Moot: Full House
4chan.org
4chan.org
For some reason I've placed him in this completely parallel place in my mind to the tech community. He's like a mythical creature of some secret world of my childhood with untold powers.
But now that I'm older and am making a career out of coding websites, I look at 4chan as something that I could feasibly create. I've seen the man behind the curtain o_O
More info, in case you're curious: http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/8/3942110/drawquest-for-ipad-...
Same company, different product.
4chan is a big hit, but don't hear much about your commercial ideas.
Should I even try to understand this?
I'll attempt to explain some of the jargon.
The part about "proud to call ourselves /v/irgins and /k/ommandos" refers to the nicknames that people on various boards (topic-specific forums within 4chan) have invented to call themselves, as a kind of in-joke. For example, "/v/" is shorthand for the video games board (because its URL is http://boards.4chan.org/v/), so people on the board extend that and call themselves "/v/irgins" (because that's much more amusing than "/v/ideogamers").
When he says "sage is now invisible", "sage" means the feature that lets you write a comment that doesn't bump that thread to the top of the board. People use "sage" in order to write comments like "this post is terrible" without promoting that post. See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sage or http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sage for more explanation.
"/q/ will be retired and replaced" - this was a board that moot had set up for talking about 4chan itself (asking him questions, providing feedback, etc).
"Post timers" prevent you from writing tons of comments in rapid sequence, which is usually spammy/abusive behavior.
All of the boards have mods of various rankings (people who delete off-topic posts vs people who actually ban/temp-ban users) and various degrees of moderation. According to the post (and agreeing with my personal experience) moderation has generally been on the rise as of late, although apparently this is due to better moderation tools rather than an increase in moderators.
Prior to the new ban-list, most moderation (I've seen anyway) is pretty quiet, save from the infamous USER HAS BEEN BANNED FOR THIS POST that you sometimes see.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that when I'm introduced to someone and they say they know of 4chan, my immediate response is "I'm sorry."
Where'd you get that impression? He's been pretty cool about the whole thing last I heard.
I don't know if anyone's actually doing it either. I could see Google having the power to pull it off. Though i'm not entirely sure given the current climate of paranoia I'd necessarily want Google keeping track of knowing exactly what and how much inappropriate material can be (even tangentially or erroneously) associated with me. A third party application would be nice but I think it would need to be anonymous - a concept Google seems dead set against.
Thanks for running the site for so long, moot. It's great fun.
10% of people posting is actually exactly what you should expect in a thriving community. Several studies of web communities have confirmed the "90:9:1" ratio of Lurkers:Contributors:Creators. Lurkers just read. Contributors will respond. Creators will initiate.
See the wikipedia article at [1] but there are also (I think) several old USENET studies and corporate email list studies which confirm this that I didn't notice in the footnotes of wikipedia.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
<3 from /mu/!
Is this true m00t?
A highlight (besides all the "ponies outside of /mlp/" ones):
"I cant get banned, im 17 and my birthday is tomorrow. Suck it m00t." -- Ban, 90 days, "Underage User"
Board | Action | Length | Post | Reason | Time
/b/ | Ban | 3 days | View | Global 15 - Pony/Ponies Outside of /mlp/ | 34 minutes ago
Wat? I thought /b/ was pretty much anything goes. How times change.
I haven't been on there in a while, but if moot says to keep ponies on /mlp/ then don't be surprised to see bans for posting ponies on /b/. It's not even a /b/ rule; it is a /mlp/ rule. It keeps the peace. If /b/ becomes unhappy (due to too many ponies), and /b/ doesn't have the numbers to retaliate against /mlp/ then /b/ might well go flood other boards to call attention to their discontent.
How could the Big Bang have predetermined a pony ban on 4chan?
And it was a better place, then they let the /b/tards have it back.
I don't think this behavior changed recently (if ever). People would frequently reply elsewhere in the thread to warn people that they are dead.
It would be interesting to see a post or an article comparing and contrasting the different methodologies between the two sites.
