4chan "blacking out" (or, "spoilering") all comments as SOPA protest | Hacker News Reader

4chan "blacking out" (or, "spoilering") all comments as SOPA protest

boards.4chan.org

157 pointsrunn1ng38 comments

I wonder if the protest suffers if too many sites that are publicly perceived as "evil" or even "slightly evil" join the blackout. The public might start to think that these sites should be blacked out.

I think the real purpose of these blackouts is to get users to finally do something. As much as I oppose sopa/pipa it wasn't until the Wikipedia blackout with direct links to my congressman/senators contact forms that I actually took the time to write letters to all of them. It had been on my "yea yea I'll get to it" list for a long time.

Now I'm sure there are many HNers who are deeply cynical about the value of writing to senators, but honestly you have to at least give it a shot.

I was afraid of that, but now that I think about it, it's less of an issue when the big names (Wikipedia/Google) are joining in. It makes it harder for a politician to single those websites out and spin the protests in a negative light.

(Then again, anything's possible in politics and PR, so it's hard but not impossible).

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Oh, irony..

4chan should stay like this.

This might be one of the very few cases when 4chan is on hn.

The other of course being that very cool sleepsort algorithm that was posted there

That made me laugh, the post quality of 4chan may be terrible but there's obviously a few smart people about there.

Terribleness is in the eye of the beholder. I would posit that 4chan's post quality is actually extremely high. People there don't complain afaik.

If you were to transfer the posts to the hep-th mailing list or something, it'd be very bad content, and vice-versa. As it stands, I imagine when people go to 4chan they tend to get exactly what they want.

I would also guess that the average 'smartness' level is a lot higher than you might think.

Whenever I've visited /prog on 4chan I'll see posts with some intelligent content then about 10 replies saying "your a fag" or something then maybe a couple of other genuinely witty replies and a few intelligent ones.

There are also entire threads started on seemingly legit topics that devolve into flamewars almost immediately plus a huge number of people who seem to just spam some meme everywhere regardless or relevance.

I'm quite surprised that the intelligent people there put up with all the other crap. I suppose it's possible there are a lot of intelligent people with the emotional maturity of a 10 year old.

"I suppose it's possible there are a lot of intelligent people with the emotional maturity of a 10 year old."

I think this sums it up correctly.

>I suppose it's possible there are a lot of intelligent people with the emotional maturity of a 10 year old.

It's not necessarily a maturity thing. When I visit 4chan it's usually for a cheap laugh, not to engage in serious discussion. The Internet's big enough for all flavors of discussion, and 4chan fills its niche. It need not be considered childish for doing so. I can enjoy a rational foreign policy debate and also cackle maniacally while running down grannies in GTA. Neither exclusively defines my maturity level.

A few years ago, I used to browse /prog/ during down time in work. After a while you learn to block out all the crap posts and trolling and you realize there's actually a tiny tiny bit of top quality content. For example, I first heard about the Factor programming language there. Nowadays I don't have the patience to sift through 99.9% crap just to read something intelligent.

I will take your word for it.

I should have!

This may inspire massive overreaction, not just /b/tards calling their congresspeople. Back when AT&T blocked access to 4chan for a few hours due to a DDoS attack, some of them assumed it was censorship and started crafting plans to retaliate with fiber seeking backhoes.

Not all comments. The textboards are unaffected.

I think today can be unofficially called the doomsday. Not because SOPA won, but because everything is dark.

Well, at least, I can be more productive today.

....nope, Facebook is still working.

Never had any doubts about on which site Facebook really stands. The bigger surprise to me is the absent of Twitter on the protests. I didn't expect them to join the -Tech companies putting profit over principles- club.

I think today can be proudly called: The Day That The Internet Stood Together In Unison.

I really hope that there aren't too many more reasons that action like this will be required again within my lifetime, but extrapolating from the way things have been going over the last couple of years I seriously doubt it.

I think one cool byproduct is the realization that we share much more in common with a group of people, not because of their home state but rather because of their core beliefs.

Living abroad, this becomes all to evident when people expect you to attend functions simply because you are all from a different geographical area (read: expats).

4chan is censoring /b/? About time :-)

I linked /co/ on purpose - I think it's one of the more civil boards.

Linking directly to 4chan should be marked NSFW. It's too easy to miss the domain name at the end of the link (like me).

The headline mentions 4chan.

Unlike what most people probably think, not all boards on 4chan are NSFW and the home page is certainly SFW.

4chan is not just /b/.

It's way too common to find porn on the blue boards and by extension the front page.

/co/ is fine for work.

I linked a SFW board.

(you can tell 4chan's SFW boards from NSFW by the background; the blue ones are - or, at least, should be - SFW, the yellow ones are NSFW)

It wasn't.

The second post on /co/ when I loaded it was a NSFW image of a nude woman making a sandwich.

So, you missed the domain, and were subject to the horrors of people discussing comics? Why exactly do we need to protect you from this terrible fate?

Some employers flag at domain level and actively monitor internet use.

Developer news / discussion sites like HN are fine, but something like 4chan.org or somethingaweful.com aren't.

So you are complaining about (the linking to) a site protesting against censorship (+etc) because this could interfere with the censorship mechanisms implemented by some employers?

more likely it interferes with his job.

So how does that support your initial reaction at all? Comics aren't NSFW just because you work in a shithole. Tons of things get posted here that aren't related to software development, you think they should all be tagged as NSFW?

Here you go:

td.title a[href*="4chan.org"] { color: rgb(255, 50, 50) !important; }

Customize it to only apply to news.ycombinator.com for your choice of browser and CSS-manipulation add-on :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com