[jbarrs]

I wonder whether 4chan is the way it is purely as a consequence of there being minimal moderation, or whether the lack of moderation combined with extreme moderation of such content on other platforms is driving it all towards 4chan. Would all platforms wind up the same way if all moderation were removed? Or would it end up being far less obviously concentrated?

[edgyquant]

4chan isn’t minimally moderated. The rhetoric you see is curated I have been banned from 4chan a number of times for reasons I’m not sure of other than the fact that I don’t share the same, let’s call them political, beliefs as most of the posters there. It’s a white supremacists echo chamber by design, not coincidence.

[sudosysgen]

Indeed. It's a nice branding trick they pulled off by making people think it's free speech, it's not, it's moderated so that the political viewpoints of the moderators are replicated.

[grumblenum]

Moderation is also why you won’t see comments which are impolite or heretical but may be obviously true. 4chan is moderated, but the goals are just very different from sites that want to avoid the hassle of vigilante activists by enforcing orthodoxy in content. 4chan also goes to some effort to ensure easy identification of its pseudo-anonymous users. It’s also useful fodder to trick people into rage-donating to the right party. Always ask what the business model is for popular web properties. If you can’t figure it out or nobody else can make money in the same domain, then there is probably a side channel being monetized.

[sudosysgen]

4chan moderators absolutely care about enforcing an orthodoxy. If your content is not received positively they won't bother, but the moderators do act against content that isn't politically useful to their goals.

[grumblenum]

And what would you say that those goals are?

[sudosysgen]

4chan is moderated specifically to encourage the views it harbors. The state it is right now is the result of censorship by white nationalist moderators and coordinated action.

EDIT: This happened to me thrice. I got 3 temp-bans from /pol/ for having politics the mods didnt like.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...

[jlawson]

This experiment was real in the earlier era of the Internet. And the answer is: When censorship isn't universal, and there are lots of more or less free spaces to speak in, extreme views don't get concentrated and exist everywhere but at a much lower level of intensity. The mainstreamers are less ignorant too because they actually have some exposure to arguments and counterarguments against these views as opposed to just vilifying and banning the others.

Lots of other benefits to this model - names that people don't get trapped in extremist bubbles as much when they're not literally banned from everywhere else.

[edgyquant]

What? Without censorship a single line of thought, the most vocal, comes to dominate while a majority of people who disagree decide to leave for a new place. This happened all the time in the early internet, it happened to 4chan after Obama became president and it happens in subreddits everyday.