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Comment by phist_mcgee | Hacker News Reader

And 4chan theoretically is better still, because the anonymity means posters are not rewarded at all for their contributions. Even the same poster, posting twice in the thread is not identifiable on most boards, allowing the discussion to be the primary focus. On the other hand, the culture of most *chans is to be abusive and confrontational, so who knows if it is any better.

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In my experience 4chan has more attention seeking behavior than IRC (inline images facilitate it moreso than nicks), and on IRC users tend to be more friendly and aware of each other's humanity.

> and on IRC users tend to be more friendly and aware of each other's humanity.

I have been on IRC since 1993 but this is news to me.

'Friendlier than 4chan' is a pretty low bar.

For sure but "aware of each other's humanity" is ... not something I'd call your typical IRC dweller.

I actually think it’s the opposite. On traditional social media a mediocre post will still get a few likes. On 4chan a new thread needs to achieve quick popularity or it’ll get deleted within 5 minutes.

I think that is part of what fules the negative culture. The anonymity and lack of moderation surely helps but outrageous threads simply have a higher chance of surviving on 4chan.

Only on the megaboards. On slower ones like /n/ a thread can hang around for months if it has discussion.

4chan style threads with account names might actually be better. You can have really good discussions in imageboards (in the smaller boards) because you don't have a bunch of non-participants butting in with their upvotes and downvotes.

Even Metafilter with their very low key favorites "voting system" gives rise to a contest for getting the most favorites.

It's not popular on 4chan, but there are other smaller imageboards on which it's popular to use usernames (tripcodes in their parlance.) I can't say I'm a big fan.

Yeah I don't like people who go by names in imageboards either but that might mostly be because of the imageboard culture.

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