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4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

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Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#51

Post by aspaceman »

jabn76 wrote: post #45
aspaceman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about. Can you even imagine using 4chan as a woman or a black man? Like not only in real life do you have to deal with people being racist as hell, but hey here's this forum that's entirely shameless about it too. You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them. The only people who can go to…

On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.

Right.

But let's go /pol/ for a hot sec. Oh hey! Ctrl-F says there's 5 occurrences of the n-word (Hard -r too!).

I'm not black, but I imagine that just ignoring stuff like that really gets to you after awhile. Here is a forum where people actively demean others based on the color of their skin, and not only is it normal, but if you're going to visit you need to make sure no one knows that they're actually black. So should they just pretend to be white?

Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#52

Post by uhdihsjhr »

aspaceman wrote: post #44
deft wrote: post #14

How many of these anti-4chan articles are written by people that regularly use it? I'm guessing zero. 4chan is an interesting site and has better discussion from a broad userbase than reddit or here. Plenty of interesting projects were born out of 4chan, particularly /g/ but the other boards have created valuable things for humans in general, not just internet culture. The positives IMO come from the whole "FREE SPEE…

> using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about. Can you even imagine using 4chan as a woman or a black man? Like not only in real life do you have to deal with people being racist as hell, but hey here's this forum that's entirely shameless about it too. You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them. The only people who can go to…

Given the Alexa ranking of 4chan lots of women and non white people use the site so no need to imagine it because it's happening.

Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#53

Post by optimuspaul »

deft wrote: post #14

How many of these anti-4chan articles are written by people that regularly use it? I'm guessing zero. 4chan is an interesting site and has better discussion from a broad userbase than reddit or here. Plenty of interesting projects were born out of 4chan, particularly /g/ but the other boards have created valuable things for humans in general, not just internet culture. The positives IMO come from the whole "FREE SPEE…

Free speech is great and all, but I prefer to spend my time with people that have the wisdom to keep some thoughts to themselves, or maybe not have the thoughts in the first place. I'll probably never go on 4chan because I don't have the time or desire to have to sort through it all, not just because it is a cesspool of human indecency.

Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#54

Post by implr »

deft wrote: post #14

How many of these anti-4chan articles are written by people that regularly use it? I'm guessing zero. 4chan is an interesting site and has better discussion from a broad userbase than reddit or here. Plenty of interesting projects were born out of 4chan, particularly /g/ but the other boards have created valuable things for humans in general, not just internet culture. The positives IMO come from the whole "FREE SPEE…

/pol/ has grown a lot louder and prominent in the past few years though, to the point where even many seasoned 4chan posters are annoyed by them. "go back to /pol/" is a complaint you can now see on almost every board.

Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#55

Post by Brakenshire »

lainga wrote: post #28
Shank wrote: post #3

> Yet this cannot last. At 15 years old, 4chan has reached adolescence. Up till now, trolls—children—have been in control. It’s not so funny anymore. After all, even the lost boys had to grow up. Just because one can write that it cannot last doesn't make it so. Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything. Facebook is 14 and Twitter is 12 and that doesn't say anything about…

I got shades of the endless 2016-era "this means Trump is FINISHED" articles.

By any reasonable standards he should have been, the mistake was expecting reasonable standards.

Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#56

Post by api »

rarec wrote: post #25
deft wrote: post #14

How many of these anti-4chan articles are written by people that regularly use it? I'm guessing zero. 4chan is an interesting site and has better discussion from a broad userbase than reddit or here. Plenty of interesting projects were born out of 4chan, particularly /g/ but the other boards have created valuable things for humans in general, not just internet culture. The positives IMO come from the whole "FREE SPEE…

There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason. Seems that they also contain any outside perspective on the site as well. /b/ and /pol/ are particularly egregious, but they're worth suffering to live if it means I can keep /g/ and /tg/. The open format of the site also, while it does contain a lot of posting, does have a curious cross contamination effect. You may learn about an entirely unrelated t…

From what I can see /pol/ in particular is extremely popular and massively influential in the promotion of shockingly vile politics of a sort that until recently I've never encountered anywhere even close to the mainstream.

