for a person if they're black.

Have you read any testimonials about racism, or how it's made folks feel, or anything like that? There's many books out there, and I think your lack of empathy comes from ignorance. Reading some first-hand experience may make it more clear.

Not to defend racism, but you'll find that pretty much every race that's not 2D gets shit on when you're on 4chan. That's just part of being a moderator-lite website. The entire idea is you shouldn't bring your real life onto the site, you'll find people ready and able to tear down anything for incredibly inane reasons. Why is it that it's so prevalent is an excellent question; why do people resort to such strong racist/sexist/divisive opinions when they get to have a mask?

Most people are not racist/sexist when given a mask, the people who are go to /b/ or /pol/, and in the process get further radicalized.

Part of 4chan's whole game is claiming that "everyone is racist with a mask" in order to justify "I'm racist with a mask".

What's ironic here is how conservative your position is: defending the status quo that the n-word must reflexively provoke outrage. People are imploring you to accept that times are changing and the word is being disassociated from hate, yet you're sticking to the 40 year old definition because "that's just how it always was".

Doesn't that remind you of something?

???

I don't care how conservative my opinion is. I don't equate the quality of arguments and opinions with which adjectives can be used to describe them.

Also please point to which decade it was where the n-word was "disassociated from hate". When has the word not been used in a hateful way?

Calling people the n-word provokes outrage because it is an outrageous thing to do. The word has a history and we all know it.

> People are imploring you to accept that times are changing and the word is being disassociated from hate

The only people imploring me of this are random folks on the Internet. I talk to black folks all the time in the real world, and you know what? It's still not ok.

There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason. Seems that they also contain any outside perspective on the site as well. /b/ and /pol/ are particularly egregious, but they're worth suffering to live if it means I can keep /g/ and /tg/. The open format of the site also, while it does contain a lot of posting, does have a curious cross contamination effect. You may learn about an entirely unrelated thing on accident, for good or ill.

From what I can see /pol/ in particular is extremely popular and massively influential in the promotion of shockingly vile politics of a sort that until recently I've never encountered anywhere even close to the mainstream.

It is my understanding that it was created as a containment board, but it's popularity and relative power has soured me on the whole site.

Here's the problem: /pol/ gets so much traffic that I can't imagine that its visitors do not cover a fairly broad subset of 4chan's entire user base. This means that if I contribute to any of the other boards I am contributing in some way to the intellectual capital pool drawn upon by the sorts of people who hang out in /pol/.

No thanks.

I'm not the only person who feels this way. I've heard others say this kind of thing too. There's a lot of people who once visited the site who no longer do so. Boards like /pol/ seem to be killing 4chan as anything other than a more Internet-cool satellite of Stormfront.

I used to visit /lit/ and /ck/ until a bit more than a year ago. I don't anymore because the /pol/ scum made it their mission to pollute the other boards with their vitriol. I visited those boards a couple of weeks back and /pol/ has basically succeeded in killing those boards' culture. Lots of people have left and you are not one or two threads away from a vile racist comment. /pol/ has basically destroyed 4chan culture in all of the boards and all that's left there now are a bunch of disgusting racists.

That was what I observed too. Never been a big user of the site but I used to stop by from time to time. A year or two ago it was brigaded by fascists and now it's dead. Can't stand it for more than 10 seconds.

No more so than you are contributing to the incredibly toxic subreddits like Redpill or the like by posting on any other reddit.

4chan is smaller and tighter. It's a different beast. Reddit is massive and those boards account for a small percentage of its activity.

2ch is similar, they have a very large Japanese nationalist/far right board that is popular. Doesn't stop people from using the rest of the site which is nothing like the racist political board.

>There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason.

I don't think there actually are, in practice.

How do you have any sort of "containment" on an anonymous forum? There's nothing at all stopping /b/ and /pol/ from stepping into any other board and either playing along or not. The only containment there is a state of mind.