Shadow bans were created originally to deal with trolls. People deliberately posting garbage. It is counter productive to use shadow bans on contributing people who happened to break an unspoken rule like "don't criticize pg".
The problem with it is it makes one particular set of assumptions about behavior - you must be a troll, you must crave attention, and in the absence of attention, you must either get frustrated and leave or else continue trolling. Because being a troll with no possible valid input to offer or being a good user is a binary state.
But of course if you look at the comments by most of those users, you'll see a number of perfectly reasonable banned comments and maybe (if you can find it) the one infraction which may have started it all. For most of them, I wind up wondering if a simple warning from a mod might have sufficed.
And yes, as you point out, legitimate posters who just lost their head for a moment go on talking to an empty room while the actual trolls just burn another account.
/r/Games for instance, has a policy of arbitrary banning people this way.
This might be interesting.
I mean I guess that was stuff that was banned from 4chan... I don't know what I was expecting
Related, one of the funniest bans I've ever seen.
4chan, in comparison, has always been organic from day 1.
You could make a case for slashdot or wikipedia or google, but IMO all have changed substantially in the last decade.
Each thread can have x posts before new posts no longer bump it. If you sage, you are using up that thread's available space (1/x worth) without bumping. Although this doesn't "downvote" in the sense that the thread is penalized/lowered, it "downvotes" because it takes up thread space with no benefit to the thread. Not to mention, sageing is a way to express your dissatisfaction with the thread, which I think was always the point (rather than trying to actually hurt the thread).
Few threads approach that limit. Idiots saging threads was purely a "look at me saying I don't like this thread!", nothing else.
>Not to mention, sageing is a way to express your dissatisfaction with the thread, which I think was always the point
Which is a bad thing, hence fixing it.
I'll always view 4chan as a website who refused to grow up and expand, because it is afraid to since it might lose its very special flavor by doing so.
It seems anonymity is quite hard to implement and make us of properly.
<3 from /g/
>Global 2 - Underage User
Why not ban the shitposters and not the underage users.
Also the introduction of some of those boards was simply to get shitposts out of other boards (e.g. /soc/ was created to cleanup /b/ and /r9k/). Worked great.
However, I have to disagree with the sage thing. While originally the term was used to not bump a thread (implying that your own post was not worthy of bumping a thread back to the front page), in the last five years (and before that, to some extent) it HAS been used as a way to 'down vote' a thread.
Sage as a method of downvoting a thread is insane and encourages even more shitposting. 4chan actually does have a "karma" that manifests in the way of replies to your posts/threads. So when you reply to a thread using sage as a downvote, you encourage the poster by giving him replies. Using sage is just a flag to the other guy that his post is irritating enough for you to sage it.
This used to be a huge problem when it was popular to post troll pony threads on macho boards like /v/, /sp/, or /fit/. What would happen is there would be 10 replies in the first minute, all sages, calling the OP a retard and reminding everyone to sage and report the thread. These replies would just feed him, to which he would reply to the sages and egg people on even more - to which he would receive even more replies.
The only acceptable analogue to "downvoting" on 4chan is to not reply to the thread. Nothing can dissuade a shitposter more than having put some effort into writing a good baity OP post, and not getting a single reply before the janitors delete it.
If you're determined enough to sage bomb the thread to image limit, especially now that there's a captcha, sorta, but not really.
Also cheers to moot. I've noticed the improvement in moderation first hand recently, even getting banned myself, whereas previously that board felt like it had zero mods.
So, using sage as a way to 'downvote' is just a way of adding towards the thread limit without bumping the thread. It's a round-about way to do it though (vs. direct downvoting).
"sage" originates from 2chan (aka Futaba Channel), which was the inspiration for 4chan. 'sage' is short for sageru.
Ahhh, memories.
If this is true, sage can not be used to downvote at all, EXCEPT if there are enough sages to make the thread expire. However, that limit is something in the 100s. No one has the time and dedication to "sage a thread into non-existence," even though they sometimes call for it.
Right, and he just fixed that problem.