It is my understanding that it was created as a containment board, but it's popularity and relative power has soured me on the whole site.

Here's the problem: /pol/ gets so much traffic that I can't imagine that its visitors do not cover a fairly broad subset of 4chan's entire user base. This means that if I contribute to any of the other boards I am contributing in some way to the intellectual capital pool drawn upon by the sorts of people who hang out in /pol/.

No thanks.

I'm not the only person who feels this way. I've heard others say this kind of thing too. There's a lot of people who once visited the site who no longer do so. Boards like /pol/ seem to be killing 4chan as anything other than a more Internet-cool satellite of Stormfront.

Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#57

Post by SiempreViernes »

creaghpatr wrote: post #6
Shank wrote: post #3

> Yet this cannot last. At 15 years old, 4chan has reached adolescence. Up till now, trolls—children—have been in control. It’s not so funny anymore. After all, even the lost boys had to grow up. Just because one can write that it cannot last doesn't make it so. Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything. Facebook is 14 and Twitter is 12 and that doesn't say anything about…

The more facebook and twitter and youtube censor their users, the more gravity will shift to 4chan, it's the law of conservation of speech on the internet.

Between 2003 and 2015, the worldwide internet penetration rose from 12% to 44%, that's 2.4 billion more internet users, but somehow there is a "conservation law of speech"?

Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#58

Post by aspaceman »

microcolonel wrote: post #48
aspaceman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about. Can you even imagine using 4chan as a woman or a black man? Like not only in real life do you have to deal with people being racist as hell, but hey here's this forum that's entirely shameless about it too. You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them. The only people who can go to…

> You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them. They can't? Almost no matter who you are, somebody somewhere is musing about your death, if you can't handle that in words, I doubt you could live much, regardless of your identifiable characteristics.

> if you can't handle that in words, I doubt you could live much, regardless of your identifiable characteristics.

I really cannot wrap my mind around the lack of empathy required to say "if you can't handle it" to people being called racist slurs. I presume you have never been called a racist slur. I presume you have never been demonized for your skin color - how can you even begin to know what that's like?

Ignoring the hatred that people on 4chan have for black people is not trivial - obviously this is more affecting for a person if they're black.

Have you read any testimonials about racism, or how it's made folks feel, or anything like that? There's many books out there, and I think your lack of empathy comes from ignorance. Reading some first-hand experience may make it more clear.

Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#59

Post by Brakenshire »

taneq wrote: post #18
josefresco wrote: post #11

Indeed, nearly every evil of the internet begins, or picks up steam, on the site. To invoke yet another metaphor: It’s a breeding ground. (The fact that 4chan has been called so many things suggests a feeble attempt to make sense of chaos.) Many of the recruitment techniques of the so-called alt-right were piloted there; many white nationalists started out as 4channers. It’s unclear if or how one ages out of the site…

They're ignoring the fact that much of current internet culture also originated there.

Seems to be something people repeat for the 'anarchic creativity' narrative rather than an actual truth.

Re: 4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

#60

Post by api »

fein wrote: post #49
samuraijack wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we going to just ignore how bigoted and racist 4chan is in general?

Understanding why it is that way would probably be more useful than trying to get brownie points for your signaling. It's like that because people with your outlook have deplatformed so much discourse that 4chan is the last bastion of a truly free exchange of ideas. Voat comes in a close second. Calling something bigoted and racist is just an attempt to deflect and ignore the conversation. Offending people is general…

People (both individuals and as groups such as corporations) have freely decided that they do not want to donate their resources to providing a platform for people to advocate genocide or to systematically denigrate 50% or more of the population. What's wrong with that? If those are the ideas you wish to freely exchange you're welcome to set up your own site, but I am not going to pay for your bandwidth.

Everyone "signals." Signaling is a fundamental aspect of social behavior. I don't care much about signaling and tend to ignore it as background noise. It's the real ideas that matter. The dominant ideas on Voat and /pol/ are political totalitarianism, dogmatic biological determinism, hatred for huge groups of people, and even advocacy of slavery and genocide.

There are toxic "left" communities that advocate totalitarianism and are full of hate as well, but they don't seem quite as common or as popular.

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