Killing Community
marginalia.nu
marginalia.nu
I just mention it here because it's probably something that doesn't occur to most people, and maybe it should be something we think about more. I think 4chan has a very interesting property in that the gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth (depending on the board) post being full of slurs. Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's value to that that people miss.
Except for all of the hate, vitriol, prejudice, and disregard for the basic humanity of others, it's egalitarian and accessible??
Doesn't matter who you are, you constantly ARE attacked while browsing 4chan. That's kind of the point. Nobody gets to be the in crowd and protected: the closest I've seen of that is for instance literal Trump and Putin, and I don't believe for a second they are truly exempt: the more certain /pol/sters try to make them be protected, the more it backfires with 4chan.
Whether it is in ANY WAY USEFUL to go to a place where everybody hates you and you hate them right back and that's what the community is, that's another question. Looking back on my relation to such things, part of the reason I drifted off was that I found things to care about or be interested in, didn't matter what, and having any arbitrary interest was as good as 4chan, at dealing with the worthlessness and ennui.
4chan is a really good place to spend time if you haven't killed yourself yet.
If you can connect with pretty much anything else in the universe, the other thing has a pretty easy time showing its appeal compared to 4chan. For instance, I got into MLP fandom, bronies. That came off 4chan, a great example of how channers can be redirected into anything else no matter how inappropriate, just as a relief from being channers.
It's always gonna be there at the end of the line, when there's nothing else but death. But then, there are actually plenty of other things, 4chan is only one angle a person can take. It's not entirely about choice, though. As choice erodes, 4chan beckons (while flipping you off).
I think this is what OP meant by "egalitarian" (though I certainly wouldn't have chosen that word) -- equal opportunity abuse. This shared constant toxicity plus no karma/upvotes and no attachment to an online persona through anonymity mean that the playing ground is perhaps uniquely level.
Yeah, this is what people misunderstand about 4chan. Obviously my race gets a lot of flak, but I've even seen racial slurs about white Europeans I've never heard anywhere else.
I'm not saying it's morally right, but it feels more of a hazing tactic than legitimate hatred. Once you pass that filter you have access to some interesting information.
No matter what your ethnicity someone on 4chan will make a joke about genociding you. The difference is that some people in the world actually are doing genocides. And someone from one of those groups, knowing that, is going to experience those jokes differently.
4chan, (and to a serious degree, HN) places the duty and the transgression on the person who has the bad experience with the genocide joke. But a completely valid model is actually that no, the genocide joke is the transgression and the one making it the transgressor.
4chan is not separate from the world it is part of it. And by fostering this environment you're providing cover for atrocities. Because not everyone is there just to have a fun time saying slurs! Some of them really do want us to die, and 4chan isn't just a diversion it is an actual site of conversion and radicalization towards their goals.
To be clear, I am not "fostering [an] environment" or defending 4chan here at all, I am just pointing out that this is a misunderstanding of what the culture of 4chan is.
Like the person I was replying to, I somehow doubt you have spent any time there. Where on the site are you even talking about? /g/? /lgbt/? /k/? /mu/? /pol/? /bant/? /sci/? /b/? Even though they share the cultural features I was talking about, they are quite distinct otherwise. Many people read threads on a topical board like /mu/ or /g/ and haven't spent any time on the more offensive or stomach-churning parts of the site like /pol/ or /b/.
> Because not everyone is there just to have a fun time saying slurs
I resent this implication that merely because I suggest people understand the things they are talking about that I am on 4chan using slurs. This style of argumentation would be right at home on the worst boards of 4chan...
> it is an actual site of conversion and radicalization towards their goals
4chan is not a person, it doesn't have "goals" or opinions any more than heterogenous online communities like eg HN or Reddit do. I would agree that 4chan as a community does house more polarized opinions than most online communities, though that seems to be largely a function of not having upvotes and allowing anonymous posting.
To your overall point, that this is a value difference between myself and the GP, I fully disagree. I am making a factual (and not value-centric) claim that toxicity towards anyone posting on the site is an integral part of the culture there.
Up to date knowledge of their internal jargon and shibboleths doesn't discredit my view of the site, it's still right there and it doesn't take long to confirm that my worst opinions of it from 2008 are still valid now.
I never claimed that the site itself has opinions or goals. But its members do! and they emerge in the patterns of interaction and rhetoric eg its culture.
How is that not an integral component of equal access?
I realize you’re probably trying to disagree with me, but, yes.
Here’s another thought: avowed Nazis are not, strictly speaking, stopped from participating in any pseudonymous forum, if they can keep their views on that subject to themselves. Why is this model less “open” or “egalitarian” than one where they’re allowed to barge into conversations and start spewing that stuff?
Yes, of course. It did seem the clear intent behind your words. Arm the sheep and it may be a different matter, no? Or, as you say, the sheep could simply not show up if they don't like their odds. I'm really not making a value judgement on the situation, just saying that everyone is handed equal tools here.
> Here’s another thought: avowed Nazis are not, strictly speaking, stopped from participating in any pseudonymous forum, if they can keep their views on that subject to themselves. Why is this model less “open” or “egalitarian” than one where they’re allowed to barge into conversations and start spewing that stuff?
Well, the easy answer is that it's less open because it is moderated. Perhaps each is open in different, conflicting ways? I'm not really prepared to perform an analysis on the ethics of each, and please don't take my response as necessarily expressing a preference for the former. Insofar as I spend time on any social platform, it is mostly HN, and mostly because I find the conversation here generally more civil than elsewhere. So in practice, I do seem to express a preference for the latter.
Sorry, I don't know what this means.
> We can't stop you from chilling with the nazis if that's what you're gonna be into
Thanks, I'll pass.
That's.. not very nice =(. I also don't see how it applies here, even if you do assume bad faith --- who exactly am I pestering? I asked you one question, then I've been having a back-and-forth with emodendroket --- a simple one-for-one. I'll also have you note that they chose to engage me. I'm certainly not following people even cross-thread, let alone cross-platform, pestering them until I get a response and demanding they justify their personal preferences.
I'm trying to have a legitimate conversation; it was my belief that intellectual discussion was encouraged here. If you don't want to discuss, don't respond, it's pretty much that simple. I'm not going to chase you down. However, if you are going to engage, I would appreciate if you don't accuse me of trolling on the basis of a disagreement and some weak notion of bad faith.
As in mostly anti Bush-establishment, lefty, pro-freedom, 'rational' anti-religion atheists.
I'd say the most of my (admittedly fuzzy) memories of that era of 4chan political activism were Aaron Swartz/Anonymous.
Anyway two points:
- The vicious racism was already enough of a consistent thing in the 2000s that I clocked it as essentially a movement at that point. They always claimed to be joking but even then it was clear that many of them were not. Regardless of what other political affiliations were commonly held there at that time. But I think you got it pretty close, they weren't that politically coherent back then, and certainly not leftist so much as just anti-bush/anti-republican.
- Gamergate was a permanent rearrangement, finally giving a coherent "them" to orient a reactionary antipolitical movement against. I think the sharp ramp up in aggressiveness and frankly violent imagery filtered a lot of people out, while simultaneously inviting people in, creating a new overlap with pre-existing and nascent reactionary groups like (self-identified I don't mean this as an insult per se) reddit incels.
So having kept an eye on it for a while now, I think it has meaningfully changed since 2008, even if a lot of the members are the same and many of the cultural signifiers are intact. Just for one it is much more coherent as an allegiance or identity, as you can see by the dozens of people coming out to passionately defend it in these comments.
Sounds like a "you problem."
I'm a former Goon. I've been all over the trashy parts of the internet. It doesn't benefit me whatsoever to lie about seeing CP on 4chan. I even remember exactly what the picture I saw the last time I went to it looked like. It is seared into my memory. That was my last visit to that trash site.
> The last time I went there it was full of CP and I lose all respect for people who use that site no matter how you try to spin it.
It sounds like you don't actually use the site --- just like GP was saying.
> If you're going to say that I've never used the site, I've also established that I have.
So… you’ve no respect for your former self? You see how this works?
Nowhere did I defend cp. Those are your words about me, not my words about anything. And what about my username? Am I supposed to hide behind a throwaway for any sort of contentious take? Does that make me a man somehow?
Good day, sir!
You have the strangest arguments. I quit going to it once I saw CP. I don't even remember why I used to visit it occasionally, probably morbid curiosity, or maybe people on somethingawful linking posts on it. I definitely didn't frequent it and I'm sure I never posted on it.
I've seen comments that it's cleaned up a lot and has better moderation. That's good.
Yikes. On 4chan you'd have just blindly implied that the poster fathered himself in a freak accident with his mother, who is a bovine. Here, on the nice polite internet, you merely implied that a real person, whose name is attached, is defending ch1ld s3xual abuse.
You're so upset about there being a forum you don't like that you've decided to use one of the most powerful accusations you can make about him - one that imho could justifiably get him killed if true - so casually. So much hatred.
