Granted a large part of that is due to the Laissez-faire/incompetent moderation of the site
Actually I'm surprised there hasn't been an anonymous website with strict rules and actually decent moderation; every single spin-off of the site also takes a freeform approach to everything
A site where everybody is invited to submit content anonymously but it's heavily censored & moderated becomes a mouthpiece for the moderators. It's basically Yelp, or the Op-Ed section of a newspaper.
Interesting comparisons, but I would have to say those places still have a sense of identity, even if it's one cooked up 30 seconds ago with a 10minuteemail address.
I'm more curious about a site with the "enforced" lack of identity present on those imageboards, except with the ruleset of Twitter or Facebook.
Rather, 4channers are very adept at heaping shame on other people. They might avoid the return fire by virtue of being anonymous, but it doesn't actually solve the problem of shame storms, just turns it into asymmetric warfare.
4chan (and other such networking media) attract individuals who have developed in an existing social environment. My understanding was that jerf wanted us to engineer a new type of social structure that could be taught to children during their formative years of development.
It's not as crazy as it sounds. PG wrote an essay about this once [1], and many East Asian cultures have much weaker conceptions of personal identities (separate from a family or larger society) than American and Western European culture does.
The challenge is that this is not an evolutionarily-stable-strategy from a game theoretic perception. When a person from a culture with a weak conception of personal identity meets a person from a culture with a strong conception of personal identity, the former tends to subordinate their desires to the latter, because that's what it means to have a weak conception of identity. As a result, the sphere of public discourse gets dominated by all those individuals with strong identities, even if the majority of people on earth do not have one. (Growing up half-Asian, this was a major source of angst for me, and still something I struggle with.)
I think it likely you’d just be replacing one set of neuroses with another.
I’m not even sure what “keeping your identity small” entails, other than assigning more of your merits/demerits to extrinsic factors, or in the Asian case to family or national affiliation. I’m not sure that either of those would help in the case of the online mass bullying that we’re discussing here.
Regarding the essay, I think PG was more right when he said politics and religion were topics which could not be decided upon, so everyone just lets loose. That echoes what Nietzsche said about modern (moral) debate being meaningless, because there are no objective grounds on which to judge anything, so people just shout at each other impotently. It’s an old one but a good one.
Do you think this weaker conception of personal identity is one of the causes of lower crime rates in Asian nations? It would seem an ethos more invested in the whole would exhibit this, along with a lower level of materialism in general.
Actually I'm surprised there hasn't been an anonymous website with strict rules and actually decent moderation; every single spin-off of the site also takes a freeform approach to everything