[alekratz]

one of the biggest problems that 4chan has to combat is spam. unfortunately, at 4chan's scale, hcaptcha and recaptcha are not free. 4chan is not exactly a font of money, either. the only reason they turned to this awful homebrew captcha was because recaptcha stopped being free. is there any better way to do it with a single developer for a website that serves millions of people a day?

[joe-collins]

Not the rampant racism or sexism or simple misanthropy or outright calls to violence or overflowing hostility.

It's the spam that tops the problem list.

[Etherlord87]

It's a bit embarrassing I even have to explain this, but yes, because racism or sexism are very important parts of 4chan's appeal: it's a place with freedom of speech. Let's be real the standards of discussion are low, but people can discuss stuff freely, which they wouldn't be able to if everything was buried under some GPT generated spam.

[codexon]

A lot of people think 4chan is one of the last bastions of free speech on the internet because they see a lot of racism that would normally be banned anywhere else.

But if you post something that goes against the alt-right that pisses them off too much and getting a lot of replies, it'll be deleted within minutes, or you'll even get banned for being "off topic".

4chan is not free speech, it is just a haven for the alt-right.

[TZubiri]

They do have rules and the site is quite moderated.

I do think though that any such site or platform will have the issue of judges inflecting their bias in their application of the rules.

So I wouldn't say that it is a unique phenomenon.

That said, of course there is a semantic as well as technical identity to 4chan. And they are quite connected, rather than isolated.

4chan, apart from its lax rules on what we now call hate speech, has developed a community where insults are now part of its culture. The fact that the site is anonymous greatly influences that animosity.

I like to think of 4chan not as a place where horrible people go, but where people go to be horrible. Of course you have the dedicated users, neets or schizos or chronically online, but again that's a propery of every site, and not necessarily a majority.

So if you read /pol/ or /b/ like articles of an organization with an editorial line, sure you will see nazis and a deranged group of people.

If you however see it like bathroom wall writings, you will see a bit of everyone.

[codexon]

There were no rules broken. Actually they selectively ignore the rule against racism as long as it is aligned with alt-right, and not just the pol board now.

https://4chan.org/rules

3. You will not post any of the following outside of /b/:

  b. Racism

The political bias of the moderators on the website have been documented by others.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...

They selectively censor any opposing views that rile them too hard or they can't easily refute, so it is not equivalent to bathroom scribbles.

Recent example just found today (not my post).

https://i.imgur.com/0Xkslke.jpeg

[throw1574236]

>https://i.imgur.com/0Xkslke.jpeg

That thread is about the Spanish movie "La piel que habito,"[0] and that OP post is actually describing the plot, it's not even a political post. So bringing up American Republicans out of nowhere is quite off topic. Strange how you conveniently cropped out the title and image that ostensibly showed this. Is this the best you can do?

[0] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_piel_que_habito

[TZubiri]

An article about 4chan from left media is something I won't read. Not a boomer, I can actually read 4chan anyways and make my own mind.

Image related is unfortunate. Not uncommon for jannies and mods in any website to use their power to self serve. It happens even in more serious and regulated sites like wikipedia, so I'm not surprised by the lack of moderation neutrality in a meme site.

[WeylandYutani]

No politics and news is just one board. You can go to 4chan to discuss more important things such as videogames.

[codexon]

Its not just the pol board as I showed in my other comments.

I don't use the videogame board so I do not know if anti alt-right comments there get deleted, but I find it hard to believe that anybody is going to be emotionally invested enough to delete posts that say "game X is going to succeed even when it is woke".

From a random search it looks like there's a lot of racist or alt-right aligned political comments there that never get deleted though.

[throw1574236]

This is not true. You can go to /v/ right now and see tons of pro black/trans in video games posters, and /lgbt/ is one of the largest boards on the site at 12th place by avg. posts per day.[0] Here are 3 /v/ threads I found in less than 5 seconds that are "pro woke":

1. 696014001

OP:

>Face it, it’s going to be a BG3 situation. Everyone will screech about it being woke, play it, then 6 months later everyone will say “no one called it woke, what are you talking about?”

2. 696014873

OP:

>If Japanese people are so based and anti-woke then why is this so popular in nipland? [pic of otokonoko game in image]

3. 696016309

OP:

>>9999 games cater to cis men, 1 doesn't

>>THIS IS LITERALLY GENOCIDE

(Two of these threads I found by searching the word "woke" in the catalog. The first was the first thread when I opened the page.)

