In 4chan a literal nazi, a drag queen, a bona-fide pedophile and a luddite can exchange opinions with no prejudice, because none of them know anyone else's background.

You might think that these people can't talk about certain things, but any subject in which discussion becomes too caustic simply doesn't even take place in other platforms, and not every discussion is a life or death discussion, they can talk about photography just fine.

This is overly romantic. I just visited /g/. Less than 1 min in, I see "nigger" and "faggot".

I'm sure there are blacks, gays and drag queens that see value in 4chan and are desensitized to those words. But, I'd estimate 99% of the population is white men/boys with antisocial tendencies.

Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with like minded people building a village. But let's not pretend the culture of the site, doesn't instantly weed out a huge chunk of multiple demographics.

You'd be wrong https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1220127-pol

Demographic

    Age: 18-34
    Gender: ~70% male, ~30% female
    Location: United States (47%), United Kingdom (7%), Canada (6%), Australia (4%), Germany (4%)
    Interests: Japanese culture, anime, manga, video games, comics, technology, music, movies
    Education: Majority attended or currently enrolled in college

"Desensitized to words" is normal mental development; infants may be excited by sheer words - not beyond.

Beyond infancy you (should) have gained filtering and control;

before that and after social experience, you should be able to understand actions as part of "playing" ("non-seriousness", transversality of intention).

I do think this is one of the big hidden problems with upvote/like systems.

Seeing a post you don't like or disagree with on Twitter/Facebook/Reddit with a lot of likes/retweets/upvotes/etc psychologically puts you on the defensive. 10,000 likes on a post you disagree with means you're up against an army of 10,000 people who disagreed with you! So you do what's natural: you fight back, you summon your own army of people (hoping to get a respectable counter-army of likes). This creates a toxic environment and you can see it play out on Twitter: every Democrat-leaning tweet will have its top reply be a Republican-leaning tweet with a counter-point, and every Republican with a Democrat.

Meanwhile, on 4chan or other old-style message board withouts those systems... yeah, it's just some asshole with a stupid opinion. Just ignore them, no need to waste effort engaging.

Interesting because from a functional user experience perspective, it's an objectively useful feature for navigating discussions. An obvious addition in terms of web design, yet with unforeseen repercussions. The medium is the message, after all.

But I do agree it's contributed to bait posts a lot, yeah. Interesting to see the impact of such a seemingly small UX change.

¹https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/28hjga/reddi...

My innocence =(

More like army of 10k bots.

It is remarkable how well moderated that site is.

Illegal posts tend to get removed immediately, while antisocial types get quickly dealt with (banned).

Site is oddly infamous, but certainly does not deserve the hate.

Remember Anonymous? That was all derivative of various chan boards and Something Awful. You probably overlap with those users more than you'd like to admit.

A thing I realized was that there's a lot of people who lurk the chans and end up promoting the more mainstream-ready content to their other communities. The chans are essentially the boiler room in terms of their role in the ecosystem of the internet.

> You probably overlap with those users more than you'd like to admit.

4chan is absolutely not a group I overlap much with.

The biggest difference to other cesspools is that it has less manners and moderation. But in terms of pure toxicity Twitter etc aren't any better, all the scheming, backstabbing and insults are just more polite and use a lot more emoji, and when someone loses the argument they block everyone.

I think this is what OP meant by "egalitarian" (though I certainly wouldn't have chosen that word) -- equal opportunity abuse. This shared constant toxicity plus no karma/upvotes and no attachment to an online persona through anonymity mean that the playing ground is perhaps uniquely level.

Yeah, this is what people misunderstand about 4chan. Obviously my race gets a lot of flak, but I've even seen racial slurs about white Europeans I've never heard anywhere else.

I'm not saying it's morally right, but it feels more of a hazing tactic than legitimate hatred. Once you pass that filter you have access to some interesting information.

No matter what your ethnicity someone on 4chan will make a joke about genociding you. The difference is that some people in the world actually are doing genocides. And someone from one of those groups, knowing that, is going to experience those jokes differently.

4chan, (and to a serious degree, HN) places the duty and the transgression on the person who has the bad experience with the genocide joke. But a completely valid model is actually that no, the genocide joke is the transgression and the one making it the transgressor.

4chan is not separate from the world it is part of it. And by fostering this environment you're providing cover for atrocities. Because not everyone is there just to have a fun time saying slurs! Some of them really do want us to die, and 4chan isn't just a diversion it is an actual site of conversion and radicalization towards their goals.

