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.
I don’t think that’s honesty, that’s being an asshole.