>primarily due to seeing the kind of place you get when the barrier for entry is non existent.
you think reddit's bad, try 4chan!
I was 4chan "janitor" (lesser-mod) for 18 months or so and I agree, these sorts of positions really twist your perception of the community you're moderating. When you're buried in reports -- and these are 4chan reports, which means not just spam, but gore, cp, raids, etc. -- it becomes all too easy to dole out harsh penalties to people who may have just made an honest mistake. I essentially stopped browsing 4chan for fun; I saw it only through the lens of the janitor interface.
Chris, to his credit, frequently expressed his gratitude to the volunteer staff for doing what he knew was a thankless, soul-crushing job. He wondered aloud why we didn't go volunteer our time at a puppy shelter or something instead. I'm sure he asked himself that question too.
I'm no longer in that position; I outed myself as a janitor and was immediately terminated. I've come to the conclusion that I'm not really suited for these sorts of roles. Having access to privileged information and special powers makes me uncomfortable. The good news is that I've recently returned to 4chan as a regular, anonymous user, and I'm really enjoying it. I hope Chris experiences something similar. He deserves it.
"not just spam, but gore, cp, raids, etc." (I'm assuming cp means children)
"The good news is that I've recently returned to 4chan as a regular, anonymous user, and I'm really enjoying it."
I've never visited the site, and really don't want to. So maybe I'm missing something, but why would you want to associate yourself with a place like that? It seems like even spending time there as an anonymous user would change your perception of the world for the worse. I see people post screenshots on Reddit sometimes and it seems pretty deviant.
Unlike reddit, 4chan is not a popularity contest. There are no likes or upvotes that dictate what you see; everyone in a thread sees the same content. Furthermore, there are no persistent identities, so you have no way of gauging the value of someone's post other than by examining its content. I think this dynamic is what made 4chan such a creative force: the only way for a post to "live" longer than one thread was to make it memetic, remixable, broadly applicable.
What I really like about 4chan nowadays is the pace. When a new episode of my favorite show is out, or when the Super Bowl is on, or when a presidential candidate says something stupid, I know there will be a thread about it. At times, it's almost like we're all in the same room together. Having browsed for 7 years now, it really does feel like home to me.
> What I really like about 4chan nowadays is the pace.
I think the pace varies from board to board, and can appeal to people and their particular tastes at the time. Using myself as an example: today I enjoy /wg/'s backgrounds and eye-candy setups, but not /b/. A decade ago, I ignored anything not /b/.
There's nothing wrong with that, but I do think the notoriety of /b/ makes people stay away from the other boards.
I don't think the lack of upvotes means there isn't still a popularity contest going on. There is still a lot of posting done just to try to get as big of a reaction as possible out of people. Some people even talk about their activity on 4chan through other side-channels, like IRC or even in-person. People brag about their exploits to other people. It may not have a number attached to it, but it's really nothing but a popularity contest.
Well, for some people everything is a popularity contest. Reddit includes an interface for popularity contests whereas 4chan is popularity contest agnostic.
As someone who casually browses 4chan (at least some of the less major boards, certainly not /b/) I've got to say that I've never really seen any particularly awful content. Either it's not as ubiquitous as people think or the janitors are really, really good at their jobs.
It's all very silly, of course. But the anonymous thing is fun and I've had some interesting debates where I can just test ideas and say whatever for the hell of it without worrying about any kind of repercussion in terms of my reputation. It's easier to go in guns blazing being wrong and learn something without feeling that it's personal when no one has a name.
Most people think 4chan is /b/, because that's where all the worst stuff happens. Imagine if reddit had an "anything legal goes" subreddit - it would be pretty messed up. Other boards can be pretty tame.
No, people think that because it's bigger than everything else put together, the fountainhead of the site's culture, and is the source of virtually everything notable that's ever happened there.
