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>And this is why I prefer 4chan to reddit. By eliminating individual identities (except on a few niche boards, almost nobody posts in any identifiable way) from a group, you are left with no way to form personal cliques.

I've never experienced this on reddit. Yes usernames are attached to every post, but it's functionally anonymous. No one knows or cares who anyone else is. With rare exceptions.

>The threads are also flat and you cannot upvote posts. This prevents the upvote-echo-chamber effect you can see on reddit.

You can sort reddit by "new" and it's awful. Likewise HN uses basically the same system and manages a much higher quality of discussion.

That's because HN is still pretty young. 4chan used to be "better" (note: actual better may vary) 8 years ago, when it was still basically a monoculture of like-minded individuals.

Reddit is awful when you sort by new because you can't see who people are replying to. 4chan solves that problem nicely, I think, with its post id and post id quoting feature. It's common to even quote a part of the post you're replying to, if it's a longer post.

What do you mean you can't see who people are replying to on reddit? Replies are organized and indented quite nicely. As far as I can tell, 4chan just uses a cryptic number, and the replies can be anywhere in the thread.

I mean posts aren't numbered and the id of the post(s) that are being replied to aren't visible in the post itself.

4chan's "cryptic number" system is pretty much perfect. You click on the number and it expands inline to the comment itself. All the posts that replied to a given post are also added to the header of that post and clicking on those numbers inline-expands the comments. The best part is you can reply to several comments at once with just one comment - the thread isn't a tree, it's a directed acyclic graph. If three people give you roughly the same reply you can reply to all three posts at once. I find this a very good feature for discussions, where very often there are several micro-threads going on on a single sub-topic inside a thread, it allows to keep everything neatly organised and you can reference people to other posts easily just by number. It used to be more cubersome before the current built-in javascript extension, when posts didn't expand and you couldn't see replies to a post tacked as references on the post itself, but today it's really really good.

I urge you to try a more tame board, say /g/ (technology), and see for yourself how things work now. It's usually best around after 6-7 PM USA time (any coast), when the people who don't live to shitpost get home from work.

Edit: to be pedantically correct (the even better kind of correct), you can make a post that quotes a future post and with really good statistical modelling and some luck, you can arrange to post in the same thread with that exact number, forming a full cycle - a post that quotes a future post that quotes the first post. This was much easier early on. I think the highest achievement was one person who managed to pull it off across several different boards while roleplaying a time-traveler.

I wasn't aware of those features, that would significantly improve what I thought of it. However having to click to see replies seems less than ideal. Reddit and HN just organize them properly to begin with. It also gets rid of voting, which I believe to be the most important feature.

HN is only a year and a half younger than Reddit itself. I don't think that theory holds.

HN is like Haskell: desperately trying to avoid success at all costs.

You must not frequent any niche subreddits. In the sports subs, everybody knows everybody.

> You don't know if the person is male, female, or a raptor butterfly from Venus.

Sure, but everyone just assumes you're a white male 20-something. And god forbid you correct anyone's assumptions, or you'll meet the endless refrain of kitchen jokes or racial epithets or whatever else they can think of. Remember, "there are no women on the internet." Disgusting.

Sure, but that reaction isn't directed at any particular group; rather, it's a "hurt them with whatever hurts" reaction to attempting to claim an identity, in a place where identity is itself discouraged. Amusingly-enough, there are slurs that are aimed at white male 20-somethings as well, when someone mentions they are one. Even though the people doing the slur-ing probably are also one. It's the principle of the thing. (The core of it being the slur "tripfag", which is used when you don't know anything about the person to hurt them with, but you still want to insult them for trying to persist their identity between posts.)

Picture 4chan as a masquerade ball in a politically-unstable climate. For example, imagine WWII-era Germany, with both members of the Nazi party, and persecuted minorities, participating. Nobody knows who anyone else is, though, and so everyone is generally genial toward one-another.

Now imagine that you start to take off your mask. I would think the immediate reaction would be for whoever was nearby to shove it forcibly back onto your face.

Which board are you using? That assumption might be right on many of them, but there are, of course, boards with majority female users and everyone there knows that.

And only a few of them get that angry - there's not much user crossover between every topical board.