They do work though. Typically a board like /g/ is on topic and containment boards are used to shame offtopic users. That might sound unconvincing and "a state of mind" but social dynamics do work. If there is 1 /pol// shitposter in a thread they will be called out as bait or told to go back to their containment board. It's a useful rhetorical tool on 4chan and it works better than any literal rule because it comes organically from the board's culture.

Well, nobody's going to keep using a site they hate unless they have to.

> ignore the crap you don't care about

The problem is that plenty of people seem to use it for recruiting to make the world worse for non-users, whether by campaigns of organised harassment or disinformation, or other means.

First point: then why write an article about it? Get someone who knows what they're talking about.

For your second point, how is that unique to 4chan? Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that.

> Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that

I just went to /pol/. No -- every message board I've ever used does not do stuff like that. And how the hell are you okay with using one that does?

...what message boards are you using that every single one of them "does stuff like that"?

reddit, topic-specific boards I browsed years ago. You're just better at ignoring the bad parts of the sites you use. I see racism on here all the time, especially against asians for some reason.

kiwifarms?

not a message board though, but a forum.

.. then you might be part of the problem.

/pol/ has grown a lot louder and prominent in the past few years though, to the point where even many seasoned 4chan posters are annoyed by them. "go back to /pol/" is a complaint you can now see on almost every board.

Free speech is great and all, but I prefer to spend my time with people that have the wisdom to keep some thoughts to themselves, or maybe not have the thoughts in the first place. I'll probably never go on 4chan because I don't have the time or desire to have to sort through it all, not just because it is a cesspool of human indecency.

"Some thoughts" == the ones you (or most people) find offensive.

So you keep repeating that and raising the censorship bar until nobody is offended anymore. And what you have is a whitewashed, sanitized forum with less creativity, originality, and free association. That's not what everyone wants. Some people want the uncensored version.

Don't mistake my comment as a call for censorship. It's a call for civility and decency. we can have creativity, originality and free association without hate, bigotry, and racism. Your straw men have no power here.

"A call for"..

How do you call for that on an unmoderated platform? Or do you think they should have a mod sit there and curate it for your tastes? Or automated software that keeps everything PC? I'm curious how "calling for " is in any way different than praying?

Yeah I don't think disallowing neo nazi talking points to spread like wildfire is "PC." I think that's just being sane and practical.

Are we going to just ignore how bigoted and racist 4chan is in general?

Understanding why it is that way would probably be more useful than trying to get brownie points for your signaling.

It's like that because people with your outlook have deplatformed so much discourse that 4chan is the last bastion of a truly free exchange of ideas. Voat comes in a close second.

Calling something bigoted and racist is just an attempt to deflect and ignore the conversation. Offending people is generally the backbone of controversial discussion.

People (both individuals and as groups such as corporations) have freely decided that they do not want to donate their resources to providing a platform for people to advocate genocide or to systematically denigrate 50% or more of the population. What's wrong with that? If those are the ideas you wish to freely exchange you're welcome to set up your own site, but I am not going to pay for your bandwidth.

Everyone "signals." Signaling is a fundamental aspect of social behavior. I don't care much about signaling and tend to ignore it as background noise. It's the real ideas that matter. The dominant ideas on Voat and /pol/ are political totalitarianism, dogmatic biological determinism, hatred for huge groups of people, and even advocacy of slavery and genocide.

There are toxic "left" communities that advocate totalitarianism and are full of hate as well, but they don't seem quite as common or as popular.

You must really hate 4chan (or, at least, the racist boards there) if you expect this level of nuance and understanding in discussion. It's certainly not within a million miles of what /b/ or /pol/ extend to anyone else.

I spend most of my time on /pol/.

Best memes. /b/ has gone to shit in the last few years, /r9k/ can be hilarious although disturbing.

No. I'm not saying we should. I'm saying it's no different than other places, the racism on 4chan is on reddit. It's all over the internet. 4chan isn't especially bad in my experience. I don't go to the boards devoted to racism and I don't go to the subreddits and forums devoted to it either.

