To rephrase a flagged comment: 4chan is a pretty good counterexample. It's not necessarily true that a community destroys itself if you have no moderation. This community would; 4chan hasn't. Why?
Yeah, I flubbed the question. Let's try again: Why is it possible for 4chan to have the line far afield of what we'd normally think of as acceptable behavior? It's not only survived, but prospered.
A naive explanation is that only awful people go there, and there are a large number of those types. But that'd be mistaken.
I don't know, but it seems like an interesting question.
I guess I'd take some issue with the claim that it has prospered; it's survived, but according to every report I've ever seen, it's never actually made money. As for why it's stayed alive, given the anonymization, it's hard to draw significant conclusions about the community there without having access to 4chan's own analytics, but my suspicion is that the number of people who are long-time contributors to the site are actually relatively few. I'm biased, but based on the people I know who were or are 4chan users and my own personal experience with the site, I suspect most users start using it young, probably in their teens, see their highest level of involvement there over the next few years after they join, then drift away from it. That was the pattern I experienced, and the pattern I saw repeat in a lot of other people. There's a constant influx, but it's not what you would think of as a contiguous community (unless you want to get into some Ship of Theseus questions about what defines a community). 4chan has some of the hallmarks of other web communities, but it diverges from somewhere like HN, Metafilter, or even Reddit by virtue of that lack of continuity. You can survive for a long time on suburban teenagers who want somewhere to play-act as nihilists, but that's never going to be a demographic that produces much by way of value.
> I guess I'd take some issue with the claim that it has prospered; it's survived, but according to every report I've ever seen, it's never actually made money.
I don't think it was ever meant to make money. Lots of great (for various aspects of great) things exist for non-monetary reasons.
4chan is a very niche community. There are some who don't care what kinds of shit gets posted, but there's a very good reason their user base is so small compared to other sites like reddit.
It's true that off-topic posts are removed, but I'm mainly curious why this kind of "say whatever you want" attitude is so pervasive on 4chan yet doesn't kill the site. On Reddit, for example, comments like that would be moderated via downvoting, which physically hides the comment unless the user clicks on it. That's still a form of moderation.
> I'm mainly curious why this kind of "say whatever you want" attitude is so pervasive on 4chan yet doesn't kill the site. On Reddit, for example, comments like that would be moderated via downvoting, which physically hides the comment unless the user clicks on it. That's still a form of moderation.
I don't hang out on chans but sometimes end up reading them for various reasons.
I think the constant noise and random insults actually are moderation: they keep away people prone to butthurt, who due to their stubbornness and obnoxity are absolutely the worst fun killers and threat to any discussion. Normally people call each other retards as a matter of course and don't give much fuck, but if you try to argue emotionally then you are flamed to the death.
To me it was quite eye opening to read a bit of Encyclopedia Dramatica once. Many times I saw it throw shit all over some people or idea just to click on the "see also: some ostensibly opposite idea" link at the bottom and see them throw shit all over that one too. That's a very simple and elegant solution to tribalism if you ask me, HN totally could take inspiration from them because the mods keep complaining about tribalism here :)
But people like that material; is it against the rules? If not, what's the problem? You may think it's trashy, but apparently it's rather popular and doesn't seem to be trolling, at least not to me.
Eh, /a/ is pretty trashy too. The thing about 4chan is that the users of the trashier boards have grown used to it. Reddit users feel entitled to a more moderated space. A lot of 4chan posts are also highly satirical, there's very few serious posts, and the posts thare are serioues are mocked for being serious. This mostly applies to the trashy boards, though. The majority of 4chan's boards are not like the subset you may be familiar with.
4chan has no economy of scale in the UI (i.e., reddit gets more interesting with more posters but imageboards get less interesting), and has no signup barriers to stop new users. The veneer of rudeness is intentional and acts to maintain quality, not reduce it.
Also there are many active topical boards like /an/ /cgl/ /fit/ /u/ you're not reading!
I thought 4chan was the largest forum on the Internet, and in fact I remember when 4chan displayed the total amount of live content on their servers as being 100GB. Now it's more than 1300GB. 4chan thus seems to have become more popular.
People really do hang out on 4chan, though it's lost some share recently to 8chan, but 4chan is certainly a very large forum, the 200k+ current users, as displayed on their homepage too, confirms this.
For a place where you don't have to worry about drive-by downvoters, for all its faults, 4chan is excellent for getting your opinion across.
I meant compared to the really large scale social networks.
I don't know how accurate this is, but to put some numbers on it, Reddit seems to be #9 and Twitter #11 according to Alexa [1] and 4chan is rated much lower [2].
Although, Hacker News ranks higher than I expected [3], which seems suspicious. Perhaps there's a better way to measure it?
There's a chance HN could be artificially compressing the number of upvotes site-wide in order to maintain the illusion of smallness. Reddit did this same thing for nearly a decade.
E.g. Obama's AMA only appeared to have 14k upvotes even though in reality hundreds of thousands of people voted on it.
It'd be harder to get away with on HN, but maintaining the illusion of a tight-knit community for as long as possible is pretty crucial to the site's success.
4chan makes almost $0, for all the time moot poured into it and all its supposed users. Moderation or lack thereof is probably why the ad space is so worthless. Its silly to compare it to Facebook.
Actually I'd say it has hurt it. Perceived excessive moderation on various boards is why people left to go to 8chan, where you can make and moderate your own boards, so long as all the content is legal.
I'd rather have no moderation than lax moderation, which is why I'm in favor of decentralizing imageboards; the nntpchan software, which is an imageboard over nntp, is very good for this. Perhaps some system using bittorrent technology, too.
To reply to astrange (I am unable to reply using the usual method because the HN mods don't like it when I post quickly, so they've stopped me from doing that, ironically in this discussion about moderation):
I wasn't trying to say that 8chan is unmoderated, I recognize that it is moderated, because of the "only legal content" rule, rather I was trying to say that an unmoderated imageboard could exist in theory, but an imageboard which insists on only legal content is of course moderated.
4chan's moderators are in an unenviable position. For example, a large number of users left because the moderators put their foot down and decided that the site would not be the base for a widespread Internet harassment campaign.
Are the users haemorrhaged from that to the detriment, or the benefit of the site?
That's largely a matter of opinion, and you must factor in what counts as a detriment or benefit, which varies with 4chan's goals. Arguably 4chan doesn't really have a goal, though some (particularly the alt-right type people) would say it's a detriment, and people like me or some users of non-political boards think it's a benefit, as one of the large concerns is that /pol/ is infecting other boards, despite the fact that it was made as a containment board.
Others boards such as /mlp/ however do not show such growth into other boards, perhaps because the rule against ponies is stronger than the rule against racism.
You can't have "no moderation" and "only legal content", and I don't think you've thought through the consequences of picking the first one. Law enforcement actually really does exist, you know.