In fact, these types of threads are against the rules,[1] but /v/ is somewhat evenly split between liberals and anti-liberals and liberals make these threads all day and can be seen in replies as well. They even have their own terms, eg. "Grumzcord Raid" "Grifter thread" etc. And if you knew anything about the mods and janitors you would know many are far from alt-right.

My guess is you went to /g/ and started making blatant political threads and got banned. Note that both sides get banned for blatant off topic political posts. Do you have any examples of posts you were banned for?

[0] https://4stats.io/

[1] rules#v §3 - "Threads should not devolve into flamewars. Instigating or encouraging such activity will not be tolerated."

[codexon]

The mods won't ban or delete 1 off posts that don't get any traction. And I'm talking about pol, the #1 board on the site by activity.

And no I don't visit g, if I wanted some discussion about technology I'd rather use this website instead. I'm not going to show any of my own examples for privacy purposes, and no doubt you will probably find some way to nit pick at those.

[throw1574236]

>mods won't ban or delete 1 off posts that don't get any traction

Janitors don't delete posts that they don't see or are not reported.

>I'm talking about pol, the #1 board on the site by activity.

/vg/ is neck and neck with /pol/, and that's only because /v/ was split into /v/ and /vg/.

And yeah, if you don't give any examples it's hard to take you seriously. The example you did give was egregiously OT, and in fact potentially thread-derailing. The fact that you saw that as an example of janitors being unfair puts your credibility into question. I showed that liberal opinions are allowed and even common on 4chan, which was your initial point. I don't browse /pol/ but I found liberal threads pretty easily here as well:

490048710 (99 replies)

OP:

>Calmly explain why pissing off these countries [in OP pic] will result in untold riches for the working class [countries are China, Canada and Mexico, in reference to Trump's tariffs]

490048788 (103 replies)

OP:

>Is Trump the last gasp of a dying empire?

>He's going hard, threatening every country in the world with huge tariffs and massive retaliation if they use currencies other than the US dollar. It's rather absurd. [post continues for another 3 paragraphs]

I don't think 4chan is necessarily a bastion of free speech. Twitter is probably more free in terms on what you can post now. However 4chan is nothing like Reddit, old twitter, YouTube etc. in terms of what you can post.

[sky2224]

The thing is, addressing the spam and also allowing users to have a low friction experience would be the first step to addressing the concerns you mentioned (without compromising the purpose of the site: anonymous and totally free speech).

There aren't many places for the people that share the views you mentioned to go other than sites like 4chan, so even though there's an awful captcha, they're going to be quite dedicated as they don't have many mainstream options elsewhere.

I believe if users were able to have a frictionless experience, then it'd reduce the chances of someone throwing their hands up in the air and saying, "this isn't worth it". I've actually attempted to reply to threads to challenge the views of others, but once I'm hit with the 300-1000 second wait time to post, I just close the tab and move on.

[ChadNauseam]

GP said "one of the biggest problems", not "the biggest problem"

[krmboya]

> Not the rampant racism or sexism or simple misanthropy or outright calls to violence or overflowing hostility.

Isn't that more easily solved by just not visiting the site in the first place?

[tovej]

This problem is a societal one, it mostly harms you indirectly by creating spaces for hateful ideas to spread, 4chan's harm is through the capacity to organize and strengthen hateful and harmful political movements. More socially conscious people not visiting the site only serves to create a stronger echo chamber.

[ranger_danger]

This is how oppression starts. First it's "let's only get rid of the most offensive content", then "let's suppress opinions we don't like".

[aguaviva]

This is how oppression starts

More often though it starts with wave after wave of logical fallacy.

As applies to your critique above, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

[Etherlord87]

A slippery slope argument is not necessarily a slippery slope fallacy. Which you should understand after reading the article you linked.

[tovej]

Would you please tell me one example where oppression has started with criticizing nazis.

[ranger_danger]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction

[matheusmoreira]

The fact you think some ideas are "harmful" is exactly why humanity needs sites like these. We don't trust people like you to determine which ideas are "harmful" and which aren't, which ideas are worth spreading and which aren't. We want to see for ourselves, thank you very much.

We are especially interested in the ideas that people deem offensive enough to suppress. Are they actually wrong or are they just socially unacceptable? Whatever the truth is, it can't be learned from a place that suppresses discussion of it. Declaring the matter as settled and suppressing any opposing viewpoint is the very definition of an echo chamber.

[tovej]

You're saying national socialism is not harmful? /pol/, /b/, and tons of other boards constantly spawn threads glorifying nazi germany and vilifying other ethnicities and women, using rhetoric calling for people belonging to these groups to be killed.

