Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online [0]. It’s so good, the Wikipedia entry [1] has a section devoted to it.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bod...
In the same vein, for those who haven't seen it, the classic "Is soup a drink?" debate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IDNuz_VFJtU
Somewhere, there are ancient Greek rhetoric teachers spinning in their graves.
Cultured gentlemen such as yourself may also appreciate:
>Intellectuals Solve Life's Big Mysteries | Big Brain by Tom and Don
[nsfw discussion] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcYzzS7PwG8
I suspect TheJosh had something like that with the week where he visualized it with Sundays at both ends but lacked the self awareness to realize that this was not a universal representation.
That's 5
> You don't start counting on sunday, it hasn't been a day yet, you don't start counting til monday. You can't count the day that it is, did you never take basic elementrary math?
Put in other terms, TheJosh uses "Sun - Sun" as inclusive start and exclusive end, while Justin-27 uses "Sun - Sat" as inclusive start and inclusive end.
I think TheJosh mixed things up when trying to explain it (durations vs inclusive/exclusive), so doubles down and comes up with weirder stuff later in the thread. I didn't read the whole thing though, stopped near the bottom of the first page.
Isn't thinking of day X as the range [midnight of X, X+1 midnight) isomoprhic to associating it with a point for X, at least for purposes of considering coverage (e.g. both approaches work to show that there are 7 days that cover a week).
> I think TheJosh mixed things up when trying to explain it (durations vs inclusive/exclusive)
<personal insult>
<the point>
<bait to continue flaming>
You see this pattern all over the Internet. For example, from that bodybuilding.com thread:
Are you retarded? [personal insult]
Maybe you should look at a calander, I didn't double count sunday, my two weeks started and ended on sunday, exactly 14 days. [the point]
What don't you understand? [bait to continue flaming]The responder is never actually confused, they have a question that they should just ask.
is another example but I think there may be some expression of non-understanding. "So retarted it doesnt make sense."
Similar, "are you a n*zi" never seen here but as a simple but clever "Could you elaborate?" often as a reply to a polite but ambiguous comment. It's basically bait for the ambiguous commenter to confirm or deny the morality of their comment.
I know this was a thing when I was a kid, but something is different now. I watch my kids do it and part of me gets it, but another part of me wonders if it’s heavily influenced by something modern like social media.
It leads to this sort of attitude, like thinking you can tell people to make it make sense. It offloads a lot of cognitive burden onto others while assuming a position of authority.
I don’t want this to sound like “kids these days!”, because I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Perhaps it’s most obvious in kids because the attitude is most well-imprinted in them, but it’s absolutely present elsewhere in older people as well. Yet I didn’t see it so prevalent when I was younger.
It’s very common in political debates. Part of what exemplifies it best is a reluctance or outright refusal to do the mental labour of explaining one’s position on a matter. That is, without fail, someone else’s job. You’ve already got it figured out. It’s their fault that they don’t get it.
Like, you don’t get why Some Idea is correct and all Other Ideas are stupid? Your loss. Make it make sense.
I’m missing a lot here. Fundamentally it’s an unwillingness and a failure to actually engage, participate in having and defending ideas, and being accountable to held beliefs. I have to constantly tell my kids to own their beliefs and understand them, because they’re remarkably comfortable adopting and espousing ideas and beliefs without examination and intentionality.
I’m not claiming it’s a problem with youth though. I think it’s a problem with the dispersal and sheer density of information these days. People are overwhelmed. More than ever we go with vibes over actual considered interpretations of what we encounter. The default in the vibe based information economy is to assume a confident position and refuse to engage in good faith discussions, because you’re not even sure how you got where you are. People’s belief systems are like a social media Plinko machine.
I don’t mean that condescendingly. There’s so much information, so much to process, so many complex matters, etc. We’re all maxed out. Make it make sense.
Go find some controversial discussion from 80-something years ago on Youtube, say, about homosexuality. Even as an older Millennial it feels the ability to entertain and politely discuss ideas we do not own nor approve of has completely disappeared. Now it’s literally just black and white, right or wrong, with or against us, with no nuance or possibility for one’s opinion to move towards compromise. It’s two camps making hateful memes about the other.
We are not made for this style of socialization and discourse, and no one is taking this problem seriously. It worries me a lot.
Ha, that's a great thought and I will doubtless quote (steal) it in the future.
