While you're right, I really do like 4chan. It doing away with any voting really creates a wholly different culture. It requires a completely different approach to reading it. Now, the people there are outcasts in one form or another, in real life or digitally. That can get you mixed results and tainted content, but the principle of how that 'forum' is set up I like a lot.

It requires a reader to think for themselves and actually analyze content.

Not for those who like their information spoon-fed.

4chan somehow has this reputation for being savants despite being just as vulnerable as Twitter in getting swept up into a mob with lazily research facts being dressed up as genuine when someone uses complete sentences. * chans only work largely because of moderation (That doesn't mean the moderation has to operate in a way you like). Likewise the for HN.

IMO, no single feature ruins online social platforms more than size. The best subreddits are the small ones, the best * chans are the small ones, the best forums are the small ones. "Features" don't ruin platforms, users do.

i chuckled that this comment was grayed out. I was analyzing my feelings and voting indicators really do make an impact. I can feel the emotional charge from all the people who downvote as I'm reading.

emotional context truly is the 6th sense.

> Well, there's always 4chan, which is exactly what you just said.

I disagree. 4chan isn’t Twitter without visible voting, it also has anonymity baked in, you can’t register an account, and old threads are automatically deleted.

A more apt example of (my understanding of) the argument you’re replying to is HN: you can see your own points on a discussion, but not anyone else’s. Posts are given more prominence due to their score, but due to their invisibility you only get a rough idea of how popular they are inside their own discussion, not how much more popular they are in relation to other posts.

hn still has internet points in the form of karma, though.

> hn still has internet points

I spent over half my post discussing them. The point is that they are not visible.

I guess my point is that they ARE visible (karma). Click on a username of someone. Yours is at, "888". Popularity contests are alive and well on hn.

Does anybody actually look at other users points on a regular basis? I think it’s rare which is why it’s not really relevant.

Besides, it’s not even a measure of popularity but more of a lifetime scoreboard. If HN reported something like average points per post or per day, that would be closer to a popularity metric (eg more inline with “number of followers”)

It's magic internet points, no matter how you slice it. Having more or less changes what you can/cannot do on the site.

> Having more or less changes what you can/cannot do on the site.

That’s unrelated to the discussion, which is about how visible internet points affect how users engage with each other’s comments.

Site permissions are a different matter altogether, and not applicable to most social networks.

4chan prioritizes active threads, which means a huge boost to trolling and content dumps.

That's the thing about trying eliminate voting. If comments essentially serve as votes, you actually get the worse kind of filter - the way the filth rises to the top on Youtube comments for example (Youtube sorts by most commented even though it allows voting - so hateful stuff remains even when downvoted).

The best solution I've seen for this is to have a separate subforum for highly contentious discussions, and anything with more than a threshold number of comments per hour gets automatically moved there and flagged for moderator review. Then the moderator can move it back, delete it entirely or just leave it in the separate subforum so that interested parties can flame each other in the fire pit instead of out where everybody else hangs out.

it is precisely because 4chan one of the last popular "free" sites that it is more extreme. if the entire internet were more like it, there would be more mild sites with more PC discussion that you could join.

A site could still allow accounts and banning and have guidelines around discussion topics, it doesn't have to be completely anonymous like 4chan.

FWIW 4chan has accounts, banning and guidelines. It's not totally lawless and anonymous. It just has the option of anonymity.

Probably the best, deepest LGBT+ issues discussions I've ever had have been on their /lgbt/ board. They were filled with people yelling obscenities too, but that doesn't bother me. I guess it's the culture I grew up with, it's natural to engage in discussion while people are yelling around me.

I'm really glad there's still a place out there that believes in free speech as a foundational principle not to be infringed upon except as an absolute last resort. I'm glad not everywhere is 4chan, but 4chan is a gem of discourse in today's world if you ignore like 90% of it. I'm increasingly convinced that that 90% is the inevitable cost of the wonderful 10% that represents the sharing of intelligent thought without fear of reprisal.

> I'm increasingly convinced that that 90% is the inevitable cost of the wonderful 10% that represents the sharing of intelligent thought without fear of reprisal.

high IQ post. that seems to be a pattern in many facets of life. (raising children, starting companies, dieting, traveling)

> FWIW 4chan has accounts

The Wikipedia page[1] claims that “Registration is not possible”. Is it wrong, or am I misunderstanding?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

4chan technically does have accounts in the form of '4chan pass', but it's not linked to your posts at all[1] and just removes the ads, and lets you bypass the captcha and some kinds of subnet level posting bans.

There is also the concept of a tripcode, which is basically an HMAC with a key that the server has a user provided code that is shown next to your post. You can use this to prove knowledge of the code. Usage depends a lot on which board you're on, but is generally frowned upon.

Some boards (such as the infamous /pol/) also have IDs on posts (IIRC derived from your IP address and the thread id), so that posts by the same user in the same thread can be correlated.

Other than that, everything is anonymous.

[1] minor exception is the "since4pass" option which just adds a little icon to your post indicating how long you've had your pass. This is basically never used (perhaps because even 4chan posters don't want to advertise that they're paying for 4chan)

Using a tripcode would be the closest thing 4chan has to an "account" that I'm aware of, but it doesn't require registration, it just adds a (theoretically) unique identifier to posts.

Yeah sorry, I was thinking of tripcodes and 4chan pass as representing most of what an "account" is. It's not the same thing though.

I'd argue that the anonymous nature of it is actually what allows it to maintain it's status as "free". By disconnecting everyone from any sort of permanent identity, it totally eliminates the possibility of a user or group of users collecting enough social capital to change things.

I don't think people understand how important this is.

i disagree there. sure you have to wade thru a lot of garbage, but the amount of truly insightful posts still make it worth going to for me. on some of the less popular, more focused boards, the general discussion quality is pretty high.