But I get what you're saying. /b/ really is the largest board. In a way it's meant to be the containment board, or the moat around the castle. It's where all the shit goes, so it doesn't pollute the rest of the site. And oh boy, is the internet full of shit.
4chan is divided into boards (like subreddits). For example, /pol/ is for politics.
/b/ is the "random" board (or "anything goes") and the biggest one on 4chan. Some pretty awful stuff happens on there (as well as some pretty cool stuff). Basically it's a grab-bag of Internet.
Reddit has subreddits dedicated to the foulest stuff that you'll ever occasionally see on 4chan. That has historically included borderline illegal content, with literally illegal content mixed in.
Reddit's reputation of being better than 4chan is entirely undeserved.
Both are interest-separated discussion boards. Reddit bills itself as more news-oriented, but quite often it serves as a regular threaded forum where the first post sets the context.
After reddit got big, we started seeing (well, started speculating that we're seeing) a lot of people come to 4chan after initially cutting their internet discussion teeth on reddit. There were speculations of a secret irc cabal of redditors, who collude to drive threads offtopic and in general mould board culture to be more reddit-like. To this day I'm not sure if those allegations were insubstantiated. We did have several prominent spammers who comandeered fleets of hundreds of proxies and spammed threads they didn't like with random-generated posts. These were obviously not redditors, but given there are people who care enough and have free time enough... In short, 4chan is a magical place.
Apart from the cp, which is very rare as an end user of /b/, I find it entertaining. There's a lot of crap to wade through, but some of the humorous content really is quite funny. 4chan seems to have contributors that really get the chaotic-feeling, disjoint sense of humor - whereas Reddit seems overwhelmed with puns and catchphrases (OK /b/'s obsession with "rolling" (looking at last digits of post number) is just as lame). I enjoy the "deviant" stuff, too, if only to marvel at the strange things people get up (and perhaps off) to. And why not, if it's an interesting experience? The raids are sometimes amazing examples of performance art (and fit the sense of humour rather well).
As another user pointed out, viewing "best of" is probably a more efficient approach, and let's you avoid some of the crap. But there's something enjoyable about being there, in the moment something is happening.
The Internet is a perfect reflection of the world at large. It
has everything in it except homeless people and that's only
because they can't afford the monthly hookup charge.
The Internet is scary to people because it TRULY makes everyone
equal.
All the people who are invisible in the normal world (the world
run by the rich and powerful), all those people you can dismiss
on the street as powerless and harmless -- ALL THOSE PEOPLE are
now in your face.
You can feel their hot breath on the Internet.
It's called "humanity."
America was invented to empower those people. It's just taken
this long to find out how to do it.
After all, the Net is just telephone lines, computer screens and
satellite hook-ups. It's purely technical.
Its only purpose is to bring the real world into focus. Anyone
who opposes that should go back and read the Declaration of
Independence.
I don't visit 4chan but I believe there's definitely value to seeing people anonymously post their thoughts. Whether they're saying something true or whether they're just trying to get a reaction, to get a look at what people will say when they're totally unhindered by any social norms or repercussions is very interesting. The thoughts that people are normally afraid to share are usually wrong, but sometimes people are afraid to share ideas that are right, as well.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply I believe what I read or see on 4chan; it's more about the way people interact with each other. Like I said, it's more of a feeling than anything else.
By "honesty", I think the GP meant that people get to act like assholes when they want to act like assholes, rather than feeling like they have to hold in their feelings based on how an outburst might affect their reputation. Those same people then go on to have perfectly friendly and nice conversations (or at least the bar-room-poking-fun equivalent) in other threads.
To me, that seems pretty "honest": you get to see the full range of human emotion that should be statistically-likely for a large group of people to be experiencing at any given moment, rather than just the faces people want to present to the world.
Assholish outbursts stick out because they're unusual compared to reputational society, but I don't think those outbursts are incentivized; they're just represented within the corpus at the same rate that people are actually feeling them, rather than hidden away and kept secret.