Reddit? Voat is completely unusable to me because every comment is tainted with a racist agenda. It is inescapable across their whole site.

/prog/ used to have an incredible amount of good discussion about programming. The perfect blend of memery to break the monotony with the perfect amount of puzzles and challenges and debate to keep it stimulating.

RIP

/g/ still has daily programming threads

I'm aware, thanks! :)

Several reasons I don't use /g/:

* I don't want to look at images.

* I don't want to search for the threads I want, they should all be in one board, that's the whole point.

* The fact that /prog/ was killed in the first place when a textboard like it couldn't POSSIBLY be accounting for much bandwidth anyways is proof enough that 4chan wanted to appeal to a wider range of users. I took the hint.

* Finally, the type of users that use /g/ are not the people I want to have discussions with anyways, even if it's programming-related. Lots of /prog/ users only used /prog/, back before it was killed.

world4ch had its own culture, but the lack of the Temporary Solution™ made it mostly noise and very very slow outside of spam.

/prog/ was sometimes fun, but I could never really spend much time there before getting bored. There's only so many times you can see SICP snake and fizzbuzz haskell before getting tired of it.

I'm sad the text boards are gone, but looking back after they went read-only I couldn't find much I actually wanted to read again, and I can't really blame moot for not wanting to deal with a slow spam-filled relic any longer.

I don't blame him for not dealing with it, I blame him for not fixing it with the https+captcha the rest of the site got.

I find some interesting stuff in the readonly. Fibonacci buttsort is always good, sicp stuff is nice to remember. Idk, it's a nice nostalgia for me.

Fair enough, I can't say I don't wish he kept it.

That said given moot's nonexistent proficiency in PHP, he probably had enough things on his plate just keeping the site running, I can't imagine integrating recaptcha in the world4ch codebase would have been very fun..

Sure, but it's also not like he didn't have any opportunity to better himself. Moot never wanted to be leet, but if you're running the world's most popular Internet cesspool, maybe you should push yourself here and there to at least be able to contribute to the code.

I don't envy the challenges of non-technical founders/ceos/managers, but I also don't sympathize with them very much. The Internet is an amazing resource for learning things.

Has tox matured into a usable system? I last tried it about two years ago and had too many problems with setting it up to suggest it to friends. Looking for a good non-centralized encrypted video chat.

> Yet this cannot last. At 15 years old, 4chan has reached adolescence. Up till now, trolls—children—have been in control. It’s not so funny anymore. After all, even the lost boys had to grow up.

Just because one can write that it cannot last doesn't make it so. Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything. Facebook is 14 and Twitter is 12 and that doesn't say anything about them. They all have their own problems, but if this age metaphor is to work, then 4chan should be "more mature" than its younger siblings. It isn't.

4chan is also not going anywhere fast. Someone seems inclined to still pay for the servers, and until that time stops, it's probably going to say well and truly the same. That's just what you get when you have an anonymous imageboard. But, even if something happened and 4chan shutdown, you'd still have any number of chans that still exist as clones. It's trivial to find them. You can close the pool, but there are infinite pools to close.

Who says it isn't mature? Is it immature because it doesn't fit your content expectations?

Reminder that after 15 long years of chaos, it still exists. It's a very specific, essentially impenetrable market of 4chan users that can't really be pushed away except by catastrophic mismanagement. The features of the site have stabilized and reacted to user demands over the years, and though good boards (/prog/ :( and others) have been terminated, lovely discussion still happens.

4chan isn't selling your identity to data scientists. 4chan doesnt fail whale every few moments, 4chan doesn't have a huge amount of bot accounts relative to human users, though I'm sure there are some.

People love to hate 4chan because there are deplorable users that use it, but it's just disingenuous and dishonest to make the claim that 4chan isn't a good product in terms of capturing their desired users.

The fact that so many other chans exist is a testament to the success of the format. Reddit has an entire sub reddit /r/RedditAlternatives, which I think accomplishes the same thing: letting reddit know "the product is good, I just don't like YOU."

