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Comment by kvuj | Hacker News Reader

> That's the very force of the reddit hivemind. I have no interest in /r/antiwork nor their ideologies, but they kept popping up on /r/all, so they get a constant influx of people aligned with the reddit mean opinion, which in turn changes the original community.

That's what I like about 4chan. In a sea of ungodly acidic garbage lies a golden heart of contrarianism. The posters will argue for a side one day, and 2 hours later will vehemently adopt opposite arguments. Some of the best leftist arguments I have ever read came from /pol/.

4chan argues for the sake of arguing, and I think that is absolutely beautiful in today's environment of everyone taking everything so seriously.

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It probably has to do with the post incentives. On Reddit, if you get downvoted into oblivion, your post disappears even if you get thousands of comments. On 4Chan, the more active the post, the more it gets bumped to the top. So being inflammatory on one makes your post disappear, and on the other it sends it to the top of the feed.

This explains Twitter too. Even before the infamous trend-boosting algorithms get involved, being more controversial gets you more retweets and more chances to be seen. Tumblr used to be the same way and its users had similarly controversial/aggressive politics.

Reddit is grossly overmoderated. You have a vote system that enforces a hivemind by itself, on top of a normal moderation system that deletes an enormous amount of content, on top of automated moderation banning posts if you use this or that word, on top of a shadowban system on top of a global content policy system.

The result is that only stuff that the majority of users allow will get displayed.

> Reddit is grossly overmoderated

I think bigger problem is poor moderation. Most of the mods are driven by some agenda and even propaganda.

Instead of focusing on quality, they focus on how their subreddit content can be aligned to their agenda.

Any user who doesn't comply, gets banned. Since roughly only 1% user actively engage in a subreddit, update macha end with Eco chamber.

That's why controversial and new are the only worthwhile comment sortings on Reddit.

I used to love the 4chan-style contrarian attitude until, in high school people I knew were killed in Iraq. Then I started to realize that those kinds of nihilist attitudes have real-world consequences. Since then, that attitude has become mainstream (or perhaps just my awareness of it) and following has been a constant trail of death and misery. I can't not take it seriously anymore when my friends and loved ones are dying and turning on each other.

As far as I can tell, 4chan is vehemently against the current neoliberal wars. They laughed their asses off at the US abandoning Afghanistan and are questioning why the NATO has to be in Ukraine at all. Perhaps I misunderstood your tone.

That definitely wasn't the impression I got back when I frequented it but I'm glad if they're more antiwar now.

I am not familiar at all with 4chan and its functioning, but if I remember correctly there is no "they" in 4chan, similar to the "Anonymous" group... everyone can go into 4chan, sometimes a radical leftist will go there, next day a radical rightist will post. Is there actually a "cultural leaning" in that site?

Of course there are a cultural leanings at every "place". What kind of people frequent that place?

HN is no different. Anyone can come here and make any argument.

> 4chan is vehemently against the current neoliberal wars.

I'm sorry, what exactly makes the current wars neoliberal?

If we're assigning blame for nihilism and Iraq, let's not forget that WaPo, NYT, CNN, ABC, FOX and the rest of the pro-war media bear orders of magnitude more responsibility than fucking 4chan.

Oh I fully agree, that's what I mean by that attitude becoming more mainstream. Just growing up I saw that expressed more fully on 4chan before I saw it being adopted elsewhere.

4chan didn't even exist when we invaded Iraq. And the justification for invading Iraq was anything but nihilism, it was a bunch of patriotism and xenophobia wrapped in religious crusade. By the time we invaded we had killed (and acknowledged killing) a million children due to sanctions.

I can't make the connection you make. When people were protesting against the Iraq War, they were told that they didn't believe in anything. I don't understand personal tragedy as an argument against 4chan; everybody you know is going to die eventually, and virtually everybody you're speaking to has known two people who died prematurely and preventably. I, in particular, don't understand people who traveled to kill instead being killed as an argument against humor.

The idea that a 4chan that didn't exist created Judith Miller is bizarre.

I feel like contrarian techniques adopted by sane mind at cooperatively manageable scale (of zero) is great, but IMO users of reactive contrarianism that eventually emerges just deserve downvotes as external means of value judgement. However that leads to communal polarization, and to solve that, regular exposure events would be necessary ... I admire Reddit, at least for its architecture.

iPhone September filled the internet up with people that never had "don't believe a single thing you read there" driven into their skulls. 4chan posting was and is a performance act. The attitude isn't the problem, pretending like context isn't a thing is the problem.

When the internet media and regular media merged one of two things had to happen. Either expose how much of a performance act the old school media was from jump street. Or make the idea of believing everything online at first pass a reasonable position to have.

Q anon grew and continues to exist precisely because it is in the best interests of "respectable" media outlets to not teach media literacy to their consumers.

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