Same goes for HN. Even with throwaways, the point system serves as this “corrective” barometer, that you’re expected to notice, even care about, and supposed to strive toward.

But perhaps most pathetically, even the moderators are brainwashed by it, as if the positivity trends of some mob are the smartest ruler to obey.

So, what if I disagree with the mob, and what if I’m right?

Well, the eigenstate of schroedinger’s cat tells us that there’s some degree of probablity that excuses us from ever taking that bet, so you can eat this hellban and lap up the antikarma like it’s the secretions of your wildest fantasy.

Enjoy the vacuum of the echochamber. In space, no one can hear you scream.

This is slightly meta, but I find it interesting that the person you're attacking is questioning the utility of a point-based system and yet that very system is trying to silence your speech rather than theirs. The mob wants you to know that refusing to question the mob is against the rules.

The mob wants to think it's self-critical when asked directly.

But I dare the mob to be self-critical of some popularly held belief without the pretext of this meta commentary. HN can be very one sided, and it shows in lots of discussions, from ads to piracy to language choices.

Or the mob simply didn't like their tone or phrasing.

I don't think it's good for communities when they became echo chambers and alienate people with different opinions.

Railing against trends is less a commentary against the premise of the site, and more a commentary against the emergent whims of groupthink.

Points systems amplify the perception of groupthink, and getting karma stomped into a ban happens a lot.

Getting banned for a greyed out comment is kind of lame, and I think a certain sort of darwinism, of letting vitriolic people express their contempt has utility.

In other words, more people should develop a thick skin, and fewer people should be silenced. In theory, that sounds good, but obviously it can also go wrong, to let people bloviate too much.

I think the solution is to permit the full stream but classify and sort the responses, but in most cases, NLP just isn’t good enough to automate grouped selections of comments, so we get stuck with a one dimensional mechanical turk voting rank. Yay versus boo!

I don’t enjoy the idea of AI submerging buried comments deepet, but trusting people to vote according to quality of discussion is a dubious gambit, and you really only get an edge detection doppler return revealing the joints of political fault lines, which gets old when holy wars guide many an opinion.

The principle still stands. Why care about points? Wasn’t that the motivating factor to remove displaying comment points on HN in the first place? Facilitating hive mentality?

If everyone agrees with a comment it probably adds no value. If everyone disagrees it probably adds no value. Maybe interesting discussions should be sorted by controversial, but I don’t think that would be a “safe space”.

That's a fallacy. The best comments in HN aren't the "edgy" or controversial ones, they are the ones where someone shares information that I've never seen somewhere else.

Saying offensive things doesn't lift the level of discourse, no matter how much people who would love not to be downvoted complain about the "hive mind".

Why are people whose views differ from your "the hive", but you, and those with whom you agree, are not?

I guess being against censorship is inherently hypocritical given you're trying to censor the censors. I'll have to live with that hypocrisy.

In a way that's 4chans strength. The comments and threads that get most noticed are the ones with most replies - ie the most controversial ones. Thats why Alexandria Ocasio Cortz is one of the most prominently posted figures on 4chans alt-light/pol/ board

> Wasn’t that the motivating factor to remove displaying comment points on HN in the first place?

lobste.rs shows points (and moderation logs and who invited who).

It still feels much "safer" than HN, but I guess the real reason is because they are much stricter about what topics are accepted.

Which means HN is more interesting to me but I also like lobste.rs a lot.

Let me pull up the front page of one of the "better" boards /lit/ right now and read literally the first post. It's for making fun of a woman's OKCupid profile. Here's a sampling of comments:

"She's a pleb with a mental illness."

"hello Jamal" (replying to someone who said they enjoy R&B)

"women are conformist by nature, is it really all that surprising?"

Let's move to post 2: "Describe hell to me"

"Imagine a place that is really really really really really really really really really really gay."