The difference is that 4chan is a very strong anchor of all chan-related traffic, outside of Japan and Germany. "competitors" don't really pose an existential threat, but rather a topical, and therefore fallible threat of feature envy or fashionable content envy.

Disclaimer: I haven't used 4ch since the /prog/ days, but I check in now and then, and lo and behold, it still exists.

>4chan isn't selling your identity to data scientists

That's actually questionable now since Hiroshima bought the site. Some weird scripts were added that were heavily obfuscated and killed the CSS if you didn't let them run. Luckily the innate computer paranoia of /g/ meant this was caught and worked around in less than a day, but it's still pretty sleazy.

Also Google captcha is needed to post, so there are the standard two Google scripts running too

A little ad-tracking here and there isn't necessarily foul play. Sleazy, sure. That's not the same as unfettered, cataclysmic access to tens of millions of users personal lives. I think what makes the Facebook thing so awful too is that people have a rather reasonable expectation that private things remain private, whereas the average 4chan user maintains some degree of privacy by merit of not identifying themselves. If it really came to it and if there was a concerted effort to at least maintain some integrity of the identifiability of what got collected, most 4chan users wouldn't leave the platform if there was a basic ad-tracking layer built. 4chan needs money, they all know that. Sometimes you gotta play the game a little bit, if it was done right, they'd play.

Disclaimer: I'm not a data scientist, so I'm not really an expert here...

I think there was talk of the scripts actually running exploits, so they were more than a bit sleazy; that being said I believe they came with the new ads so it wasn't a conscious addition by the new owner as much as shitty ad companies

Overall though I believe most of the money comes from the 4chan pass system over whatever ads end up getting run

> Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything.

Drawing parallels between the two exemplifies poor analogous journalism on the part of WIRED.

> The internet makes sense in metaphors. (from the article)

No, it does not. However, it helps immensely in crafting the opening salvo of a clickbait-y article to drive site views.

> poor analogous journalism on the part of WIRED.

Has Wired ever been known for good journalism? It's pretty much always been tabloid level: shallow articles on most subjects with pompous headlines.

The more facebook and twitter and youtube censor their users, the more gravity will shift to 4chan, it's the law of conservation of speech on the internet.

Between 2003 and 2015, the worldwide internet penetration rose from 12% to 44%, that's 2.4 billion more internet users, but somehow there is a "conservation law of speech"?

Yep! I'm one of the censorship refugees on /pol/.

Adding to this, it's not a static group of people on there growing old together. There is a a consistent group of adolescents reaching troll age and joining in.

Yeah, I was on 4chan as a 16yo-20yo regular lurker starting back in 2004; never an active poster, just commenting randomly and joining in conversations on various boards. It was a decent anonymous community, sometimes I'd wander over to /b/ and it would be like walking past an apartment building at night and seeing completely random (sometimes disturbing) things going on through all of the windows; lurking on /b/ was the online equivalent of being an active peeping tom in a neighborhood without curtains.

When moot sold the domain a few years ago to a former 2chan admin, I noticed it barely changed. But I haven't really visited much since 2009 or so...

> Someone seems inclined to still pay for the servers

It kind of seems like a tradeoff between creating a focal point where that kind of individual can congregate (keeping them away from 'normal people') and maintaining a cesspool where that kind of individual breeds. Depending on what's actually happening (and even figuring that out would be an interesting research project) other major sites might even be bankrolling it to help keep their own sites cleaner.

4chan is paid for by its users through the 4chan pass and through advertisers, both companies and individuals. It is most likely barely more than solvent or losing money. 4chan's funding isn't a secret that needs to be investigated.

I got shades of the endless 2016-era "this means Trump is FINISHED" articles.

By any reasonable standards he should have been, the mistake was expecting reasonable standards.

Holy shit, Twitter is just 3 years younger than 4chan?!

