It used to be a diverse place without much to tie all the boards and users together save for a shared commitment to counter-culture. Then GamerGate and Donald Trump happened. "Every board is /pol/" was one of the most frequent replies you would see for a while until all the halfway decent people left.
/g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.
/g/ genuinely was one of the worst boards on the website, but there were a handful of lurkers who made good posts in some of the general threads. the site as a whole was still was a diverse place up until yesterday, with only a few boards being unusably bad, and it was getting increasingly better.
it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.
I guess the thing that really changed is our tolerance for bad actors. As far as I'm concerned even a 99% signal-to-noise ratio is unacceptable if the 1% represents a contingent of determinedly obnoxious and hateful people, and 4chan was never anywhere close to 99% signal.
Nah, the board culture really did change in the last 7 years. In a past that's not too distant nobody was obsessed with trans folk. That's not to say there weren't vulgarities and unpleasantries, but there was definitely a substantial IQ drop somewhere around 2018 and 2019. I haven't seen the "Install Gentoo" meme in a while, the old board culture was basically replaced with cringe fringe zoomerisms.
ive always wondered, is there a way to use technology on a board style wesbite to enforce a higher quality culture? i toyed with the idea of requiring an org email similar to Blind except it could be a school email too, the hope being that after verification you are fully anon still just now with write privileges and that it would somehow lead to better quality discussions and engagements
Aka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only)
Social network culture is a multipart problem:
Any system that creates the above will be successful.The rub is that the humans behind (1) are free agents, with little incentive to stick to the site once (2) fails.
Hence rapid Digg-style collapses from site owners who don't realize how tenuous their community quality is.
I would say that reddit quality has declined a huge amount, but people won't leave because there's a huge network effect. Nobody will join a reddit clone that is 95% functionally the same because there's nobody there. Every community that tried to migrate off reddit to a reddit clone has failed.
As an example of why reddit is so bad now (aside from the obvious moderation issues) about 1-2 years ago, reddit added a block feature that stops you from replying to any comment the blocker made and even any comment somebody else made below them.
So pretending this is reddit, I could make this reply saying that you are wrong and then say you have no evidence for your claims. Then I could immediately block you, making it look like you have no response. You are also not allowed to edit any of your comments saying you got blocked or else it will shadow delete that comment.
I have personally witnessed this abuse 5 times in the past few months and I don't even use reddit that much.
Is there any evidence that most of Reddit is actually real people (paid shills and bots don't count)?
reddit may have shills and bots but even if they were 90% of the population, they still have way more users than anything like voat, saidit, etc...
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Every community that tried to migrate off reddit to a reddit clone has failed.
r/drama spun off their own site successfully, and I know of another community that did and is thriving using a fork of r/drama's server software (won't say which to keep the normies away)
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>Aka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only)
Similarly, I've heard it said that Usenet should never have allowed non-.edu posts.
You forgot problem 4: You need to provide your VC ownership a profitable exit.
This plays off problem 3. Growth-focused social media platforms don't want to remove anything but the noisiest noise, because there's still a pair of monetizable eyeballs behind most sources of noise. In fact, if you can be particularly noisy, you generate drama, which makes the platform emotionally salient and thus stickier.
How this applies to 4chan is vague since 4chan isn't exactly a growth platform. Moot's VC ownership was his mom's credit card[0] and his exit was "panic selling to hiroyuki because Hollywood actors' lawyers are breathing down my neck". Hiroyuki himself is incredibly sketchy. As far as I can tell, he bought 4chan mainly because 2channel got rugpulled by his domain registrar[1], after 2channel also had a massive data breach. Funny how history repeats.
Anyway, imageboard ownership being a fractal mirror of the incestuous bullshit going on in big tech and far-right politics aside, once a social network or forum becomes big enough to be 'known', it tends to stick, because moving off those platforms is a collective action problem. So between you holding your friends mutually hostage and the drama from letting the dumbest idiots post on your site, you've created a powerfully addictive socialization substitute that can be manipulated to make people do whatever. Quality posters and value don't matter; in fact, once you're established you want the quality level to go down.
Digg collapsed because they replaced the entire website with something completely different. They didn't fail to moderate the community, they just shut it down. It'd be like if tomorrow Facebook said "we're not doing user posts anymore, we're just going to have a bunch of comment sections for videos from legacy media outfits". Everyone would leave immediately because there's no more mutual-hostage-taking by your friends.
[0] This is not to be confused with Canvas, a similar imageboard platform also started by Moot that lasted like a year.
[1] If you believe the guy who stole the domain, the data breach rendered 2channel unable to pay domain hosting fees. That being said, the guy who stole the domain is also the owner of 8chan and a huge QAnon nutter, if not Q himself, and stealing your client's website because they ran out of money is an extremely malicious move.
As far as anyone knows, hiroyuki got the money to buy 4chan from Good Smile Company. Yes, the people who made Nendoroids.
> Growth-focused social media platforms don't want to remove anything but the noisiest noise, because there's still a pair of monetizable eyeballs behind most sources of noise. In fact, if you can be particularly noisy, you generate drama, which makes the platform emotionally salient and thus stickier.
This depends if a platform is building for quality or quantity.
There are a number of things HN could do tomorrow that would substatially drive engagement, but lower quality.
Granted, VC funding requires growth-at-all-costs, which tends to remove quality as a long term option.
> Digg collapsed because they replaced the entire website with something completely different. They didn't fail to moderate the community, they just shut it down.