The guy has replied to every single one of my posts after I said I quit going to 4chan because of CP defending 4chan. A little odd considering my circumstances for leaving it. That shouldn't even remotely be a debate on why I left.
Thanks.
> That shouldn't even remotely be a debate on why I left.
Sure, you're the definitive source for why you left.
> there's a forum that I saw tons of child porn on.
It wasn't a forum for that though (I hope), it was a forum where people trolled others by posting it. Do you know someone put CP in the bitcoin blockchain?
And yeah, I use a no-images no-JS browser for a lot of things and 4chan would be one. I expect to be blocking 99% gore, but that last 1% is many things I'm also happy not seeing.
> I guess I shouldn't be upset
Upset at who, though? Upset at the people who enjoy an uncensored forum and have accepted that it'll be full of crap, or at the people who feel the need to poison it simply because someone else was enjoying themselves?
> trans-hating homophobes
Anonymous forums are actually one of the first places trans people were free to discuss themselves. You might (will) be flamed and trolled for it, but also engaged with. Reddit seems more free to be trans, except if you look at the forums there's always someone being banned for non-hateful things, such as being the wrong type of trans, or detrans. (Truscum vs Tucutes vs old-school Transexuals ...)
I don't understand why it's important to be flamed at all by people who are anonymous? I might banter with friends, but there's a shared history of understanding there; in an anonymous message board there's none of that so I don't understand what it's trying to achieve?
No, that stuff is gross and you block/avoid it. The integral part is that the forum uncensored - even if a large quantity of that uncensored content is unwanted.
And fwiw, 4chan is only one example of a (nearly) uncensored board, it's far from the best or nicest.
> I don't understand why it's important to be flamed at all
That's not the important part, but that you can have the conversation at all. The idiots running around screaming are like ghosts in Harry Potter, distractions if you let them be but almost invisible if you ignore them.
> racial slurs ... are an integral part of the culture?
Well sometimes yes, actually. Like the now banned subreddit, 2balkan4u, sometimes "hate subs" actually aren't. I'm familiar only via gaming friends, but it's basically people who've come together around "hating" each other for ethnic reasons. It doesn't look friendly but is, with people bonding over their shared history - often dark - and collectively watching the world go by from a cynical pov. It's like therapy and the hanging out with the only people who understand you, something many veterans feel even when meeting ex-"enemy" combatants. A sanitized version of this wouldn't work.
Uh. I replied to two posts; everything else has been direct back-and-forth with you. Every one except this one anyway; this one is because you're directly discussing me. I don't know if that's "every single one of your posts" or not, but it certainly sounds less dramatic when you realize that it's.. two.
> after I said I quit going to 4chan defending 4chan
Go back and read a second time. I didn't actually defend 4chan, and I certainly didn't and am not defending csam. I didn't say anything objectionably about you leaving, either; what I did respond to was your assertion that you're familiar with 4chan. All I really said is, hey, sounds like maybe you don't actually hang out there (which is fine!) --- just like GP was saying in the first place. I also tried to point out that the internet at large is basically unmoderated, and 4chan itself exists within that space. You could just as easily make the argument that the internet itself is dangerous and to be avoided.
You don't have to agree with me. You don't have to like me --- even if I wish you wouldn't make snap judgements about me based off of a few terse exchanges. What I would hope for, however, is that you could remain civil, rather than open fire with personal attacks. Especially here on HN.
I'll leave that one up to you; we can discuss further or not, but I'm not going to engage in an open flame war here.
You act like you're being an anthropologist, but you're just apologizing for a culture we all know and which does demonstrable harm in the world. It's not "polarized opinions", it's celebrating terrible things. You know that, we know that.
...except realistically, even though I'm in the age and interest group, I've been there like, a single-digit number of times --- which totally qualifies me as an expert on it, right?
This is the absolutely critical point that people are either too privileged to have ever thought of, or too disingenuous to admit.
Yeah, I'm a relatively wealthy (by global standards) white guy of European descent. You can joke about genociding me and I'll laugh because it's a ridiculous thought.
People who grew up genuinely at risk of genocide, or who had recent ancestors killed, don't see that same joke that same way. Worse, the people making those jokes about populations that are currently being exterminated are just doing the old "hey I'm a nazi, ha ha just kidding, can't you take a joke" thing. Which, great, free speech. But at some point if you're goose stepping in jest on a daily basis, that's just who you are.
Kurt Vonnegut said it: we are what we pretend to be.
...or fundamentally disagree with? Yes, you're describing something real. You're also setting a double standard. Is it possible to understand the premises but come to different conclusions?
You are also too privileged to think anyone might not be offended by those words, or even allow them the chance to speak for themselves. The banning of r/2balkan4u was a great exercise in the White Man's Burden of freeing the poor helpless "minorities" from Balkan inside jokes
Do you by any chance have any Italian ancestors? It took a large amount of lynchings, a significant public uproar and finally a threat of war from Europe for the US to finally elevate Italians to "white" . Americans ingrained need to be racist against everyone they could almost causing WWI (with all the interwoven alliances) is an interesting thought.
Have you ever been anywhere in the world which you found less racist than the USA? (Bonus points if it actually has a substantial population and racial/ethnic mix to test that, and it's not just theoretical.)
A lot of places have hidden hatred of groups which acts like racial hate, but doesn't appear that way to people from the USA where the divide (black/white) was so stark and visible. Turks/Armenians, Shia/Sunni, etc.
The USA isn't perfect, but I can't think of anywhere else that I could so unreservedly recommend to anyone around the world. Not Canada, not Germany, maybe the UK, sorta Singapore if you're not certain races, etc, etc.
The transgression is on those who carry out the genocide. There is no model where reminding someone of the existence of something is a transgression.
You might not agree with it but there's definitely a model that many people subscribe to.
People suffering the trauma of conflict can be hurt by harsh words. It's a choice to consider them or not when you speak.
If you need to subscribe to that model to hide from yourself from the fact that you don't actually care, it is your life to live, but it is not a model that works beyond one's self. The disingenuity is out there for everyone else.
The fact that trigger warnings exist and are in use in many places is evidence of the existence of this model.
There is no denying the existence of the model, but it is used to try and hide from oneself that one doesn't actually care and would rather take the fun road of talking about it instead. Which is fine. It is your life to live and if that is what it takes to get through the day, so be it. It is not the altruistic behaviour you are trying to make it out to be, however.
I'm simply responding to "There is no model where reminding someone of the existence of something is a transgression" but we seem to have reached an agreement that there is.
In my experience people are normally careful about what kind of jokes they make around someone who has suffered a traumatic experience, an "there's a time and a place" kind of thing.
I believe many people would find it transgressive to make jokes about public transport around someone whose child had recently been killed by a bus.
You can see this even in popular culture. I'd give the famous "Don't mention the war" episode of Fawlty Towers as an example.
I think it's part of the human experience to exhibit sensitivity towards others and to reflect that in your language.
Who? On internet forums, there is only you. Any words you write are done so to stroke your own thought processes. There is no expectation of anyone else being on the line. In fact, most comments you write will never be read by anyone. And even when something does reply, there is no belief that it must be human. It could just as easily be a GPT model, and that's fine. It wouldn't change the experience.
Again, forum usage is solitary activity. If there are other humans involved behind the scenes to make the software work, that is merely an implementation detail that is not of concern to the user. Any care for the words you choose is only for your own benefit, and as it pertains to the discussion, most likely because you don't want to accept some truth about yourself.
This doesn't actually make a difference one way or another. Abuse is abuse.
I do think this is one of the big hidden problems with upvote/like systems.
Seeing a post you don't like or disagree with on Twitter/Facebook/Reddit with a lot of likes/retweets/upvotes/etc psychologically puts you on the defensive. 10,000 likes on a post you disagree with means you're up against an army of 10,000 people who disagreed with you! So you do what's natural: you fight back, you summon your own army of people (hoping to get a respectable counter-army of likes). This creates a toxic environment and you can see it play out on Twitter: every Democrat-leaning tweet will have its top reply be a Republican-leaning tweet with a counter-point, and every Republican with a Democrat.
Meanwhile, on 4chan or other old-style message board withouts those systems... yeah, it's just some asshole with a stupid opinion. Just ignore them, no need to waste effort engaging.
Interesting because from a functional user experience perspective, it's an objectively useful feature for navigating discussions. An obvious addition in terms of web design, yet with unforeseen repercussions. The medium is the message, after all.
But I do agree it's contributed to bait posts a lot, yeah. Interesting to see the impact of such a seemingly small UX change.
¹https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/28hjga/reddi...
My innocence =(
More like army of 10k bots.
It is remarkable how well moderated that site is.
Illegal posts tend to get removed immediately, while antisocial types get quickly dealt with (banned).
Site is oddly infamous, but certainly does not deserve the hate.
Remember Anonymous? That was all derivative of various chan boards and Something Awful. You probably overlap with those users more than you'd like to admit.