> "The design remains proudly undesigned"

I've always thought 4chan was beautifully designed. Its hyperfunctional in a way that wired.com designers will never know because they are too busy injecting ads into every inch of available space.

It's not that well designed. Replying to comments, for example, is not very intuitive.

I wish the comments would nest, even if it's just one level like Stack Exchange.

There are 4chan browser extensions which have this feature.

Summary: grouchy suburban dad who realizes he isn't cool anymore shakes fist at rebellious neighborhood kids, shouting that they need to grow up.

Why is it that whenever a mainstream site like Wired pumps out an article looking down their noses at some "problematic" online community, it's immediately obvious that the author has never been part of said community and instead bases their overly simplistic views on an hour of research.

Purely optimized for clicks and shares. Also, any amount of perceived approval of something controversial will get a nuclear reaction from Twitter demanding the author's job or going to the advertisers saying "look at this stuff that they are okay with!"

>a nuclear reaction from Twitter

Ironic isn't it? Author can't express a particular view about a website that became popular because it protects people from the consequences of expressing unpopular views.

It's on the font page of HN so clearly it works

> There isn’t darkness without the light, it seems. So it’s probably fair to say 4channers are, at least a little bit, right: Their haven is the soul of the internet, the deep source of its sights and sounds, for worse and, occasionally, for better.

I couldn't see much notable in the article, aside from a negative slew at the start, and some 'the other side of the coin' in the above quote.

15 years is noteworthy, however, and I'm surprised so short, as I started visiting it back in 2003/2004; it seemed about as busy then as today. 4chan hasn't changed much from an external perspective. Traffic has probably been at stable levels for years, while the price of traffic has fallen.

I quite enjoy it's existence. There is a great diversity between message boards. Some are the reverse of b and pol highlighted in the article, as is the case on Reddit. Anonymous can be good. a la Hacker News's freedom of registration.

>Traffic has probably been at stable levels for years, while the price of traffic has fallen.

Absolutely not! Please take this the wrong way, but I don't see how an old friend could have not noticed the MASSIVE increase in traffic (and the problems it brought).

Here's some official 2005-2013 traffic statistics from the 10 years anniversary panel I compiled just to prove you wrong: https://i.4cdn.org/s4s/1527869817275.png

Cheers.

The stats - Incredible how anaecdotal observation and recall differs. Bias too: Perhaps I'm not viewing the site as a whole and new boards, increased linking, whatever, thanks for stats.

Old friend - Certainly. The fact the idean of anon is default (though optional) means each post can be besed on it's on value / meritocrious as it carries no internet points of the 'owner'. Anarchy, but the negative that term often brings should not be carelessly and automatically applied.

Yes, that's actually very interesting to me, since I've never heard that from anyone before. Do you happen to have a small secluded place for a homeboard? Are you /jp/ or something like that?

I've noticed over the years that the bigger a board grows (see /b/, /pol/, /v/) the worst the quality and serious discussion gets, and the more funposting there is.

Every year people complain that their boards are getting worse, part of it is just those people growing older, but the other part is the community becoming larger, different, and noticeably more mainstream.

This is a really sensationalist article. I'm not going to ignore the parts of 4chan highlighted by the article, but there are some really good boards you can visit where the level of discussion is far superior than what you would find in most corners of today's popular forums. Personally I don't participate in any conversations, but I'll read the threads on the boards I find interesting.

If anything, 4chan is an authentic reflection of the internet's user base. You'll find both gold and garbage depending on what you visit and frequent. It is unfair to broadly paint the site as only containing the worst of human nature. If you were to similarly depict other popular websites like Reddit in the same fashion, you would get something just as horrifying.

wow, this is an example of some horrible, horrible journalism.

I could tell after first two paragraphs, that the author did not spend more than 15 minutes on the site itself and most of her "facts" come from lazily googled trivia.

I spent more time, than I'd like to admit on this and similiar imageboards. I still visit it semi-regulary (only fitness board nowadays), but this description as place where only edgy teenagers go to bully other people is plain wrong and misdirecting. Will you be judging Reddit next, solely by /r/politics, or /r/The_Donald, which both are terrible communities? Because that's what you did, with mentioning only /b/ and /pol/ as the core of 4chan.

