While 4chan continues to flirt the border line between nsfw reddit and deepweb, what is its moderation policy ?
To say that 4chan's enforcement is inconsistent would be an understatement. But, the chaos is a feature, not a bug. Something to keep in mind.
But for everyone else, this is one of the reasons I think seriously that 8chan is the next big thing, it's basically Reddit, but for image boards. Mod abuse (real or perceived) will result in community fragmentation but on the same site, rather than exodus to other sites.
I think this is the only legitimate stance to take when it comes to a UGC site that allows people to set up their own communities. The staff of each board should be responsible for their own moral compasses, with a minimum of interference by the folks upstairs unless it becomes absolutely necessary.
The existence of a doxxing board is distressing, but it's not against any law in the USA. I don't want it there, but I want hotwheels making decisions like that even less. I feel the same way about things like /r/beatingwomen (exactly what it says in the title) or /r/picsofdeadkids on Reddit.
https://storify.com/a_man_in_black/baphomet
You are also 100% incorrect about "only legitimate stance." Hotwheels needs to be clear about what his guidelines are; as long as it's clear what rules the communities operate under, and as long as people are free to decide whether or not they wish to create a community, it's certainly legitimate to have more restrictive rules.
"UGC site" is a red herring. I am creating UGC right now in the form of this post.
And as far as "incorrect", that is your opinion and it is your own, I have a differing one. I like the idea of a site where the admin has assured that they will not interfere with you unless they have to.
Really, did you miss the qualifier "that allows people to set up their own communities"?
And since I've hit the posting limit:
That is your opinion @zorpner, and nothing I can say will change it. We disagree, vehemently, on the whole "silence is complicity" thing.
@bryantd: Because freedom of speech is a guiding principle, a human right, not just a law, and that guiding principle is a higher priority than people talking about societally-disapproved-of-things. The price of following that principle is that people can and will talk about things that some or even most people don't like.
The idea of cracking down on people discussing things because you personally find it distasteful is, to me, incredibly offensive. I don't like the idea of neo nazis or places where people post pictures of dead children, but I also don't think someone should have the ability to come in and say "No, you can't talk about that."
@bryantd again: Ah, gotcha. In that case, no, I don't think there is a strictly different moral obligation in play.
I get that curated spaces are a thing, and I don't have an issue with those, but the problem I see a lot is that there are N stated rules in a space, but N+X unwritten rules and breaking them gets you in trouble, and oftentimes you don't know what you did wrong. This leads to the superficial projection of freedom of speech and an open community, but in reality, that is not what's happening. I.e. deception. And in an atmosphere of deception, censorship follows. Censorship, to me, being a greater evil than whatever someone could possibly be talking about.
That's the "why", because the moral obligation of free expression, IMO, is a few levels higher than most others.
Heck, even here on HN, this is a problem (though not NEAR as much as some other sites, thanks to Dang and PG and the rest). But still, we have shadowbans and post timeouts and opaque algorithms that kill posts before anyone has had a chance to read them.
If an admin chooses not to interfere, that does not absolve them from the responsibility of what happens on their site. If they had the power to remove it, and did not, they share in the blame for the consequences.
Are phone companies liable when criminals use their products to talk on the phone? Are the developers of encryption liable for ISIS encrypting their calls?
Call me when CNN and Fox News get sued for lying, and when Sony gets prosecuted for starting trivial lawsuits to stifle free speech.
Then we can talk about censoring internet forums.
And in the context of culpability, it's obvious that such a relationship only exists when the individual with the power to prevent bad action is aware of the action. So in this case, where Hotwheels is not only a participant in the relevant boards on 8chan but has expressed approval of what's happening, it's easy to hold him culpable (and probably liable as well, for what it's worth).
Can you explain why you think granting the ability to create a sub-board generates a different moral obligation, in your opinion, than granting the ability to create a new post?