A thing I realized was that there's a lot of people who lurk the chans and end up promoting the more mainstream-ready content to their other communities. The chans are essentially the boiler room in terms of their role in the ecosystem of the internet.
> You probably overlap with those users more than you'd like to admit.
4chan is absolutely not a group I overlap much with.
The biggest difference to other cesspools is that it has less manners and moderation. But in terms of pure toxicity Twitter etc aren't any better, all the scheming, backstabbing and insults are just more polite and use a lot more emoji, and when someone loses the argument they block everyone.
I don't understand what you mean, unless you mean posters on 4chan hate themselves. Anyone who isn't you is an other, after all.
In 4chan a literal nazi, a drag queen, a bona-fide pedophile and a luddite can exchange opinions with no prejudice, because none of them know anyone else's background.
You might think that these people can't talk about certain things, but any subject in which discussion becomes too caustic simply doesn't even take place in other platforms, and not every discussion is a life or death discussion, they can talk about photography just fine.
This is overly romantic. I just visited /g/. Less than 1 min in, I see "nigger" and "faggot".
I'm sure there are blacks, gays and drag queens that see value in 4chan and are desensitized to those words. But, I'd estimate 99% of the population is white men/boys with antisocial tendencies.
Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with like minded people building a village. But let's not pretend the culture of the site, doesn't instantly weed out a huge chunk of multiple demographics.
You'd be wrong https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1220127-pol
Demographic
Age: 18-34
Gender: ~70% male, ~30% female
Location: United States (47%), United Kingdom (7%), Canada (6%), Australia (4%), Germany (4%)
Interests: Japanese culture, anime, manga, video games, comics, technology, music, movies
Education: Majority attended or currently enrolled in college"Desensitized to words" is normal mental development; infants may be excited by sheer words - not beyond.
Beyond infancy you (should) have gained filtering and control;
before that and after social experience, you should be able to understand actions as part of "playing" ("non-seriousness", transversality of intention).
Yes, and if you spend an hour in it, you'll see them dozens of times more. Words hold the meaning we give them, by constantly seeing words like these you stop caring about them. This is part of what makes 4chan so inclusive.
Because rather than having a social agreement not to call someone this or that, everyone calls everyone this or that so, so often that it bears no meaning anymore.
For everything else there is documentation, experimentation, social clubs and entertainment.
1. There is a 'account system' for reputation, but it is trivial to auto generate throwaway accounts for 'hot takes' or counter group-think. There are even simple mirror websites that allow for browsing without hiding flagged posts. No Edit:[I don't think any] attempts have been made to reign this behavior in, likely for good reason. Perhaps it keeps the discourse interesting and encourages lateral thinking?
IMO gatekeeping (by the community) is a good/necessary thing for spaces to not become completely gutted/become kicked out of what was formerly your space.
I think this image sums it up quite well. https://img.ifunny.co/images/8f4199becd35483d8f498f9ccd0eb73...
Still, HN could make a couple of changes to email verification and make smurfing much less trivial. I think it is good they don't
Just listing a bunch of unrelated shit that upsets you isn't responsive to the comment you're replying to.
Those problems you list are present on every online forum and are orthogonal to being free and egalitarian.
What's more egalitarian and accessible than allowing all "hate", "vitriol", "prejudice" and "disregard for the basic humanity of others"?
What you do you prefer? A non-egalitarian and inaccessible place where only the hate, vitriol, prejudice, etc you agree with is allowed?
Everyone gets equal right and opportunity to demean each other equally!
I’m Jewish and mentally filter out all the antisemitic stuff without even thinking about it. 95% of the content outside certain pockets is not even antisemitic, it’s just a shock humor phrase used independently of any actual relation to being Jewish like the term “goyslop”.
And yeah, a certain portion of the population does actually hate Jews/transgender people/black people. But when you post nobody knows you are like that. It’s ego-less, you don’t even have an account, so you really don’t even have any reason to care because it’s not directed at you in particular, so it’s just like if you saw something racist on Twitter. Just a very different model compared to the pseudonymous forums/Reddit/hn and fully-linked regular social media.
4chan is certainly not the best source compared to, say, scientific papers or technical conferences, but is there any evidence it's any worse than Reddit? A lot of the work pushing Stable Diffusion forward came out of 4chan IIRC. I believe the most popular UI (automatic1111) came out of 4chan.
Something developing this way is brought forward best by intensely disagreeable nerds with too much time on their hands, exploring in an undisciplined but persistent way.
Tell me that doesn't sound like 4chan :)
You are talking about tools that can be abused to make infinite porn. I am not sure anyone wants to know how much time 4chan users invested into learning about them just to be able to modify and fine tune their models.
Interesting choice of words. Why would it be an "abuse" of a tool that can be adjusted to generate nearly anything, to use it for a relatively specific subset of anything?
Would you also consider it an "abuse" if they were, say, attempting to generate new works in the style of michaelangelo or picasso instead?
I think 'the most well informed sources' in many things will NOT be the consensus opinion, but vanguard thought trying to get somewhere else beyond the sum total of what's currently known. This is fundamental to science and truth generally.
Disagreeableness is overwhelmingly a quality of such thinking, in the technical psychological sense: agreeableness leads to complying and ceasing to seek alternate thoughts/points.
I run Airwindows and have recently put out a Console system based on applying the absolute minimum alterations to the mantissas of floating point words, just to see what I'd get. That's internal algorithms, volume, and I added panning, doing nearly everything with bit-shifts for this purpose. Got a very interesting sound out of full mixes done this way.
I am as nice as pie, and putting videos on YouTube where I must talk about 'shifting of bits' because Youtube will always think I said 'bitch' and draw conclusions about my video from what it thinks I keep saying. And yet, at the same time, I am intensely disagreeable, because I'm persistently exploring ideas in digital sound that STARKLY contradict what's taught as common knowledge.
I'm not doing this on 4chan, but if I was, it would be every bit as supportive a community to my unusual directions as the 'normal world' is, if not more so. I wouldn't be one bit surprised to know that 4chan had pockets of research or content creation that are leading the world. It wouldn't be the first time 4chan led the world, for good or ill.
Ok, so mostly ill :) but that is because influential is not the same as useful. And the ability of 4chan to put any idea or content into effective practice is grossly stunted as 4chan cannot govern, or organize worth a damn by real-world standards. But it's probably the most likely source for whatever is going to be moving the world twenty years from now, compared to normal sources. It will just immediately lose control of anything that achieves escape velocity.
Think 'petri dish', or perhaps 'rainforest swamp'?
Let's be real - what people miss is being able to act like racist edgelords on the internet without consequence, and they confuse that freedom with something profound, when it's just a deeply ingrained culture of immaturity. But apart from that one aspect, there's nothing to the accessibility of 4chan that isn't available elsewhere, certainly not quality of conversation.
As long as I don't put anything personally identifiable in each post, the chances of them being linked together to point back to my real identity is miniscule, so I can share stuff I would normally want to keep private.
I have bonded over deeply personal trauma with anons that I will never knowingly meet again but also know they are out there on the same board as me. I've commiserated over health concerns that I wouldn't share on social media in fear of seeming unprofessional nor with friends to avoid making them worry.
Hell, I made a throwaway just to post this since I don't want people to look at my profile and go "that guy is a 4chan user" since that could be an issue professionally, yet nothing I said here is a hate speech. That's an example of how anonymity allows for more honest speech in ways most sites elsewhere don't offer.
I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all seemed to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on everything. There was the occasional Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, but back then, even they tread _very_ carefully - they would deviate maybe a little bit from the maintstream opinion but not much, at least not looking back on it.
I didn't see things the way the news saw them on almost anything. At the time, I thought I must be the only one who disagreed on so many points - after all, if anybody thought like I thought, there would have to be at least some newspaper somewhere that was printing it. But there wasn't.
Then the internet came along, and people could chat and argue with each other without a newspaper or magazine or TV editor getting in between. I found out that there were a lot of people who thought the way I did. A lot of people who disagreed with the dominant news media viewpoint that was 90% identical.
I think there was an initial rush of people who took voicing that disagreement to a bit of an extreme when the internet was new, but that's sort of subsided now - there are full grown adults with college degrees and jobs and mortgages who've been on the internet their whole lives and can't _remember_ when all media was as tightly controlled as Reddit's /r/politics subreddit.
Now the push back is becoming more serious, less "edgy" and more potentially disruptive and even a threat to the people who've made their livings and fortunes censoring debate - it should come as no surprise that there's such a push to get the genie back into the bottle.
This was the era of satantic panic[1], D&D being controversial due to devil worship, and when democrats and republicans joined hand in hand to try and outlaw vulgarity.
The 80s was absurdly conservative.
A regular talking point on 90s TV newscasts was about if it is ok for a man to kill another man who (romantically) hits on him. That was an actual topic the country was divided over.
1990s America, also not a bastion of radial left thinking.
(I even disagree with both the left and the right on some things).
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1268/tipper-gor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_panic_defense#Use_of_the_g...