(Though, there might be a bit of a reverse-causation where people visit 4chan when they're angry to let off steam, because they know it won't affect their reputation. That could explain away quite an increase in the representation of assholes.)
The culture on 4chan is such that people are actively encouraged to be assholes more frequently. They start to play their role. That’s not honesty, that’s performance.
I think you are completely ignoring the impact culture has on behavior. This notion that people somehow hold it in if they are not mean to one another and that they would actually and in all honesty rather scream at each other – that’s such a foreign concept to me. Some people just honestly don’t have to hold back because they are just not like that, at least not all the time.
Do you not see that being abrasive can just as much be an act as being polite?
It's true. But in a sense, everything is an act: the behaviors that might sometimes feel a little phony in adulthood, but are still easily maintained with only the barest hint of conscious thought, were completely unknown in infancy, but, as we witnessed them thousands to literal millions of times, were eventually engraved so thoroughly into our pattern recognition systems that we can no longer make any true conception of being without them. Indeed, phoniness marks the tip of the iceberg: nurture affects to some extent all morality, emotion, and logic, even those aspects that seem the most pure and natural; true, we can deduce from evidence like universality among cultures, the behavior of animals, evolutionary principles, etc. that some of it is truly hardcoded into our genes, but there are no sharp boundaries...
Not that any of that is a bad thing. But in a sense, 4chan is a simulation of what we could all really, honestly be like in a different environment - to the extent it's fueled by acting, it's just compensating for the fact that nobody is raised there from birth.
> That’s such a foreign concept to me. Some people just honestly don’t have to hold back because they are just not like that, at least not all the time.
Some people don't, sure. I was trying to make a generalization of what humans as a group are statistically likely to do; breaking it down, some humans would be assholes all the time, some a few rare times, and some never at all. (Side-point: don't feel the need to defend yourself from statistical assertions about human behavior, they're not intended as accusations: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/04/about-isnt-about-you.h...)
There are indeed real people who have real rage that they don't get to express as often as they'd like, though. There are people with anger management problems, or aggressive mania. There are people feeling intense (sometimes justified!) frustration in some part of their lives. There are people who are just plain sadists, and either don't know there's such a thing as a willing masochist or can't find one.
Let me draw a parallel: road rage. Depending on the culture of a particular area of the world, road rage can be either taboo or permitted. People everywhere get frustrated at the behavior of other drivers around them; that is never in question. It's only whether they choose to let those other drivers know about it that changes with each culture.
I do agree that it's possible some percentage of the assholish behavior is performance. (Though as I waved-vaguely-at in my previous post, if you can detect this sort of thing—read the intention in it—it stops actually seeming assholish and becomes more like friendly jibing. A large part of the point of 4chan is to engage in a digital communal game of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dozens, and a large part of becoming "part of" 4chan's community is building up a tolerance to this.)
But real asshole behavior—not the clever insults written with a cool head, but rather the seek-and-destroy-the-vulnerable bullying that harkens grade school—is not something you do to seem clever or liked. In the real world, in small communities, it can maybe win you "friends" through intimidation (thus why some real-world bullies do it), but on an anonymous forum there's just no gain in doing it but to hurt the other person. The sort of actually-hurtful things said by a bully aren't celebrated as successful roasts; they're just sort of left to sit there. When playing the Dozens, you don't poke at actual hard spots in the other person's life; it's bad form.
Now, of course, there are sociopaths who enjoy causing chaos and "stirring shit": the Iagos and Izaya Oriharas of the world. And 4chan attracts these sorts of people as well. But as much as they're a negative force—encouraging people to cut off their toes, arranging raids, etc.—they're rarely visibly assholes. In fact, they have to be a bit charismatic to get people dancing the way they want. And, oddly, 4chan seems to "hold" these sort of people at bay, as well; they identify with the community, attacking its enemies (Tumblr, say) and its obvious unaccustomed interlopers ("newfags") but tend to stay out of the way of the average user. But that might say more about the "hardiness" of the average user—it takes a certain self-sufficient mindset to function in even controlled anarchy, and this mindset often makes one immune to confidence men.