To be clear, I am not "fostering [an] environment" or defending 4chan here at all, I am just pointing out that this is a misunderstanding of what the culture of 4chan is.

Like the person I was replying to, I somehow doubt you have spent any time there. Where on the site are you even talking about? /g/? /lgbt/? /k/? /mu/? /pol/? /bant/? /sci/? /b/? Even though they share the cultural features I was talking about, they are quite distinct otherwise. Many people read threads on a topical board like /mu/ or /g/ and haven't spent any time on the more offensive or stomach-churning parts of the site like /pol/ or /b/.

> Because not everyone is there just to have a fun time saying slurs

I resent this implication that merely because I suggest people understand the things they are talking about that I am on 4chan using slurs. This style of argumentation would be right at home on the worst boards of 4chan...

> it is an actual site of conversion and radicalization towards their goals

4chan is not a person, it doesn't have "goals" or opinions any more than heterogenous online communities like eg HN or Reddit do. I would agree that 4chan as a community does house more polarized opinions than most online communities, though that seems to be largely a function of not having upvotes and allowing anonymous posting.

To your overall point, that this is a value difference between myself and the GP, I fully disagree. I am making a factual (and not value-centric) claim that toxicity towards anyone posting on the site is an integral part of the culture there.

Up to date knowledge of their internal jargon and shibboleths doesn't discredit my view of the site, it's still right there and it doesn't take long to confirm that my worst opinions of it from 2008 are still valid now.

I never claimed that the site itself has opinions or goals. But its members do! and they emerge in the patterns of interaction and rhetoric eg its culture.

How is that not an integral component of equal access?

I realize you’re probably trying to disagree with me, but, yes.

Here’s another thought: avowed Nazis are not, strictly speaking, stopped from participating in any pseudonymous forum, if they can keep their views on that subject to themselves. Why is this model less “open” or “egalitarian” than one where they’re allowed to barge into conversations and start spewing that stuff?

Yes, of course. It did seem the clear intent behind your words. Arm the sheep and it may be a different matter, no? Or, as you say, the sheep could simply not show up if they don't like their odds. I'm really not making a value judgement on the situation, just saying that everyone is handed equal tools here.

> Here’s another thought: avowed Nazis are not, strictly speaking, stopped from participating in any pseudonymous forum, if they can keep their views on that subject to themselves. Why is this model less “open” or “egalitarian” than one where they’re allowed to barge into conversations and start spewing that stuff?

Well, the easy answer is that it's less open because it is moderated. Perhaps each is open in different, conflicting ways? I'm not really prepared to perform an analysis on the ethics of each, and please don't take my response as necessarily expressing a preference for the former. Insofar as I spend time on any social platform, it is mostly HN, and mostly because I find the conversation here generally more civil than elsewhere. So in practice, I do seem to express a preference for the latter.

Sorry, I don't know what this means.

> We can't stop you from chilling with the nazis if that's what you're gonna be into

Thanks, I'll pass.

That's.. not very nice =(. I also don't see how it applies here, even if you do assume bad faith --- who exactly am I pestering? I asked you one question, then I've been having a back-and-forth with emodendroket --- a simple one-for-one. I'll also have you note that they chose to engage me. I'm certainly not following people even cross-thread, let alone cross-platform, pestering them until I get a response and demanding they justify their personal preferences.

I'm trying to have a legitimate conversation; it was my belief that intellectual discussion was encouraged here. If you don't want to discuss, don't respond, it's pretty much that simple. I'm not going to chase you down. However, if you are going to engage, I would appreciate if you don't accuse me of trolling on the basis of a disagreement and some weak notion of bad faith.

[0] https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/sealioning/

As in mostly anti Bush-establishment, lefty, pro-freedom, 'rational' anti-religion atheists.

I'd say the most of my (admittedly fuzzy) memories of that era of 4chan political activism were Aaron Swartz/Anonymous.

Anyway two points:

- The vicious racism was already enough of a consistent thing in the 2000s that I clocked it as essentially a movement at that point. They always claimed to be joking but even then it was clear that many of them were not. Regardless of what other political affiliations were commonly held there at that time. But I think you got it pretty close, they weren't that politically coherent back then, and certainly not leftist so much as just anti-bush/anti-republican.

- Gamergate was a permanent rearrangement, finally giving a coherent "them" to orient a reactionary antipolitical movement against. I think the sharp ramp up in aggressiveness and frankly violent imagery filtered a lot of people out, while simultaneously inviting people in, creating a new overlap with pre-existing and nascent reactionary groups like (self-identified I don't mean this as an insult per se) reddit incels.