The racial epithets only persist as long as a mod isn't looking (global rule #2), but "correcting someone's assumptions" is also against the rules (global rule #6), since it's offtopic! So it shouldn't be the majority of a post.

> The threads are also flat and you cannot upvote posts.

THIS.

You have to conduct REAL interaction with the "thread". Not just artificially by voting for stuff you like.

Information is everything that matters. The only upvote-like mechanism is posting in a thread.

There are still people posting stuff without additional informations to show their approval, but they have to type something and type a captcha, which prevents the whole mass from skimming over boards and randomly vote as they go.

And if you just go around posting "this" or "qft", you'll be flamed, given a warning by the mods, banned for a day and if you persist, banned for a long while.

One good thing about upvotes is that every single person now doesn't have to contribute to the thread by posting.

When your site is too popular, there will be lots of posts that aren't good, since everyone wants to contribute, and it just tires everyone out reading and processing them. Voting takes no space on the page.

When your forum gets too big, it becomes a problem again, as you can see. Now there's so much voting it barely means anything. Without selection on reddit users, there's no "taste", which is one of the worst problems with reddit's front page.

(The other problem with reddit's front page is that they used to subscribe you to the gore and pictures of dead people board by default.)

A better system, but one that takes too much time for most people, is explaining yourself in the upvote. Like Slashdot!

In the absence of that, you can impose "taste" on users by defining a topic and having "board culture", aka, making everyone but a certain class of people too weirded out to post. This is totally egalitarian as long as you have enough different classes of people.

I'd love a system that required accounts and login (for moderation purposes), but then either made users anonymous to one-another, or only exposed identity on a per-thread basis (e.g. each user would get an identicon attached to each post, but it would be generated from SHA1(uid + threadid + salt), so in each new thread, your icon would change.)

That is implemented on 4chan. Your IP is your identity for moderation purposes. Not ideal, but an explicit goal is to never ever require logins.

IDs are present on some boards. The /int/ board for instance puts a country flag next to your post, /b/ used to have IDs the way you describe, then it didn't, but now it has them again, I think. Some other boards also have per-thread IDs.

And should you chose to do so, you can always pick a tripcode. Basically you pick a password, type username#password in the name box and it comes out as username!hash, where the hash is the same each time you type the same password.

Right, I'm familiar with all the things the Yotsuba codebase does for "identity." I was trying to say that they suck.

Tripcodes are an abomination--when you use them and others don't, you get made fun of, and allowing them to persist between threads removes the point of anonymity. Country flags (or any real-world-attached property of yourself), meanwhile, encourage hate and trolling.

Probably, the most obvious system would involve taking tripcodes, forcing the arbitrary-input-string to a numeric value one can increment (i.e. increment on each post where a "Keep Identity" checkbox isn't enabled) so that everyone always has one but they can still change easily, and then adding the thread-ID to the hash so that they can't be kept forever. And then visualizing them with something colorful, because when every post has a tripcode they become a mess of very-hard-to-track text.

Or, you know, hashed thread+user identicons, like I said.

> Your IP is your identity for moderation purposes. Not ideal, but an explicit goal is to never ever require logins.

You don't need logins to have accounts. Use an http://samy.pl/evercookie/, and generate an account for someone when you haven't seen them before. Make unnamed accounts ephemeral (expire them after a year or so.) And make it so that if you enter just an email address, you get sent a link that--provided it's opened under the same evercookie--merges the account it was opened in and its history into a named account.

Thus, the login flow looks like this:

1. go to 4chan, browse around, make posts;

2. decide you want to keep these posts;

3. enter your email address in the "email" field while making a post; now all the posts you made on this computer are attached to your account (but that doesn't retroactively change the identicon they have in their threads) and you are logged into that account from then on.

4. somewhere else, using a new computer, repeat 1-3.

This makes it much simpler to ban miscreants, while still generally keeping things anonymous. The one problem with it is that you won't be able to "remove" a 4chan identity from a (possibly public!) computer--but this can be handled by making computer identities separate from user identities, and allowing the "user" to log out while still remembering who the computer is. (And by making a ban ban both your current user- and computer-identity, of course.)

That's the exact experience of the Secret app.

Of course you are not moot. Moot has his own account on HN :)