> I'd say the fact that your posts are most likely to be forgotten, even if it is archived, is much more of a negative aspect of the site than a positive.
This is the most magical aspect of 4chan, which is why I don't care for archives.
This is the most magical aspect of 4chan, which is why I don't care for archives.
The written word allows us to lend ideas (memes, concepts, what have you) a sense of permanence that they never would have had otherwise. But at the same time, it prevents them from evolving in a way they otherwise might have, if their exact origins were not so easily recorded & referenced.
I don't think it's a coincidence that 4chan, which lacks this permanence, is the origin of so many of the top memes of the past decade (and by 'meme', I don't just mean things like LOLcats).
(Gleick argues this same point in the first few chapters of The Information, for those who are interested).
EDIT: Just realized who I was replying to - if I may ask, are you concerned at all that an official API might detract from 4chan (by making said content more traceable)?
I agree, and that's why it was horrible for 4chan. In the beginning, there were new memes, concepts, and what have you every other day, and old stuff was forgotten (or rather used to show you'd been there for a while.) Now, it's just a constant recycling of the first few years of the site.
IMHO it was caused by archives and meme dictionaries. No need to lurk moar anymoar. Also, very little reason to laugh.
Two features I still think wouldn't conflict with the site are buttons to expand images inline in a thread and turning the text links clickable (copying and pasting on a tablet sucks). I know there are bookmarklets which do this but I can't display my bookmarks bar on chrome on my tablet.
I understand that 4chan isn't very/at all profitable. I think there really is opportunity for you branch out on some boards rather than just links to that jlist site. Have you considered doing more contextually aware ads or even relevant amazon affiliate links in threads to boost your revenues? There will always be detractors but I think most users really appreciate 4chan and would love to see you better compensated for it as long as it doesn't ruin the site in the process.
one more thing, This API will no doubt be used by people to create their own sites which add the features they want to 4chan, do you consider the API a potential source of revenue by perhaps charging for faster versions of it?
I guess it's my own fault for fighting against the nature of the site, but sometimes I try to go the extra mile and put some effort into a post, and feel like no one even notices when I do. It's very discouraging for a conversation to have long since moved on by the time you've posted, or for a person you were trying to help to have given up already and left their thread. While I like 4chan for what it is, I'm still a little bit sad that the textboards never really took off as much, and I wonder why they didn't -- anonymous somewhat-long-form discussion sounds appealing to me. I'd be right at home in a text board with a fraction of the userbase of a 4chan board and a slightly slower pace, but most of the ones I know of are practically dead at this point.
On the other hand, the default in my mind is anonymous discussion. You only don a pseudonym or reveal your true identity when it's actually relevant to the conversation, and immediately stop when it isn't -- people usually don't care about who I am, but they might care about what I have to say. As an example of this, I've browsed Hacker News daily for over a year now, and just recently got around to creating an account. I still feel uneasy about it, even though I'm posting with nothing but a pseudonym, and not posting about anything that I would particularly care about having traced back to me. I doubt Hacker News would have the same culture if it had allowed anonymous posting, but I certainly would have started contributing much earlier if I didn't have to create a pseudo-identity to do so.
It's important to note that while it might be true that Reddit serves as the West's 2chan, the two deliver markedly different experiences. 2chan being as enormous as it is (millions of posts per day) should indicate to you that there is some itch that a giant collection of anonymous textboards can scratch that Reddit can't.