My advice for the author: LURK MOAR :)

So many of these "journalists" are just filing stories with barely any research because there are no consequences. When you pick a topic like 4chan and you are criticized, absolutely nothing will happen to you. In fact, all you need to do is say "racists and misogynists are after me" and you will become the next story. There will invariably some subset of clowns who say hateful stuff on social media, and they will be held up as the norm.

The media has also turned up their "if you criticize our work it means you hate a free press" sensitivity meter, so as such there will never be any consequences for poor quality journalism unless the problem is fixed at the editorial level. There is no incentive to do it though.

As someone who has frequented 4chan for nearly 15 years I don't think you want 4chan to die for many reasons. If 4chan is gone then all of the time people spend there will be spent somewhere else. Maybe the internet is too far gone to be significantly impacted, but I'd rather not test it.

Most of 4chan boards aren't really that bad though.

I've been there almost as long, and it's true most boards are boring. I like the diy and music boards, for example.

But it seems you're "implying" that if we weren't there we'd be somewhere else the same or worse. I suggest there are many better places we could be. What we do there isn't a function of ourselves alone. We are a midpoint between ourselves and our environment. I would much rather go the playground and kick a soccer ball around or play basketball, but there isn't one around open after dark :(

And I can't stand the egoic virtue-signaling/posturing on fb so I go to 4chan to get a more down-to-earth conversation experience. If i melt down on there, no one cares. My FB world is completely uptight and ready to ostracize on a hair trigger. Of course 4chan is also full of people faking badassery, but it's not attached to individual egos. That's what's amazing about anonymity that moot could never articulate: it doesn't make much sense to lie, because it doesn't really increase your standing because no one knows who you are! So people are much more honest and forthright. yes, that's often ugly, but it's better to know about than to fear it.

Now the part that anonymity doesn't solve is that although the individual ego is dissolved, the way is paved for group egos to form. And as we've seen, especially on /pol/, these collective identities have flourished.

I completely agree about the anonymity. That is really the core of 4chan and what I find appealing about it. Everything that is said there is for the sake of the thing being said and not about building yourself up as a persona.

There needs to be other sites that don't have usernames in any way. Even if you attempt to ignore it, it somehow is always relevant. Somewhere such as Reddit in particular always comes down to being a popularity contest and it will skew what people are willing to say in order to get the most likes.

> Most of 4chan boards aren't really that bad though.

This is an important note that I feel like not enough people understand. Too many people just think 4chan, and then think of all the messed up stuff on something like /b. There is lots of stuff on 4chan that is completely normal and not toxic/illegal. Although, I will admit that I usually just browse reddit, personally.

There is nothing illegal in 4chan, and if there is, it gets removed quickly.

/g is interesting especially /g/dpt (the daily programming thread). Today's thread: http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/66170997

Indeed, nearly every evil of the internet begins, or picks up steam, on the site. To invoke yet another metaphor: It’s a breeding ground. (The fact that 4chan has been called so many things suggests a feeble attempt to make sense of chaos.) Many of the recruitment techniques of the so-called alt-right were piloted there; many white nationalists started out as 4channers. It’s unclear if or how one ages out of the site—but it is clear that it unleashes trolls on the real world.

Sounds like a great place.

They're ignoring the fact that much of current internet culture also originated there.

Seems to be something people repeat for the 'anarchic creativity' narrative rather than an actual truth.

I think knowyourmeme can attribute quite a few memes to 4chan, and the traditional account is that both Anonymous and the alt-right was spawned there, so they certainly did contribute to internet culture.

The question is really how many lolcatz do you need to balance out one radicalized incel?

Yes, I'm sure r/memeeconomy and other very serious and important people are grateful.

