Is it? I always admired the much-scoffed YouTube as the free-est place to talk on the internet. Where a vegan gay liberal from NY can discuss on the same video with a neo-con Mongolian and a 15-year old hipster from Sweden, an Israeli Jew, an Arab, and a black South African truck driver, and even agree and share experiences, and at worse you just get a few insults thrown and that's it.
I can only imagine how much worse it is for the team over at Youtube. The first thing I would do as CEO over there is hug them, give them a raise, double their vacation time, and make sure they have very good access to mental health services in case they need it. I'm not saying they're treated poorly right now, but again, it would be one of the first things I looked at.
/r/AskReddit is one of the best places to have such free and open conversations and the best thing is that you get to set the topic for the conversation instead of some arbitrary video remotely related to what you want to talk about.
That's a good point (allowing for deeper discussion), but in YouTube I also like how the image/video transcends borders and politics etc in a way that targeted discussion doesn't.
(You can be anything, black, KKK, hipster barrista, 40yo soccer mon, Jew, Arab, donald-fan, etc, but still like/dislike the same cat clip, or old bluegrass song, or belly dancing or whatever).
Freedom of speech is great, and important. That doesn't mean that there's any value in just anybody exploring the boundaries of it.
This says more about your sampling bias than youtube itself.
And the fact you are posting this says more about the magnitude of your political bias (its exact direction being yet tbd) than anything you read. I'm not sure if you realize how many nuts really say what they believe and believe what they say.
And both of the above say more about your willingness to characterize the parent than about the issue under discussion.
>I'm not sure if you realize how many nuts really say what they believe and believe what they say.
Doesn't seem to matter, as long as they don't also ACT on what they believe/say. Which is the case for most people (both positive, e.g. they are racist but they wont act on it, and negative, e.g. they say their are this or that good thing, but they're all talk about it).
A naive explanation is that only awful people go there, and there are a large number of those types. But that'd be mistaken.
I don't know, but it seems like an interesting question.
I don't think it was ever meant to make money. Lots of great (for various aspects of great) things exist for non-monetary reasons.
It's true that off-topic posts are removed, but I'm mainly curious why this kind of "say whatever you want" attitude is so pervasive on 4chan yet doesn't kill the site. On Reddit, for example, comments like that would be moderated via downvoting, which physically hides the comment unless the user clicks on it. That's still a form of moderation.
I don't hang out on chans but sometimes end up reading them for various reasons.
I think the constant noise and random insults actually are moderation: they keep away people prone to butthurt, who due to their stubbornness and obnoxity are absolutely the worst fun killers and threat to any discussion. Normally people call each other retards as a matter of course and don't give much fuck, but if you try to argue emotionally then you are flamed to the death.
To me it was quite eye opening to read a bit of Encyclopedia Dramatica once. Many times I saw it throw shit all over some people or idea just to click on the "see also: some ostensibly opposite idea" link at the bottom and see them throw shit all over that one too. That's a very simple and elegant solution to tribalism if you ask me, HN totally could take inspiration from them because the mods keep complaining about tribalism here :)
Communities with better moderation are apparently more popular.
Also there are many active topical boards like /an/ /cgl/ /fit/ /u/ you're not reading!
People really do hang out on 4chan, though it's lost some share recently to 8chan, but 4chan is certainly a very large forum, the 200k+ current users, as displayed on their homepage too, confirms this.
For a place where you don't have to worry about drive-by downvoters, for all its faults, 4chan is excellent for getting your opinion across.
I don't know how accurate this is, but to put some numbers on it, Reddit seems to be #9 and Twitter #11 according to Alexa [1] and 4chan is rated much lower [2].
Although, Hacker News ranks higher than I expected [3], which seems suspicious. Perhaps there's a better way to measure it?
[1] http://www.alexa.com/topsites [2] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/4chan.com [3] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com
It'd be harder to get away with on HN, but maintaining the illusion of a tight-knit community for as long as possible is pretty crucial to the site's success.
