[shipscode]

The take on 4chan on here is super intriguing. I always felt that the current social media/doomscroll/memesharing landscape which has become so common worldwide is indiscernable and in some ways worse than 4chan. It feels like 4chan left it's homepage and went worldwide sometime in the early 2010s when iPhone-style phone use became more commonplace.

I remember that 4chan users had more honor than users on the internet today. One example would be 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts, driven by huge accounts on IG/Tiktok/etc, that hit normal people daily.

The modern social media landscape has become far more hectic, harmful, and downright scary than 4chan. Dodging explicit imagery is harder on Instagram's explore page than on 4chan, and the widespread popularization of OF creators has zero bounds across the socials. DOXXING is no longer frowned upon and now commonplace. And memes have become less unique and funny and more commoditized.

[profmonocle]

> 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts

That's too generous. "Not your personal army" started because 4chan had a well-earned reputation for harassment - usually raiding other web sites, but often targeting individual people who caught their attention for one reason or another.

The "not your personal army" slogan came about because people who were very aware of this reputation were showing up, hoping to make a web site or person they disliked the next target. That got annoying fast, hence they told those people to go away.

It wasn't a moral stance against target harassment - far from it. It was a stance that the group mind will choose the next target when they feel like it - not because some rando is mad at their ex or something

[Ferret7446]

4chan will always be superior than modern social media to me, for one very simple reason: all posts are anonymous and there is no voting/ranking.

Each and every post must stand alone and be judged alone. You do not know if it was posted by someone you hate or adore. It doesn't get hidden or promoted based on what a bubble voted. You see the post and you must judge it alone.

[lurk2]

This used to be a selling point for me when I was younger, but increasingly I find myself not wanting to deal with poorly-moderated platforms. I can’t tell if it’s because the transgressive vulgarity that these platforms enable has lost its novelty as I’ve gotten older or because the median user has less to contribute. Every time I try to browse 4chan these days I find that half the posts are repulsive, basically pornographic representations of the world, and the other half is the product of psychosis (that is, the people making the posts likely need to be institutionalized).

There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation, and a lot of people who are actively detrimental to a conversation. It used to be that you would put up with the craziest ones for the benefit of finding novel and overlooked ideas, but as the internet has become more accessible, the former group now outnumbers the latter.

I would be inclined to think that the problem is that I just grew out of the shock value, but I see the same trend on almost every other platform, too.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation,

While true, the few people who do have something to contribute to a conversation simply can't do so on a highly-sanitized, heavily-moderated forum. The things they'd say would be too upsetting to a status quo, and the status quo will win. There is a real difference between something truly insightful and flat earth theory, but outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-breather whose only qualification for moderating is that he showed up to r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone else is not the way to detect those differences.

Wait until you're banned without appeal from some place because you called it the master branch out of 15 years of habit then get back to me if this moderation thing is all its cracked up to be. 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least insane of all internet forums, and humanity would be ashamed of that if it wasn't the root cause.

[lurk2]

> but outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-breather whose only qualification for moderating is that he showed up to r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone else is not the way to detect those differences.

Spez once compared these people to a landed gentry; they are not unlike domain squatters. Notably, 4chan is basically identical in this regard. I’ve been banned from /lit/, /trv/, and /his/ for posts that the janitors of each board have decided were off-topic, even though they were plainly related to the board’s subject. There are potential structural solutions to this incentive problem, but the easiest solution is to take your ball and go home when a platform demonstrates that they don’t want you there. The big issue is that the global audience has consolidated onto a few sites, so there isn’t a lot of meaningful competition for the users that do leave.

> 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least insane of all internet forums

Hacker News is superior by almost every metric. Reddit was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in the years before Trump was elected. The model works as long as the managers are not incompetent. The true problem is how to keep the network effects in play when moderators abuse their position as stewards to censor others due to motives of pride or self-enrichment. Federated networks might be the solution here.

[GoblinSlayer]

You described stackoverflow. People aren't banned elsewhere because they have nothing to say, not because moderators are better.

Those same mods ban for certain posts about Discord. Coincidence?

[lurk2]

> People aren't banned elsewhere because they have nothing to say, not because moderators are better.

I don’t understand what you mean.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Hacker News is superior by almost every metric.