Eh, as someone on it at the time, Digg's userbase collapsed before the redesign.
This roughly tracks with my memory: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bzibi/c...
I remember the HD-DVD/Blu-ray encryption key episode especially being an 'Oh, you're a square, not one of the cool kids' community moment.
Time limit for a reply. If you could only reply once in a 20 minutes, that wouldn't hinder most thoughtful users, but for user that are quick to draw a reply it's a detterenr.
Autoadmit is a message board that required .edu to register and ended up with a pretty similar culture (though with an older userbase given the initial focus on law school admissions)
A community that only admits academics is pointless, and a community that only admits American academics is completely absurd.
Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays (at least in Western societies). Counter-culture is not always a good thing.
There is no counter-culture anymore, not really. Society is virtually balkanized.
> Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays
No it's not. It's as mainstream as you get. One of the two major parties ran explicitly on a platform of transphobia ("keep men out of women's bathroom", "your daughter is being beaten up in sports by a man"). You can't call it counter-culture anymore.
The USA is not the whole Western world.
And in most of the Western World the main culture accept trans people. They may differ on who can take pills at what age or if the state should pay for surgeries (is it cosmetic, is it vital) but people who'd beat up transgender people for who they are would be shunned.
If I watch or read modern cultural product, there are huge chances some character will be officially transgender or the theme will be present (shout-out to wildbow). That's being part of The Culture. So being against it means being against the culture. Culture changes over time thanks to people against the status quo (counter-culture). You may have been counter-culture in your youth but once your cause has been accepted you're not counter-culture anymore. You won: celebrate. A meme is how Rage Against the Machine has been Rage for the Machine for a long time already.
Now once you accept you're older, you won, you're for the current status quo you may feel some dread about two things: are you still relevant? (hence why many groups will always try to prove their fight is not won); and: what are parts of the status quo which the new generations of counter culture want to see change (and surely for a good reason). What's the "lobotomy for everyone" of our generation?
I think it's difficult to label "majority" culture when most things are split 50/50.
Counter-culture feels like it requires at least an 80/20 or so.
Transphobia has been a majority cultural view throughout every culture based on the Abrahamic religions and their strict patriarchal hierarchies. Even given that the nature of gender roles change over time, and concepts like "homosexuality", "heterosexuality" and "transgender" being modern inventions, transgressing those roles has almost always been taboo.
Memoryholing the four years of the Biden administration.
No, not really. The "groomer" panic took place during the Biden years, with plenty of states passing anti-trans legislation and banning pro-trans books from libraries. The Biden administration did not reverse the widespread cultural hatred, discrimination and violence against trans people in the US in any meaningful sense. And it's honestly weird that you would think it even could have, given where we are now politically.
It’s two different cultures, one of which is more dominant, or was during the Biden years. As always, only the dominant culture matters culturally.
The premise that during the Biden years transgender culture was the dominant culture in America is just plainly ridiculous, as is the implication that only transgender identity mattered, culturally, during those years. Again, these were the years when transphobia began to mainstream and become codified into legislation and "antiwoke" and "anti-DEI" culture. It was never dominant, it only just started to become visible enough to really piss people off (similar to gay culture in the 1980s.)
Not transgender culture but elite coastal liberal culture.
What would you call the political culture that has replaced it?
I wouldn’t say anything has replaced it yet, more that the Trump admin is trying to do so currently by removing a lot of programs, banning words, purging employees, etc. Whether that will be successful remains to be seen but coastal liberal culture is very dominant and I don’t see it being replaced any time soon. And I guess you could call the other culture conservative culture.
Probably correctly termed "counter-revolutionary", given the self-used terminology of its proponents. [0]
Historically ironic, given MAGA's ideological birth in the Tea Party movement.
[0] https://americanmind.org/salvo/trumps-smithsonian-counter-re...
I would argue MAGA is somewhat revolutionary from the neoliberal globalist two party consensus in the last 30-40 years. Coastal liberal culture and its components might see itself as revolutionary, woke and so on, but I see it as just a continuation of liberal culture. After all, wokism, or whatever the term is, very comfortably fits in elite coastal liberal culture and that culture has been dominant for decades.
Joe Biden was saying he had the back of Trans people in his State of the Union Address, trans kids especially. His white House was holding Transgender day of visibility and tweeting about transgender issues His Department of Education Secretary was anything but transphobic
Yeah, after 2015 it became impossible to go to any of the boards if you weren’t a pol poster. They made it their mission to spread their vile shit everywhere.
Meh, /pol/ leaks but people also gets called out for it all the time. Overall I'd say containment style moderation like the one 4chan has works pretty well if you're looking to host "discussion" of a wide varity of topics.
It’s not a terrible theory. You could argue that other websites banning their containment communities caused a spillover effect into the wider internet as well.
Gamergate and Donald Trump was a 4-6 year period depending on where you put the needle. There were 10 years before it and now close to 5 years after it. The people who continue to hammer about it are just announcing that they don't understand the site and are complaining about ancient history. The most popular board right now is the video game generals board, and second place belongs to the regular video games board.
The site was markedly different before and after those events. /pol/ didn't exist before those events and aggressive alt-right rants didn't constantly leak into every other board from it (and get treated with kid gloves or be allowed by mods, who were specifically instructed to do so).
Frog in boiling water moment. Most of us have had enough experience with the platform before, during and after this period to know that it's not going back to what it was.