Then there was the incredible level of controversy over an out of the closet lesbian on nationwide TV!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppy_Episode#Reception
Finally, I'll note that Rush Limbaugh was one of the nations most listened to media voices during this time period.
Um... you do know that Tipper Gore was and still is an adamant leftist, right? She's Al Gore's wife.
My entire point was that the entire country was more conservative, a point I was demonstrating by showing a time when Democrats and Republicans joining hand in hand to censor music from black musicians. (They also tried to censor violent video games, and the entire internet!)
> Um... you do know that Tipper Gore was and still is an adamant leftist,
Look up https://www.politicalcompass.org/ specifically https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2
1 axis for left vs right makes no sense, especially when there are members of both dominant political parties who want to curtail liberties.
Politics as a team sport is stupid, don't vote based on single letter next to someone's name, vote for the individual policies a candidate supports.
Absolutely nobody can agree on what should and should not be moderated to some perfect degree, and here the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, it's the enemy of sanity. It always starts off with some easy low-hanging fruit, and then it ends up with people rage-quitting because some moderator has taken the "wrong" stance on discussions about Israel and Palestine, something small like that. The more control, the more that needs to be controlled. It just invites people to filter ever-finer, based on the narcissism of small differences.
Ideally, offer some kind of client-side filtration. Let the user maintain it, let them run into the Scunthorpe Problem for themselves. Rate-limit the spam, and be robust about that, but everything else is up to the individual. And frankly, the people who have selected fragility as a kind of lifestyle rarely have much to offer a community anyway.
I say this as an Old who has watched communities arise, develop, and fold over decades, on platform after platform, protocol after protocol. Most deaths are the kind of slow-motion suicide that in humans would be reflected in lousy lifestyle choices. And one I see so, so very often is becoming intensely rulebound so that everyone will behave. It never works.
So, I think there is some additional gatekeeping: ability to ignore the fact that the one day the community decided to personally make me a target of their vitriol. :(
Why would the "hentai/alternate" board be targeting you? Even "insulting" you, rather than the norm of posting hentai?
This woman captured the image of me with my dog and posted it for her feed calling me a slue of slurs and various labels. I spent the next few days in bed and was afraid to leave my house. I had to delete my Twitter, scrub the internet of that image, and get a new email address because her followers would not stop trying to contact me to continue what I could already see them saying on that Twitter thread. It took Twitter over a week to remove the thread, even though it clearly doxxed me and violated their policies barring inciting harassment.
Personally, I think some people just wake up and choose violence, and other minds can't help but dabble. Sorry this happened to you.
How so, are you thinking?
After reading OP, my guess is that maybe you're suggesting it's the way the toxicity/chaos keeps too many people from joining, that helps keep it a village? Helps keep it smaller, or less rate of newcomers, since so many find it distasteful?
But maybe you mean something else? What are you thinking about how the toxicity/chaos might be the main thing that enables it to continue as a village? How might it do that?
The fact there isn't any kind of karma system might also have something to do with it.
If you're lucky there won't be a counterculture, but the culture of the board won't always be conductive to discussion. I stopped browsing /g/ years ago but I remember a distinct decline in the quality of discussion around Linux and FOSS topics as the board shifted to more towards more general consumer technology, FOSS threads naturally became lower effort and more memetic* as a result to compete with the influx of new users who didn't care about this subculture. When Linus Torvalds announced that he would try to be more polite it gave some ammo to the anti-Linux culture and things deteriorated more. There was a particularly pertinent post around the attitude of NixOS users on /g/ that reflects this period pretty well I think.
* This sort of trend isn't unique to 4chan of course, the quality of discussion on hobby subreddits tends to decline when mods start allowing memes and low effort posts. Even if discussion continues it's never the primary focus and becomes harder to find.
A friendly nitpick: the word 'conductive' is a physics term. The term which means 'tending to cause or bring something about' is conducive, with no t, and is pronounced 'cundoosiv'.
Well, and filter out the CP, dead and butchered bodies, nazis & any number of other horrifying things I ran across when I've looked at the site. Granted that was years ago but it's not really the type of thing you check up on to see if things have gotten better...
Sure maybe not on /g/ but that leaves lots of people just one mistaken click away from potential nightmares. That's not a value people are missing, it's a cost they aren't willing to pay for someone else's concept of being egalitarian.
You could fill every post on every site with slurs and I would barely notice. Slurs aren't 4chan's problem though, the crowd of unrestrained sadists is.
That said, it's absolutely not worth the time, unless you are bored and feel like most of the internet is too sanitized for your tastes. It's just, unquestionably a big waste of time at best.
I don't think it'll ruin your brain, but it probably won't expand it either.
Visit 1: porn, porn, porn, funny creative joke, porn porn porn
Visit 2: porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn
Visit 3: porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn
Visit 4: porn, anti-muslim rant , porn, porn, porn, porn
Visit 5: porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn
weeeeeell, people did spam lolicon and gay furry porn in like 2011 for a couple months but the mods swooped in and it's been a well-enforced blue board since
the real problem with /g/ in the current age though is the thought-terminating memes. it's no longer really the bastion of oblique insight it once was. opinions on the board have ossified to the point you're not going to find out about anything cool from them first. this is common across most blue boards these days honestly; they are no longer really tastemakers
r/askhistorians is a fantastic example where curation produces high quality insight and debate.
The bigger issue is that r/askhistorians is an English-language subreddit, and English is the most widely-used language of the Western-Imperialist powers, so it makes sense that if you ask in their language, you are mostly going to get their answers. The people who would have equivalent expertise from other viewpoints are mostly not lurking that subreddit.
And yes, it's not meant to be a place to debate, it's meant to be a place to get access to historians' subject matter expertise. When 2 historians' accounts conflict with each other, they aren't supposed to start arguing about it, they're supposed to each make a separate reply to OP with their sources.
If you’re not chasing infinite growth, or even if you are but want to set the right culture at the outset, I think the HN moderation model is ideal. Just delete low quality and blatantly offensive posts and ban repeat offenders. You don’t need some complicated mechanism for implementing restorative justice or scaling moderation via community moderation teams, you just don’t want those users to post
4chan is filled with people asking easily googleable questions and the user base generally seems to be about 17. I know that’s the age when I visited the site the most (thank god it was before the 2016 election which irrevocably ruined the site). It has a very low bar for discussion and the signal/noise ratio is terrible unless you’re willing to wade through piles of shit to find a gem here and there.
4chan for sure has useful insights like a very low (captcha) barrier to use the site and a very low-ego culture. But the discussion quality is actually abysmal
I think a central aggregator that is Reddit still produces the less friction. I haven’t felt compelled to sign up for any alternatives sofar. It’s an interesting field at the moment, and with Twitter in flux, a smart player might be able to take advantage of the unique opportunity.
Unfortunately I will need to switch to a non-pseudonymous account to launch and really talk about it, so can’t get into too much detail on this one.
I honestly think that, if these sites had been ok with measly 9 figure valuations and didn’t go chasing 11 figure valuations (or, a huge nonprofit treasure chest, or allowed petty busybodies to exert undue influence on the site), none of them would have gone to shit.
It's interesting how people go to a certain board specifically infamous for posting that kind of stuff then are shocked to see said stuff, then generalizing the entire site off that one interaction. It's as if I equate /r/AskHistorians, a heavily-modded academic sub, to /r/(insert raunchy sub here).
Most boards are rather tame.
Also, I think most avid 4chan users have their filters set up in a way to get rid of most garbage simply by excluding posts with certain keywords.
Other communities are rather shallow, comparatively. Mere implementations of conventional values.
For good and ill, of course.
Entryism has been a fairly effective strategy for subverting conservative institutions, and I don't think McCarthy style communist hunting was actually in the long run an effective solution. It just ended up creating martyrs and justified a persecution narrative that bolstered the left-wing cause.
The logical solution for the right is to form institutions with such a "stink" from a leftist point of view, that nobody wants to associate with them for fear of permanently tarnishing their reputation.
https://journal.burningman.org/2016/10/philosophical-center/...
I was about to say "I keep hearing this" but then realized you are the same person I heard it from last time. Every time I go to /g/ I find it hard to believe you can distill actual useful information from there. Maybe it's just me who don't know how to navigate it.
To give a concrete example, a few months ago I was trying to parse through what's necessary to train LoRAs and how best to format a dataset for doing so. Google/Youtube/Reddit weren't giving me good results, and asking on 4chan I was pretty immediately linked a lengthy rentry that had a setup guide for the relevant tools as well as anon's notes on their exploration of the space. It helped me get up an running in a couple hours and avoid a lot of trial and error. Generally the quality is far better than your average medium post. I think largely because people write medium posts for clout and clicks, anonymous rentrys exist out of the goodness of people's hearts and for no ulterior motive.
Like you say, it's not egalitarian towards those who don't have an easy time ignoring the hate speech. And, okay, in principle if the strength of one's stomach for hate speech was randomly distributed to humans with no correlation to anything else, maybe that would not disqualify it as egalitarian.
