What I really like about 4chan nowadays is the pace. When a new episode of my favorite show is out, or when the Super Bowl is on, or when a presidential candidate says something stupid, I know there will be a thread about it. At times, it's almost like we're all in the same room together. Having browsed for 7 years now, it really does feel like home to me.
I think the pace varies from board to board, and can appeal to people and their particular tastes at the time. Using myself as an example: today I enjoy /wg/'s backgrounds and eye-candy setups, but not /b/. A decade ago, I ignored anything not /b/.
There's nothing wrong with that, but I do think the notoriety of /b/ makes people stay away from the other boards.
Unidan.
Oh, if only!
It's all very silly, of course. But the anonymous thing is fun and I've had some interesting debates where I can just test ideas and say whatever for the hell of it without worrying about any kind of repercussion in terms of my reputation. It's easier to go in guns blazing being wrong and learn something without feeling that it's personal when no one has a name.
cough gamergate started on /v/ cough
But I get what you're saying. /b/ really is the largest board. In a way it's meant to be the containment board, or the moat around the castle. It's where all the shit goes, so it doesn't pollute the rest of the site. And oh boy, is the internet full of shit.
What's /b/? Because I don't know 4chan and have been assiduously avoiding learning anything about it.
/b/ is the "random" board (or "anything goes") and the biggest one on 4chan. Some pretty awful stuff happens on there (as well as some pretty cool stuff). Basically it's a grab-bag of Internet.
Reddit's reputation of being better than 4chan is entirely undeserved.
As someone with extensive experience with both... it is entirely deserved.
No use comparing things that are the same.
After reddit got big, we started seeing (well, started speculating that we're seeing) a lot of people come to 4chan after initially cutting their internet discussion teeth on reddit. There were speculations of a secret irc cabal of redditors, who collude to drive threads offtopic and in general mould board culture to be more reddit-like. To this day I'm not sure if those allegations were insubstantiated. We did have several prominent spammers who comandeered fleets of hundreds of proxies and spammed threads they didn't like with random-generated posts. These were obviously not redditors, but given there are people who care enough and have free time enough... In short, 4chan is a magical place.
As another user pointed out, viewing "best of" is probably a more efficient approach, and let's you avoid some of the crap. But there's something enjoyable about being there, in the moment something is happening.
https://subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles2/X0095_The_Gr...
Here's the tail end, I think it's relevant:
The Internet is a perfect reflection of the world at large. It
has everything in it except homeless people and that's only
because they can't afford the monthly hookup charge.
The Internet is scary to people because it TRULY makes everyone
equal.
All the people who are invisible in the normal world (the world
run by the rich and powerful), all those people you can dismiss
on the street as powerless and harmless -- ALL THOSE PEOPLE are
now in your face.
You can feel their hot breath on the Internet.
It's called "humanity."
America was invented to empower those people. It's just taken
this long to find out how to do it.
After all, the Net is just telephone lines, computer screens and
satellite hook-ups. It's purely technical.
Its only purpose is to bring the real world into focus. Anyone
who opposes that should go back and read the Declaration of
Independence.
4chan is honesty where most everything else is façade. I enjoy the feel, even if not every day.
I don’t think that’s honesty, that’s being an asshole.
To me, that seems pretty "honest": you get to see the full range of human emotion that should be statistically-likely for a large group of people to be experiencing at any given moment, rather than just the faces people want to present to the world.
Assholish outbursts stick out because they're unusual compared to reputational society, but I don't think those outbursts are incentivized; they're just represented within the corpus at the same rate that people are actually feeling them, rather than hidden away and kept secret.
(Though, there might be a bit of a reverse-causation where people visit 4chan when they're angry to let off steam, because they know it won't affect their reputation. That could explain away quite an increase in the representation of assholes.)
I think you are completely ignoring the impact culture has on behavior. This notion that people somehow hold it in if they are not mean to one another and that they would actually and in all honesty rather scream at each other – that’s such a foreign concept to me. Some people just honestly don’t have to hold back because they are just not like that, at least not all the time.
Do you not see that being abrasive can just as much be an act as being polite?
Not that any of that is a bad thing. But in a sense, 4chan is a simulation of what we could all really, honestly be like in a different environment - to the extent it's fueled by acting, it's just compensating for the fact that nobody is raised there from birth.
Some people don't, sure. I was trying to make a generalization of what humans as a group are statistically likely to do; breaking it down, some humans would be assholes all the time, some a few rare times, and some never at all. (Side-point: don't feel the need to defend yourself from statistical assertions about human behavior, they're not intended as accusations: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/04/about-isnt-about-you.h...)
There are indeed real people who have real rage that they don't get to express as often as they'd like, though. There are people with anger management problems, or aggressive mania. There are people feeling intense (sometimes justified!) frustration in some part of their lives. There are people who are just plain sadists, and either don't know there's such a thing as a willing masochist or can't find one.
Let me draw a parallel: road rage. Depending on the culture of a particular area of the world, road rage can be either taboo or permitted. People everywhere get frustrated at the behavior of other drivers around them; that is never in question. It's only whether they choose to let those other drivers know about it that changes with each culture.