I like playing with this sometimes by saying something like "I'm not trying to be racist but have you noticed that the weather is a bit cold today"... "that wasn't racist?!" ... "yes, I said it wasn't"
Of course, people will inevitably use it sarcastically.
Maybe it's just what happens when narcissists get online. The inability to acknowledge that the argument doesn't matter and so you can chill out and let retards be retards is fundamentally a failure in humility.
1 me being polite and not calling you an idiot.
2 me hedging my bets in case I am the idiot.
> I think you're wrong
> Here's why I think you're wrong
> Please correct me if I've misunderstood something
It divides fairly evenly (I think, being generous to myself here) between:
Yep, something I thought was true was not true.
Something they said was wrong, or they omitted something without which their meaning was ambiguous.
Maybe a smattering of "I/they misparsed what was said" too. But really. Often I'm just confused. When I use it I definitely don't mean they're an idiot I just worry that they'll think I'm an idiot... (...and that they might be right.)
Lots of dick helicopters though.
The thread is possibly: https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=170324391 (now defunct)
The link title was "Pitbull vs Sun, Pitbull wins because.... - Bodybuilding.com Forums"
The link text preview was "it just has to attack in the night time when the Sun is sleeping. amirite or is there a way for the Sun to win?"
Unfortunately this is not in archive.org or archive.is
Why was a mathematician necessary for this assertion?
Jon Bois did an amazing video about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eECjjLNAOd4
Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
I discussed it somewhat recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276865#42283887
/pol/ isn't trying to be like the millions of other politic discussion forums online. It's literally intended to be politically outrageous so when people like yourself complain that it's full of outrageous alt-right content you're typically missing the point.
It's full of things that appear to be alt-right because stuff like racism, sexism and transphobia is extremely politically incorrect. While far-left views might be equally reprehensible, these views are not seen as equally politically incorrect. It's actually quite hard to hold politically incorrect far-left views unless you incorporate some far-right views – being so pro-trans that you hate biological women or something stupid. This is why you tend to see less left-wing content there. It's hard to be offensive and left-wing.**
But even then I think it's wrong to say /pol/ is full of alt-right content to be honest. There are alt-right people there for sure, but huge amount of the political memes posted on /pol/ are mocking the alt-right and the right more broadly. The board is constantly roasting the MAGA movement, for example.
As a brit my favourite threads on /pol/ are the brit/pol/ threads which basically just post politically incorrect memes mocking Brits and joking about how shit the UK is. These threads largely just Brits shitposting with each other and it would be wrong to assume the existence of hateful anti-British content on /pol/ is somehow evidence that /pol/ is xenophobic against Brits. People should take a similar views of the racist/alt-right threads – the vast majority of people there are just trolling and being offensive for a laugh. You don't have to like the humour, but most of it is just people shit posting.
> they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
Loads of stuff gets removed... If you're posting content that "goes against the alt-right" you're probably taking the board way way to seriously and you probably should be banned.
** Interestingly another commenter in the thread asked about why there's so much interracial porn on /pol/ if it's so racist, which kinda highlights my point here. Just hating white people isn't politically incorrect – there's people doing that all over Reddit. To make hating white people offensive you basically have to incorporate racist stereotypes about about how whites are genetically inferrer to blacks in various way, but then in doing this you'll get viewed as racist and alt-right because you're using racial stereotypes about how blacks are more athletic, etc.
If you're up for it I challenge you to be politically incorrect from a left-wing perspective without it being possible to argue that it's actually far-right.
I would accept this is a problem though. I just question whether the solution is censoring views. I guess I'll give an example...
In the UK there's a lot of people questioning why young boys today seem to often hold such radical views about women. Of course, there's the surface level explanation we're given that boys are watching people like Andrew Tate online and are becoming radicalised, but then you have to ask why boys are watching people like Andrew Tate in the first place when they could also be listening to male feminists and have gone in the opposite direction.
It seems to me the most likely explanation for this content selection bias is that boys are told lies about gender from a very early age and then on hearing become easily radicalised partial truths from people like Tate. The uncomfortable reality is that Tate is telling half-truths about the biological differences and that many of these half-truths are just denied outright by others in positions of authority. It's really no wonder they find his content interesting. It's probably the same reason someone like Jordan Peterson seemed to fill a large cultural hole a few years back. Somehow just being positive about the unique contributions and strengths of men was a radical and shocking position that people found interesting.
