Blue Ball Machine
blueballfixed.ytmnd.com
blueballfixed.ytmnd.com
Edit: Two more personal favorites from back in the day:
Still know the URL by heart.
Though floor796 is way more rich and interesting, and still receiving additions every few days.
Reminds me of those early 2000s Russian ones.
How did they got access to it? Concerning..
Someone bound system:anonymous to ClusterReader "just for now, for testing, I'll delete it right after".
One of the greatest contributions to humanity was the conversion of ytmnd from flash to html5
https://yourethemannowdog.ytmnd.com/
And my favorite, which was probably the most popular one of all time:
Also still my favorite:
The whole story is over here: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21202658/ytmnd-return-shut...
My favorite creator on YTMND
Another point for old web longevity
I probably got computer skills wasting time on YTMND for one reason or another.
I 100% attribute 4chan's b for inspiring me to program. Their raids inspired me to learn programming when I was a teenager.
But... I see that the alt-right came out of 4chan and the previously funny memes were no longer funny memes but serious accusations.
Maybe its basic phenomenology, but I wish I could see these websites as I once did, funny and edgy. Today I feel like there was something a bit darker that corrupted many users.
Let me introduce you to: newspapers, radio, television, books.
I disagree. Anonymous was an substantial movement.
4chan has long existed before the concept of facebook and to compare 4chan to the new trends of the likes such as facebook or reddit when 4chan is it's own, you can't.
Reddit and Facebook have all been designed to cater to the masses; 4chan not so.
To rule out that 4chan has never been influential is incorrect.
As for the origin of the movement I remember saying exactly this way back in 2008 after the bank bailouts:
(Paraphrasing a bit)
“People don’t realize how much trust has been lost. People want pitchforks. I don’t think they care whether the far left or the far right is handing them out.”
The far left did hand out a few, but they tended to sublimate all their anger into race and minority grievances. Their pitchforks didn’t have enough mass appeal, especially to the white working class killing themselves with opiates.
The right handed out more classical pitchforks with more mass appeal. They went for the old timey scapegoats of immigrant and minority hate and good old fashioned antisemitism (thinly veiled).
They were also the only ones who started talking about “elites.” I remember reading an actual quote on Reddit back then that stuck with me: “if we can’t destroy the financial industry from the left we’ll do it from the right.”
Americans have a short memory. We’ve already forgotten the Bush administration and how it burned a century of goodwill toward our country and a trillion dollars or two in Iraq. We’ve already forgotten how banks that imploded were rescued in such a way as to give the executives leading them a bonus and a promotion for imploding them. (The blame for that goes to both Bush and Obama for doing nothing to intervene.)
So now people are like “where did all this populist rage come from?” They blame crap like gamergate and 4chan when those were just small lightning rods for niche communities. The USA around the turn of that decade was a pile of oily rags waiting for a source of ignition.
The alt right and Trump just saw an opportunity. They didn’t create it, nor did 4chan.
Being anti globalism was THE left wing thing back then. Trump sounds more like Michael Moore / Noam Chomsky than anything approaching right wing. He’s classic 90s left wing, especially the taking the jobs thing, that’s Michael Moore to a T.
Some others I remember (paraphrasing):
“I can’t throw a Molotov cocktail into the White House but I can throw a Trump.”
“I hope Trump does as much damage as possible.”
“When Trump said he’d do something about outsourcing I decided I’d die for this man. I don’t care what else he does. He can eat a baby on live TV.” (This was a self described former union Democrat from Michigan.)
The left almost gets it. “A riot is the voice of the disenfranchised.” They just need to understand that for many, especially in 2016, Trump was a riot. They were electing him to do harm, explicitly.
In some ways America’s short memory is a strength. It keeps us from getting caught up in stupid ancient conflicts like the Middle East. America tends to at least mostly move on. But it also means we walk around in this perpetual fugue state not understanding why anything is happening.
If you don’t know US history from 2001 until 2008 you can’t understand what’s happened since.
I recently heard that depressed people are unable to habituate to things. I think I might be very depressed because I was never able to accept the increasing inequality, pointless wars against "terror" (how do you ever win a war against an emotion/concept?), surveillance/ad-driven capitalism, and environmental degradation. I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills.
If its all about what is normal, actually caring about the things you mentioned are indeed crazy. Growing your own food, or even knowing where your food comes from, is then also crazy. Ironically, not taking any prescription pills is also on the list of taking crazy pills, as I think the last stat I saw was that something like 70% of Americans are on at least one prescription drug and a little over 50% are on two or more.