Good times only exist because bad times exist to weigh them against. Good times would merely be "times" without bad times.
Language is full of color - and I find it a disservice to desaturate those colors. The bright are made all the more brighter when contrasted with the dim.
By muting language you make it harder to distinguish between those colors. Polite language becomes aggressive and disliked because you know when it is forced and dishonest and when everyone is expected to be polite - you lose the ability to distinguish between the forced politeness and the honest politeness. You begin to treat all politeness as forced politeness.
If you've ever been in a "100% optimistic, go-positive attitude" environment for any length of time you learn to hate it and treat everyone there with contempt. Being able to express negativity is important.
You may not see it that way, but the negative experiences of your life have probably taught you more, influenced the core of your personality, and made you grow more than the positive ones.
There are plenty of ways in which people get simply harmed with no "benefit", or even crushed. By definition we only ever talk with those who survive in some way, and I think it's best to leave it up to a person to decide how they feel about bad things in their life, and what it did or didn't do for them. If you suffered through horrible things and grew from it with no permanent damage, that's great (no sarcasm intended), but please don't assume that's how it goes for everybody.
It depends on how negative they are. Deployed to Afghanistan, is the PTSD worth it? Abused or neglected as a child, is the stunted development worth it? I don't think so.
Honestly I don't think you can sugar-coat negative experiences.
I suppose I do sometimes think about how much better my current job is than my previous one, but I'm not sure I see a universal silver lining for every negative experience.
It may be true that I learned various things from the time mom was violently murdered, but I've never once woken up and thought about how glad I am that today isn't as horrible as the day her corpse was discovered in our basement. Nor can I easily believe that the resulting years of depression added anything worthwhile to my enjoyment of life.
It's kind of like how execs of partner companies could enjoy Steve Jobs saying well done when they hit a deadline only because he would scream, "You fucking dickless assholes!!!" at them when they were behind schedule.
A lot of it is the anonymous culture, the idea that discussions can be based soley on the contents of message not the poster's history. This creates good content and interesting discussion. Its just learning to adjust your signal to noise filters.
> "The good news is that I've recently returned to 4chan as a regular, anonymous user, and I'm really enjoying it."
> I've never visited the site, and really don't want to. So maybe I'm missing something, but why would you want to associate yourself with a place like that?
> I see people post screenshots on Reddit sometimes and it seems pretty deviant.
As depicted in some screenshots people post on Reddit. (One thing that helps: look at the background of the screenshot. By default, a blue background indicates a "safe for work" board, and that's well-known enough that people sometimes use the term "blue board".) And yeah, a subset of it is, including several entire boards.
4chan features the full gamut of what you could expect from the Internet, or humanity in general. The quote about Usenet and "a herd of performing elephants" applies quite well there. And like the broader Internet and culture in general, the quality of content varies massively.
However, the bet of what 4chan has to offer includes some amazing content, much of it original, and only a small subset of that makes it to the outside world. A huge number of Internet memes start there. People create impressive original art, sometimes drawn on the fly and posted in response to others nearly in real-time. Despite the name "image board", people write and share huge walls of text there too. People tell stories ranging from side-splittingly hilarious to heartwarming. (Yes, really, 4chan can do "heartwarming" on occasion.) And much of the best content gets saved in screenshots, files, and wikis, and re-posted later. (Its transient nature has as much to do with its culture as its anonymity.)
For one of many examples, the tabletop gaming board /tg/ has quite an impressive array of content. People develop campaigns and settings there, run games on the board, design games, produce interesting original writing, post stories of gaming adventures, and otherwise produce an astonishing amount of original content. You can go there if you run a game and you're looking for material or inspiration, or if you just want to laugh at a pile of nerdy jokes and enjoy some interesting stories. And note that /tg/ is considered a "safe for work" board, and the moderators do enforce that.
