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The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

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191–200 of 302 posts

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy that has been using 4chan and other anonymous messageboards since he was 12 acts and thinks like a 4chan user. What a shock. I know it's not the same to you, but if you look at the top 15 boards on 8chan, that list includes a board that Fredrick likely has no interest in (gay porn), boards full of users that he probably disagrees strongly with (/leftypol/, a left wing version of /pol/, and /christian/, iirc he…

If you own a media site (or, let's say, a newspaper), you're very much responsible for what's on it. If you believe in free speech to the point that you'll publish anything anyone wants to say to your audience, then you're very much enabling them and responsible for anything that happens as a result of publishing that.

Image boards aren't like newspapers or blogs. All content is user generated.

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#192
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody actually knows. People have been banned for violations of the stated rules on each board despite not actually violating them, people have been left alone for flagrant violations of said rules. Board features like names, macros, and so on are toggled on and off more or less on a whim. To say that 4chan's enforcement is inconsistent would be an understatement. But, the chaos is a feature, not a bug. Something to…

Eh, I can't really support 8chan. The admin/owner/dev/whatever is an absolutely horrible person.

Fredrick Brennan, the admin of 8chan.co/8ch.net, was born with osteogenesis imperfecta; he's spent his entire life in a wheelchair. He has endured broken bones over 120 times in his life. He is three feet tall. His arms are severely deformed and barely usable without enduring extreme pain. He was surviving in NYC without a personal care assistant on less than 1k per month. Despite these obstacles, he somehow managed to bootstrap his own project. He was on the verge of suicide before his site suddenly became successful last year.

His site fully complies with US law. He immediately removes illegal content as soon as he is made aware of it. He is happy to work with law enforcement whenever necessary.

He is beyond reprimand. As someone who is presumably an able-bodied white man with moderately wealthy parents, you're making your libelous and oppressive comment from a privileged position. You are also perpetuating a hate campaign against the differently-abled.

This hate campaign has included the following attacks:

- Ceaseless coordinated attempts to take his site down via false accusations to his hosting provider that he is supposedly hosting CP.

- Similar attempts to socially engineer his registrar into disabling his domain.

- Incredibly powerful DDOS attacks lasting weeks at a time, the most recent of which even took down his business partner 2ch.net for three days straight, which is the favorite site of approximately 20% of Japan. Imagine if reddit was brought down for 3 days because someone was angry about something that was uploaded to imgur.

- Attempts to destroy his livelihood and drive him back to the precipice of suicide by bullying sites like Patreon into pulling his funding; the goal being to leave him stranded, penniless, and homeless in the Philippines without a personal care assistant.

Separately, these are colossal nuisances. Together, they amount to a murder attempt by a ruthless, bigoted hate mob.

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#193
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the lax rules, for better or worse, is what it really has going for it. Better. 4chan was the most culturally influential website out there. I don't know how much that's true today but it shaped the humor and language of the internet in a way nothing else did. It's good to have places where there are no rules, no sacred cows, no need to be polite and politically correct. In a sea of bland derivatives, it at least ha…

One thing I noticed that is really interesting, is that MANY 4chan memes that leaked into internet at wide, started at 2chan... 4channers that also frequent 2chan frequently end posting 2chan memes in 4chan, 4chan then modifies them as needed (ie: "westernizes" them), and then those memes might one day become widespread on the english internet. This has the interesting side effect of syncing many memes between the en…

I think there's been quite a lot of interplay between these forum sites, in a way that is pretty hard to track. There's also a reasonable amount of 4chan's cultural/linguistic/meme output that is an adaptation of stuff from SomethingAwful's forums, especially in 4chan's earlier years.

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you are just trolling, or maybe you actually believe in what you say. I know I used to believe the "it's above games journalism" point of view, as I found it had plenty of merit. In case it's the second one, I have to tell you something: it really isn't about truth in games journalism. I know a lot of people think it is, but it truly isn't. Gamergate's sword are its misogynistic views and its coordinated attack…

Would you care to elaborate on this further? The number of people who disagree with GamerGate, who are willing to deeply go into their reasons why, is very very tiny in my experience. Usually all you get is "gamergate is about harassing women", a link to an instance where trolls have done precisely that, and nothing further. Absolutely nothing to directly rebut the constant refrain that most people in the movement ar…

I just assumed that the whole thing is just massive trolling, with the mark being anyone who takes any of it seriously.

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't happened? http://gawker.com/8channers-sent-cops-to-wrong-house-in-atte... http://feministing.com/2015/01/16/things-have-happened-in-th...

Those articles are just repeating the accusation without evidence. Also, I'm not sure why anyone would give any credence to information from those sources in the first place. I am astounded by the viciousness and mendacity of those who are determined to undermine 8chan at any cost. These people are essentially fighting for total corporate control of every corner of the internet, just because 8chan doesn't promote the…

> Those articles are just repeating the accusation without evidence

Except for all the evidence that's in the article, like the newspaper link with quotes from the police chief. But hey, if you ignore all the evidence, there's no evidence!

> Also, I'm not sure why anyone would give any credence to information from those sources in the first place.

Probably because they lie a lot less than GamerGaters seem to.

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#196
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to elaborate on this further? The number of people who disagree with GamerGate, who are willing to deeply go into their reasons why, is very very tiny in my experience. Usually all you get is "gamergate is about harassing women", a link to an instance where trolls have done precisely that, and nothing further. Absolutely nothing to directly rebut the constant refrain that most people in the movement ar…

No, they're primarily picking fights with individuals and systematically distracting everyone from the actual corruption of monied interests. Every so-called ethics issue that GamerGate has highlighted has been a hugely overblown misinterpretation, while several major ethical issues, such as the attempt to tightly control what YouTubers could and could not say about Shadows of Mordor, were ignored by GamerGate. Major…

>GamerGate has, as a movement, systematically refused to decry the harassment or take any kind of practical steps to curb it

As somebody that has watched GG from the outside out of fascination, I don't think this point is true and I think think it points to a broader problem online that I feel is becoming increasingly troubling - a failure to recognize that trolls are attracted to conflict and not necessarily representative of anyone on either side of an issue.