So having kept an eye on it for a while now, I think it has meaningfully changed since 2008, even if a lot of the members are the same and many of the cultural signifiers are intact. Just for one it is much more coherent as an allegiance or identity, as you can see by the dozens of people coming out to passionately defend it in these comments.

Sounds like a "you problem."

And yeah, you're right. We all have an axe to grind against 4chan. We're all making up that we saw CP on it.

I'm a former Goon. I've been all over the trashy parts of the internet. It doesn't benefit me whatsoever to lie about seeing CP on 4chan. I even remember exactly what the picture I saw the last time I went to it looked like. It is seared into my memory. That was my last visit to that trash site.

edit because I can't reply: Jholman - that's my point. Good work. I don't care about their age. I already said they're probably in their 30s. Telling me they're in their 30s is, what is it, redundant? Obvious? Read paragraphs, man.

edit2: Jholman deleted his post. Eyeroll.

…and because I didn’t do that, you’re calling me a pedophile? Come on man, let’s reign it in a bit here…

> The last time I went there it was full of CP and I lose all respect for people who use that site no matter how you try to spin it.

It sounds like you don't actually use the site --- just like GP was saying.

> If you're going to say that I've never used the site, I've also established that I have.

So… you’ve no respect for your former self? You see how this works?

Nowhere did I defend cp. Those are your words about me, not my words about anything. And what about my username? Am I supposed to hide behind a throwaway for any sort of contentious take? Does that make me a man somehow?

Good day, sir!

You have the strangest arguments. I quit going to it once I saw CP. I don't even remember why I used to visit it occasionally, probably morbid curiosity, or maybe people on somethingawful linking posts on it. I definitely didn't frequent it and I'm sure I never posted on it.

I've seen comments that it's cleaned up a lot and has better moderation. That's good.

Yikes. On 4chan you'd have just blindly implied that the poster fathered himself in a freak accident with his mother, who is a bovine. Here, on the nice polite internet, you merely implied that a real person, whose name is attached, is defending ch1ld s3xual abuse.

You're so upset about there being a forum you don't like that you've decided to use one of the most powerful accusations you can make about him - one that imho could justifiably get him killed if true - so casually. So much hatred.

The guy has replied to every single one of my posts after I said I quit going to 4chan because of CP defending 4chan. A little odd considering my circumstances for leaving it. That shouldn't even remotely be a debate on why I left.

Thanks.

> That shouldn't even remotely be a debate on why I left.

Sure, you're the definitive source for why you left.

> there's a forum that I saw tons of child porn on.

It wasn't a forum for that though (I hope), it was a forum where people trolled others by posting it. Do you know someone put CP in the bitcoin blockchain?

And yeah, I use a no-images no-JS browser for a lot of things and 4chan would be one. I expect to be blocking 99% gore, but that last 1% is many things I'm also happy not seeing.

> I guess I shouldn't be upset

Upset at who, though? Upset at the people who enjoy an uncensored forum and have accepted that it'll be full of crap, or at the people who feel the need to poison it simply because someone else was enjoying themselves?

> trans-hating homophobes

Anonymous forums are actually one of the first places trans people were free to discuss themselves. You might (will) be flamed and trolled for it, but also engaged with. Reddit seems more free to be trans, except if you look at the forums there's always someone being banned for non-hateful things, such as being the wrong type of trans, or detrans. (Truscum vs Tucutes vs old-school Transexuals ...)

I don't understand why it's important to be flamed at all by people who are anonymous? I might banter with friends, but there's a shared history of understanding there; in an anonymous message board there's none of that so I don't understand what it's trying to achieve?

No, that stuff is gross and you block/avoid it. The integral part is that the forum uncensored - even if a large quantity of that uncensored content is unwanted.

And fwiw, 4chan is only one example of a (nearly) uncensored board, it's far from the best or nicest.

> I don't understand why it's important to be flamed at all

That's not the important part, but that you can have the conversation at all. The idiots running around screaming are like ghosts in Harry Potter, distractions if you let them be but almost invisible if you ignore them.

> racial slurs ... are an integral part of the culture?

Well sometimes yes, actually. Like the now banned subreddit, 2balkan4u, sometimes "hate subs" actually aren't. I'm familiar only via gaming friends, but it's basically people who've come together around "hating" each other for ethnic reasons. It doesn't look friendly but is, with people bonding over their shared history - often dark - and collectively watching the world go by from a cynical pov. It's like therapy and the hanging out with the only people who understand you, something many veterans feel even when meeting ex-"enemy" combatants. A sanitized version of this wouldn't work.

