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Comment by olah_1 | Hacker News Reader

>In our study of gender nonbinary people of color, women of color, and online commentary, participants talked about having to constantly run a cost-benefit analysis on participation in any online conversations, based on the likelihood that they would be attacked, merely for participation.

4chan solved this problem a decade ago. Put your content before your identity rather than the other way around.

In many spaces today, being a straight white man is far more inflammatory than being a non-binary person of color. This is especially true in the open-source community.

The solution is to stop pushing your identity onto people when it's completely irrelevant. I'm not saying hide who you are. But it's simply not relevant to the vast majority of discussions.

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>In many spaces today, being a straight white man is far more inflammatory than being a non-binary person of color.

As a straight white man, this is bullshit. I have many close friends who are part of the LGBT community, so I can see their experiences compared to my own. They don't go around "pushing their identity onto people" and neither do I. We're all just normal people trying to build cool things.

And I see my experiences are much more positive than theirs.

How good is your experience in tech if you preface a statement with "as a straight white man..."? I'd say the response would be downright aggressive and you would be silenced.

Preface a statement with "as a non-binary person of color..." and you get applause.

My previous comment literally started with the phrase 'as a straight white man', and it received several up votes. Does this website count as tech?

The trick is: don't be an asshole and recognize that other people have different experiences which are just as valid as your own. Every time I've seen someone talking about how it's terrible to be a white man these days, it's because they want to be an asshole to someone and are being told that's wrong. Straight white men who are actually kind and listen to others, seriously considering their opinions don't get much flak for being straight and white. Is this really that difficult to understand?

Exactly, the main thing about 4ch and the likes is that you can't satiate your need for validation through likes / upvotes and a profile.

Much like what Instagram is trying now (hiding other people's likes count) or this very platform, doing away with those metrics should help foster better conversations.

> you can't satiate your need for validation through likes / upvotes and a profile.

The concern mentioned in the excerpt from TFA was a perception by the people it spoke to that they had to self-censor in order not to be personally attacked in online discussion.

You make a good point but it seems like it is about something other than what the TFA excerpt describes.

TFA quoted by OP:

> participants talked about having to constantly run a cost-benefit analysis on participation in any online conversations, based on the likelihood that they would be attacked, merely for participation.

Yeah, I agree with you but I think removing a way to feed the ego might have side effects that could help, namely killing any mean behaviour fueled by the need for points.

Are you suggesting there's no mean behavior on 4chan?

I find 4 chan to be an interesting experiment. Yes it mostly is a cesspool. Yes folks there are pretty much awful.

But it's also extremely egalitarian. Everyone is on the same, whether you be an old* or a new*.

I don't partake but I like to dive in and observe them. Fascinating, because as much as we'd like to deny it, 4chan is the whole spectrum of humanity.

4chan is unfiltered and there are a bunch of people that aren't able to handle this, so it's a self-selected pool of people that are capable of participating in unfiltered discussion. In other communities heavy filtering is going on. Comments get removed and accounts banned, so that the people that cannot handle unfiltered content won't leave.

Personally I think all content should be unfiltered and the people who cannot handle this, should learn it. Open discussion is difficult when you have to self-censor all the time. We have it so bad, there's even a bunch of words we're forbidden from using in filtered communities and it's sold as a good thing. Lots of ideas and opinions are also banned, which is really unfortunate. We tend to criticize China for exactly the same things that are completely normal for most of us. It's just that China bans different ideas.

Governments and online communities are two very different things, and the key concern with government censorship is that there is no recourse or alternative.

4chan isn't unfiltered. Every community has its culture with its accepted norms and taboos, to say nothing of the requirement of any site on the open web to ban illegal content like child porn, and many like 4chan which also ban threats of violence and brigading. The boards on 4chan aren't immune to this simply because they don't use dedicated accounts. Not every board is /b/, and even they have their limits.

Having a high tolerance for vulgarity and dank Nazi memes is not the same as having open discussion or tolerance for opposing points of view. People who rally behind sites like 4chan, Voat and Gab in the name of "free speech" just want to be able to shitpost hate in comfort without consequence - they want their own filter, not freedom, certainly not for anyone who disagrees with them.

There's no need for tolerance for opposing views. What's important is communication. That means listening, not tolerating, and engaging. What you describe as hate are valid opinions based on rationality. It's possible to engage them in discussion. They're not ignoring facts and can be brought to change their mind. I've engaged them before, I know. Voat is a pretty good place for this. But you need to enter the conversation with the assumption that you could be wrong, otherwise your view gets clouded and all you see is hate. Instead of banning you for wrongthink, on Voat people actually respond to you with providing sources for their opinions, which you can then review and either debunk or validate. But you will be insulted a lot. People who can't handle this should stay away.

With all due respect, I'm looking at the front page of Voat right now, and articles like "Fucking jews want whites to eat this shit now 'for the environment'" and "Stop the Jewish war machine" don't appear to be presenting "valid opinions based on rationality", or a community which I should expect to be able to engage in honest, intellectual discourse.

I think it's a perfectly valid opinion on my part to consider this garbage and to not want its stench everywhere.