I'm just here to say that 4chan seems to be censoring stuff that goes against it.
They've basically made it a safe space echo chamber for the alt-right.
I'm just saying that whilst some people may be posting controversial content in jest, others will get the wrong end of the stick and take it seriously.
In addition there will also be people pretending to be ironic, but are actually posting their sincere extreme views. Like a reverse Poe's Law
I don't take the board seriously.
The posts I made that got deleted for being "off topic" were mocking the alt-right and I just wanted to get a reaction out of people rather than trying to sway anyone. I know I'm not going to convince anyone and I'm not trying to get anyone elected.
So when I see my posts get deleted or I even get banned for being "off topic" while a post on the same topic with an alt-right bent stays up with 300 replies,it's a clear indication that 4chan has a strong political bias and is absolutely not free speech anymore as most people seem to think it is.
You too buddy
I don't browse 4chan anymore though I did used to (a lot) years ago. Take what I say as anecdotal evidence but I used to chat with a group of people I met through a former friend that seemed to start with a similar mindset to the one you have and then went down the pipeline over a few years of unironically espousing the most absurd abhorrent kind of thoughts you'd see on /pol/ and feeling 100% justified in doing so. They had gotten so used to seeing and interacting with such content day in and day out that it became normalized for them and they started to think that such a large forum existing with people saying similar things validated the way they began to think and act.
I think my main takeaway for sites like /pol/ is that you can't really pretend to act one way for humor for extended periods of time without it rubbing off on you in one way or another and that there are too many young people out there that stumble upon places like that and adopt those views since they lack the world experience yet to have formed their own.
As someone with an experience similar to this I think the route is more like:
You do the edgy trolling. You try to get better at being edgy by coming up with better and better arguments for the edgy thing. You start having doubts of "wait, this actually sounds like a good reason?". You have no one to actually seriously discuss the issue with because its outside the Overton Window (ostracisation or bans would be given in serious places if you entertained the ideas), instead you find only stupid strawman arguments. Years of not finding anything to beat those arguments gradually shifts your views.
This effect is one of the reasons I think it's extremely important to have as wide an Overton Window as possible and proper serious safe spaces to talk about taboo things.
How is this any worse than the feedback loop of extremism and purity spirals you see in upvote base communities?
It just seems like a different mechanism for the same thing. In both cases the overton window is moving somewhere stupid one witty and well received comment at a time.
A lot of it is ironic, but a lot less than it used to be.
Have you considered that what you think is radical left-wing is just centrist, and that you are acclimated to such right-wing views that it appears radical-left? In such a case, it is hard to be politically incorrect while saying something centrist.
> If you're up for it I challenge you to be politically incorrect from a left-wing perspective without it being possible to argue that it's actually far-right.
I think anything from these would qualify:
* https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/expansion-of-the-...
* https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/lenins-hanging-or...
Those are far left. And don't say that they don't count or are too extreme or whatever, when literal Nazi quotes are being used for the right wing. Comparing 'trans-rights' to far left which using Nazis as the example of far right is nonsense. The Nazis would literally have murdered trans people just like real leftists would have murdered you for being bourgeoisie.
The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.
Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.
Anti-jewish content was there 10 years ago as well. The board is full of white supremacist posts when I checked yesterday with lots of threads complaining about non-white races. There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
Just because they changed their name to "groyper" doesn't mean they aren't alt-right anymore.
As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
A lot of influencers in this space are non-whites born outside of the west. The scale of what he’s describing is exaggerated, but the trend is there.
> As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
This might have been true ten years ago. Most of the people in this space became disaffected with Putin after the war began owing to his moves with Dagestan and the Wagner group’s activities in Africa. /pol/ and /k/ are far more supportive of Ukraine than one would expect if your theory held true. There’s reason to suspect this is the result of the same kind of influence campaigns that were being run on the site by Russia during the Syrian Civil War.
However, from what I can see /pol/ still serves as significant breeding ground where people deeply committed to their views can get together in a "mask-off" manner without fear of moderation, while they have to be more "mask-on" on platforms that are more dissemination-focused like Youtube.
On 4chan, Nick Fuentes is loudly and routinely criticized as a closeted homosexual who hates women and encourages his impressionable underage followers to also hate women. He's a more active part of the incel pipeline than 4chan these days and is called out for it on 4chan.