In the most narrow of topics, it's semi-superior... and because of bizarre circumstances that aren't easily replicated. We can't do politics here (though that erodes every day, looks like), which keeps the worst shit-shows out of here, but anywhere else that wouldn't ever happen. dang is some sort of minor saint, had this been reddit that would have morphed into "we can't do politics except those I like".

Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.

>Reddit was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in the years before Trump was elected.

Sure, for a brief period as the reddit population was ramping up, but before ever slack-jawed imbecile showed up thinking it was the new Facebook, it was pretty good. But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.

>The model works as long as the managers are not incompetent.

...

>Federated networks might be the solution here.

Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other. Have you checked out Lemmy? The first and biggest instance was a bunch of Stalin-esque commies who camped out on it with the intent of dominating the entire system. See, with reddit, no one quite understood that it might become big, and so no one was eyeing it with the intent od a landgrab. But once it failed, everyone was on the lookout for the next-big-thing, and if there was even a chance of it they set up shop. No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.

[lurk2]

> Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.

This line might exist, but I have yet to see it. I have seen users on this forum advocate for eugenics and murdering CEOs, and not obliquely.

> But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.

It was around the time they banned /r/TheDonald. There was still a ton of good discussion going on there until that point. The new app also brought in a ton of casual users who didn’t fit with the site’s historical demographic of cerebral young men.

> Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other.

That’s the problem I haven’t figured out. In theory you could have a branching moderation authority that could be forked if the moderator starts abusing their power, but the issue is that most users won’t notice anything is wrong until years after the problem arises.

> No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.

Would you not consider a shift back to personal networking a technical solution to the problem?

[variadix]

I would really like to see some exploration of alternative site structures, ways to design new social media sites with better systems of incentives, for users and for mods. There is very little diversity in how social media sites are driven by users and moderated by admins (engagement or vote driven post recommendations, opaque administration decisions). I think a small fixed cost per post paid in XMR has potential to significantly improve post quality for anonymous platforms. Moderation is trickier, especially if the owner doesn’t take a back seat and rein in the mods occasionally, but more transparency into moderators and their moderation decisions (public ban log with detailed justification, pseudo anonymous account tracking per mod) with some accountability from the user base e.g. meta discussion board around site policy with engagement from mods and owner.

[tovej]

No moderation is still worse. It means that -- especially with 4chans activity-based thread sorting -- the most "engaging" (read: rage-inducing) content gets bubbled up without fail. AND that you can drive away all reasonable people with, e.g. gore or absolutely reprehensible political views. Views that are not only explicitly racist but genocidal. The board is called /pol/, but it doesn't actually discuss politics, it discusses racist or otherwise hateful worldviews. There's no serious policy discussion going on here. Let's not kid ourselves.

I was a regular in 2007-2010 on /g/, /sci/, /mu/ and /fa/. The boards had their share of trolling then, but were mostly alright. I cannot recognize the boards anymore. They are full of vile garbage. Nobody is interested in discussing the interests that the board is there for, they're just posting the most outrageous thing possible. It's slop for the brain just as much as any social media feed is.

Whatever communities I found on 4chan have managed to survive outside of it, and none of us go there anymore. I don't use reddit, but it is still 100x better than 4chan.

[throwaway652368]

Why do people think 4chan is unmoderated? It is moderated, spamming an unrelated board with gore or porn will certainly get you banned, and illegal porn will get you banned and reported to federal agencies. It's unmoderated in the sense that you're allowed to say things that are against the status quo, but that's a good thing.

>absolutely reprehensible political views

Also known as thoughtcrime

[jajuuka]

Please, 4chan has always been rife with illegal porn. It's been like that since the beginning. The Fappening and subsequent leaks were driven by 4chan. It's about as moderated as twitter is these days. Let's not white wash the site and pretend that every thread doesn't have multiple people just popping in to call OP or other uses slurs.

[lurk2]

> Also known as thoughtcrime

Is conspiracy to commit murder an unfairly persecuted thoughtcrime that we should permit on the off-chance that punishing it would lead to Orwellian outcomes?

[Yeul]

Reasonable people are boring though. I find the vile people amusing.

[GoblinSlayer]

>There's no serious policy discussion going on here.

Presumably leftypol is underrepresented on /pol/ because it's overrepresented everywhere else. Additionally it crucially relies on favorable moderation, so it really opts out on its own.