Uh. I replied to two posts; everything else has been direct back-and-forth with you. Every one except this one anyway; this one is because you're directly discussing me. I don't know if that's "every single one of your posts" or not, but it certainly sounds less dramatic when you realize that it's.. two.

> after I said I quit going to 4chan defending 4chan

Go back and read a second time. I didn't actually defend 4chan, and I certainly didn't and am not defending csam. I didn't say anything objectionably about you leaving, either; what I did respond to was your assertion that you're familiar with 4chan. All I really said is, hey, sounds like maybe you don't actually hang out there (which is fine!) --- just like GP was saying in the first place. I also tried to point out that the internet at large is basically unmoderated, and 4chan itself exists within that space. You could just as easily make the argument that the internet itself is dangerous and to be avoided.

You don't have to agree with me. You don't have to like me --- even if I wish you wouldn't make snap judgements about me based off of a few terse exchanges. What I would hope for, however, is that you could remain civil, rather than open fire with personal attacks. Especially here on HN.

I'll leave that one up to you; we can discuss further or not, but I'm not going to engage in an open flame war here.

You act like you're being an anthropologist, but you're just apologizing for a culture we all know and which does demonstrable harm in the world. It's not "polarized opinions", it's celebrating terrible things. You know that, we know that.

...except realistically, even though I'm in the age and interest group, I've been there like, a single-digit number of times --- which totally qualifies me as an expert on it, right?

This is the absolutely critical point that people are either too privileged to have ever thought of, or too disingenuous to admit.

Yeah, I'm a relatively wealthy (by global standards) white guy of European descent. You can joke about genociding me and I'll laugh because it's a ridiculous thought.

People who grew up genuinely at risk of genocide, or who had recent ancestors killed, don't see that same joke that same way. Worse, the people making those jokes about populations that are currently being exterminated are just doing the old "hey I'm a nazi, ha ha just kidding, can't you take a joke" thing. Which, great, free speech. But at some point if you're goose stepping in jest on a daily basis, that's just who you are.

Kurt Vonnegut said it: we are what we pretend to be.

...or fundamentally disagree with? Yes, you're describing something real. You're also setting a double standard. Is it possible to understand the premises but come to different conclusions?

You are also too privileged to think anyone might not be offended by those words, or even allow them the chance to speak for themselves. The banning of r/2balkan4u was a great exercise in the White Man's Burden of freeing the poor helpless "minorities" from Balkan inside jokes

Do you by any chance have any Italian ancestors? It took a large amount of lynchings, a significant public uproar and finally a threat of war from Europe for the US to finally elevate Italians to "white" . Americans ingrained need to be racist against everyone they could almost causing WWI (with all the interwoven alliances) is an interesting thought.

Have you ever been anywhere in the world which you found less racist than the USA? (Bonus points if it actually has a substantial population and racial/ethnic mix to test that, and it's not just theoretical.)

A lot of places have hidden hatred of groups which acts like racial hate, but doesn't appear that way to people from the USA where the divide (black/white) was so stark and visible. Turks/Armenians, Shia/Sunni, etc.

The USA isn't perfect, but I can't think of anywhere else that I could so unreservedly recommend to anyone around the world. Not Canada, not Germany, maybe the UK, sorta Singapore if you're not certain races, etc, etc.

The transgression is on those who carry out the genocide. There is no model where reminding someone of the existence of something is a transgression.

You might not agree with it but there's definitely a model that many people subscribe to.

People suffering the trauma of conflict can be hurt by harsh words. It's a choice to consider them or not when you speak.

If you need to subscribe to that model to hide from yourself from the fact that you don't actually care, it is your life to live, but it is not a model that works beyond one's self. The disingenuity is out there for everyone else.

The fact that trigger warnings exist and are in use in many places is evidence of the existence of this model.

There is no denying the existence of the model, but it is used to try and hide from oneself that one doesn't actually care and would rather take the fun road of talking about it instead. Which is fine. It is your life to live and if that is what it takes to get through the day, so be it. It is not the altruistic behaviour you are trying to make it out to be, however.

I'm simply responding to "There is no model where reminding someone of the existence of something is a transgression" but we seem to have reached an agreement that there is.

In my experience people are normally careful about what kind of jokes they make around someone who has suffered a traumatic experience, an "there's a time and a place" kind of thing.

I believe many people would find it transgressive to make rape jokes in the company of someone who is still processing the trauma of their sexual assault.

