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Comment by decibe1 | Hacker News Reader

I really miss the freedom of usenet. 1000's of odd and niche discussion areas. The lack of any moderation lead to a massive influx of spam. Reddit was looking like a good alternate, until the various ban waves shutdown any hope. Oddly enough 4chan still seems the only place for discussion outside the overtown window.

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Usenet could really only function in its form so long as the people who could access it were mostly part of a somewhat exclusive club. It may also be worth noting that there was the alt hierarchy and most everything else. I'm sure I'm remembering somewhat selectively based on where I participated, but I recall things like rec and comp being mostly pretty sane and mainstream and alt being a lot wilder.

> Usenet could really only function in its form so long as the people who could access it were mostly part of a somewhat exclusive club.

A few mainstream apps, such as Outlook Express, tried to make Usenet accessible to the average Joe, but it just never really caught on with the masses.

Maybe not the masses but enough spammers, scammers, and a generally less "restrained" set of users so as to really degrade it. And then, of course, the "old Internet" mostly went away and DejaNews and then Google didn't do it any favors.

> 4chan still seems the only place for discussion outside the overtown window

Gab, too, outside of the politically oriented groups.

4Chan is one of the few online communites with the 'spirit' of the old internet, it has remained functionally the same since 2003. There's only a few sites like that left (newgrounds? Somethingawful?).

Somethingawful threw some of their worst shitposters out, and they went to 4Chan. 4Chan has since thrown a subset of their worst shitposters out, and they went to... Other forums.

> Oddly enough 4chan still seems the only place for discussion outside the overtown window.

Most of the outside-the-overton-window discussion on 4chan is discussion of national socialism, with an occasional call for genocide.

I don't think people not participating are missing much.

>Most of the outside-the-overton-window discussion on 4chan is discussion of national socialism, with an occasional call for genocide.

If your impression of 4chan as a whole is just /pol/. 4chan as a whole is much more ideologically diverse than reddit due largely to the site's format and lack of censorship, but if you're an outsider to 4chan's (often outlandish and intentionally offensive) cultural norms you're just going to think it's a nazi site. Mainstream media has tried and failed to understand it for decades now.

>Mainstream media has tried and failed to understand it for decades now.

Yes... because even after decades of industry-wide integration with the web and a generation of people working in media who have grown up with it, somehow they still can't grasp the true nature of this one forum full of shitposting edgelords.

You're actually on point even though you're being sarcastic. Communities aren't hiveminds, and the edgiest members of a group don't constitute the whole picture. Upvotes and downvotes definitely work to make communities act more like them, however.

4chan is very much mainstream and much more than /pol/, it's one of the most popular websites on the internet.

> Most of the outside-the-overton-window discussion on 4chan is discussion of national socialism, with an occasional call for genocide.

4chan attracts people with extreme, elitist opinions on everything. Nazism is just one manifestation of this.

Saying "I like systemd" on /g/, "I like Murakami" on /lit/, and "I support the State of Israel" on /pol/ will garner roughly the same reaction.

Yes, but because other forums tolerate extreme opinions on other subjects, people who hold them don't have a particularly burning desire to congregate there.

I don't think anyone's been banned here for liking systemd, or for expressing their support for Israel, but they will be for calls to genocide the Middle East.

Reddit is still a good alternative, a lot of hate groups were banned, various watchpeopledie, piracy subreddits sure. What subreddit bans led you to this belief?

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