Current Internet culture is toxic so yeah - I guess that makes sense. 4chan was all fun and games until it started effecting people IRL. Swastikas are only funny when there's no chance they'll infiltrate the real world. When nazis are being elected, it's not so funny anymore.

There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online

To put this in context, Eternal September was in 93, and Slashdot was started in 97. But apparently moot imported trolls from Japan in the early 2000s?... or something? I didn't really bother trying to understand.

When did new immigrants to the internet stop learning about the things we long-considered to be emergent phenomena of social interaction on the Internet? Eternal September eventually became known as a breaking point where what "is" and what "ought" will never be the same again. It seemed like we resigned to mapping/understanding the ways conversation breaks down so we could practice good mental hygiene of recognizing it, and stopping ourselves from accidentally getting sucked into it. Why did we loose the collective wisdom of social systems at scale?

tl;dr: Who am I to blame for the fact WIRED of all places is writing hot takes about social dynamics of the internet like a Dad that just got their first smartphone?

>4chan has never been a nice place. Most people don’t spend time there

Imagine a place where people don't take things that seriously and things are just weird enough that the inside jokes keeps all the outsiders out and alienated. Everyone else is sitting around the virtual campfire telling jokes and sharing stories. 4chans all reaching (and not-just-/b/-and-/pol/) bad rep comes largely in thanks to people who obviously don't browse 4chan or have only taken a look at /pol/ or /b/. They took a passing glance, maybe for a day or two, saw nothing but inane bullshit, and (justifiably) moved on with their lives. 4chan has a lot of shit, I don't deny that and I don't blame anyone for not having the desire to wade knee deep in it. Although wading through only the deep end of it skews perspectives heavily.

Notice how this article purposefully cherrypicks boards like /pol/, /h/, and /y/ instead of the less egregious boards /g/ (technology), /o/ (automobiles), /his/ (history), or /co/ (comics). One would leave with the idea that 4chan is nothing but a place for hentai and alt-right hate groups. Even among itself /b/ and /pol/ are disliked among the site. They're considered containment boards that prevent other boards being shit up. But one wouldn't understand the concept of a "containment board" if one doesn't browse 4chan. In fact - most articles about 4chan don't even use the term "containment board" because the authors never lurk long enough to discover the term.

>There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online

Are they talking about pre-Usenet days? I don't remember a time online when trolls didn't really exist.

>And because each message board is limited to 10 pages of posts, most messages get bumped off the server within a day, if not hours. It’s pretty much unusable for the uninitiated.

This is by design. Hence "Lurk more." Imagine trying to jump into an hour old conversation having heard only the past 10 seconds of it. Nothing you have to say at that moment could have any relevance to the conversation because you still don't know what the conversation is even about. Now imagine that conversation has been going on for 15 years and you've only just showed up an hour ago. Oh - it's also in a language you can only half understand and can't speak yet. Nothing you could say is important, you're missing any useful information, can't identify greentext and copypasta from actual opinions and information. The concept of lurking before contributing to a discussion is seemingly lost in a post-Usennet, post-forum internet.

>And Gamergate, the smear campaign against female game developers?

Audibly laughed. They're still sticking with that? Gamergate has, and you can count yourself, has "harassed" far more males than females. Almost all journalists - and almost all peddling bullshit. Saying someone is spewing bullshit isn't harassment. Although I do love how Elon Musk became an alt-right, anti-Semitic, GamerGator because he dared speak out against the media.

In related news Wired Magazine is 25 years old and doesn't understand 'kids these days.'

>Not that you’d want to be there. The most popular boards on 4chan are typically /pol/, a place for what they say is “politically incorrect” (read: racism, misogyny, homophobia)

So this is what the article is about. /pol/ offended some journalist's sensibilities. I bet they're laughing at him right now.

4chan is the last and only bastion of free speech on the internet. I know most here still think it's about trolling/racism/sharing shocking images, but I've seen there the most interesting discussions that cannot be found anywhere else. I agree that /pol/ is full retards, but there is also /his/, /g/, /sci/ and /mu/

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