you'd think this would be common knowledge given 4chan is literally an open website, but I always hear these mythologised recountings of it like it's some kind of mysterious inaccessible cult. It's just reddit for people who hate reddit.
Isn't that hackernews
It's just reddit for people who hate
It's pretty interesting, because as long as I've been conscious on the Internet it's always been posed as an 'inaccessible cult.' Probably due to all the inside jokes, I guess?
First time you go there is a Chaotic mess that feels you went back to 90's.
Then in shock you start to see the subs like /pol/ then you click and bam More chaos.
Threads and threads you are more lost.
Then you click catalog and set order Reply-by-count.
Then it does start to make sense. You read people talking in two ways. On the text and on the image attached.
It is full-duplex com.
In the 90's I used to read my Mainstream media + Pravda (the other side) jornal.
Now I read the local MSM and 4chan (the other side ) jornal.
Do many HN users actually frequent this website or should I be reinstalling my OS right about now??
You are safe... don't worry. Unless you started downloading stuff from random users on 4chan. But if you did that i'm not sure we can help you!
4chan's indeed a cesspool, and /pol/, /b/, among some others are the worst. In fact, they're called "containment boards" for this very reason.
oh my it's like watching a baby taking the first steps.
You gotta ask yourself "by whom?". Actual users of the site, people having serious discussions about the site, writers of pop articles aimed at non-users of the site, or someone else?
Even then, you have this conflation of /b/ (or I guess these days /pol/) and 4chan at large. Some communities are more welcoming than others.
That's true on a technical level only. But culture matters.
Attitudes like yours were why 4chan was such a surprise to the rest of us. The culture that we all thought was just "ironic" and "edgy" with its casual racism turned out to be... kinda actually racist when right wingers decided to weaponize xenophobia and bigotry. The groupthink of a bunch of almost-exclusively-male incels turned out to be hiding genuine misogyny once they had an enemy to point themselves at in gamergate.
Culture matters. Being an "open website" just describes how it happens, not why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
though the world is probably better off without a lot of those, they are not all literal nazi subs.
Trolls can always take over unmoderated forums because while they can drive the reasonable users out by reducing the signal to noise ratio down to a useless level, the reasonable users have no power drive them out. It's a completely imbalanced power dynamic. All forums need some sort of moderation or they will always collapse once they grow beyond a fairly modest threshold.
Some of the other forums on 4chan might be better examples, but even those have some moderation. Forums like /tg/ have managed to hang on alright, although their total post volume per day is quite small compared to /b/.
and some people enjoy that. you don't have to go there if you aren't one of them.
you're not describing some platonic ideal of an internet forum. you're just describing what you personally want out of one.
Nothing has more of a "Whoever fights monsters ..." vibe than the endless fixation on Nazis. I suppose we will have to amend the Four Horsemen of the Infoacalypse from "drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles." My vote is that we put "Nazis" in place of "terrorists," given that a well-known anti-DDoS service decided to revoke protections for Stormfront while still providing services at the time to ISIS. Yes, that ISIS, the slow-motion, lovingly filmed execution of infidels ISIS.
Because it never stops at just filtering out the Nazis.
Edit- it had live (think chat room) but threaded comments and was anonymous (temporary, randomized identites)
I haven't had the heart to completely decommission it yet so I've stood it back up so you can see what I am talking about .
Second, names could be more distinct. The fact they all begin with the prefix "user" (from what I saw) is redundant. Could you mix and match from a short-words list to create unique and memorable names? e.g. RedFoxFun.
Anonymous posting prevents weird popularity cliches from taking over, and post linking via ID allows multiple conversations to flow much smoother than reddit's tree-structured comments. I'd also say that sequential ranking over popularity upvote would prevent as many low-effort hot takes/jokes from always being at the top of each thread, but I'm practice that doesn't really seem to play out like it should.
Anonymous textboard written in Crystal.