(He's also as a federal informant, since he was never thrown in the slammer for plainly inciting J6 activity. The feds had him dead to rights for that and just let him. I mention this not because it's relevant to the point, just for completeness.)
Lurk moar.
This doesn’t establish credibility because you opened with dead memes from 8 years ago.
Could you give some examples? The more unexpected, the better.
Preferably with sources, because tracing word origin is difficult enough on its own.
> fren later came to prominence on sites such as 4chan and the subreddit /r/frenworld as a dog whistle used by far-right white nationalists and fascists to refer to each other
I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:
- based
- goyslop -> slop
- normalfag -> normie
I think there's actually a better case to be made that the pipeline of "co-option" (if you want to call it that) is stronger in the reverse direction. I posted a sister comment to yours about that.
There wasn't any connection. You are running things in reverse. There was an explicit concerted effort to 'take it over'. With celebrations when it succeeded as the media to the bait.
I can’t keep up anymore.
That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms.
But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.
Also for indie video games, many do find their attention and early fanbases on /v/ before they spread out to twitter. Largely because /v/ is very information sensitive and will pick up primary news usually minutes after they arrive.
- no modern web frameworks
- no microservices/kubernetes clusters
- no algorithmic curation/moderation/recommendation algoritmhs
One wonders just how much of the modern engineering developed in the past decades, that cost a fortune to develop and run is actually necessary or even beneficial for running a modern social media website
Damn you got two of those? That's advanced magic
It was eventually a replacement for the /new/ board, where news of the arab spring first started, shortly before it was shut down. However, it was plagued with proto-pol behavior before anyone was bothering to complain about pol.
There was always these 'cells' of non /jp/ shitposters, if they weren't the OG shitposters themselves, that would post about left-right politics ad nauseum, and in the most hallmark unproductive ways. It was when trolling evolved from 'clever this and that' to shear brute forcing. It was the topic of the news that attracted these unsavor political actors into that place, which was for a short period of time, a great diverse place for collecting news.
This social phenomena and history could never be repeated enough, particularly since we might be finally ending the story of pol/4chan - which was more popular than 4chan itself.
People who still complain about /pol/ look a little like people who would still complain about ebaumsworld: Completely out of touch individuals who equate everything to a tiny phenomena.
I don't care if some other sub-board is all sunshines and happiness, it's a nazi forum because of all the nazis that are coddled there.
I'm not entirely certain that I would call /pol/, which generates upwards of 110K posts/day a tiny phenomenon. It's about 13% of all 4chan posts. Add in /b/ and it's about a fifth.
And of course, casual bigotry is all over 4chan, not just /pol/.
… but then again I never looked at /pol/, maybe it's even worse than /b/?
No idea if this is true but it sounds plausible.
I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation. 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting word filters that I can't repeat here without my post getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of hate.
I think very little has changed in twenty years really. Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now, when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant contrarianism.
If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call your son gay until he grows out of it.
At some point something did change though. It was around the same time as Gamergate and it’s been written about extensively. I’ve been into edgy hacker adjacent culture since like 1992 and when the “actual not ironic” stuff landed it was immediately recognizable as something unfamiliar and different. I’m still not sure how many people got “pilled” versus how much of it was some kind of weird collision with normie spaces where people didn’t get the culture.
There was a generational shift in there too. OG hacker culture was GenX and older millennials, the people who grew up with the net pre enshittification. The /pol stuff and GG seems like younger millennials and GenZ.
I am not pretending to have a clue and I don’t think anyone truly does. It’s all a very complex soup of memes and people and influences.
The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the present day, there is a very strong correlation between the prevailing political leaning of a space and that space's ideological moderation strength.
And despite things like shooting pharma executives in broad daylight being mainstream now, /pol/lacks rightly recognize that this is still edgy upon edgy upon edgy. And thus they meme the shit out of it.
I left in 2012ish, never really did /pol/, if it even existed then, but that 100% squares with my experience of the site.
edit: po vs pol
Their internal narrative and outward justification for their transitory position is irrelevant.
That's probably why a lot of websites use moderation to avoid having one section of it turn into a cesspit of every -ism you can imagine, up to and including fascism, because once you have a section of your website that is openly coordinating the pushing of fascism on society, everyone kinda forgets about the diverse and interesting other things it might have, because of the fascism.
that's not to say stringent moderation doesn't make a site less welcoming, though. it's about choosing what's the lesser evil to you, i guess.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
Considering the site has been around for over 20 years and people still call out and flame racism, I think this is an uncharitable and unfounded cynicism. I'm not sure declarative claims of 3rd order effects in a system so chaotic are capable of being accurate.
