(There are certainly parts of it that are risky clicks though)
The reason 4chan has survived has been that it promotes anonymity and hence genuine expression. After dealing with it, for a while, you get to kind of know different types of people. You can go to a containment board and find people that are genuinely, for example, homophobic and antisemetic with complete seriousness. They compete for space with people that are just trolling, and both compete with some genuinely level-headed people. It's fascinating to watch.
Meanwhile, in other boards, you'll find people snarking over guns (/k/), bicycles (/n/), anime (/a/), otaku and general Hikikomori behavior (/jp/), making things (/diy/), and on and on.
Because everything is anonymous and the boards move so fast, there's no advantage to the sorts of politics and forking you see in Reddit or whatever--instead, you just develop a sort of hang-out culture and occasionally interact with invaders. It's fun.
Unlike other more oppressive moderation schemes (cough reddit hackernews cough), 4chan just accepts as cost of doing business that people are going to want to be shitheads.
So, you have boards specifically for people wanting to be shitheads. Over time, that becomes board culture, and often raises to a level of self-parody that they become easy to spot when they leak. Imagine, if you will, an island whose sole form of humor is hyperbolically racist, sexist, classist, or materialist. If you can contort yourself into that headspace and engage the art on its own terms, it is a never-ending source of creativity and amusement.
The best part is, if it shows up somewhere else, you can just tell them to "go back to <whatever>", and they don't get a persecution complex about it, because they're not being censored.
Maybe it's just me - but I think the irreverent self-aware toxicity has it's advantages.
4chan's /b/ is seen as "the cesspool" and nobody tries to make it better because nobody wants it to be better. It just needs to be that place where the EMT that spent his day dealing with life and death can relieve his stress and let go of what's plaguing his mind with "lol, tits or gtfo"[1].
Because in the end, it's all a big joke.
1: Can't find back the exact screenshot were a /b/ user was saying this, sorry.
Some of the very large subreddits such as /games and /askscience have actually retained very high quality. They just require very strict rules and heavy moderation.
Just compare the frontpage of http://reddit.com/r/gaming with http://reddit.com/r/games — granted one is about twice as big as the other in terms of active users, but /gaming has been full of low-quality submissions since before it became a default subreddit.
It just comes down to having proper rules and enforcing them.
Now, reddit and 4chan are very different in the regard of perceived quality. If you heavily moderate a subreddit the low-quality submissions will for the most part only be viewed by those that browse the queue of new submissions. This isn't really true with 4chan since the low-quality submissions that are buried will still be viewed by everyone (although this kind of depends on if you've configured the order of submissions).
As an interesting aside, you can actually significantly impact what submissions get buried in a subreddit with very few votes since there's not a lot of people that browse the new-queue.
The idea of individually singling someone out to make their lives miserable, for something stupid they've done, seems anathema to 4chan's culture. Or at least what makes 4chan's culture work. I see no problem with 4chan's mods removing dox.
You're an idiot, so are we all, but people don't forgive as easily as they should.
So have an upvote, make another post, and try again! Stick around Giorgi.
> My take-away from this is that social software is
> remarkably hard, ...
> and that whatever you do, people will hate you.
In particular, successful communities often have places where similar members can congregate and effectively shun people who don't fit in. Call it a clique, call it a subreddit, but really its about finding a mental space to be.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/12/07/socratic-fishing-in-lak...
The relevant point is the dynamic balance between "plazas" (highly accessible areas to anyone) and "warrens" (areas accessible only to an accultured in-group). "Evaporative cooling" is the phenomenon of the best contributing members "boiling off" and leaving due to frustration from excessive noise, flame wars, etc. From the post:
"Warrens are like rabbit warrens: low global visibility, highly personalized corners where small groups can aggregate/self-segregate. Plazas are like grand public town squares with lots of global visibility. Warrens are maze-like: it is hard to break out of your current corner, and it is easy to get lost. You couldn’t get lost in a plaza even if you wanted to.
[...]
'Warrenizing' a site undeniably slows evaporative cooling, by allowing groups to self-segregate. On Sulekha, we had a warren of individual topic boards, and a firehose plaza that consolidated the entire discussion stream at the landing page. When flame wars got too hot, we used to simply turn the plaza stream off, so people were forced to go directly to individual corners. Things would immediately get quieter. Groups would get sequestered, and therefore less likely to leave because of unpleasant activity elsewhere that they didn’t like."
Over a period of time I learnt to ignore trolls and baits
Smaller communities could make for more specialized content, and everybody living on the edge of a bubble means theres plenty of opportunity for valuing middleman-style culture sharing (AKA reposts.)
So really, all of the two things that I suggested are things that reddit doesn't do.
http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/section-2-social-media-...
If the numbers there are right and only 4-6 million people are using it as a social network it isn't very surprising that Google would be "giving up on pitching Google+ as a social network"
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-google-plus-...
Every time I want to create a new playlist, I create a new G+ profile, then delete it immediately afterwards. It is tedious. I'm sure many other people, when faced with roadblocks like these, create a do-nothing profile but don't bother deleting afterwards.
Or don't use playlists and find other websites.
Just sayin'..
I would be surprised if the founders get to contractually retain the entire $3MM taken off the table in that funding round. It is possible that this is the case (and so maybe not so surprising) but given the often unique terms in startup funding, I would be surprised if this were the case here.
Secret cofounders David Byttow and Chris Bader-Wechseler were both veterans of Google+. Byttow, in particular, I recall being quite well-respected as someone who got shit done, quietly and efficiently, by the rest of the G+ team. I didn't know him personally, but I had a few professional dealings with him where I found him to be a straight-shooter that was remarkably effective and helpful. When I heard of the product concept for Secret, my first thought was "Woah, somebody's finally decided to take the other side of the stupid Real Names policy and build a social network that's completely anonymous."
Apparently that doesn't work either, and when you do that, people hate you just as much.
My take-away from this is that social software is remarkably hard, and that whatever you do, people will hate you. The social sites that survive - like Reddit, Flickr, and Facebook - are those that very carefully balance everyone's competing desires, making just enough changes to keep everyone slightly disgruntled but not enough to leave the site. The ones that die - like Secret, G+, LiveJournal - are the ones that either do nothing to moderate or that introduce heavy-handed blanket policies. (4chan, as always, remains inexplicable; somehow it is still going strong despite being a cesspool. Maybe that's the whole point of it, though, to be the Internet's honey pot of bad behavior.)