[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?

[throwaway652368]

I've never seen conspiracy to commit murder of individual people on 4chan. That would violate U.S. law and thus is banned from the site. There are retarded posts about genociding whole groups of people, but while that's totally retarded, it shouldn't be censored, no more than it should be illegal to propose blowing up the sun.

[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.