But it's not. People who face discrimination and hate speech IRL will, on average, surely have less tolerance for it online than people who don't. I have to believe that women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and so on, feel much less welcome on a place like 4chan. They've already spent their "ignoring hate speech points" ignoring someone harassing them on the subway.
So whatever it's virtues -- and I'm willing to believe you there are some -- I don't think that a place with this much toxicity can rightly be called egalitarian.
Or maybe its the opposite, because we know words on a screen are not violence. 4chan is egalitarian in that everyone is an n-word, everyone is an r-word and anonymity means we are all the same. There's a reason unnecessary tripcodes are frowned upon.
We all called each other various slurs back then and the only reason you'd get mad or emotional over it is because you hadn't been on the internet for long enough. Or if you're getting rekt in a video game and they're rubbing it in, i guess.
The mainstream platforms that have appeared since only brought politically correct faux civility that hid the aggression behind a system of rules that has only made communication less genuine and more toxic. Strip away the identity behind a post and only the content remains. And that's why it works. It shuts down behaviours looking to cultivate a persona, which is bad for engagement, but good for content.
This. I'm not exactly making an argument that slurs increase genuineness, but forcefully stripping them away definitely does not decrease toxicity. Nobody is suddenly a nicer person just because they can't call you a ***. They just find another way to be an asshole, and maybe work a little extra-hard while they're at it.
In some ways it seems to make the waters more difficult to navigate. You try to engage with people in earnest and get subtly accused of all sorts of bs. Sometimes it's easier if someone just drops a few choice expletives at you and you both just move on with life.
You don't make a village by welcoming anyone and everyone. An egalitarian country with strict immigration laws and rampant racism towards foreigners is still egalitarian within its own populace. Likewise, simply because people who disagree with 4chan's abrasive culture don't feel welcome there doesn't make it any less egalitarian within itself.
Being absolutely egalitarian is a fantasy. No one does that. The government is not egalitarian on the axis of murdering people. Universities are not egalitarian on the axes of failing all your classes constantly and not being able to pay for them. Workplaces are not egalitarian to open racists or people who post on HN all day instead of getting anything done. There's always some elitism at play, relevant to whatever's being emphasized (being a good student, being a good programmer, being a good worker, etc.).
Part of the elitism on 4chan is tolerating horrible cringe banter and opinions. I think that's fair given that the rest of the Internet is elitist on the basis of being as nice as possible and mindful of the algorithmic censors to not upset advertisers' spice flow.
I strongly disagree - tone policing isn't about being nice but about appearing nice. And lately even that pretense is not required when talking about the right groups.
I don't understand why in your example, the point couldn't be made without specifically using crude language. It doesn't seem like that racial slurs would contribute to the threads topic.
The author is specifically talking about places where you go to interact with people who share your interests and _aren't_ jerks.
People on 4chan are jerks if viewed from an outsider. But 4chan regulars probably think nothing of it
I believe the lack of magic internet points and very hands off moderation is the key. Also, I think it's some kind of addiction to raw unfiltered truth. It's not a place for people who get offended, you have to grow past that and have a thick skin. Say it like it is.
Thank you for posting this. This captures something that I had trouble putting into words.
As someone who started using Reddit back in 2006 pre-Digg migration, this is probably one the best explanations of the immense loss I have felt in experiencing Reddit change over the past decade and a half. All the parts I enjoyed were pushed to the periphery, and while you could still find "villages" there, the bulk of the experience was "just passing through". This isn't a "get off my lawn" sentiment, it's about what value you place on the places you inhabit, whether in person or online. Whether I kept returning to Reddit out of habit or because I was still looking for that old experience almost doesn't matter, because it's not there anymore.
Mostly gaming stuff, but there was some great work on math, science, and DIY. Today even the "Reddit gold" posts are garbage by the standards of those days.
The sad thing is that even if you are using an actual keyboard and type well, you look like a weirdo on Reddit today if you type longform text. I have seen someone posting merely a couple of solid paragraphs get reactions like “LOL wall of text bro”.
The average person’s use of a phone today is also one reason why it’s not easy for PhpBB-style communities to make a comeback.
I still do this on occasion if I think what I have to type is worth reading. But usually when I do, I include a tl;dr to act as a hook/summary to get my main point across.
0. https://reddit.com/r/secretsanta/comments/nw294q/sunsetting_...
He even has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan
> In July 2014, Eisenkop's Unidan account was banned from Reddit for using alternate (or "sockpuppet") accounts. The accounts were used to upvote his own submissions and downvote submissions made by other users that were posted around the same time and were potentially attracting attention away from his own.
In some ways Reddit is like the club. In your 20s you're meeting all these new people and the interaction feels amazing. In your 40s, you're still meeting all these new people, but you are bored of it and just want to go home to bed.
I was in the world record secret Santa and it was the funnest coolest thing ever (they sent me my world record letter even!)
Pre-subreddits, it felt very similar to HN (which they ofc have the same birthplace) and the real gold was in the comments, which made it stand out from all others and made it less about you and more about us.
When subreddits started it was totally game changing and from there on it was great.
The Condé Nast thing was weird but it didn’t really change anything, but slowly it felt like it was trying to always “grow up” but never figured out that it didn’t need to
All this nonsense going public is expected but it’s sad and another victim of late stage thunderdome capitalism.
The first time I saw this happen was clear back in 1997 with an IRC system called "Talk City". It was a dot-com startup that grew out of the incredibly vibrant, close-knit chat-room community which developed on Apple's short-lived "eWorld" service, carrying forward most of its people and culture... right up until the company signed a couple of big money-making deals, one with WebTV and the other with some ISP in India, connecting their customers to Talk City's network.
It was amazing to watch, in a kind of natural-disaster way, as hordes of strangers showed up practically overnight - far too quickly to be assimilated - and the whole social fabric dissolved. A community I had spent at least an hour a day on for several years simply disappeared under the flood.
It hasn't been there for many many years. I loved how open and free it was. Everyone really had a place there and you could read and interact with every idea, viewpoint, etc. Then as it got popular, it got corporatized, politicized, etc. Journalists attacked it to make reddit align with their version of hell. Corporations attacked it to make it more amenable to foreign markets. Political actors attacked it to further their political interests. It became an insufferable propaganda shithole. Movies, music, sports, nfl, etc subs used to be interesting places for discussion. Then it became publicity platforms for movie and music studios, sports teams, etc. News subs used to be interesting places for open discussions. Then journalists got their meat hooks into it and now they are state propaganda. Even political subs used to be diverse places for political discussion. Now they are purely political propaganda probably run by political parties.
But I guess that's the way it is with all social media. Once it gets popular, the corporate, news and state entities want control over it. Now, most major subs are just advertising platforms. Which is ironic since most of the subs ( news, movies, politics, etc ) started as a reaction against advertisements masquerading as news articles, movie reviews, sports commentary, political commentary, etc. Money/power ultimately won and reddit became what it hated.
I mean yea, you see it that way because you grew up with small reddit. But by the time journalist's were on to it, that small reddit was dead and a much larger city existed with all its dark and danger filled corners. Even by that time reddit was bleeding money fast and was looking for further investor handouts to survive.
Reddit never wanted to be small. This was always set to happen. I think you just have too thick of lenses in your rose colored glasses to see that.
Yup. And from a mod's perspective: you go from being an elder in a village, so to speak, to being a security guard at a train station.
> The central thesis is that what these villages can’t tolerate is a sustained large influx of strangers [...] A slow trickle of strangers is tolerable, a brief large influx is fine; the strangers’ average interaction is eventually stabilizes and biases toward the a stable group of members, and they quickly find shared values and become villagers too.
The tragedy of Reddit is that I believe this thesis is fundamentally wrong. Reddit has shown that villages can tolerate a sustained large influx of strangers if they are given the tools to scale the onboarding process - ensuring people understand those shared values, and ensuring that bad-faith actors are identified and prevented from destroying the fabric of the overall community.
These tools exist - they are the ecosystem of API-based moderator tools! People have been iterating on them for years to serve the needs of the moderators of Reddit's diverse communities. And these are the very tools that Reddit is destroying without providing sufficient replacements, without providing time to adapt, and with a remarkably sardonic and vitriolic corporate communication strategy.
I'm a member of multiple subreddits that are shutting down indefinitely because the thinly-stretched moderation staff is constantly under attack - by everything from karma bot farmers to politically motivated aggressors (including would-be infiltrators applying for moderation positions). The moderators' ability to use third-party apps was the only thing keeping the effective DDoS at bay.
And I truly don't think that those moderators would ever say that the number of strangers was the problem, because the tools did scale, and they were able to provide supportive and positive communities to thousands of those "strangers" who would never have had access to those communities before.
I always saw Reddit as a model of how communities could scale beyond physical constraints - and how some of the learnings of scalable community governance could perhaps be ported to real-world scenarios. Now, people will read posts like OP's and simply think that this was always impossible, and that's just sad.
