something tells me 4chan will survive the birth and death of many social media platforms. lessons to be learned but everyone keeps repeating the same mistakes
People thank that 4chan has no moderation and no rules but it has both. The moderators are invisible to users. Posts are and can be reported by users. Moderation action also happens invisibly as the users are mostly anonymous.
Additionally like how some irc networks had a philosophy of hidden ops, encouraging users to hide their elevated status leads to a more egalitarian experience. Moderators can't abuse their position as easily as on other platforms.
There are rules specific to a board and the site itself.
The rules are more libertarian than other platforms but the users modify their behaviour to play within the rules as much as on other platforms.
The site proactively reports illegal things to various national law enforcement agencies. They don't wait until being asked by the police or ordered to by a judge. This fact is probably why it's still online.
Personally, I would like to see an 4chan style image board but with stricter rules of behaviour so that people are less toxic and more kind in their communications to each other.
I agree but I don't see how this is possible at any scale because any rules would be subject to interpretation by other humans.
One example that happens a lot is the "code of conduct" in FOSS projects, bad users often use it as a false flag to justify suppressing opinions they don't like, AND bad moderators (in addition to the false flag approach) abuse their colorful interpretations of subjective terms to push a narrative.
Not sure if it tracks given that the founder himself more or less got ousted from his platform. I don't exactly think the current owners keep the servers up in good faith.
I do have to wonder if people are on to something calling it a honeypot due to cloudflare inexplicably keeping them online yet ban other sites like kiwifarms. They still service 8chan as well and they're even posting zoosadist videos. Maybe law enforcement really is keeping it up in order to catch people, I don't know.
Maybe this lends weight to the idea that the strongest social network is decentralized and not reliant on a single point of ownership/control/failure? :)
We’ve had that for 40+ years. It’s called email. It’s a cesspool of spammers and scammers with an asymmetric cost advantage over the filters and operators of servers.
Sure, but that influence has not exactly been positive. That's the catch I think. It's much easier to exert negative influence than positive influence.
It’s not that simple. Tribalism is easy and most considered a net negative. Tribalism is easy to sell because it’s ingrained in humans. That’s what 4chan does, pick the lowest hanging fruit.
It does but that’s not what a large scale scalable corp is trying to achieve. You want as many participants as possible enjoying themselves for as long as possible.
Maybe that's the key... sites should not become so large that it creates big echo chambers for one person to reach millions, it keeps other people having to search for answers and do their own research instead of just everyone listening to the same group of idiots.
Perhaps you could also force a limit on how much time was spent (or how many posts made in X time) on the site.
Additionally like how some irc networks had a philosophy of hidden ops, encouraging users to hide their elevated status leads to a more egalitarian experience. Moderators can't abuse their position as easily as on other platforms.
There are rules specific to a board and the site itself. The rules are more libertarian than other platforms but the users modify their behaviour to play within the rules as much as on other platforms.
The site proactively reports illegal things to various national law enforcement agencies. They don't wait until being asked by the police or ordered to by a judge. This fact is probably why it's still online.
Personally, I would like to see an 4chan style image board but with stricter rules of behaviour so that people are less toxic and more kind in their communications to each other.