Who? On internet forums, there is only you. Any words you write are done so to stroke your own thought processes. There is no expectation of anyone else being on the line. In fact, most comments you write will never be read by anyone. And even when something does reply, there is no belief that it must be human. It could just as easily be a GPT model, and that's fine. It wouldn't change the experience.

Again, forum usage is solitary activity. If there are other humans involved behind the scenes to make the software work, that is merely an implementation detail that is not of concern to the user. Any care for the words you choose is only for your own benefit, and as it pertains to the discussion, most likely because you don't want to accept some truth about yourself.

Doesn't matter who you are, you constantly ARE attacked while browsing 4chan. That's kind of the point. Nobody gets to be the in crowd and protected: the closest I've seen of that is for instance literal Trump and Putin, and I don't believe for a second they are truly exempt: the more certain /pol/sters try to make them be protected, the more it backfires with 4chan.

Whether it is in ANY WAY USEFUL to go to a place where everybody hates you and you hate them right back and that's what the community is, that's another question. Looking back on my relation to such things, part of the reason I drifted off was that I found things to care about or be interested in, didn't matter what, and having any arbitrary interest was as good as 4chan, at dealing with the worthlessness and ennui.

4chan is a really good place to spend time if you haven't killed yourself yet.

If you can connect with pretty much anything else in the universe, the other thing has a pretty easy time showing its appeal compared to 4chan. For instance, I got into MLP fandom, bronies. That came off 4chan, a great example of how channers can be redirected into anything else no matter how inappropriate, just as a relief from being channers.

It's always gonna be there at the end of the line, when there's nothing else but death. But then, there are actually plenty of other things, 4chan is only one angle a person can take. It's not entirely about choice, though. As choice erodes, 4chan beckons (while flipping you off).

This doesn't actually make a difference one way or another. Abuse is abuse.

For everything else there is documentation, experimentation, social clubs and entertainment.

1. There is a 'account system' for reputation, but it is trivial to auto generate throwaway accounts for 'hot takes' or counter group-think. There are even simple mirror websites that allow for browsing without hiding flagged posts. No Edit:[I don't think any] attempts have been made to reign this behavior in, likely for good reason. Perhaps it keeps the discourse interesting and encourages lateral thinking?

IMO gatekeeping (by the community) is a good/necessary thing for spaces to not become completely gutted/become kicked out of what was formerly your space.

I think this image sums it up quite well. https://img.ifunny.co/images/8f4199becd35483d8f498f9ccd0eb73...

Still, HN could make a couple of changes to email verification and make smurfing much less trivial. I think it is good they don't

I don't understand what you mean, unless you mean posters on 4chan hate themselves. Anyone who isn't you is an other, after all.

When you say 'nice little community X' is more fucked up, and when you fail to find the same bitterness in it and go 'well, let me show you what that really is' and wreck it until it IS bitter and broken, you're kind of missing the point.

Societies are really interesting things, but it's normal for people to form societies that are more structured and rule-laden to make their preferred people more comfortable and complacent. I'd judge 'em by their methods of exclusion, and I'd assume any society worth being in, must strike a balance between complacency and stability.

4chan is maximally stable in its flat field of shit and rubble. I'm not arguing that, I just think it's not unreasonable to aspire to more, even knowing there might always be the possibility for motivated outsiders to reduce anything you have to shit and rubble. That can be true, but it doesn't make shit and rubble INTERESTING. It's just maximally stable, it cannot be further disrupted, there is no 'down' to take it.

Just listing a bunch of unrelated shit that upsets you isn't responsive to the comment you're replying to.

Those problems you list are present on every online forum and are orthogonal to being free and egalitarian.

What's more egalitarian and accessible than allowing all "hate", "vitriol", "prejudice" and "disregard for the basic humanity of others"?

What you do you prefer? A non-egalitarian and inaccessible place where only the hate, vitriol, prejudice, etc you agree with is allowed?

Everyone gets equal right and opportunity to demean each other equally!

I’m Jewish and mentally filter out all the antisemitic stuff without even thinking about it. 95% of the content outside certain pockets is not even antisemitic, it’s just a shock humor phrase used independently of any actual relation to being Jewish like the term “goyslop”.

And yeah, a certain portion of the population does actually hate Jews/transgender people/black people. But when you post nobody knows you are like that. It’s ego-less, you don’t even have an account, so you really don’t even have any reason to care because it’s not directed at you in particular, so it’s just like if you saw something racist on Twitter. Just a very different model compared to the pseudonymous forums/Reddit/hn and fully-linked regular social media.