Each of these "villages" have different subcultures and distinct moderation needs, especially to the extent they are targeted in different ways by bad-faith actors and repost bots. And it's good that they have different needs! No single moderation team should need to maintain all those subcultures with one single set of policies, nor do they have the same on-ramps and levels of traffic. Together they form a web of meta-communities. Web platforms can easily allow overlapping spheres to coexist; the dimensionality of the platform, so to speak, is practically infinite.
But part-and-parcel with this is that the number of potential moderators in any group is spread across those sub-groups. If Reddit wanted to continue to grow, it would make sure the barrier to entry to maintain these communities was low. It is doing quite the opposite at this precise moment.
> In this context, the defining trait of a village is that it’s group of people where the average interaction over time is with people you’ve seen before.
What I find especially insightful in this description is that it applies to lots of communities at all scales, both online and off, as diverse as a childhood friend group, a technical project team, a corporation, or an alliance of world superpowers. What defines the village is that the members you interact with are mostly the ones you have been interacting with. Change happens, but it is gradual.
What destroys the village is whatever upsets that defining trait. In the article's telling, a sustained influx of strangers is one way to kill it; there are others (for example, a large set of village members exiting, or the village splitting in two would also work.) And as you rightly point out, a way to effectively manage that change can allow the village to survive, be it tools to manage onboarding, or gradual acceptance (ala SO's points-based permissions), or a well-led corporate merger where changes are introduced gradually and with the buy-in of all participants.
What is the case, is that on short timescales, the average interaction is consistent with what I expect from the community. The anonymity of Reddit has show that the specific face or individual doesn’t matter. It has a ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ option that I’ve never used and really never felt like I needed to use it.
Reddit actually became less familiar to me when I saw users tag other users in a post to share them with other users. The same with user specific subreddits. It’s when Reddit moved from content centric to user centric.
I think mod tools are huge. I also think voting on content is big, though. Finding a village that aligns with my value of content is more important than recognizing specific people online.
1. Try to cut off any upstart rivals of my better performing bet from playing the same trick by sabotaging easy data extraction
2. Cut my losses and rid myself of future ones by somehow sizing Reddit down a notch, not so much that it dies though - I'm a sentimental guy, bite me
3. Ensure no one finds out I had anything to do with this by throwing someone else under the bus and buying them off if they ever figure it out (lucky for hypothetical VC me, Reddit's CEO seems arrogant, impulsive, and greedy enough that he probably wouldn't even realise having been played before its too late + easily convinced to take the fall for far less than that'd actually be worth)
Wouldn't it be something if I could have the subject of step 3 take care of step 1 and 2 for me, perhaps together in one single master-stroke of a go?
*evil laugh*
There aren't so many players who have the vision, evil and money to do this, right? Any guesses?
About the same amount as the number of wheels on a tricycle ;)
Just to be clear it wasn't meant as an allegation and no proof exists. I consider to resemble something closer to a terribly written fanfic more than anything else, really.
The very first YC fanfic perhaps?
To me, the data cat is out of the bag, and no single corp will ever put it back again.
laughs evilly for sweet ideas none the less
Not at all, it's the only source mentioned simply for the fact that no others bear any relevance to the story.
Frustrating other parties' capability to access as much source material as possible makes sense if you forget about common moral values for a second and reduce everything down to a zero sum game: their loss equals your gain.
We seem to all agree that VC-funded platforms are the wrong bet, and I would take it further and say that that means that no centralized platform can be the answer. You simply can't run something on the scale of Reddit with any other funding model.
I would like to think something like the fediverse could work—instances can in theory function as small villages, they can gate membership so that they can control the rate of new additions. An instance can be small enough in scale that it can be paid for out of pocket by a single admin, maybe with help from the members, which eliminates the perverse incentive for growth. Federation can (in theory) provide links between communities that aren't possible with a traditional bulletin board forum.
I do wonder, though, if the fediverse is going to suffer for straddling the middle ground between village and platform. A lot of people seem to want all the benefits of the village without losing the intensely-connected feeling of a place like Reddit or Twitter. Is such a thing possible, or are they mutually exclusive?
The great promise of the fediverse is that you can have both, even at the same time. You can be part of a single small group where you know the people around you and would notice someone new. But you can also have massive instances without any of those connections.
That’s not really what I’d consider a village, or even a real community. I think a lot of the things a lot of people miss about the “old web” is really just things being smaller. You’d go into an IRC channel and it would be the same people that was there every day. This made it possible to actually create a community, where people knew each other.
Sure it’s fun to be on HN or Reddit or similar and sometimes bump into someone “famous”, but it’s not like it’s really “social” when you’re just talking to a new bunch of people every time you post. That is, if what you post is even read by anyone.
"Online community" and social media are in some way social, to the extent that there is communication, something that defines humanity and that humans enjoy doing.
It just isn't high-value communication in most instances. Much of it is short affirmations and expressions of good will.
Our species survived through social grouping. A real village (or even larger community in meatspace) is an anchor for social trust.
A real village differs significantly from online community in the simple fact that in reality, people are in a group for the survival benefits that the group offers. People will avoid talking nonsense or uttering threats because there are reputational and/or legal consequences that could deprive these people of group benefits. People will nuture their absurd opinions and resentments, but they tend to suppress expressing these because membership in the group is more valuable than their opinions and resentments.
People do unleash their resentments and talk garbage on the Internet. In a real village, talking garbage will have consequences. In most cases, people in a real village understand to be careful in how they express themselves. In the days of the "old Web", people extended their "real village" values in the interactions on the Internet.
In a real village, the way for people to feel confident about their resentments is to try to find a group where they can feel impunity. This is harder to do in a real village than it is on the Internet.
One or two generations later on the Internet, with full penetration by marketing, ranking, and malicious participants (sometimes even at the scale of state-sponsored propaganda), the strong foundation of social trust is gone. All that remains is "enshitification" and Harlow monkeys[1].
Now, in an ironic twist, real communities are shaken by the artifical world of the Internet, and some people aspire to make the Internet be community in a way that it can never be.
It has however been successfully monetised.
[1] _ https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/o...
I'm afraid Steve Huffman made the correct calculation that Reddit's network effect is large enough that the wound it'll sustain with the API lockout won't be enough to imperil the platform.
On the scale of other platform enshittification (Digg in particular), this one isn't directly user-hostile enough, and the aren't any good enough alternatives.
Enshittification is basically inevitable for (venture)capitalist-funded online platforms. My biggest disappointment is that Reddit went that venture-capitalist (or adjacent, whatever) route, I thought/hoped their "Reddit Gold" approach was good enough to be sustainable.
Facebook has always lead the fight to monetize users to the max. If its sudden API changes or shutdowns, or suing 3rd party app developers. Yet they still generate Billions and people are fine using them, instagram, or Whatsapp, even though they fully understand the enshitification the timeline has gone through throughout the years, and how aggressively they monetize their user base
I also see Reddit as extremely similar to Facebook groups, which can also have millions of users, and are moderated for free by volunteers
But yes, long term it's on We The People to fund our own communities.
I'd say that Reddit (and really the internet as a whole) hit that years ago. Another user said this on a different thread, but Reddit has this deep depression inside it that isn't really noticeable until you leave. Like, you don't ever really see happy people on there anymore, just people with varying levels of misery. I don't think that's really unwanted by Spez and Co, either. If there's something that the internet has taught me, it's that it's easier to retain audiences by keeping them miserable and afraid than it is by keeping them happy.
Well put, I've also noticed this. Be it games, movies or sports. Whenever I enjoy something, I just know that the moment I go on Reddit (or Twitter), there will be a shitstorm complaining and crying about mundane details. And without fails those threads gain thousands of upvotes, while the positive threads die with 12 upvotes in new. Outrage seems to be the best way to drive engagement and clicks.
For example, things like automatically banning based on activity in other subs is not necessary a power that improves the site.
I suspect many of the more disappointing echo chamber effects (that steer something like a local subreddit into a political one) are due to over-moderation.
It seems to me that users should _want_ their community platform to be profitable in order to sustain, but not "too profitable" (=greed) or the sense of community vanishes.
If that is true, is it the responsibility of the online citizen to interact/transact on a platform with the "right" degree of profitability (not too small, or it'll close tomorrow, but also not to greedy, or enshittification occurs)?
PS: How profitable exactly is "right" - reminds me of the family game where the winner is the "most average" person - scoring points closest to the arithmetic mean instead of the person with the max. score.
Enshittification is a direct consequence of this mindset being applied to companies who reach something resembling market saturation. Once your user growth starts slowing down, you need to show that you'll continuously make more money per user than you did before. And that path can only lead to shit.
Maybe Ycomb has done some math, possibly a litte more up to date, and the people, culture and cred this site gives them is worth more than selling it?
Your main point remains valid of course, but we don't all suffer evenly - the internet is still a great place for many and a new home will be found or at least the next generation will find one.