[smsm42]

This is good sometimes but also horrible sometimes, because reputation exists for a reason. It's a filter, and if you have terabytes of information around which has mostly garbage quality you need filters if you want to make it useful. Of course, reputation does not solve the problem entirely, but at least it makes some steps towards the solution. Otherwise, you're basically on your own against the ocean of garbage, and not many people can really handle that.

[sph]

Agreed. I would go so far as to say all the ills of modern social media are because of ranked platforms, such as upvote/downvote-based, or like-based. They turn into echo chambers, that promote witty one-liners over nuance, and any sort of controversial position is effectively censored.

That said, HN functions decently well, though in some ways it is even worse in the censoring the outliers.

[bananalychee]

HN has a good model for technical discussions, and the fact that it's a forum with a limited scope whose audience mostly consists of technology professionals probably helps a lot in filtering low-effort posting (not to downplay the role of moderation). But when it comes to emotional topics like anything political, it clearly devolves into what you described.

That makes me wonder if there are forums out there that focus on current events in politics or economics and successfully filter emotionally-charged posts; the few commentators on X who manage to stay detached are the only people keeping me on algo-driven social media.

[ropable]

Hard disagree. Finding anything of quality on 4chan is like searching for gold nuggets by hand in a mountain of radioactive poop. The only times I've ever seen anything useful in there is when someone else has already done the hard work of curating a post.

The core reason why HN is superior (IMO) is the curation and the moderation.

[anonfordays]

That is heretical now, unimaginable to huge swaths of the Internet.

[amadeuspagel]

"Not your personal army" goes father then not doxxing. It's a rejection of any attempt to imagine a community of strangers, united by hatred of a scapegoat.

[smsm42]

> united by hatred of a scapegoat.

United by hatred of a scapegoat that they didn't choose on a random whim or due to some common agenda. Otherwise it's completely fine.

[shadowgovt]

If someone rallied a hate-mob on 4chan, though, how would people know?

Since 4chan overtly resists it, it'd rapidly move off of there, but it's still a great place to find like-minded folks that'd follow someone to another server to go brigade someone.

[Klonoar]

4chan has always claimed to resist it, but 4chan was never immune to being shuffled a specific way.

[mikeyouse]

Right, “not your personal army” was a quick way to decline to advance whatever doxx was being requested at that moment. Not an actual ethos. They regularly doxxed and swatted all sorts of people.

[snvzz]

Immune is the extreme.

"claimed to resist but hasn't been immune" is reduction to absurd.

[bboygravity]

So "not your personal army" == don't be a journalist?

[anigbrowl]

No it was a stock response to proposals for board/site raids from people who had lost an argument or been banned and wanted to retaliate (but without offering comedy potential). Kinda like when corporate people discovered flash mobs and tried to use them for free marketing.

[watwut]

Note that it is possible only because harassment, abuse and raids happened so frequently, it was a well know fact.

Not exactly something that makes 4chan people into ethical or moral.

[jabroni_salad]

A thing about the site is that comments not threaded or ranked. When the site started getting a reputation you had a lot of tourist beggars coming in fishing for free labor. NYPA is about getting those people to stop cluttering the place with garbage.

[PixelForg]

My main problem with 4chan is how they talk, like the language they use. They really don't care about anyone's feelings and show a lack of empathy. Unfortunately this has been spreading to other social media as well.

Imagine how good a place it could have been if people over there talked like people on HN.

[ogurechny]

There is no “they”.

Like many others coming from social web, you expect to find some kind of community which fashions everyone shares, an apparel you can put on. The idea is complete opposite: you don't need to follow any fashion, or imagine yourself “part of the team” any more than you want to. Even though it's not written in any rules, you don't have to use slang or tone if you find them dumb, overused (globally or locally), or forced. Neither do you have to treat stupid posts with respect.

I assume that after 15-20 years of being part of collective consciousness, anonymous image boards have mostly the same public as any average site. Amount of crap that you can read there is just the same as everywhere (though in some cases this or that Big Brother hides it from your view — obviously, to make you more comfortable, and spend more time in his warm embrace). The difference is that regular social fashions mandate the use of suitable set of candy wrappers for the crap, then there are customary ways of dealing with them, so in the end people just spend their time wrapping and unwrapping crap, but are proud of themselves, and call it “civilised discourse”.

[fwip]

You're saying that the demographics of 4chan is roughly similar to most any site on the internet?