Also see the TED talk from Christopher Poole ("moot"), which mentions several more interesting stories.
4chan does have a large amount of "background radiation" to ignore, and portions of its culture can be quite toxic. It's not in any way a curated collection of content. But parts of it can be awe-inspiring, useful, and fun.
Because that is a few into what humanity is really made off. In that hellhole, you can not get high on any ideology.
You can not delude yourself.
Its the ugly mirror.
You look into it to understand, to cut yourself on the shards to find out what you are made from. Sure you can distance yourself from this.
But the human nature from whos understanding you distance yourself, is what makes up your team, its what might create your software. Not wanting to know, because its ugly, can get ugly in itself.
4chan (and it's successor 8chan) mix two tendencies. One is to post horrible or strange things for the sake of it. The other is to post things that have some validity or purpose, but would be censored in other places. Now clearly what things one puts in what categories are very subjective, but there are certainly people who claim to belong largely to one or the other group (as well as neither). But so far there hasn't been an approach to allow the second category but not the first, so people who have views that don't fit into the mainstream (mostly on the political right) tend to congregate at this sort of place.
Both Reddit and 4chan have areas that provide value. Kinda like how every major city has drugs sex trafficking as well as an arts district and fine dining.
As with most things, the truly terrible stuff is a minority of users. There are lots of areas on 4chan that are completely harmless and people just discussing mundane, boring stuff that they deem interesting.
I was a Wikipedia admin, three times. If you have a tendency towards depression, steer clear of that site. It matters not a jot what you actually do there, you will eventually be burned.
(In case you are wondering what I did for Wikipedia, I rewrote most of their USA PATRIOT Act article over a two year period, established the Wikipedia Admin Noticeboard, created the [cutation needed] tag, in the early days kept their Wikipdia In The Press page up to date (eventually this became irrelevant), encouraged Australian Wikipedians to write up about their own country and areas, fought trolls, helped influence a number of policies, and did a remarkable amount of blocking of truly awful people whilst attempting to maintain clans encourage civil discourse on the project.)
Oh my god, [citation needed] was so sorely needed in the early days. I believe there was something similar like [weasel words] but it didn't fit the bill most of the time, because it only applied to "some people say X" instead of the article just stating "X is a fact"
I honestly don't think the two are even comparable. Moderating a large subreddit on reddit is infinitely harder and more complex than 4chan. Some of the larger subreddits see more pageviews than the entirety of 4chan.
Moving beyond that, moderators on 4chan are completely anonymous unless they choose to be known. This isn't the case with reddit. Moderators often have to have a long and tenured account history or else they don't really have a shot at being added onto a mod team in the first place. Very few subreddits, and no large ones, will add someone to their team without a history.
This is important because with a history, you open yourself up to attacks. If you do something unpopular, you will get witch-hunted by reddit's masses. I speak from personal experience. People will call your house, your loved ones, send pizzas or worse. You're literally walking on eggshells 24/7, 365 days of the year. And then even if you do everything right, if someone has it out for you, it doesn't matter. They'll still figure out who you are and harass you. It's an added dynamic that just doesn't exist with moderation on 4chan.
Moderating a large subreddit on reddit (a large default, like /r/Pics, /r/Funny, /r/Worldnews, etc) is probably the toughest moderating job on the internet right now. And what makes it tough are the millions upon millions of users.
On 4chan, you're literally a janitor. On reddit, you're a janitor and you're also responsible for community building and everything that comes along with that. It's your community and if you don't build it, nobody will come.
>On 4chan, you're literally a janitor. On reddit, you're a janitor and you're also responsible for community building and everything that comes along with that. It's your community and if you don't build it, nobody will come.