"dying to meet Hitler"

"A fat girl sits on your face and farts on you for the rest of eternity"

Is this the place we should be romanticizing? This was all within about 90 seconds of opening the site. I spent a lot of time on 4chan when I was younger, specifically /mu/ and /lit/ and I think it was really bad for me and my mental health at the time. These communities are extremely toxic, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and more than anything, downright cruel.

You have to take the good with the bad in the case of 4chan. Consider that any thread can be bumped to the front page with a reply, and consider that when a new thread is created, one is pushed off page 10 and then disappeared/archived. 90 seconds after first opening 4chan or any similar imageboard do not tell you anything. Yes, if you randomly go on the front page of any board, it is not exactly weird to see low quality threads that were either just recently made or have been freshly bumped. And you do not know why the thread was bumped without going into it. It may have been a poster who came in to complain, or to shitpost inside of it because it was a shit thread anyway. This is just part of imageboard culture unlike other sites which actively hide all the bad from you. Unless a thread explicitly breaks rules, is completely unrelated to the respective board, or is cancerous in its own right, it won't be deleted right away unless it has some backlash either by live feedback from anons or reports. On 4chan, you see all the bad that comes along with the good. Or no good at all sometimes. Depends on whoever's posting that day and how they feel. It's free(as in freedom) and pretty great usually.

I used to spend a lot of time on these boards, for years when I was younger. I know how it works, and I am familiar enough with 4chan to know that this language is common and normalized (calling people f-----s, n-----s, etc). /lit/ in particular I remember as being violently misogynistic (and a quick browse today confirms that). I'm familiar with the culture, the "irony" that justifies this kind of language, all of it. I was immersed in it for a long time, I "get" it. And it's not OK.

I think 4chan is an incredible, fascinating experiment, and I don't think all of it is trash or worthless, and it's true that not all boards are /b/. But it is undeniable that the overall culture is one of hostility, aggression, and cruelty, especially towards marginalized groups (not to mention the creepy sex stuff, which also pervades all boards). It's not a model for a healthy internet community by any means.

Edit: OP was edited, want to add a bit:

My overall assessment of 4chan is totally different: it is a cautionary tale of what free as in freedom on the internet actually looks like: a place where a few cynical teenage/early 20s white dudes may have a good time, while creating a culture totally devoid of empathy or inclusion for anyone else. A hotbed for lawlessness where violence and extreme ideologies fester and have real world consequences, the worst of the mid-2000s web.

I don't deny that 4chan is a cesspit, but like I said, you have to take the good with the bad. From my experience, as a person who is of a minority race, as long as you do not mention your race, literally no one cares. You're perfectly welcome to join in on the shitposting. Back then and still today, it has been race and sexuality related bigotries, but 4chan would be happy to insult you in any other fashion as well if given the opportunity. But since those words still have power given to them by those who choose to be offended by those words, they are still by far the best weapon of choice for 4chan users to rally behind. Do I endorse it? No, but I'm not against it either.

While I don't think 4chan is a model for a healthy internet community, I believe the internet is healthier if 4chan exists than if it did not. Some say it is the last bastion of free speech on the internet and I would agree. I can't name any other place I would go to see what I see on the chan.

> those who choose to be offended

This is simply not how the brain works. "Taking offense" comes out of a mix of low-level mental responses and emotions, bubbling up into the conscious mind from below, rather than being the outcome of a top-down rational thought process which one could "choose" to switch off.

The whole site reminds me of teenagers who are trying too hard to act rebellious. The problem is that it apparently has a large enough audience that some adults find that kind of behavior acceptable.

Incredibly influential in internet history? We were doing all those things before reddit and 4chan.

Memes in the form they took on on 4chan definitely weren't a thing before.

The word meme itself was a sterile almost scientific term.

I'm not sure how old are you, but if you were around at the time this happened (early to mid 00s) and active on imageboards you would surely have noticed just how different the experience was.

My memory is the word being used quite often as any “contagious idea”. It started to became synonymous with “tired internet joke” in the late 90s with dancing baby, then cemented 2001 with the someone-set-us-up-the-bomb video.

Surely the memes of 4chan fame came directly from SA and related forums?