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A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

arxiv.org

11–20 of 155 posts

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

#11
post #5

Can someone explain to me why they keep focussing on 4chan and not 'chans' in general? AFAIK 8chan's /pol/ has had a bigger impact this time around because they censor less. (Not censoring doxx information and such)

Most average people don't even know what a 'chan' is or even know what 4chan is all about, except for the times it gets demonized by the media. And it becomes just associated with something sensational and negative.

The higher ideal: the philosophical context of freedom through anonymity resulting in great creativity is completely drowned out by the petty stuff.

There's a reason it creates a major portion of culture,memes, and ideas on the internet. It's one of the few places unimpenged by materialism or status or th ability of your boss to find your account. This means every one is simply judged by what ideas they create and I think thats a beautiful thing.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

#12
If you are a researcher looking for a 4chan dataset spanning a much longer time period and many different boards, I would recommend looking into the archive.moe database dump[0] that was uploaded to the Internet Archive after the owner decided to stop his activities.

[0]: https://archive.org/download/archive-moe-database-201506

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

#14
"9. RARE PEPES In this Section we display some of our rare Pepe collection."

Things that you have never thought would appear on a bonafide research paper for 800$.

EDIT: 4Chan thread regarding this paper, this is worth the read on it's own. http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/92612923/a-longitudinal-m...

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

#15

How does it take eight people to write this paper?

Two people collected the data, two did the analysis and wrote the paper, three helped a bit, one got the grant which funded the lab. Or something similar.

The incentives for giving credit to everyone who participated even a bit are quite strong: in most academic disciplines you get more than an eighth of a paper's worth of 'credit' for an eight-author paper.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

#17

"9. RARE PEPES In this Section we display some of our rare Pepe collection." Things that you have never thought would appear on a bonafide research paper for 800$. EDIT: 4Chan thread regarding this paper, this is worth the read on it's own. http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/92612923/a-longitudinal-m...

This sentence -- not to mention the rare pepe collection at the end -- made me pause a bit and wonder if the paper isn't a particularly elaborate chan troll. Clearly "rare pepe" is a chan in-joke.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

#18

How does it take eight people to write this paper?

It's quite popular in the NGO/SJW world to do informal "manus manum lavat" deals to gain credibility: you help us with our current campaign, we put your name on our future publications.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

#19
post #17

"9. RARE PEPES In this Section we display some of our rare Pepe collection." Things that you have never thought would appear on a bonafide research paper for 800$. EDIT: 4Chan thread regarding this paper, this is worth the read on it's own. http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/92612923/a-longitudinal-m...

This sentence -- not to mention the rare pepe collection at the end -- made me pause a bit and wonder if the paper isn't a particularly elaborate chan troll. Clearly "rare pepe" is a chan in-joke.

Rare Pepe is the "name" of the meme as far as the subject specific custom pepe images/shops go.

But I still can't believe that there is a research paper out there where there is a section which describes the researcher's "collection" of rare pepe memes with visual aide samples.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web

#20
post #5

Can someone explain to me why they keep focussing on 4chan and not 'chans' in general? AFAIK 8chan's /pol/ has had a bigger impact this time around because they censor less. (Not censoring doxx information and such)

Most average people don't even know what a 'chan' is or even know what 4chan is all about, except for the times it gets demonized by the media. And it becomes just associated with something sensational and negative. The higher ideal: the philosophical context of freedom through anonymity resulting in great creativity is completely drowned out by the petty stuff. There's a reason it creates a major portion of culture,…

This means every one is simply judged by what ideas they create and I think thats a beautiful thing.

And it drives higher quality content because of it. Most people do not realize that a lot of the popular memes and internet jokes shared on more mainstream platforms originally came from the "chan" culture.

To your point though the high quality content is often difficult to find in the cesspool of low-quality spam on these boards.

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