4chan cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating a 4chan thread during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...
The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...
The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...
Stop whitewashing 4chan's history.
What would be gained if they didn't "go easy on racism"? Would we all start singing kumbayah and love each other, hippy-style? Or would people be just as racist even more remote corners of the internet/world, and then slightly-left-of-center-minded individuals could pretend that all the world's problems were solved and it could continue for another 100 years?
And it still does, but it's less effective, because various flavors of cretin now have online spaces where they can meet like-minded people and nurture those beliefs, and worse still, all of those spaces reward extremism as any social media site does: subtle, balanced views are not incentivized at all, and you get the most social attention for saying the most outrageous thing in the space. We all know this, like maybe you've never thought about it before, but I'd wager almost everyone on this board has had this experience over one thing or another, even benign nothing issues.
And all of that is before we even get to the subject of things like influencers peddling YouTube videos, TikToks, or whatever to amplify those beliefs for their own profit. Whether they "really believe" these things is irrelevant frankly; in either case, people who believe these things see people being paid to represent their (wrong) ideas which lends them legitimacy.
And now we just have little bespoke engines of radicalization humming away all over the internet in the little shadowy corners, whipping people up into a lather about whatever dumbass thing they googled way back about how they can't get a girlfriend or whatever, and there seem to be a lot of spree shootings now for some reason, totally disconnected I'm sure.
Like the problem with this Libertarian "as long as you're not hurting anyone" is that it leaves a wide open loophole in there about hurting yourself, and while in many cases hurting yourself doesn't lead to anyone being harmed apart from yourself, as I keep saying: No one is an island, if you harm yourself in certain ways, you are absolutely a risk to other people.
Is this documented?
I discovered 4chan around 2008 as a kid, it was much less hostile back then. Even as an adult I used to go on /fit/ every now and then. It was useful and funny and even “wholesome” in its own special way.
But over the last few years, the entire site became /pol/, and other boards became unusable. Maybe once a year I will pop in and immediately regret it.
I still miss hanging out on /v/ and /fa/. When they split /vg/ out into its own board, the colour started to drain from my experience.
I'm curious, why bodybuilding.com in particular? I think I've only heard of it once. I wonder if anyone on HN remembers stardestroyer.net or old weird tech forums?
I gradually lost interest when they started heavily pushing commercial sponsors. I get it; sites aren’t free to host, and moderator time isn’t free / unlimited, but it’s still sad.
Reddit can't get close due to its voting system.
/g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.
it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.
Social network culture is a multipart problem:
1. You need quality posters
2. You need to provide value to those posters
3. You need to remove low-quality posts attracted by site growth
The rub is that the humans behind (1) are free agents, with little incentive to stick to the site once (2) fails.
Hence rapid Digg-style collapses from site owners who don't realize how tenuous their community quality is.
Similarly, I've heard it said that Usenet should never have allowed non-.edu posts.
As an example of why reddit is so bad now (aside from the obvious moderation issues) about 1-2 years ago, reddit added a block feature that stops you from replying to any comment the blocker made and even any comment somebody else made below them.
So pretending this is reddit, I could make this reply saying that you are wrong and then say you have no evidence for your claims. Then I could immediately block you, making it look like you have no response. You are also not allowed to edit any of your comments saying you got blocked or else it will shadow delete that comment.
I have personally witnessed this abuse 5 times in the past few months and I don't even use reddit that much.
r/drama spun off their own site successfully, and I know of another community that did and is thriving using a fork of r/drama's server software (won't say which to keep the normies away)
This plays off problem 3. Growth-focused social media platforms don't want to remove anything but the noisiest noise, because there's still a pair of monetizable eyeballs behind most sources of noise. In fact, if you can be particularly noisy, you generate drama, which makes the platform emotionally salient and thus stickier.
How this applies to 4chan is vague since 4chan isn't exactly a growth platform. Moot's VC ownership was his mom's credit card[0] and his exit was "panic selling to hiroyuki because Hollywood actors' lawyers are breathing down my neck". Hiroyuki himself is incredibly sketchy. As far as I can tell, he bought 4chan mainly because 2channel got rugpulled by his domain registrar[1], after 2channel also had a massive data breach. Funny how history repeats.