That's a fair point. I was mostly addressing the comment about "barrier to entry," since the barrier to entry on 4chan is essentially nil. Without anything resembling an account history, there's a huge amount of impersonation, which makes for a challenging social dynamic.
> If you do something unpopular, you will get witch-hunted by reddit's masses
Interestingly, my janitor handle was leaked at one point, and despite it being just a few hops away from my real identity, I never experienced any harassment. I can only assume it's because I wasn't much of a target; 4chan doesn't tell you who was responsible for your ban, so only moot and a few of the more outspoken mods attracted the attention of the mob.
Does Reddit pay you for moderation? I think I know the answer, but they should start to pay. It's not like they don't have throw around money?
I can take some Reddit, but get tired pretty quick. One joke is funny, but 50 quips just reminds me how I loate humans. (Not loathe--just dissapointed.) Kinda like the feeling I get when I'm on Facebook longer than a few minutes?
They build it, and people came. People opened their mouths, and confirmed all doubt?
There are enough people that see moderating a subreddit as a source of power that they simply don't have to, new mods would always be available for free.
>It's not like they don't have throw around money?
Uhh, reddit hemorrhages money, every attempt at profitability has failed. Paying moderators would provide no value.
They'll still figure out who you are and harass you. It's an added dynamic that just doesn't exist with moderation on 4chan
No, 4chan just generates and targets harassment against other identifiable people instead, including those not on 4chan, and the moderators are complicit in this harassment by not removing threads organizing it.
When I first visited /b/ I felt like finally having found my virtual home. It is just no limits, do whatever you like, without consequences and as long as it is original and twisted enough you will find others to play along.
It is so rare to find such a place which is willing to challenge any conventional, good / bad thinking but instead is completely unafraid of offending anyone. Other than clearly illegal stuff there seemed never any intentional censorship in place. Chris seemed to have an incredible backbone to stand for that principle - until Gamergate happened.
Lovely. Reminds me of this quote from Lorraine Daston:
The marvel that stopped us in our tracks—an aurora borealis, cognate words in
languages separated by continents and centuries, the peacock’s tail—becomes
only an apparent marvel once explained. Aesthetic appreciation may linger…but
composure has returned. We are delighted but no longer discombobulated; what
was once an earthquake of the soul is subdued into an agreeable frisson.… The
more we know, the less we wonder.
I feel this personally when learning a new piece of music. All the gestalt beauty drains out as the song is reduced to a mountain to be conquered rather than a landscape to be appreciated. By the time I've memorized all the notes, a grim irony sets in: when I listen to a recording of the piece, I am no longer capable of hearing what I initially set out to replicate.
I'm really curious, could you say how does 4chan recruit moderators? Normally in online communities you'd have get some frequent users invested in the forum and upgrade them in status. This of course fails for 4chan where you can't see who's a regular, or who has a good history. So how does it work? Are mods usually moot's friends from real world, or some other community?
you think reddit's bad, try 4chan!
I was 4chan "janitor" (lesser-mod) for 18 months or so and I agree, these sorts of positions really twist your perception of the community you're moderating. When you're buried in reports -- and these are 4chan reports, which means not just spam, but gore, cp, raids, etc. -- it becomes all too easy to dole out harsh penalties to people who may have just made an honest mistake. I essentially stopped browsing 4chan for fun; I saw it only through the lens of the janitor interface.
Chris, to his credit, frequently expressed his gratitude to the volunteer staff for doing what he knew was a thankless, soul-crushing job. He wondered aloud why we didn't go volunteer our time at a puppy shelter or something instead. I'm sure he asked himself that question too.
I'm no longer in that position; I outed myself as a janitor and was immediately terminated. I've come to the conclusion that I'm not really suited for these sorts of roles. Having access to privileged information and special powers makes me uncomfortable. The good news is that I've recently returned to 4chan as a regular, anonymous user, and I'm really enjoying it. I hope Chris experiences something similar. He deserves it.