[benbscholz]

You may want to visit Mr. Poole's first website, 4chan, which requires anonymous posting on some areas but allows a limited identity in others (through tripcodes). The effect of anonymous posting on content quality is immediately apparent.

[runn1ng]

4chan doesn't dissallow tripcodes anywhere. edit: they apparently do that in /soc/. Oh well.

I wouldn't say that the discussion there is that terrible (of course if you don't go to /b/, the "everything goes" board). Yes, for example for technology, /g/ board is unreadable, full of mindless hatred and the same type of discussions over and over (absolutely incomparable with Hacker News). The same for /v/. /int/ is just a shoutbox for racism and stereotypes. Really, the more popular boards are terrible. Poole sometimes seems to like it, trumping it as "raw uncensored opinion", but it's mostly just dumb.

However, I also visit /co/ board for cartoons and comics, and it is one of the best places to talk about these.

[jeffool]

Actually they do disallow tripcodes on /soc/, which is hilarious.

Doubly funny though, is how people there still use the name field, and rarely troll with it. The honor system largely works.

[runn1ng]

Oh. I didn't know that. I don't visit /soc/ at all.

[jeffool]

... I've said too much.

[redthrowaway]

Try reading /k/ or /o/. Tripcodes don't really make a huge difference, it just means the flamewars are more personal.

[EdiX]

I heard of a website called Hacker News that allows anonymous posting. I bet that's a cesspool too.

[icebraining]

I don't think having profiles, like here in HN, means the system is no longer anonymous. As long as if you have nothing to link you to your other identities, it's anonymous.

Besides, 4chan is a clusterfuck for other reasons; it's part of the culture of the place, and that even differs for each section. /lit/ is much more civilized than /b/, for example.

[brigade]

Not particularly. If anything, it's a case study in how the older / more popular an online public community gets, the worse the average content quality gets.

Also, pretty sure there hasn't been forced anonymous in years.

[william42]

The more I think about this stuff, the more I think there's almost a Smeed's Law[1] for communities, where the content quality is statistically dominated by the size of the community and not much else. But this would be next-to-impossible to formalize.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smeed%27s_law

[gbog]

AH,good, someone in his own mind here. OP is pure wind, 4chan is full of shit, Google, FB, etc will never want this kind of content. I was on Usenet long time ago, you have some idle guys who would spend a lot of time turning all discussions into shit, allowing pure anon is giving them all latitude to do so.

[garethsprice]

Google and FB are full of 4chan content... love it or hate it, 4chan is the source for a huge number of the memes that eventually bubbled up to the mainstream over the last few years.

Anonymity (or at least, properly contextualized identity) allows people to try out different identities and modes of creation. Removing all social context results in a smoothed out, lowest-common-denominator of personality, but it's the jagged edges and oddities that really make people interesting - or ugly.

[skeptical]

I will play the devils advocate here...

I've browsed 4chan every now and then during the last year I will totally disagree with you.

If anything, the post quality is deceiving, not immediately apparent. I couldn't understand at first, but then it became obvious. 99% of the posts are striped from any real content, they are irrelevant single words, offenses, f*ked up puctures, funny pictures, etc. But then, in 1% of the comments lies the real value of 4chan.

I've seen very insightful comments in there. Many topics that would be taboos on pretty much any other place on the internet are discussed there openly and with innovative views. I'm not sure about the purpose of the huge amount of useless fluff, but if you want to get the real content you need acknowledge that crazy people will post tons of stupid things while serious discussions take place.

If you have a totally new way of looking at a subject, if you expose it to a place where your identity is valued, you will for sure get it damaged. So everybody refrains from posting potentially controversial opinions. Going the opposite direction and totally remove identity ties, will attract trolls, but you get the real stuff, what people really think, no bullshit, no political correctness.

[SoftwareMaven]

If you have a totally new way of looking at a subject, if you expose it to a place where your identity is valued, you will for sure get it damaged. So everybody refrains from posting potentially controversial opinions.

That's the part that scares me the most. In a world where everything you say is directly associated with you and indexabke forever in a search engine, people will have every reason to fear stepping out of mainstream opinions. The majority will become more beige. The minority will become more extreme. There will be less in between.

I prefer my world more interesting.

[Ezku]

> If anything, the post quality is deceiving, not immediately apparent. I couldn't understand at first, but then it became obvious. 99% of the posts are striped from any real content, they are irrelevant single words, offenses, fked up puctures, funny pictures, etc. But then, in 1% of the comments lies the real value of 4chan.

I couldn't agree more. I've long since lost the ability to get offended by pretty much anything 4chan could throw at me, so I must be pretty biased at this point. My view, however, is that the trolling and gore are in essence just a filter for potential audiences. In the early days, not rarely would there be threads up posting gore with the explicit goal of getting rid of newbies. (The actual vocabulary associated with these subjects on 4chan is rather more crude and graphic, and I will not denigrate this discussion with voicing it aloud.)

By getting past the filter, ie. being able to scan boards and threads for relevant content and not getting too offended on the way, you will have proven to the collective consciousness your ability to partake in discussions of taboo matters and doing so with a certain degree of objectivity and an open mind. That's the point after which actual discussion can happen. Combined with anonymity and volatility of content, this quality makes /b/ not only a cesspool of humanity but a place where entirely new kinds of conversations can take place and new ideas be entertained.

To understand the essence of moot's argument of prismatic identity, I find a certain underlying understanding of the scene where he's coming from is also necessary. It's not often that I see this point discussed, but I think it's important. Thank you for bringing it up.

[notatoad]

you might be conflating 4chan with /b/. there's a lot of 4chan that isn't /b/. further, i think it's possible to argue that the huge amount of useless fluff on /b/ is not a bad thing - the whole point of it is to be a sink for that stuff.