If you've ever read the comments on news articles on Facebook (MSNBC/Breaking News/etc.), it's amazing the hateful, racist, bigoted shit people will post under their REAL NAMES. I can only imagine how bad it would be if people could choose to post anonymously.
Again, norms are determined by the group, just as they are in real life. There are some things I'd feel comfortable saying to a group of friends that I would never say to a stranger, and others that I could say to a group of strangers but never dream of saying to my friends. In this sense, moot is absolutely right.
You don't have to imagine the past very hard. Was it really that bad just a few years ago?
Mainstram media forums are full of idiotic posts because the mainstream is primarily composed of idiots.
I wouldn't say that the discussion there is that terrible (of course if you don't go to /b/, the "everything goes" board). Yes, for example for technology, /g/ board is unreadable, full of mindless hatred and the same type of discussions over and over (absolutely incomparable with Hacker News). The same for /v/. /int/ is just a shoutbox for racism and stereotypes. Really, the more popular boards are terrible. Poole sometimes seems to like it, trumping it as "raw uncensored opinion", but it's mostly just dumb.
However, I also visit /co/ board for cartoons and comics, and it is one of the best places to talk about these.
Doubly funny though, is how people there still use the name field, and rarely troll with it. The honor system largely works.
Anonymity (or at least, properly contextualized identity) allows people to try out different identities and modes of creation. Removing all social context results in a smoothed out, lowest-common-denominator of personality, but it's the jagged edges and oddities that really make people interesting - or ugly.
Also, pretty sure there hasn't been forced anonymous in years.
Besides, 4chan is a clusterfuck for other reasons; it's part of the culture of the place, and that even differs for each section. /lit/ is much more civilized than /b/, for example.
I've browsed 4chan every now and then during the last year I will totally disagree with you.
If anything, the post quality is deceiving, not immediately apparent. I couldn't understand at first, but then it became obvious. 99% of the posts are striped from any real content, they are irrelevant single words, offenses, f*ked up puctures, funny pictures, etc. But then, in 1% of the comments lies the real value of 4chan.
I've seen very insightful comments in there. Many topics that would be taboos on pretty much any other place on the internet are discussed there openly and with innovative views. I'm not sure about the purpose of the huge amount of useless fluff, but if you want to get the real content you need acknowledge that crazy people will post tons of stupid things while serious discussions take place.
If you have a totally new way of looking at a subject, if you expose it to a place where your identity is valued, you will for sure get it damaged. So everybody refrains from posting potentially controversial opinions. Going the opposite direction and totally remove identity ties, will attract trolls, but you get the real stuff, what people really think, no bullshit, no political correctness.
That's the part that scares me the most. In a world where everything you say is directly associated with you and indexabke forever in a search engine, people will have every reason to fear stepping out of mainstream opinions. The majority will become more beige. The minority will become more extreme. There will be less in between.
I prefer my world more interesting.
I couldn't agree more. I've long since lost the ability to get offended by pretty much anything 4chan could throw at me, so I must be pretty biased at this point. My view, however, is that the trolling and gore are in essence just a filter for potential audiences. In the early days, not rarely would there be threads up posting gore with the explicit goal of getting rid of newbies. (The actual vocabulary associated with these subjects on 4chan is rather more crude and graphic, and I will not denigrate this discussion with voicing it aloud.)
By getting past the filter, ie. being able to scan boards and threads for relevant content and not getting too offended on the way, you will have proven to the collective consciousness your ability to partake in discussions of taboo matters and doing so with a certain degree of objectivity and an open mind. That's the point after which actual discussion can happen. Combined with anonymity and volatility of content, this quality makes /b/ not only a cesspool of humanity but a place where entirely new kinds of conversations can take place and new ideas be entertained.
To understand the essence of moot's argument of prismatic identity, I find a certain underlying understanding of the scene where he's coming from is also necessary. It's not often that I see this point discussed, but I think it's important. Thank you for bringing it up.