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

wired.com

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

#101

Post by aspaceman »

mikec3010 wrote: post #93
aspaceman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What's ironic here is how conservative your position is: defending the status quo that the n-word must reflexively provoke outrage. People are imploring you to accept that times are changing and the word is being disassociated from hate, yet you're sticking to the 40 year old definition because "that's just how it always was". Doesn't that remind you of something?

???

I don't care how conservative my opinion is. I don't equate the quality of arguments and opinions with which adjectives can be used to describe them.

Also please point to which decade it was where the n-word was "disassociated from hate". When has the word not been used in a hateful way?

Calling people the n-word provokes outrage because it is an outrageous thing to do. The word has a history and we all know it.

> People are imploring you to accept that times are changing and the word is being disassociated from hate

The only people imploring me of this are random folks on the Internet. I talk to black folks all the time in the real world, and you know what? It's still not ok.

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

#102

Post by aspaceman »

Brakenshire wrote: post #86
rarec wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to defend racism, but you'll find that pretty much every race that's not 2D gets shit on when you're on 4chan. That's just part of being a moderator-lite website. The entire idea is you shouldn't bring your real life onto the site, you'll find people ready and able to tear down anything for incredibly inane reasons. Why is it that it's so prevalent is an excellent question; why do people resort to such strong rac…

Most people are not racist/sexist when given a mask, the people who are go to /b/ or /pol/, and in the process get further radicalized.

Part of 4chan's whole game is claiming that "everyone is racist with a mask" in order to justify "I'm racist with a mask".

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

#103

Post by jabn76 »

aspaceman wrote: post #83
ddevault wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have a right to be offended and the offender has a right not to care. I certainly don't endorse 4chan culture but it's different from what you think.

What is it that you think "I think" 4chan's culture is? I am saying that 4chan is not a safe place if you are black or most minorities. Period. I don't care what 4chan's culture is because it doesn't matter for the sake of this point.

A safe place? It’s not like they can slap you over tcp/ip. I think you take the internet too seriously, and are disrespectful of other people’s opinions.

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

#104

Post by mikec3010 »

optimuspaul wrote: post #53
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.

"Some thoughts" == the ones you (or most people) find offensive.

So you keep repeating that and raising the censorship bar until nobody is offended anymore. And what you have is a whitewashed, sanitized forum with less creativity, originality, and free association. That's not what everyone wants. Some people want the uncensored version.

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

#105

Post by ddevault »

aspaceman wrote: post #83
ddevault wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have a right to be offended and the offender has a right not to care. I certainly don't endorse 4chan culture but it's different from what you think.

What is it that you think "I think" 4chan's culture is? I am saying that 4chan is not a safe place if you are black or most minorities. Period. I don't care what 4chan's culture is because it doesn't matter for the sake of this point.

I know what you're saying, and I'm telling you that you're incorrect. 4chan is not a safe space for anyone, minorities are not special in this regard.

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

#106

Post by aspaceman »

adamrezich wrote: post #99
aspaceman wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you mean. But minorities always just "ignore it" - but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect them. It's how folks are frequently taught to cope. Even if you're staying in more of the "safe" boards, I imagine you're always worried that someone you're interacting with doesn't.

Why would anyone posting on an anonymous imageboard be worried about people making negative comments towards them, anonymously? Your fellow anonymous users only know about you what you choose to share in your posts, and unlike reddit or HN, you don't have a persistent identity.

Because it tells you that's what "society" thinks of you. And that will affect your day-to-day life.

It affects folks in the same way learning that a lot of folks on Reddit/HN like to Haskell. "Oh hey I didn't know Haskell was so popular"

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

#107

Post by mikec3010 »

deft wrote: post #85
samuraijack wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No. I'm not saying we should. I'm saying it's no different than other places, the racism on 4chan is on reddit. It's all over the internet. 4chan isn't especially bad in my experience. I don't go to the boards devoted to racism and I don't go to the subreddits and forums devoted to it either.

Reddit? Voat is completely unusable to me because every comment is tainted with a racist agenda. It is inescapable across their whole site.

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

#108

Post by ImSkeptical »

I was just listening to an interview with Elon Musk where he discussed the importance of reasoning from first principles as opposed to by analogy. The author of this wired article would benefit from taking that lesson to heart.

The Wired article is reasoning "by analogy". 4chan is like a teenager, or the soul of the internet, or the id of the internet, or whatever. Then, the author draws spurious conclusions based on those analogies. If 4chan is like a teenager, and it is fifteen years old, then surely it should be time for it to start getting more mature - right?

On the other hand, if you reason from first principles you see that the reporter's conclusions are nonsense. If you start with some basic assumptions - like that the culture of a web community is influenced by the mechanics of that community, you can conclude that 4chan is unlikely to change. 4chan is unlikely to change, not because it is in some psychological period of arrested development the way some human teens may be, 4chan is unlikely to change because the mechanics of how the board work are unlikely to change.

The behaviors on 4chan are better explained by the mechanics of the community than by psychological analogies. No registration. No persistent identities (or at least rarely used and abstruse persistent identities). No sorting of threads or replies. No persistence of threads or comments. Threads live or die based on the responses they attract and not any measure of quality.

The mechanics of 4chan, or any web community, influence how the users behave and not the age of the community. That's because 4chan is a web community and not a human teenager.

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

#110

Post by tomatotomato37 »

qop wrote: post #42
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…

Who says it isn't mature? Is it immature because it doesn't fit your content expectations? Reminder that after 15 long years of chaos, it still exists. It's a very specific, essentially impenetrable market of 4chan users that can't really be pushed away except by catastrophic mismanagement. The features of the site have stabilized and reacted to user demands over the years, and though good boards (/prog/ :( and other…

>4chan isn't selling your identity to data scientists

That's actually questionable now since Hiroshima bought the site. Some weird scripts were added that were heavily obfuscated and killed the CSS if you didn't let them run. Luckily the innate computer paranoia of /g/ meant this was caught and worked around in less than a day, but it's still pretty sleazy.

Also Google captcha is needed to post, so there are the standard two Google scripts running too

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