Allowing posts on a single board doesn't carry that obligation, because that's not what you're offering; the individual posts aren't and aren't meant to be communities with their own culture. I would still say that moderators have a moral obligation to be open, accountable, and representative of the community they moderate (even if it's a community they didn't want or ask for), and HN does a particularly poor job in this regard (lobste.rs demonstrates that it's possible to run a site like this with an open moderator log).
This is not a simple problem.
However, it's also irrelevant to my question: why do you think that the admin of 8chan has a different moral obligation vis a vis free speech than the admin of Hacker News? You said that allowing people to set up their own communities was important, and I sincerely don't know why that makes a difference here.
It's OK with me if you misspoke, and you think that Hacker News should operate under the same principles as 8chan.
You're doing it wrong.
I submit that the two are not in conflict. The first is a principle that all people should have this right. The second is moral guidance on the subjective application of that right.
People can use their rights for good or for ill. The key thing is that people have that right. It's not a right if someone else's subjective moral judgments can take it away.
> This is not a simple problem.
That depends. Why do you think there is complexity? At a guess, you think others should live by your principles, and so you are conflicted when they do not.
If free speech wasn't fundamentally important to me, I wouldn't think it was a complex problem, I'd be happy to limit speech.
Which wouldn't be so bad if neo-Nazis were the only ones affected, but sadly they're one of the groups least likely to be driven off the internet this way.
FWIW, I agree strongly that unclear rules are bad. You should know what parameters you're operating under. I think there's some space for judgement calls, because it's really hard to write rules that cover all possible cases, but I also think it's significantly better to make those exceptions rather than SOP.
Sincere thanks for taking the time to explain. I will not burden you further with having to edit your posts to reply to me, and certainly feel free to drop me an email if you'd like.
But I'm guessing blindly believing rampantly biased media surrounding the subject is more your style, right?
If you actually want to call it paraphrasing, I'll go ahead and say that it's an outright misrepresentation of the post you responded to, since it contained nothing to suggest that.
> But I'm guessing blindly believing rampantly biased media surrounding the subject is more your style, right?
Where do I begin?
You could tell me how / why I am wrong. I'd appreciate it.
His site fully complies with US law. He immediately removes illegal content as soon as he is made aware of it. He is happy to work with law enforcement whenever necessary.
He is beyond reprimand. As someone who is presumably an able-bodied white man with moderately wealthy parents, you're making your libelous and oppressive comment from a privileged position. You are also perpetuating a hate campaign against the differently-abled.
This hate campaign has included the following attacks:
- Ceaseless coordinated attempts to take his site down via false accusations to his hosting provider that he is supposedly hosting CP.
- Similar attempts to socially engineer his registrar into disabling his domain.
- Incredibly powerful DDOS attacks lasting weeks at a time, the most recent of which even took down his business partner 2ch.net for three days straight, which is the favorite site of approximately 20% of Japan. Imagine if reddit was brought down for 3 days because someone was angry about something that was uploaded to imgur.
- Attempts to destroy his livelihood and drive him back to the precipice of suicide by bullying sites like Patreon into pulling his funding; the goal being to leave him stranded, penniless, and homeless in the Philippines without a personal care assistant.
Separately, these are colossal nuisances. Together, they amount to a murder attempt by a ruthless, bigoted hate mob.
Frederick is an inspirational bloke and all these people casting aspersions on his character whilst lamenting m00t's departure for his cultural boldness, despite disagreeing with the content is pure hypocrisy.
Especially given the non-inclusive hate mob moniker attributed to GG by a genuinely terrible cabal of shoddy journalists and their transparent smears.
I believe common sense will prevail in all of this and there will be no victory fanfares or v-days - quietly the press will mature, the trolls will get bored and good websites and reporters will get justified clicks.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/01/8chan-domain-seized-...
Has that changed?
8chan.co still works.
it doesnt always result in an exodus, but mod abuse has spawned new subreddits in the past without question.
Of course it's not easy, but it shouldn't be easy. Mods spend a lot of time building up their communities. It should take an equal amount of work to create a competing subreddit.
