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Comment by moot | Hacker News Reader

I saw this and said "Why the fuck is this on Hacker News?" out loud.

Hey, moot!

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)

Because moot runs one of the largest, most active, and longest-lived anonymous social networks and discussion boards on the 'net?

Did you notice who wrote that comment?

...oh snap, moot is on HN?!

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

Well, it shouldn't be much of a surprise since he has also ventured into the startup world. Backed by AZ16, etc http://canv.as/

We've been working on DrawQuest for the past year: http://www.drawquest.com

More info, in case you're curious: http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/8/3942110/drawquest-for-ipad-...

Same company, different product.

Are you making good money with this stuff?

4chan is a big hit, but don't hear much about your commercial ideas.

A better question is why isn't he posting as anonymous.

i see wut u did thur

I think that's a moot point.

Maybe moot just needs to be reminded himself?

Hah, no I did not.

No he didn't #LOL

I suspect there's more of a userbase overlap than you'd think.

Because you're a hacker like the rest of us. :)

Jedberg responding to a comment from Moot on Hackernews? I think we may have just hit inception levels here.

Quick, someone call Kevin Rose!

Now we just need pg to come in and post "ಠ_ಠ", and we'll have an HN shark-jumping trifecta.

Did somebody say... spiderman thread?

Why? He's an admin on a YC-backed company...

"How to grow your site from 3.2m to 22.5m users when you can't talk about your site: the rules 1 and 2 strategy"

Same, but I'm ok with it. I haven't been on 4chan in years, but I still love it and everything that it built/made in internet culture (well - maybe not EVERYTHING). It's good that the community would be sure to vote up the very most important posts IRT it, because I wouldn't find them any other way.

Well, you are a startup founder, and arguably a household name on big swaths of the internet nowadays. It certainly fits the criteria.

He should talk to those guys who wrote about advertising their food delivery service on pornsites

eat24, if I recall correctly.

Do you recommend that people go to 4chan?

Definitely. Be sure to check out /d/!

I wish I hadn't

Yeesh, sorry.

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."

No problem. I'm in my 50's. I didn't see my first porno until I was 19 at a drive-in. I didn't see my first super-gore picture until I was in my 30's. It seems very weird to me that kids see all this at a very young age. Now Hentai is another weird thing to me. I do know humans are adaptable, but don't know in what way kids have adapted to it. My poor father, he heard Jimmy Fallon mention 2 girls 1 cup so he looked it up. He was visibly shaken when he told me about it. I have managed to avoid that one.

If nothing else, I suspect children of the Internet generation have learned not to blindly Google things they heard about from their friends. So perhaps a bit of wisdom is trickling down :-)

That's true. The last time I made that mistake was many years ago with goatse. I also laerned to check links that might be cleverly disguised. Would that they were all as innocent as rick rolls. If I really want to be safe, I open a link up and only look at it with my peripheral vision. It works surprisingly well to classify something as bad without actually taking it all in.

There is this pretty cool research project at Stanford (it's headed by Andrew Ng of the Coursera fame) that uses NLP and machine learning to detect content that the user might prefer not to see. It's still pretty rough around the edges but this demo is pretty cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

I actually really like that song, maybe because I came of age in the 80's. The funniest thing about it is that Rick Astley seems pissed. He should lighten up because nobody remembered anything about him before rick roll and now he's a household name.

>The funniest thing about it is that Rick Astley seems pissed.

Where'd you get that impression? He's been pretty cool about the whole thing last I heard.

This was from an interview a few years back. It could have been because he wasn't making any money from it. I haven't kept up, but glad he's embraced it.

Astley participated in a rickrolling himself, at the Macy's Thanksgiving parade a few years ago. He popped out of a float in the middle of another musical performance and started singing Never Gonna Give You Up. It was a staged stunt, with a canned background track ready to go, and the TV announcers obviously feigning surprise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL-hNMJvcyI

I've thought about something like applying a threshold filter to thumbnails to distort them sufficiently so they're not potentially "offensive" but have it still be apparent if they might contain bad content. It's too difficult a problem for me to actually implement though, and I suspect it could be easily hacked somehow.

I don't know if there is a service to rate images. Google seems to have the best technology. It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to programmatically upload an image using an api and get a rating back. This might be a way to curtail teen sexting, which is against the law. A parent could for example, admin a setting to change nudie selfies to a Sesame Street character on their way out. Or maybe better yet, process any photographs taken with the cell phone at the time they are taken and make all nudie images turn into Sesame Street characters ;-)

Something like that (but with humans) was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6075465

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.

That's true, then Google would have nude pictures of your teenagers.

As part of the internet generation, I believe the opposite to be true. Hence the widespread popularity of 2g1c

Have a strong suspicion that adults are more sensitive and find this stuff more disturbing than kids.

/d/ can be a pretty nice community considering the focus. I don't know if I can put into words the effect it had on me, but in retrospect it seems to have been mostly positive.

Thanks for running the site for so long, moot. It's great fun.

/u/'s always been a pretty nice community too, and is unlikely to offend anyone except social conservatives. (/y/, on the other hand, has always been fairly hostile. Don't ask me why.)

i think if your asks that in is not the more easy questioned to say... could be if your to not think so it bad but possible.

I've heard a lot of stuff about 4chan, and this sure sounds important. But this post is literally the first thing I've ever read on the site.

Should I even try to understand this?

You're replying to the owner of 4chan right now, if you're unaware.

I was indeed aware.

Why not! This post is about moderating a very large and very complex forum, which can be interesting to anyone who participates in forums, or anyone interested in social software and online communities.

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.

Thanks. It's still not clear to me what kind of moderation system is in place (if any). But it's OK :-)

There is a list of global rules, as well as some board-specific rules [1]. Generally boards just require you to stay on-topic (unless you're on /b/, where the only off-topic thing is ponies, which is the only on-topic thing on /mlp/), refrain from spam, and not post anything that could get 4chan in legal trouble. Rule offenses result in IP bans, usually for a certain time (from a day to month to forever).

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.

[1] https://www.4chan.org/rules

The only off-topic thing is My Little Ponies?! OMFG what has this world come to?

Not the easiest thing in the world to define what is off-topic on a "random" board.

They're not off topic they belong in /mlp/

Shhh... Mods are asleep...

IIRC, "invasion threads" were off-topic (bannable offence) at one point too. I don't know if they are anymore (it's been years since I've been there).

The post is interesting but it's fundamentally about 4chan culture (and I'd say there have been more important changes in the past). I don't think it will make sense without being at least a little familiar with that culture - you'd be better off visiting the actual boards and getting a feel for the place first.

Then how about adjusting the cooldowns back to how they were? 4chan is still supposed to be a collection of imageboards, and the new cooldowns make image posting extremely time-consuming with large amounts of images (which can be very much on-topic and valued content). Shitposters are not suddenly going to stop shitposting just because they have to wait longer between posts, so ultimately this just seems to make life for legitimate posters worse.

I'm personally very afraid that he will include that as a "feature" for the Passes.

where are my subs Daiz?

Who knows. Underwater, maybe?

I advise you to rethink the 60 second posting rate for /a/, it's making dumping chapters impossible.

Because #4chat is the culture of them interwebs and is the foundation likes of craigslist.

Hi Chris, do you still keep up with your good friend DAVE!? :)

Things have changed around here in the last two years.

Who let you out of Higgins' trunk?

don't worry moot, it's of above-average relevance compared to recent months' activity.

Hello moot, nice to see you here :)

Hey moot!

<3 from /mu/!

I heard that trips and dubs are cancelled.

Is this true m00t?

lol internet

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