Not because I'm afraid to have my views challenged, or to be insulted, but because it shouldn't be my responsibility to have to turn every racist and bigot on the internet, particularly when opinions to the contrary abound and they could just as well educate themselves, and because it gets tiring to deal with this kind of nonsense all the time.

Like I said, if you can get over this and assume that you may be wrong it's a great place for discussions. If you engage them you will notice, that most of the stuff you see there is perfectly rational. You're just trapped in a filter bubble and possibly uncomfortable to find out your gay, to use a weird proverb.

>Yes it mostly is a cesspool. Yes folks there are pretty much awful.

This isn't even true in my experience. Frankly, it's a reputation that helps to keep the riff raff out of the space. Chan communities are the best kept secret on the internet, in my opinion.

Welcome to being a human being.

No, seriously, if you're a person who is not measuring what they're saying to see what the cost may be, you can expect attacks to come your way for your own carelessness, and it has nothing to do with your identity. Being able to gush at the mouth is not, in fact, a sign of privilege, but is rather more rope to hang yourself with.

Did they, though? The only demographics I could find on 4chan are their advertising stats, and according to that the site is 70% men under 35, mostly from the US and a handful of European countries. [1]

Doesn’t really sound like a thriving wellspring of diverse opinions.

1: https://www.4chan.org/advertise

You are working under the fallacy that diversity of opinion will be correlated somehow to arbitrary characteristics such as Race, Gender and Sexuality. This is patently not true.

Those characteristics aren’t arbitrary; they equate to an entirely different life experience. That means a more diverse set of viewpoints.

“People who are different from one another in race, gender and other dimensions bring unique information and experiences [...]”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-mak...

Sorry assumptions about how an individual thinks based on their race, gender or sexuality is clearly a nonsense. You cannot point at any individual and know their thoughts. The best you can do is say "This demographic in this place tends to agree with this statement".

As for the the actual article you linked, the author herself has nice race-bait titles of work such as "The White standard: Racial bias in leader categorization", you can't seriously tell me that this is an objective body of work? There is also the piece she wrote called "Office Holiday Parties Highlight Racial Dissimilarities and Fail to Promote Team Unity" ... apparently the office party isn't safe from race based politics. Sorry but this sets of alarm bells in my head.

The piece itself doesn't cite any evidence for anything it claims.

If anything, communities like 4chan have helped to dispel my preconceived notions about specific races, genders, etc.

People would be surprised.

Bear in mind that a perfectly equal sex distribution would be 50%; 70% is skewed, but hardly a sausage party.

And I don't think you need to be from a diverse set of locations to have a diverse set of opinions.

Ah yes, 4chan, the bastion of respectful and productive online discourse.

4chan has got a lot of stuff done. Consider the HWNDU saga:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw9zyxm860Q

Obviously this is trolling, but it damn impressive they found it.

They've done quite a lot of other stuff including finding ISIS targets and getting them killed, using nothing bit a sheet of paper and an innocuous message to make the media look silly, they've even caught animal abusers.

Plenty of people stick their nose up to them but they are probably one of the more effective online communities. It just depends whether you happen to like what they are effective at.

I hear they've recently been pushing racist and edgy themes like family cohesion, Christianity and a fatphobic healthy lifestyle with exercise. \s

Such a fun way to spin calling people "degenerates" (literally nazi wording) and promoting a worldview from half a century ago or whatever where people got treated like shit. I mean yeah if you want to be equivalent to a klansmen, I am sure they also promoted "family cohesion" and Christianity.

I was on 4chan many years ago, I went to the Anonymous protests in London. I have thick skin and I know not to take stuff seriously, but in the last few years especially it seems like it's become dominated by /pol/ and people who are legitimately white supremacist traditionalist alt-right scum, because those communities seized upon the edgy culture of /pol/ as it used to be and use it as a channel to push their very real non-ironic toxic politics.

The way I heard the story everyone could say whatever they wanted on 4chan, but all the discussions were always "won" by the Nazis through better arguments and facts, so everyone else got tired on always getting called out on their own delusions, so they left the place, where only reason and facts prevailed. Hence the necessity to ban them on other platforms, because of the impossibility to win arguments against them. The only way they could keep believing in their delusions (like "people are equal" etc.) was to create safe spaces where they could ban everyone disagreeing with them. Apparently in a truly free space Nazis win all arguments, which makes everyone else leave.

The other explanation is "those people are mean and I don't want to hang around mean people", but that's really not all that different from the first explanation.

And "ironically" inspiring white supremacists to commit mass murder and shout them out in their manifestos.

You are literally saying “hide who you are, whenever I decide that who you are does not matter.”

EDIT: OP literally says: “ I'm not saying hide who you are. But it's simply not relevant to the vast majority of discussions.”

Again, who gets to make that decision? Who gets to set the criteria for making that decision?

>Again, who gets to make that decision? Who gets to set the criteria for making that decision?

The people you're talking to. These are all just social mores, but you are the one that deals with the fallout.

There's pushback on identity first discourse because it's often seen as distasteful.

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