I think reddit has shown us quite conclusively that the "create-your-own-niche" paradigm simply leads to a series of over-specialized echo chambers with perpetually rising levels of groupthink and self-reinforcing, self-congratulatory posting. In other words I think reddit's architecture amplifies shitposting rather than mitigating it.
IMHO the "benevolent dictator" style works better. People on 4chan complain, sure, largely as a consequence of no upvotes and complete anonymity from other users. But they also mostly just "make it work" when it comes to classifying content. On the tech board /g/, there's a surprisingly diverse stream of content that makes its way through. Because there's only one /g/ it all fits into one melting pot and the community is more vibrant and diverse as a result.
I think the same happens here on HN. A lot of different people with different tastes frequent this site. If it was simply "news for startup founders" or "javascript framework news" it would be a lot less interesting.
That is a legitimate force, but it's canceled out by the fact that when you create your own sandcastle, no one comes to to visit it.
You can start your own subreddit, but it will be dead until you build an actual community there and that takes a ton of effort. In the meantime, it provides you no value—all the links on it are ones you yourself added, there's no discussion, etc.
It is (was) moot's website. Other people aren't the ones who set the rules.
Since the design of the site has official topics for each board, you do have to set limits on what's relevant and make new boards when something new comes up. And it's not always possible to make new boards if you don't have mods for them.
In this case, mixing 2D and 3D can be dangerous. It's also a little unfair in that the yaoi board wouldn't be usable for the same thing.
On any *chan style imageboard, this isn't a thing. You can hide posts that you don't like, but by design, all posts are equal. If someone posts something you don't like, your options are to ignore it or respond to it, but it's there, in the open, for all to see.
This, I think, is the better system, combined with the default anonymous posting style of these boards that completely ensures that any post is judged on its merits, rather than the identity of its poster. That's not say that board culture doesn't exist, it does, but it exists purely socially, rather than being a feature of the software. The things I've seen happening on YouTube and G+ and Facebook have convinced me that existence of a coherent identity has zero impact on people's behavior.
I don't know that accountability is a bad thing. If you're so ashamed of what you're saying that you don't want people bringing it up later, don't say it. Or use an alt.
This can balance out the fact that it's an anonymous anything-goes site. Yes, people can say pretty much whatever they want but if they know they will get shamed for it later, it might prevent them sharing the worst stuff.
Reddit and 4chan are both pretty big echo chambers, it's just the way they (the users) maintain it that's different.
>Instead of taking your ball to another subreddit where you can now bully everyone who disagrees with you, 4chan just screams at you until you submit to the will of the board or you take your ball to some other website.
That's precisely the difference that I was referring to when I said that 4chan is more of a melting pot. Either people fit in and stay, or they don't fit in and leave.
By contrast, reddit (and I guess 8chan which I've never visited) operates on a "something for everyone" model which I find more irksome with each passing day. I'm sure it's a great model if you're trying to sell ads, but in terms of UX I think it's the pits.
Combine with the lack of anonymity and prominent karma scores, and you've got a recipe for constant regurgitation of lowest-common-denominator memes, shitposting, and cults of personalty.
That's why reddit is quickly becoming one of my least favourite websites.
As for its moderation policy: NSFW content is actually prohibited on the majority of the site, including most of the high traffic boards. All of 4chan is not /b/.
/out/(doors) and /diy/ contain tolerably interesting content. The tech board contains somewhat more mixed quality.
Being anon, there's not much pimping for karma or upvotes or likes or whatever all over the rest of the web, making it refreshingly honest and realistic. You'll be disappointed if you're in the mood for headlines like "You'll never guess the top 5 things that happen after this headline ends in a rhetorical question?" clickbait sites or if you were expecting the prose of the New Yorker, but its not bad, mostly.
There is more to 4chan than /b/ /hc/ and /pol/, although media trying to do a hatchet job obviously disagree. The eternal "best camping knife" debate on /out/ is not going to generate clickbait headlines on mainstream media site unlike pretty much everything posted on /pol/, at least /pol/ in the old pre-censorship days.