[ogurechny]

Well, everyone who wanted to join was able to do it. Constant media attention informed everyone and the dog about it.

[fwip]

Sure, everyone who wanted to join, could. That doesn't mean that the same kind of people want to join orstick around. Even sites like Twitter and Facebook have pretty different userbases, despite being pretty similar.

[ogurechny]

I guess I should set the reference point.

I remember the time when normal internet users who visited imageboards simply couldn't figure out what was happening, and went back to normal sites (sometimes in disgust). There were no tourist guides written by journalists for the general public. Big forums had informational topics teaching users who “internet trolls” are (starting a short period when any argument which someone didn't understand, or pretended to, was automatically called “trolling”). Someone who used imageboard slang on a regular site was seen as an underage idiot (and certainly looked like one to outsiders), and could find that his accounts with “original” passwords no longer belonged to him (because internet was serious business). Oh, and if someone wrote a post praising some politician, no one needed an explanation that it was a satire that made fun of people believing in “supporting our candidate”.

Compared to that, and after 15+ years, 4chan public is pretty normal, even if it is not exactly the same as on some other site.

[starfezzy]

3/10 troll

That's antithetical to many of the foundational rules of the internet, which are core to 4chan culture.

The whole point is that they don't let the fluctuating, weak-willed whims of normie sensibilities determine what's allowed.

[PixelForg]

And thats exactly what I don't like, there's no good reason why the internet has to be like this. It's simple, just be the same online like how you'd be irl. Tired of all these people that would talk shit online but become weak irl.

Then again this is just my opinion, I don't like 4chan because of the mentioned reasons so I don't visit it. Nothing trollworthy about that.

[starfezzy]

Oh I was just saying it came off as an uncle er troll because it's like a weak bait with a comical conclusion.

It's like saying "4chan would be great if they were more like reddit". But the entire point is to not be like reddit. HN is largely equivalent to reddit for this point—progressives who cant fathom the existence of intelligent people who reject frail sensibilities; who conclude out of such closed mindedness that anyone who rejects those sensibilities must be broken.

I think there's room for improvement in both places. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the value in the internet is that you can be exactly the way your are IRL. As someone who rejects a lot of ultra progressive stuff (most of what's astroturfed as "normal" by giga-progressives corporations that have taken over the internet and banned dissent for 15 years), I appreciate that I can at least feel a false sense of security sharing mentally sound ideas that have been recognized for thousands of years without having my life ruined.

[ASalazarMX]

> That's antithetical to many of the foundational rules of the internet, which are core to 4chan culture.

The most foundational rule of the Internet was the sharing of information, and that's a coincidence of hackers being the first to adopt it. Being macho and emotionally stunted was never a foundational value, that's immature manchildren equating kindness with weakness.

[YurgenJurgensen]

Nobody on Twitter or Reddit or Bluesky or Facebook or whatever ever cared about anyone’s feelings either, they just avoid using certain no-no words.

[Zambyte]

I have an awesome circle of people on Bluesky that I'm connected with that very much care about each others feelings. I'm sure that's not universal on there, but the corner that I'm in on there has probably been my most pleasant experience on the internet ever.

[artursapek]

It’s performative. Not real

[Zambyte]

No it isn't. I have plans to meet people I originally connected with on Bluesky in person. I have received physical mail from people on the other side of the world that I connected with on Bluesky. I connected a person I met on their with my mother due to related personal struggles. Making this claim is really weird when you don't know anything about me or my friends.

[YurgenJurgensen]

I think it’s notable that your examples of people caring on Bluesky all involve moving to a channel other than Bluesky. Surely if the emotional connection were real, you wouldn’t need to move off social media to facilitate it?

[nathan_compton]

This is one of the weirder contemporary "anti-woke" takes. For one thing, that which is performative can easily also be genuine, and quite arguably if one feels genuine about something then one ought to perform it, hopefully in a way that makes it attractive to other people.

But on the subject of whether things are genuine or not, I see lots of actual, cash on the table, give money, mutual aid in these communities. I could understand performance as being artificial, but if someone is dropping cash to help a person out of a bad situation, that seems a pretty good definition of authentic to me.

In any case, "it's performative" simply does not imply it is not also real.

[Ar-Curunir]

What a sad mindset.