Anyway, imageboard ownership being a fractal mirror of the incestuous bullshit going on in big tech and far-right politics aside, once a social network or forum becomes big enough to be 'known', it tends to stick, because moving off those platforms is a collective action problem. So between you holding your friends mutually hostage and the drama from letting the dumbest idiots post on your site, you've created a powerfully addictive socialization substitute that can be manipulated to make people do whatever. Quality posters and value don't matter; in fact, once you're established you want the quality level to go down.
Digg collapsed because they replaced the entire website with something completely different. They didn't fail to moderate the community, they just shut it down. It'd be like if tomorrow Facebook said "we're not doing user posts anymore, we're just going to have a bunch of comment sections for videos from legacy media outfits". Everyone would leave immediately because there's no more mutual-hostage-taking by your friends.
[0] This is not to be confused with Canvas, a similar imageboard platform also started by Moot that lasted like a year.
[1] If you believe the guy who stole the domain, the data breach rendered 2channel unable to pay domain hosting fees. That being said, the guy who stole the domain is also the owner of 8chan and a huge QAnon nutter, if not Q himself, and stealing your client's website because they ran out of money is an extremely malicious move.
As far as anyone knows, hiroyuki got the money to buy 4chan from Good Smile Company. Yes, the people who made Nendoroids.
No it's not. It's as mainstream as you get. One of the two major parties ran explicitly on a platform of transphobia ("keep men out of women's bathroom", "your daughter is being beaten up in sports by a man"). You can't call it counter-culture anymore.
Counter-culture feels like it requires at least an 80/20 or so.
And in most of the Western World the main culture accept trans people. They may differ on who can take pills at what age or if the state should pay for surgeries (is it cosmetic, is it vital) but people who'd beat up transgender people for who they are would be shunned.
If I watch or read modern cultural product, there are huge chances some character will be officially transgender or the theme will be present (shout-out to wildbow). That's being part of The Culture. So being against it means being against the culture. Culture changes over time thanks to people against the status quo (counter-culture). You may have been counter-culture in your youth but once your cause has been accepted you're not counter-culture anymore. You won: celebrate. A meme is how Rage Against the Machine has been Rage for the Machine for a long time already.
Now once you accept you're older, you won, you're for the current status quo you may feel some dread about two things: are you still relevant? (hence why many groups will always try to prove their fight is not won); and: what are parts of the status quo which the new generations of counter culture want to see change (and surely for a good reason). What's the "lobotomy for everyone" of our generation?
> A Soyjak.Party users also shared a list of emails they claimed are associated with janitor and moderator accounts, including three .edu emails. Although some internet users claimed that the leaks included .gov emails associated with members of the moderation team, this remains unverified.
Like who cares?
Reply references the post it is replying to by ID, most boards will turn that ID into a link or even create a UI to view a chain of replies.
> How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back?
You shouldn't, an anonymous imageboard invites you to engage with ideas, not people. However, on most boards you can enter a password with your post, which is displayed as a hash, changing you from anonymous to pseudonymous (although this is generally considered attention-seeking and is frowned upon).
Where I'm sat the only reason our three (?) social media companies restrict none illegal speech/content is to make it more appealing to advertisers.
I miss the internet before it was driven by advertisers and their investors.
Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which I've stayed in contact with long term.
I believe that's fair. Sure, it's "a different board" but it's just another URL on the same domain and same administrator, just different janitors. So it is really the part of the whole website. I know that 99% of people on 4chan disagree with me because they do not wish to be associated with /pol/ /b/ /gif/ but if they wanted to disassociate themselves with those boards then they should be on an entirely different domain without 4chan in name. polchan perhaps.
If that is the case that might explain why so many on 4chan feel that different URL's are different sites. Most of the current members seemed to have shown up from Reddit. Most of the original members grew up and left, myself excluded. I still visit from time to time but don't stick around long as most threads and posters are obviously just 4chan-GPT and people being tricked into replying to it.
There are certainly overlapping circles between Reddit, 4chan and HN. 4chan people talk about and make fun of members of this site all the time. They also make fun of Reddit but don't seem to call out specific people on it.
Combining that with the "post hands" request for a lot of food it was just an unpleasant community to participate it.
Weirdly trying to load the page right now I'm getting Connection timed out. Is hackernews ddosing 4chan? What a world.