What practical steps to curb the actions of anonymous internet trolls would you have considered sufficient?

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you own a media site (or, let's say, a newspaper), you're very much responsible for what's on it. If you believe in free speech to the point that you'll publish anything anyone wants to say to your audience, then you're very much enabling them and responsible for anything that happens as a result of publishing that.

Image boards aren't like newspapers or blogs. All content is user generated.

You're still giving them a platform to do so - it doesn't matter the exact details of how much is user-generated and how much isn't.

If you allowed anybody in the world to put an ad in your newspaper, for example, you would be responsible when ISIS use it as a recruitment or propaganda tool - they wouldn't have that reach otherwise. Same with imageboards, reddit, or HN.

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#198
post #52
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8chan can't be mentioned because it's a competitor I assume? But what about Gamergate, why is it taboo to discuss it?

Because GamerGate was brewing to become the new chanology, which would have been a disaster for the whole website. As for 8chan I guess it's because its address was being spammed constantly on every board and it's also considered advertising.

If the original chanology wasn't a disaster, why would gamergate be one?

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you are just trolling, or maybe you actually believe in what you say. I know I used to believe the "it's above games journalism" point of view, as I found it had plenty of merit. In case it's the second one, I have to tell you something: it really isn't about truth in games journalism. I know a lot of people think it is, but it truly isn't. Gamergate's sword are its misogynistic views and its coordinated attack…

Would you care to elaborate on this further? The number of people who disagree with GamerGate, who are willing to deeply go into their reasons why, is very very tiny in my experience. Usually all you get is "gamergate is about harassing women", a link to an instance where trolls have done precisely that, and nothing further. Absolutely nothing to directly rebut the constant refrain that most people in the movement ar…

It's also the perception I have, mostly as a kind of observation of where the harassment seems to go (admittedly personal observation, not at all studying it systematically). I've spent a good amount of time mocking the gamergate set under my real name and nobody's done much to me. Trolling them is even a bit fun; it's sometimes a little unsporting, but sometimes it's amusing [1]. In related news, I'm a white male. Yet a number of my female colleagues have gotten torrents of abuse for much less criticism than I'm doing. That milieu seems to really smell red meat when someone who's a woman in tech says something they perceive as offending them. There is also a weird obsession with tracking down previous romantic/sexual partners of women who come across their radar, either for its own sake, or in hopes that the ex-boyfriend can be goaded into saying something negative. Whereas I can call them whatever I want with impunity. None of the gamergaters seem interested in tracking down a history of my sexual partners!

Besides being gendered, the other bit I've noticed is that it seems very anglosphere. We had a brief discussion in class here (Denmark) about gamergate, which I was initially very cautious about because I didn't want to be leading, but it ended up mostly fizzling because afaict students just viewed it as foreign and not their problem. They didn't seem to view it as an active debate here that they should be for or against, but rather some weird debate in America that they could only shrug about (weird debates in America that you can only shrug about are a dime a dozen). Well, maybe America plus some tagging along from CA/UK/AU. That perception is probably strengthened by the fact that the high-profile "pro-gamergate" articles have come from right-wing Anglo-American media outlets like Breitbart Media, whose politics start from a position that's pretty weird/foreign by local standards.

[1] There was a period when a bunch of people had a conspiracy theory about how DiGRA (http://www.digra.org/), a small and mostly ineffectual professional society for academics studying games, was taking over games. Being vaguely on the fringe of that organization provided good opportunities for trollish hashtagging (I attended a DiGRA conference once, which I believe made me a member for 1 year as a result of paying the conference registration fee). It was fun to imagine ourselves as all-powerful conspirators directing the future of games, when almost no game developers have even heard of the conference (much less read its papers), and the organization's powers are such that releasing a timely call for papers once a year remains an aspirational goal.

Re: The Next Chapter – moot retires from 4chan

#200
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to elaborate on this further? The number of people who disagree with GamerGate, who are willing to deeply go into their reasons why, is very very tiny in my experience. Usually all you get is "gamergate is about harassing women", a link to an instance where trolls have done precisely that, and nothing further. Absolutely nothing to directly rebut the constant refrain that most people in the movement ar…

No, they're primarily picking fights with individuals and systematically distracting everyone from the actual corruption of monied interests. Every so-called ethics issue that GamerGate has highlighted has been a hugely overblown misinterpretation, while several major ethical issues, such as the attempt to tightly control what YouTubers could and could not say about Shadows of Mordor, were ignored by GamerGate. Major…

> the attempt to tightly control what YouTubers could and could not say about Shadows of Mordor

That story was broken by TotalBiscuit, a prominent YouTube game reviewer who's generally considered to be part of Gamergate by its opponents and has been under attack by them for supporting it for months. (I believe they're currently trying to get his Steam curator privileges pulled for supporting it.) The gaming press didn't even report on it until over a week after it'd already blown up in Gamergate circles, the PR company behind it had apologized and promised not to do it again, and the Youtubers who took the deal had been scrutinized. Even then, I think TB was the main driving force behind them reporting on it.

The whole narrative about Gamergate ignoring it started a while after the gaming press finally reported on it, so about two weeks after GG got those responsible to apologise and back down from their decision. (By which point there wasn't much new GG discussion of it because they'd won and it was old news.)

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