I do agree that it's possible some percentage of the assholish behavior is performance. (Though as I waved-vaguely-at in my previous post, if you can detect this sort of thing—read the intention in it—it stops actually seeming assholish and becomes more like friendly jibing. A large part of the point of 4chan is to engage in a digital communal game of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dozens, and a large part of becoming "part of" 4chan's community is building up a tolerance to this.)
But real asshole behavior—not the clever insults written with a cool head, but rather the seek-and-destroy-the-vulnerable bullying that harkens grade school—is not something you do to seem clever or liked. In the real world, in small communities, it can maybe win you "friends" through intimidation (thus why some real-world bullies do it), but on an anonymous forum there's just no gain in doing it but to hurt the other person. The sort of actually-hurtful things said by a bully aren't celebrated as successful roasts; they're just sort of left to sit there. When playing the Dozens, you don't poke at actual hard spots in the other person's life; it's bad form.
Now, of course, there are sociopaths who enjoy causing chaos and "stirring shit": the Iagos and Izaya Oriharas of the world. And 4chan attracts these sorts of people as well. But as much as they're a negative force—encouraging people to cut off their toes, arranging raids, etc.—they're rarely visibly assholes. In fact, they have to be a bit charismatic to get people dancing the way they want. And, oddly, 4chan seems to "hold" these sort of people at bay, as well; they identify with the community, attacking its enemies (Tumblr, say) and its obvious unaccustomed interlopers ("newfags") but tend to stay out of the way of the average user. But that might say more about the "hardiness" of the average user—it takes a certain self-sufficient mindset to function in even controlled anarchy, and this mindset often makes one immune to confidence men.
Language is full of color - and I find it a disservice to desaturate those colors. The bright are made all the more brighter when contrasted with the dim.
By muting language you make it harder to distinguish between those colors. Polite language becomes aggressive and disliked because you know when it is forced and dishonest and when everyone is expected to be polite - you lose the ability to distinguish between the forced politeness and the honest politeness. You begin to treat all politeness as forced politeness.
If you've ever been in a "100% optimistic, go-positive attitude" environment for any length of time you learn to hate it and treat everyone there with contempt. Being able to express negativity is important.
That sounds very poetic, but I honestly don't think that any of the horrible things that have happened to me have made me enjoy life more.
Honestly I don't think you can sugar-coat negative experiences.
It may be true that I learned various things from the time mom was violently murdered, but I've never once woken up and thought about how glad I am that today isn't as horrible as the day her corpse was discovered in our basement. Nor can I easily believe that the resulting years of depression added anything worthwhile to my enjoyment of life.
4Chan can be extremely hilarious sometimes; some of the funniest content I've seen on the internet is from 4Chan.
But spending any real time there looking for that content, waiting for it, that's a waste in my eyes.
As if it belongs behind some kind of gate with locks that we should all feel priveleged to have had access to.
content: something that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing, or any of various arts:
Do you get it now? Is this still a problem? I think you probably just didn't know what the word meant.
> I've never visited the site, and really don't want to. So maybe I'm missing something, but why would you want to associate yourself with a place like that?
> I see people post screenshots on Reddit sometimes and it seems pretty deviant.
As depicted in some screenshots people post on Reddit. (One thing that helps: look at the background of the screenshot. By default, a blue background indicates a "safe for work" board, and that's well-known enough that people sometimes use the term "blue board".) And yeah, a subset of it is, including several entire boards.
4chan features the full gamut of what you could expect from the Internet, or humanity in general. The quote about Usenet and "a herd of performing elephants" applies quite well there. And like the broader Internet and culture in general, the quality of content varies massively.
However, the bet of what 4chan has to offer includes some amazing content, much of it original, and only a small subset of that makes it to the outside world. A huge number of Internet memes start there. People create impressive original art, sometimes drawn on the fly and posted in response to others nearly in real-time. Despite the name "image board", people write and share huge walls of text there too. People tell stories ranging from side-splittingly hilarious to heartwarming. (Yes, really, 4chan can do "heartwarming" on occasion.) And much of the best content gets saved in screenshots, files, and wikis, and re-posted later. (Its transient nature has as much to do with its culture as its anonymity.)
For one of many examples, the tabletop gaming board /tg/ has quite an impressive array of content. People develop campaigns and settings there, run games on the board, design games, produce interesting original writing, post stories of gaming adventures, and otherwise produce an astonishing amount of original content. You can go there if you run a game and you're looking for material or inspiration, or if you just want to laugh at a pile of nerdy jokes and enjoy some interesting stories. And note that /tg/ is considered a "safe for work" board, and the moderators do enforce that.
Also see the TED talk from Christopher Poole ("moot"), which mentions several more interesting stories.
4chan does have a large amount of "background radiation" to ignore, and portions of its culture can be quite toxic. It's not in any way a curated collection of content. But parts of it can be awe-inspiring, useful, and fun.
"The good news is that I've recently returned to 4chan as a regular, anonymous user, and I'm really enjoying it."
I've never visited the site, and really don't want to. So maybe I'm missing something, but why would you want to associate yourself with a place like that? It seems like even spending time there as an anonymous user would change your perception of the world for the worse. I see people post screenshots on Reddit sometimes and it seems pretty deviant.