Normal today is a very strange thing, in my opinion.
Psychological drugs specifically? I imagine the bulk of these are people managing their cholesterol or something.
I don't have the stats handy though I do remember psych meds being a high proportion of those on prescription drugs.
The even more interesting/concerning (IMO) related stat is that the US military recently released a report that 77% (going off memory here, if that's not exact it was very close) of 18-24 year olds wouldn't be deemed fit for service and a majority of that was related to psych med prescriptions. Nothing wrong at all with taking those meds when they are needed, just an insight into how many younger people couldn't enlist due only to that rule.
>I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills.
Years ago, someone on HN made a comment to the effect of, "I feel less and less a part of this world. Like the world is just moving away from me."
I understood the sentiment perfectly. And, this was before the madness of the last 9 years or so.
Funny thing is it seems that a large number (perhaps the majority) of people feel this way, yet powerless to do anything about it. I think the things you mentioned represent a very short list of the total dysfunction to which people of conscience cannot (and probably should not) habituate. And, I wonder if it's really the sense of powerlessness in the face of these things that is actually the depressing bit.
Of course it seems that the sentiment has been weaponized, with a third to half of the U.S. (and some significant portion of other countries), now incited to destroy it all, including their fellow citizens whom they have been convinced are part of the problem.
While this superficially sates their disaffectedness by channeling it into a kind of frenzied bloodlust, their behavior further demoralizes those who consequently feel more powerless in a world that is now more hostile and even less sensible.
1. The conflicts in the Middle East aren't ancient. They originate in the 19th Century at the earliest. 2. When you're the world's current most powerful global empire, you have the privilege of forgetting. Chile can't forget. Cambodia can't forget. Nicaragua can't forget. Etc.
> And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
The last point in particular has proven quite prescient to our current moment.
I don't know how you convey to such people how these problems don't get solved without rectifying the racist underpinnings - that "that's not okay" only gets teeth when "that's okay because it only happens to 'those' people" is no longer accepted. Only then do you see a substantial decrease in face-eating leopards.
It's very easy for populist demagogue con artists to pit these groups against each other or focus all these groups' anger at one third party scapegoat ("the Jews," "the rich," or some foreign enemy are popular choices) in order to gain power.
A big problem is that real solutions to these problems don't fit nicely into 140 characters. They require that people stop and take the time to understand one another and the historical forces that created their situations, empathize with one another, and find win/win solutions. Populist demagoguery, scapegoating, and totalitarian schemes do fit neatly into sound bites, so they're easier to spread especially in an era of collapsing attention spans.
I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social media and even mainstream media, they originated on Tumblr and 4chan, respectively. I wonder whether one could quantify/measure it somehow.
Most memes and ideas went no where but some had a chance to multiply without getting stamped out by the censors.
You can find discrediting examples in the mid-2000s thread collection the internet archive recently released ("archive ten billion"): memes appear in the chanological record years before they anywhere Google knows of. But how can you know that's the real origin? Even "Know your memes" first appears in there as a /b/ catchphrase in April 2006, but you must notice that's also when the /b/ posts in the collection begin.
Edit, another example:
4chan is also known as a Mongolian basket-weaving forum, among other things: corruptions descended from the meme of referring to anime as "Chinese cartoons". An old 4chan saying, as KYM finds? No, it came from that Russian anime newsgroup, ru.anime.chainik, after its parody FAQ from 2002 was translated by users of an associated LiveJournal group and added to a since-deleted Uncyclopedia article.
Q: Что такое аниме?
A: Китайские порнографические мультфильмы.
(This post originated on 4chan)
and Mongolian is a stand-in for mongoloid, which fell off the euphemism treadmill as a descriptor for people with Downs syndrome.
So "Mongolian basket-weaving forum" means "place for r*, useless people"
the livejournal stuff is also still up https://ru-onime.livejournal.com/71601.html
(2005)
4chan is unique because of its combination of scale, relative lack of moderation, and relatively high anonymity. By nature, it's a place where political radicals would be able to shitpost freely en masse. 4chan was absolutely a vehicle for platforming radical politics, but the word "shitpost" is key - the average discourse on 4chan isn't at a level where ideological formulation can happen at a meaningful scale.
