[FabHK]

FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later Reddit, Twitter, Instagram; and web sites such as Thought Catalog, later Jezebel, xoJane, Rookie Mag, and the Daily Dot, then everydayfeminism.com, Salon, Vox.

I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social media and even mainstream media, they originated on Tumblr and 4chan, respectively. I wonder whether one could quantify/measure it somehow.

[ethbr1]

> I wonder whether one could quantify/measure [where ideas originated and entered the mainstream] somehow.

You could probably use something like genetic tracing, if you could come up with a way of fingerprinting free text semi-reliably.

My expectation is there are probably "tell words" (i.e. not used elsewhere or for that purpose) in novel ideas, and you could likely observe these spreading over time, as the ideas carrying them did.

One of the first things groups tend to do is specialize and redefine language / create jargon.

[Cthulhu_]

A complication is that some of this jargon gets mangled over time. "Based and redpilled" is definite jargon associated with certain subcultures, but you won't see it in mainstream media other than articles about that exact phrase.

[kevindamm]

I would posit that the proportion of "originated from 4chan" notes on knowyourmeme.com are an indicator of its outsized influence.

[sen_armstrong]

I wouldn't bet much on KYM's provenance research. Memes spread so far so fast on the information superhighway, those that started on some Korean photography forum or Russian anime newsgroup, you'd never know if you weren't there ... or know where to look. KYM often cites 4chan because it's popular, in English, and well-archived (ironic indeed) and KYM editors will take the earliest hit from the third-party archives as provenience, when the archive itself might be younger than the meme.

You can find discrediting examples in the mid-2000s thread collection the internet archive recently released ("archive ten billion"): memes appear in the chanological record years before they anywhere Google knows of. But how can you know that's the real origin? Even "Know your memes" first appears in there as a /b/ catchphrase in April 2006, but you must notice that's also when the /b/ posts in the collection begin.

Edit, another example:

4chan is also known as a Mongolian basket-weaving forum, among other things: corruptions descended from the meme of referring to anime as "Chinese cartoons". An old 4chan saying, as KYM finds? No, it came from that Russian anime newsgroup, ru.anime.chainik, after its parody FAQ from 2002 was translated by users of an associated LiveJournal group and added to a since-deleted Uncyclopedia article.

  Q: Что такое аниме?
  A: Китайские порнографические мультфильмы.

The full FAQ is on the author's website, which is still online, shounen.ru/anime/tech/afaq.shtml But is it entirely original to that newsgroup? Some of those terms seem to have come from FIDO...

[sen_armstrong]

a mirror of the uncyclopedia page https://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/Onime

the livejournal stuff is also still up https://ru-onime.livejournal.com/71601.html

(2005)

[kevindamm]

Thanks for your reply and examples, very informative. I agree it's an awful metric but seemed it might hold water when I first typed it. Full disclosure, I have never actually visited 4chan despite ample opportunity.

[bombcar]

This is exactly why it's so famous; everyone knows of it but is scared to visit (or admit they visit) so it's a perfect "source of anything".

(This post originated on 4chan)

[sdwr]

"Underwater basket-weaving" was a derogatory term for impractical university classes back in the 70s (?)

and Mongolian is a stand-in for mongoloid, which fell off the euphemism treadmill as a descriptor for people with Downs syndrome.

So "Mongolian basket-weaving forum" means "place for r*, useless people"

[_3u10]

4chan is the America of the internet, the only reason it has outsized influence is because ideas were allowed to incubate.

Most memes and ideas went no where but some had a chance to multiply without getting stamped out by the censors.

[ryukoposting]

As someone who was exposed to 4chan at far too young of an age, I don't buy this. There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been. Granted, I avoided that board like the plague, but cursory glances never showed me any novel ideas being formulated. Even if there is real conversation of various political ideologies, it's drowned out by a sea of kids who think it's cool to say the N word online.

4chan is unique because of its combination of scale, relative lack of moderation, and relatively high anonymity. By nature, it's a place where political radicals would be able to shitpost freely en masse. 4chan was absolutely a vehicle for platforming radical politics, but the word "shitpost" is key - the average discourse on 4chan isn't at a level where ideological formulation can happen at a meaningful scale.

Memes are the only exception. 4chan memes have, on multiple occasions, turned into widely-known (and sometimes widely-misunderstood) political imagery. That imagery routinely has no clear symbolism whatsoever, and is assigned all kinds of wacky meanings depending on you ask... which is what you'd expect from 4chan, I guess.

[filoleg]

> There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been.

Agreed, but to be fair, /pol/ was created with the officially stated goal of acting as a containment board. And tbh, that’s exactly what it still is to this day.

[Cthulhu_]

4chan is the infinite racists on infinite typewriters analogy; that said, some ideas converge and crystallize and escape out of the shitposts. Greentext screenshots and images that are distributed outside of the cesspool and get mainstream appeal though e.g. Reddit.

Survivorship bias, evolutionary somethings, and curation help the shit escape 4chan's confines. I can probably word that more eloquently when my brain isn't fried.

[causality0]

It's absolutely baffling to me that despite the sheer amount of garbage, people still choose to post non-garbage content there at all. You sort through a hundred neo-nazi and race-baiting posts and then you find news that happened less than thirty seconds ago and won't be on CNN for two hours. I wish these "insiders" would find a better place share their information.

[underlipton]

That was Twitter. Twitter was just 4chan For Everyone. But it was a company with investors and content with political ramifications, so they changed things to suit advertisers and politicians. They changed the timeline algo. And the reply algo. And the Trending algo. And they added "Verified" accounts. And then Musk bought it.

It can be made again. But whoever does it has to learn from past mistakes.

[ryukoposting]

There is no voting system by which to gauge one's popularity. There is no profile or personal brand to be crafted. There is no follower count to build. Post ranking is most-recent-reply first, and nothing more.

This model attracts all manner of idiocy and hatred, and it's much too easy for one provocateur to hijack the system. The result is that the site requires several containment zones like /b/ and /pol/.

However, the upshot of 4chan (or any imageboard, really) is the total lack of narcissistic incentive. If you stick to blue boards, consciously avoid the containment zones, and you ignore the provocateurs (big IFs, I know), 4chan hosts some remarkably eclectic discussion of the arts, science, and entertainment. It's really good at elevating things that are thought-provoking or avant garde, if only within the bounds of a polarizing and inaccessible platform.

[bombcar]

It's the very fact that it's unmoderated that it can be unfiltered.

If you happen to get footage of a "happening" and post it on 4chan, people will notice (and call you various slurs).

If you post it anywhere else it's liable to be deleted, or worse, ignored.