Violent far-right groups use these threads as a pool for recruitment. These far-right groups cause real societal harm through violent crime and shifting the view on violent policies against minorities.

I am not using an abstract moral argument when I say these ideas cause harm, I'm arguing based on objectively observed effects that the loose ethical norms of a liberal democratic society would unambiguously deem harmful.

[matheusmoreira]

> You're saying national socialism is not harmful?

Everything with the word "socialism" in it is harmful.

> vilifying other ethnicities and women, using rhetoric calling for people belonging to these groups to be killed

Unfiltered hate like that is a property of humanity itself. It is not at all exclusive to the so called internet hate machine. If you look closely, you'll find that plenty of "virtuous" people are capable of just as much hate, if not more. I've personally witnessed it.

[skotobaza]

That's the price you pay for ability to freely and anonymously voice different opinions. And even then 4chan is considered "soft", because mods still delete some egregiously "incorrect" opinions.

[avar]

    > is there any better way to do
    > it with a single developer for
    > a website that serves millions
    > of people a day?

No, the other reason they're using this is to make it so annoying that you'll spend $20/yr to buy a 4chan pass to bypass it.

If you're not making your free website annoying to drive revenue there's obvious ways to make it less annoying.

E.g. keep the annoying captcha, but don't show one again for the lifetime of a cookie, validate users who can make a money transfer of $0.01 etc.

[alekratz]

>No, the other reason they're using this is to make it so annoying that you'll spend $20/yr to buy a 4chan pass to bypass it.

I think this is a really cynical outlook, especially for a website that is not run as a modern tech-centric company. 4chan's roots are in that of the Old Internet, where it is a creative and messy and interesting place to be. why would they be banking solely on using a terrible captcha as a method to drive user subscriptions, when they have the option to run circus-tent ads? if making money was their sole purpose, why would they not kick the problematic and porn boards to the curb and ban the use of slurs to make room for more friendly advertisers? there are so many other avenues to increase profitability that most websites have taken which 4chan has staunchly refused to follow. why would they choose only the 4chan pass and ads as their only opportunity at making money?

[avar]

You're reading a lot into my reply. The GP's question was "is there any better way to [avoid the captcha] with a single developer?".

That's clearly the case. As a trivial example, 4chan could take your $20 and avoid giving you a captcha for 2 years, or charge you $10 for one year.

Both are a 2x improvement, if the only goal is to get past the necessary evil of the captcha.

But that clearly isn't the goal, that doesn't mean I'm begrudging 4chan their business model, that's something you grabbed out of thin air.

    why would they not kick the
    problematic and porn boards
    to the curb and ban the use
    of slurs to make room for more
    friendly advertisers?

How would that be a realistic alternative for the "single developer "? The entire selling point of 4chan is that it's a very limited time capsule of the old Internet wild west.

What you're describing would be a Reddit or Facebook groups clone. If 4chan became that, nobody would use it. They'd just use Reddit or Facebook groups.

[TZubiri]

Cynical yes, incorrect no.

The link between spam protection and payment is well documented and as old as the internet.

Consider the origins of bitcoin and PoW have been as a currency to stop email spam.

I do agree that the incentive is probably not to make money, but to deter spam. That said after so many times the company has been sold, I wouldn't disregard that theory

[iterance]

Doing so would destroy the culture of 4chan.

Companies centered around communities don't generally have leeway to shape their communities into a profitable form by directly altering the fabric of the community. Time and again it has been shown that forcing changes to the identity of a space leads to communities' rapid demise. In rare circumstances and with a skilled hand a community can be guided here and there in even some significant ways, but 4chan probably does not have that option: they'd need a massive shift to pull off what you describe.

Instead profit must generally be built around what is there. But whether or not such communities exist to make profit, they surely must be profitable, or they will not survive. They must, some time or another, be free of deficit. This is not a matter of capitalist greed for most communities, but an attempt to find a path towards stability.

[Anon1096]

> keep the annoying captcha, but don't show one again for the lifetime of a cookie

This is already being done, there's a cookie and heuristics in place that will give you an easier captcha or occasionally skip it entirely. But 4chan really does have a couple (and I truly mean a small amount of super super dedicated users) of bad actors who constantly spam and try to work around any roadblocks given to annoy the rest of the userbase. You cannot give them a reliable way to spam no matter what. That's why there's now many country and region blocks in addition to your standard VPN/DC IP range blocks. Plus the Cloudflare check added a couple years ago.

[bsagdiyev]

Is the anontalk guy still up to his shenanigans? It's admittedly been a very long time since I've used 4chan.