Memes are the only exception. 4chan memes have, on multiple occasions, turned into widely-known (and sometimes widely-misunderstood) political imagery. That imagery routinely has no clear symbolism whatsoever, and is assigned all kinds of wacky meanings depending on you ask... which is what you'd expect from 4chan, I guess.
Survivorship bias, evolutionary somethings, and curation help the shit escape 4chan's confines. I can probably word that more eloquently when my brain isn't fried.
Agreed, but to be fair, /pol/ was created with the officially stated goal of acting as a containment board. And tbh, that’s exactly what it still is to this day.
If you happen to get footage of a "happening" and post it on 4chan, people will notice (and call you various slurs).
If you post it anywhere else it's liable to be deleted, or worse, ignored.
This model attracts all manner of idiocy and hatred, and it's much too easy for one provocateur to hijack the system. The result is that the site requires several containment zones like /b/ and /pol/.
However, the upshot of 4chan (or any imageboard, really) is the total lack of narcissistic incentive. If you stick to blue boards, consciously avoid the containment zones, and you ignore the provocateurs (big IFs, I know), 4chan hosts some remarkably eclectic discussion of the arts, science, and entertainment. It's really good at elevating things that are thought-provoking or avant garde, if only within the bounds of a polarizing and inaccessible platform.
It can be made again. But whoever does it has to learn from past mistakes.
You could probably use something like genetic tracing, if you could come up with a way of fingerprinting free text semi-reliably.
My expectation is there are probably "tell words" (i.e. not used elsewhere or for that purpose) in novel ideas, and you could likely observe these spreading over time, as the ideas carrying them did.
One of the first things groups tend to do is specialize and redefine language / create jargon.
As far as the alt-right goes, this is true, but they're definitely responsible for Pizzagate and QAnon. One might consider those the genesis of a "post alt-right" movement but it might also be too soon to tell.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...
My serious but unsubstantiated suspicion is that this was part of a neoconservative campaign, which included the likes of GamerGate, all in the interests of defanging and commodifying observant, critically-minded, tech-savvy young people (mostly men, mostly white) who otherwise would have found themselves on the progressive end of the political spectrum (as per their class affinity).
If you ask many of them, they will tell you that they were "red-pilled" after Occupy Wall Street so spooked the establishment that "wokism" was deployed to split the bottom 3 wealth quintiles and pit them against each other. My take is that the premise is correct (OWS did indeed push the elite to take class solidarity as a serious threat in a way that they hadn't previously), but that the conclusion is wrong. Rather, "red-pilling" was the intended remedy, and "meme magic" was the vector.
Case-in-point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905726 and parent.
All you had to do was say "this will offend people" and 4chan rushed off to do exactly that, over and over.
4chan was originally just a contest to show how much something doesn't bother them, because they were still competing with each other like a clique of schoolkids, and any feelings were viewed as weakness.
Also, 4chan spawned QAnon. That was absolutely "starting a movement".
2016 called—they want their guilt-by-association blanket branding for any and all thought outside of what the established media corporations and entrenched political class consider to be acceptable political thought back.
The term "alt-right" contains the more or less the same legitimacy and valence as the term "libtard"—except, you see pundits use it in headlines in mainstream publications, so you think it's more acceptable and less of a nonsense blanket term designed to conveniently silo anything that exists outside of a general sphere of acceptable thought together so as to encourage political tribalism and prevent critical thinking.
And I'm well aware that "you" (plural) have all sorts of new blanket terms to tar disconnected groups of people and their thoughts with, so as to lump them together, so as to subdue any kind of thinking that exists outside of that prescribed by corporate media and the entrenched political class, by equating any dissident thought or position with that of the most vulgar individuals within the meta-group "you" (plural) created, by associating disparate individuals and small groups of people together using an emotionally-loaded label—regardless of whether or not its constituents agree with said labeling, which they don't have any say in, of course, because "you" (plural) have the in-group consensus of the general public on your side, which is informed top-down by the corporate media and entrenched political class.
But it's nevertheless interesting and amusing both that the "stickiest" one is—still to this day—one that was coined by an ultimately exceedingly minor and uninfluential figure, nearly a decade ago now, and that it's still wielded to this day by conformists with exceedingly simple-minded worldviews who see no problem boiling things down to "people who uncritically accept the social consensus" ("good people") and "people who are willing to entertain any sort of thought outside of the social consensus" ("bad people"—"alt-right", or whatever new terms "you" (plural) have concocted).
At least it's kind of nice to see that you tacitly admit to pursuing such a goal, in continuing to invent new terms for the same tired purpose.