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Comment by DarkShikari | Hacker News Reader

It's practically a rule of the internet at this point that every single news article about 4chan will basically only talk about /b/, even though there are dozens of other boards with millions or tens of millions of posts. This is like an encyclopedia article about Asia that only mentions China.

For some reason, /b/ seems to be the most interesting to the media outlets -- this lets them talk about Anonymous, hacking, lolcats, and other things that the media seems to like, without having to explain difficult things, like what "Dungeons and Dragons" or "Yaoi" or "Touhou" are.

Perhaps this is for the best, lest the rest of the site be overrun by the "Eternal September" that hit /b/ years ago. There's some surprisingly good communities left, with topics ranging from 3D modeling to tabletop gaming.

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/b/ is the most interesting thing about 4chan. People don't write about the other sections because they are boring and not especially different from the many other D&D forums.

Strong agree. It confuses me when people respond to articles about Anonymous and /b/ by saying, "You know, there are lots of other boards on 4chan!" My perennial answer is: So what? /b/ is the only one whose influence leaks out of 4chan itself, like rainbow-colored smog billowing out of a dilapidated smokestack. The article isn't like an encyclopedia entry on Asia mentioning only China; it's like a little kid opening a package of Starbursts and eating only the pink ones. Everyone knows they're the tastiest, and only candy apologists insist otherwise.

Yuck! The pink "strawberries" are the WORST!* I have a pile of them underneath my monitor when I'm unlucky enough to get one in the little two-packs.

* Out of the original flavors (orange, lemon, cherry, and strawberry.)

"This is like an encyclopedia article about Asia that only mentions China."

Good point, and they should've at least mentioned the other boards, but this article was written for Vanity Fair not Wired. They know their demographic probably can't or won't differentiate - it's all on the same site.

Or they are focusing on what they expect to be the most interesting to a general audience - not Touhou games.

For sure, articles cater to their audience, but are we still writing articles on /b/ in 2011? This is like the articles in 2008 explaining this new phenomenon called "blogging" -- this isn't even new in the mainstream media, let alone our typical news sources. It's just repetitive garbage that could have been written with 15 minutes of copy-pasting from Encyclopedia Dramatica and 500 other previous articles on the topic.

There is a difference between focusing on a certain part of the whole and speaking as though that certain part is entirely representative of the whole. It's less like talking only about China in a discussion about Asia, and more like using the words "China" and "Asia" interchangeably. Touhou and tabletop games may not be of interest to a general audience, but these things don't necessarily have to be discussed in depth; they can be covered as briefly as a sentence stating that "4chan hosts a variety of boards catering to various interests, including video games, Japanese culture, and cooking."

I think that's pretty much the definition of stereotyping and patronizing.

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