Even if Reddit dies, its users won't. This is a cancer that won't stop spreading.
But as the internet grew forums and news sites and blogs, I bounced around, and through, many. I lost interest in most of them before they got enshittified, but it does, in retrospect, seem that most suffered either of two fates: irrelevance, stagnation, and evaporation, or enshittification to one degree or another. I count among my past lives the past online communities that I participated in. I don't long for those pasts but I do feel a loss that not only are those specific ones gone, but the striking inevitability of them all dying. It seems like a law--a tragic one at that. Anyway, RIP <nostalgic online forum>.
It incredible how badly malformed the "future" has become.
I only meet one person from it IRL, and that was the moderator that vanished one day. And I only meet him when he sold a fancy modem and told me about the BBS being a great way to test it out.
I eventually moved away, but still dialed in (with long distance, even) and felt like I knew people online, if only via pseudonym. One day it all died. No doubt either the PC it was running on finally died, or someone said "what's this computer in the corner do, anyway?"
I sometimes still miss TechBBS.
The problem is, theres just no ramifications for pumping a company to its death.
I disagree. A corporation is a machine for economic production. It is not a community, it is a mechanism. Communities can exist within corporations, of course, but the community aspect is secondary at best.
There is nothing about a corporation that implies economic production. In fact, many (most?) corporations are negatively productive until the community decides to disband, and some corporations are established with explicit intent to not be economically productive (e.g. non-profits).
I don't think so. There are tons of corporations that consist of one person, after all.
Corporations are legal entities that are distinct from the people that are involved with them. That's the whole point.
But a lot of this depends, I suppose, on what you mean by "community". People who are part of a corporation are a community by the strict dictionary definition of the term, but they aren't necessarily a community in any meaningful sense. A community works together, collaboratively, to support each other. Typically in a corporation, the people are working to support the corporation rather than each other.
That can be true. Certainly communities have to start somewhere and not all efforts by one person will see a community form. While this is a fun point for the sake of pedantry, it doesn't change much. One person running the service and a different person using the service results in the very same competition of interests. It's all just people at the end of the day. Even the legal system itself is just people.
> Typically in a corporation, the people are working to support the corporation rather than each other.
Typically people work to support their own interests. This is true in communities of all shapes and sizes, including communities which have been legally formalized as a corporation. In all cases one's own interests may help another's, but that's ultimately incidental.
No different in this community. When we write comments we are doing it because we derive some kind of individual benefit from it. Most likely the entertainment value in thinking about something and putting it words. If someone else takes something from a comment, that's merely a bonus. It was never really for them.
Not a corporation in the classic sense but I guess what you actually care about is the product, not the company, correct? Such web apps exist and continue to function even when not maintained anymore, for years and possibly decades. The only thing that's tricky is storage payment, to be truly independent and not reliant on any outside input, I suspect there is no way around users having to pay for it.
the paper, "Optimizing human community sizes", abstract:
We examine community longevity as a function of group size in three historical, small scale agricultural samples. Community sizes of 50, 150 and 500 are disproportionately more common than other sizes; they also have greater longevity. These values mirror the natural layerings in hunter-gatherer societies and contemporary personal networks. In addition, a religious ideology seems to play an important role in allowing larger communities to maintain greater cohesion for longer than a strictly secular ideology does. The differences in optimal community size may reflect the demands of different ecologies, economies and social contexts, but, as yet, we have no explanation as to why these numbers seem to function socially so much more effectively than other values.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
I sometimes think about this also when people are hostile towards other people who want to limit city/neighbourhood growth via NIMBYism. If a city is somehow so nice that more people want to live there, it's not going to be the same city anymore after you double the population. People who are against building more housing in their neighbourhood have a point; they don't want whatever it is that they find likeable in their neighbourhood to be killed.
That also explains the wounded anger from users whenever the mask slips or the abstraction leaks.
That's why some people stay in abusive relationships, dysfunctional families and lousy corporations.
Sometimes resisting change in a community, a startup or organization is more a case of very strong risk-aversion than anything else.
Same with products, most people say that their favorite brand of a consumer product is what they're currently using, this is why telco's incentivizes switching carriers, because people stick around...
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Best friends: 2-3
Close Friends: 15-30
Friends / "Friends": 100-200
Acquaintances: 1000-2000
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Something along these lines. With the biggest kind of aha moment for me being that the army (notorious for optimizing everything to the highest degree) has organized itself in similarly sized groups:
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Squad
Section
Company
Brigade
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This finally made it click for me why I stopped playing online multiplayer games when dedicated servers were abandoned in favor of matchmaking. All the villages were gone.
Anyway, I recently contacted the mods of deGoogle to see if they would like to add to their side bar the ad-free search engine I have been working on all the time for a couple months now
They basically said they didn't trust me (again, no karma) but asked me to post on the board to see feedback
The post quickly drew ire from a user who accused me of disrespecting the community (although he later calmed down once he learned that the mods had "given their blessing" for me to post)
Anyway, even though the post largely received positive feedback and was really upvoted (and user retention from that post has been amazing), the mods ended up dismissing me in a pretty cold way
That's why I fail to feel sympathy for anyone involved in these "villages". As a "stranger", I fail to comprehend their struggle for fairness and virtue. As a side note, HN is starting to feel a bit alienating too. Lately, I find myself not posting for fear of being downvoted - or worse - downvoted and search indexed
Here is the post I am talking about anyway (subreddit is currently on strike)
https://www.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/13qpzy4/a_new_sea...
I suppose you failed to read the bit where the mods specifically asked me to create the post. Either way, the overwhelming majority of the village enjoyed the post
To be a village member is either to grow up there, or to move in a stay
However it has the "too easy to reuse an account" problem that has its own issues, too.
Thread support was added to alleviate some of the noise problem but in communities that actually use them there's so many threads it's easy to lose track and everywhere else they're basically just strange ways of isolating yourself from the rest of the people in the community.
I stepped away and came back like a month later.
It had grown so fast, with so many users, there were suddenly like 50-60 channels, it was unreal how hard it was to keep track of anything happening. Even the original three channels were completely overrun with so many discussions and chats, I couldn't keep track.
So I had the experience of joining a small server, only to have it blow up when I came back and I just had to give up and moved on.
None of this scales, it's totally unworkable if you have 100+ people actively chatting, let alone thousands.
I never would have found the smaller servers, where at this point no one's playing the game we initially met through but are all friends, if not for bigger servers meeting the need of that entrance to the pipeline.
Reddit is/was also arguably a huge group of villages. It still feels that way, if you are only subscribed to sensibly small subreddits and you experience it through the prism of old.reddit and third-party apps like Apollo. Reddit doesn't think that that model is the future, though, and the mainstream Reddit experience has evolved away from that and toward the algorithmic feed model.
I would be wary in assuming that Discord's interface and community model will remain the same as it seeks ways to monetize.
I think that this demand for continual growth is what destroys community. There's a word for unchecked growth: cancer.
Both seem to work and people are able to choose. I think it is also important that reddit facilitates a very different model of interaction, a discord server with a thousand users can be extremely active and engaging, while a subreddit with a thousand people tends to be quite "empty".
It's the system and people able to act peacefully within it - not their personal relationships.
The problem with Reddit is that it's run by a guy who doesn't respect the people who make it possible. He isn't a trader of value for value - he's a parasite.
Without the use of force?
> "It’s an oppressive, alienating, and disempowering environment."
Strongly disagree. For me, the absence of 'social baggage' in large stranger-to-stranger boards like HN is liberating, while village-style boards are intimidating. I do not want to 'build community', i want to discuss topic.
It just becomes so boring and predictable.
The standardised comments you mention are a way for the less intelligent to participate, and the upvotes they attract reflect the numbers of these users. The ones you've mentioned sound like a case of aping one's betters; the ones I see most often are the vacuous 'Putin must be defenestrated' comments that litter the Ukraine war daily threads, and are the worst kind of performative virtue signalling.
Reddit as a loss-making assembly of communities is dying; Reddit as a profitable set of curated feeds, a sort of TikTok that's not just for short video, is rising.
It is very insighful of you to point out that Reddit will be more profitable as a set of curated feeds.
It is too easy to ostracize members of a group in online forums, too easy to silence dissent.
My physical neighborhood has a diversity of lifestyles, backgrounds and opinions that just does not exist in a place where people are quick to act on their shallow judgments.
A middle eastern immigrant family, an elderly black couple, a flag and sign maximizing Trump supporter, a Black poet and his African Studies professor wife, a Facebook PR team lead, a retired HP programmer.
To me, this a community. People living together in peace with very different opinions and lifestyles. We’ve all got each other’s backs.
A couple of months ago I marched over to the Trump sign household and had a three hour long conversation with the wife… who surprisingly happened to be a bit of an old hippie and pot head and said she didn’t realize how upsetting some of her husband’s flags were to people. Since then it’s just been an American flag with a “Jesus Loves You” flag beneath. No more crossed AR-15s with skulls!