I'd rather have no moderation than lax moderation, which is why I'm in favor of decentralizing imageboards; the nntpchan software, which is an imageboard over nntp, is very good for this. Perhaps some system using bittorrent technology, too.
To reply to astrange (I am unable to reply using the usual method because the HN mods don't like it when I post quickly, so they've stopped me from doing that, ironically in this discussion about moderation):
I wasn't trying to say that 8chan is unmoderated, I recognize that it is moderated, because of the "only legal content" rule, rather I was trying to say that an unmoderated imageboard could exist in theory, but an imageboard which insists on only legal content is of course moderated.
Are the users haemorrhaged from that to the detriment, or the benefit of the site?
Others boards such as /mlp/ however do not show such growth into other boards, perhaps because the rule against ponies is stronger than the rule against racism.
Have you seen Facebook?
That's not what it's optimizing for. Profit and eyeballs. Don't delude yourself. Toxic? Poison? Sure thing, as long as they can sell your attention span, Facebook don't care.
Honestly. You know what it's doing. Doing to everybody.
In as far as this team is building or sustaining a community, it's a tiny sandcastle on a beach facing the automated tidal wave of corporate exploitation of our dopamine/addiction response.
Sustaining a community of junkies is very, very hard. It's not just a simple cut-and-dry "freedom to do whatever to your body" vs "personal health". There's an enormous amount of nuance involved to sustain a crack house that won't just devolve into a toxic waste dump that's poison for 99% of the people there.
In my experience working at crack houses, many of them don't treat their bouncers well, or it tends to be an afterthought. In reality, this can be the hardest and most important job. PTSD is a real problem with these teams, and pay is often sub-par. And when they make mistakes (or when they don't but people still get mad), they tend to get the bulk of the criticism from it. And then at the end, they usually aren't allowed to talk publicly about any of the work they do.
(the analogy holds about as far as until you try to hug them--which is when they'll punch your lights out. but they do mean well, or something)
Yeah, that's not even close. They might get stressed, but it's not like seeing your best friend(s) getting blown to pieces every time you close your eyes.
Let's imagine that there is no moderation. What will happen ? OK, some people will have argument, there will be insult, blood, etc. And, well, depending on a tipping point, we may realize that oooooops, letting people talk in the open is not so good. FB would be blamed and hen disappear. So be it. Now, another thing to do is : prosecute those who say unacceptable things. With prosecution, you have the justice system that will handle the case. That'll be slower but there will be discussions and, hopefully better laws.
FaceBook is becoming the Judge Dredd of free speech. It decides what's criminal and what's not and it applies his own power to handle the case directly.
This also happens in sports. Someone says something in an interview, in a social network post, in a private conversation which gets published... and what happens? Depending on offense the team may, ignore, fine, suspend or fire the person in question, outside the legal framework. That is, someone may say something insensitive or can be accused (not yet proven) to have done something unbecoming... teams often feel pressure to act extrajudicially. It's just how it is where money and the public sphere of opinion intersect.
Moderators do refer the most serious cases to the police. But there's a lot of crap that falls short of that, so milder penalties work better.
You actually understood me very well. That's my secret point. I don't see why FB must do better than police. If someone insults me, then, well, I fight back, go to the police, prosecute, etc. That works well because there is the work of justice.
By displacing the problem out of FB into the realm of justice, I want to make two points :
1/ The social norm of what is acceptable or not acceptable speech is governed by the people, not by a single entity.
2/ If there are too many cases to handle for the judge, then, let's add more judges (in my country, justice department is starving for budgets).
FB has way too much power, that's its (totally fair) success but now, it's too big to be let alone.
In my experience working with startups, many of them don't treat their content moderation team well, or it tends to be an afterthought. In reality, this can be the hardest and most important job at a company. PTSD is a real problem with these teams, and pay is often sub-par. And when they make mistakes (or when they don't but people still get mad), they tend to get the bulk of the criticism from it. And then at the end, they usually aren't allowed to talk publicly about any of the work they do.
Please take your content moderation department seriously. If you have one, read through the crap Facebook's team has to deal with on a daily basis, and then go over and hug them.