[willis936]

Feature, not bug. Edgy teens don't want responsible adults in their clubhouse. Unfortunately it also attracts manchildren.

If it was pleasant to the senses then it wouldn't be counterculture.

[HaZeust]

HN is 4chan in many ways - the smart, civilized people just come here. Whereas the smart people that are willing to act disabled go there.

[NewUser76312]

Ha, not even close. Not anonymous, upvoting and vote manipulation mechanics, and a very soft and liberal political bend, I'm leaning.

I like it though, good to have some opposites to view so you don't get stuck in a bubble.

[sph]

HN is older 4chan. On the imageboard, you have the constant feeling you are arguing against 12 year olds.

[Zambyte]

Edit: this post is irrelevant to the context.

4chan is four years older than Startup News (the original name of Hacker News).

[sph]

I wasn't talking about age of the platform. I was talking about average mental age of its users.

[Zambyte]

Ah, my bad

[foolfoolz]

modern 4chan has a certain authentic charm to it. this is missing from most other places. you have to sift past loads of junk to get it, but you have to do that on any app to get the content you want.

with no names, likes, virality, accounts, etc there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments. less companies trying to sell me stuff. less focus groups trying to tell me what to think. and with less censorship you end up seeing more creativity

[LeafItAlone]

>there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments

I’m not sure you’ve actually been to 4chan…

[rincebrain]

The memetic speedrun that's so common now on social media has some roots there, to be sure, but I think a lot of it was parallel evolution combined with cribbing things that were already polished from years of metaphorical rock tumbling on 4chan, in the best ifunny.com style.

The ubiquitous expectations for modern humor among younger and even middle-aged people rely a lot more on knowing not just the joke but the culture and context it evolved in, and that sort of thing very much dominated bubbles of terminally online people before many people became terminally online and there was an expectation that everyone would know what you meant if you sent an image macro as the entire reply to an email.

You can find example after example from not that long ago of people who are not so terminally online being completely perplexed, on TV and otherwise, and memes like "what the fuck is he saying" "let's get you to bed grandpa" about the cultural disconnect.

Unfortunately, this sort of attention minmaxing without enough deliberation and learning around it produces people who are uncritical of what they consume and just want the next hit.

[gtirloni]

Isn't that the path that most platforms follow once they get mildly popular?

[KennyBlanken]

Multiple white supremacist mass shooter have been 4chan users and they cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...

The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...

The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...

"Not your personal army" but 4chan users would routinely dox, swat, and otherwise harass people all the time.

I have no idea why people are whitewashing 4chan so hard.

[smsm42]

This is a cheap bait - of course when there's a small number of leniently moderated popular platforms, there will eventually be a high-profile criminal that would use one of them, because a) that what "popular" means and b) anti-social types would gravitate to more leniently moderated platforms. And of course on the same platforms there would be online edglelords that would make sure to cheer whatever causes the most offense, because that's what they are there for. If you close 4chan, there would be another platform that would become focus of the same people - because the people focus on the platform, not the platform causes the people to become bad. The press that tried to frame it the way which reverses the cause and the effect is doing you a disservice, and you may want to consider using a better source of information. If, of course, you are interested in understanding the causes and the effects of things, not just feeling good by having your preconceptions confirmed.

[sph]

How many of these used Facebook, Twitter or Reddit? They are not mentioned in mainstream media because they are popular, but I assure you there are a lot of deranged people that never even posted on 4chan and just stuck to the “good” ones.

[seanw444]

Or the countless people that like and use 4chan, and would never remotely consider perpetrating such a heinous act.

[graemep]

I see dog whistle (if its sufficiently subtle to qualify) racism every time I look at my FB feed, along with lots of ragebait and idiocy.

[seanw444]

Yeah I don't think the 4chan demographic is substantially different from the "normie" social media. It's just that everyone speaks more openly about what they already believe there, including the crazies.

[brnaftr361]

Do it for 2ch now.

[14]

As a parent I have seen first hand some of the bullying teens face on some of the mainstream platforms. Kids being bullied in an instant on snap where things are spread around at lightning speed for one example. But I have also seen some bad things happen on 4chan. People releasing nudes of their exes or posts where users submit clothed pictures of girls they want to see photoshopped naked and a person does so. Or the rekt threads with gore content blocked on most other sites. I guess my feeling is that no matter the site you will always get bad actors.