It's absolutely not for everyone, but I think the anonymous nature makes it so low stakes it's trivially easy for me to just not care, not engage. You can just ignore things you don't like!
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.