Try that on Reddit!
So how do you know these people? And how do those people know the people you don’t know? How did everyone meet? What’s the organizing factor around this particular Discord? Is it purely topical and open to the internet at large or is it an extension of a friend group that met offline?
There should be like a wikipedia table like this one [1] but where explanatory factors (funding model, corporate structure, moderation tools, algorithmic timelines, discovery modes, anonymity, upvoting/downvoting mechanisms etc etc) would be tabulated against failure modes (toxicity, inanity, obsolescence etc etc)
You then run an ML model and find the pattern. The problem is that our sample is totally imbalanced. We don't know what good looks like.
The solution might be to take life expectancy before enshitification into account.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
> Many people go online to find a sense of belonging and community, and in the right circumstances, they can find it while they may struggle to do so offline.
I understand it’s true, but it doesn’t apply to me. I find it sad that people struggle to get a sense of belonging offline and have to resort to ersatz communities like Reddit, which commodify the users’ identities and are generally low trust.
Reading that line puts a flicker in my mind, a thought that I might be an “enshittification accelerationist” when it comes to Reddit (Facebook too). Let it kill itself, because it’s not that good anyway.
I was a fairly avid user of Reddit as a late teen / early 20’s person, when I was forming my identity. But now I’m done doing that, and I find Reddit overall to be of low value, especially now that LLMs have scraped most of the good stuff.
People want free, so they flock to the new free thing that replaces the old free thing that got bad because it either had no business model and collapsed, or the business model drives it to sell user data and eke out every dollar it can for its investors. Inevitably, the free things go bad. Sometimes, people tolerate it for a very long time, but it seems eventually they all implode.
Well, seeing the path many of the big social media players chose, I could imagine that the term enshittification will be around for a little longer, unfortunately.
We're all a product of our time and circumstance. Trying to wash that away in order to write something timeless means we just write something bland instead.
[0] Which is functionally identical to "understand" whenever it's used, except 99% of the population has no goddamn idea what it means and 1% of the population can read the subtext that the person using who said it is a nerd
And I hope you're right and it will be embarassing to read in the future, because it would mean this trend of user-hostile behavior has stopped, but I'm not holding my breath.
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
To shit on: To cover in feaces from above
Shit: The refuse, rubbish, that which comes out the other end. As opposed to mana or fodder.
In conclusion, new words are great. A word for new words is neologism, it is a very nice word. I think enshitification really hits the mark here - something good is made bad. And it is visceral, you can feel the process slipping through your fingers as you try and hold on to the past.
This is what happened to Tumblr. After the large exodus, the community was a lot smaller, the site got purchased by another company (Automattic, the guys behind Wordpress). They did revert the rule changes that started the whole mass-migration, and now it's again a village with a coherent and shared culture. Smaller than before, but somehow cozier.
Its a part of why I liked it, if the content is good, it doesn't matter if you have zero followers, or a superhero, you just post it into the right subreddit.
I needed subreddit-specfic user descriptions to know that a user is the developer or whatever, the person posting the content was never important.
Same thing with HN, there are always exceptions, but the user posting the comment/link doesn't have to be important on such platforms, reddit isn't Twitter.
It applies here, as well.
How can I meet my mirror image freak if he's in another village?
This makes a lot of sense. Then again, people flock to the largest communities because that where they are most likely to get quick answers or just find a stream of novelty. Being in a small forum feels like "missing out". I think the fediverse can solve it, if it allows for aggregated communities.
Youtube started with piracy and pranks but it got contentID over time
This is true, however "community" is typically lost when that happens.
That was before it turned into a cesspit, I guess.
For better or worse, the net was overrun. Given the size of things back then, it actually seems a decent example of the article topic.
Word.
OTOH I don’t think the train station analogy holds as eg funnily enough NYC subway stations to me usually show everything that can be great about “big city scaled up village culture where strangers meet strangers”.
I’m not sure if still the case but I do miss NYC just for this sense of belonging, everyone being in conversation with everyone and general readiness to help out (“I <3 NY” isn’t just marketing). To me a clear testament that this can work IRL and it probably works online as well (and did, for a long time, on Reddit actually).
Although not “permaculture” per se these “free open / public spaces” remind me a lot of it (again, even / especially NYC): No over-bearing central organizing force (VC/capitalist, what have you) will be able to “let go” enough in order to “let it grow” from common experience so far.
Fediverse etc hence to me the only potential way out at this point.
Can someone explain this to me like I'm 5? This feels like some religious dogma more than a real thing.
Also, growth doesn't necessarily mean size, but it does imply long term increase in value for owners. If I buy stock in a company, I want to get richer for owning that stock and that means either the dividends need to be high enough to recoup my investment or the stock needs to rise in value, making me richer when I sell it (starting the cycle again). Both of those outcomes sort of imply some sort of growth over time. If I expect that time to be short, as one might with an internet company, I'd like that timeline accelerated so I get as much value as I can in as short a time as possible. That's what leads to moves like this.
Once upon a time there was this optimistic idea that as we add voices to the internet it becomes exponentially better, like a super brain developing.
This has become true in some parts (Wikipedia, open source software, stackoverflow, the like) but it doesn't seem to apply to social networking. On social networks, the larger it gets, the worse it becomes. The large size making it an attractive target for scammers, divisive posts, trolling, dunking, pile-ons, influencer tactics. It ends with the worst of us winning, the unreasonable ones.
The size of the social network is a factor, its algorithms (what is amplified), but also the underlying dysfunctional political system. I've come to the conclusion that a large scale social network is near impossible to keep healthy, stable, useful. Or this slowly becoming clear at this point in time.
My advise would be to not obsessively search for the next new thing, instead to pause and critically evaluate what you're getting out of it anyway. Make your goal as narrow and tangible as possible.
As an example, say you have a particular professional/hobby interest. You follow experts on social networks. Instead you could just subscribe to the endless amount of newsletters that come weekly. Find the good one. Read it once per week and you're up to speed. No need to spend hours per day listening to noise. I cannot recommend this enough, it's so calming.
The perhaps more controversial tip is about people "finding community". I respect and understand that in particular situations, people can find like-minded individuals that they would otherwise not find in the real world.
Fine, but I'd also argue that this isn't true for many people, and "finding community" strongly aligns with being chronically online. If so, now would be a good moment to ask hard questions about this "community". Do you even know whom they are? Have you ever met any of them? Would they help you if something happens to you? Have they ever shown an active interest in you? Has the community in any shape or form tangibly improved your life? Do they like you unconditionally or drop you like a stone when you say the wrong thing?
Perhaps your community is just a bunch of randos that do not care if you live or die, that happen to have the same suspiciously precise opinion, and you're just there to see it validated, for hours on end, day by day, without this making any difference whatsoever to anything at all.
My point being, optimize your social network usage. Go to direct sources, exit communities where there is no real personal stake, then walk the dog in the nearby forest. Reclaim your real life.
And yes, I'm hypocritical for posting here. I'm just as flawed in wasting time online. But I genuinely believe I should just exit 90% of it for the simple reason that it offers no tangible value, and quite a lot of negative value (lost quality time).
What comes after Twitter and Reddit? How about fucking nothing?
I think the model demonstrate how the ’enshittification’ process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on a venture capital model.
Yes, it is called “extracting rents” in economics, and it is why, say, Uber drivers pay 50% of their salary to a company with 1 worker per 1 million people. It’s the shareholders. You see, to build Uber requires a few million dollars, but the “dream” is sold to entrepreneurs that they can become billionaires. VCs discover the startup and “reduce friction” with money-losing economics until it goes IPO. Then the whole thing is dumped on the public, and everyone who bought at X dollars a share wants the price to go up, and that means extracting rents from all the sides of the market.
There is a far better model of funding projects without this failure mode of shareholders, namely utility tokens, where the community owns the network. I know, I know… “web3 sux” and all that. Well, it doesn’t have to be Web3. Check this: https://qbix.com/Twitternomics.pdf
If you’re interested in joining us in building an open source alternative to all this venture-funded stuff, email me (details in bio).
The main argument is that (sub)cultures have to do at least some gatekeeping to stand a chance of not dissolving into the mainstream, and being replaced by "$thing lite" that's more amenable to the average passer-by.
- Reddit is a collection of echo chambers where users pile on and moderators ban those who disagree even on fair points.
- Reddit is a politically biased organization that banned the subreddit associated with former president and current candidate Donald Trump.
- Reddit uses shady tactics to hide the fact that they are banning a subreddit that has content they find disagreeable such as clearing out the moderation team and replacing them with a hostile mod that bans the normal users of the sub.
- Despite all this censorship there remains tons of creepy behavior hosted on Reddit such as adults hanging out on /r/teenagers pretending to be teenagers and trying to lure teens into sharing nudes and such.
The recent changes to Reddit, to a certain extent, highlight a trend in the internet where the things that people find extremely useful end up transitioning in a way that seems actively user hostile.