It's rather disappointing that the authors didn't talk about the biggest thing that has reshaped discussion in 4chan since years.
The reply indicator.
For people who don't go to 4chan, you can read it on http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-here-s-your-you. Basically, if someone else replied to your post, the post pointer will show a (You) word, showing that the poster replied to a post that you wrote.
Moreover, the post number of posts that replied/quoted you will be attached to your own posts. Much-replied post will have a lot of link to the posts that replied them, and very visible when you skip through the thread.
This one simple feature has changed 4chan. Before, posts are similar and anonymous since they don't have visual distinction between each other. You have to actually read their content to know what's inside. The reply indicator make controversial posts very visible and "famous" in the thread.
Much like Reddit's voting system and Facebook likes or Twitter's retweets/favorites, 4chan now has its own post rating system. The difference is that Facebook likes and Reddit's vote system rewards popular posts that people agree with and liked. 4chan's "rating system" rewards controversial posts that people rebuke or laugh at.
The presence of this reply indicator make people try to post controversial contents, and to be controversial by 4chan standards, your post have to be very, very controversial.
I speculate that the ban on raids had a much bigger impact. Before that they were used for all kinds of things, mostly to cause mischief, occasionally even for a good purpose, e.g. op chanology. So this might have tied up and channeled a lot of the mischievous energy of the more active users. Now that it's banned we get more informal, less organized hit-and-run harassment.
I miss the BattleToads threads, especially when they would record their calls to the Pawn Stars and GameStop stores. Or just visiting 4chanarchive to watch drama unfold in some previously massive thread. There just isn't anything like it on the Internet still, as far as I'm aware. Unless you enjoy a 'LIK DIS IF YOU CRY EVERTIM' Facebook post.
Posts linking their replies in the header has been a feature for a very, very long time. This doesn't have the negative impact you think it does. It's not a post rating system, and only trolls and candyasses pay attention to the number of replies on your post.
There isn't any kind of long-term karma game like on other sites. 4chan is still content-heavy and shit posts are still looked down upon by the larger community. It may not seem that way, but the stupidest people are often the loudest.
>Posts linking their replies in the header has been a feature for a very, very long time.
Before, that was add-on/userscript feature. Since moot adopted them into 4chan's codebase, everyone has it.
>only trolls and candyasses pay attention to the number of replies on your post
Exactly. This feature encourages and rewards trolls and people who fish for replies.
>There isn't any kind of long-term karma game like on other sites. 4chan is still content-heavy and shit posts are still looked down upon by the larger community.
The dynamic of the discussion changes though. Even a slight nod matters in a long run considering that 4chan's culture evolves in a very rapid pace, thanks to its ephemerality and anonymity.
After Hacker News, 4chan is the only non-specific community I enjoy, due to how it manages threads it's easy to sift past shitposts and find the good stuff. All of the problems you present aren't really representative of the actual 4chan experience. I'm sorry you haven't figured out how to make it work for you.
No, it's disappointing that 4ch is getting any attention, because attention has always been the cancer that is killing X. I suppose network effects can also work against you...
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.
I can't believe that a presidential candidate prominently featured a page on their website attacking a stupid internet meme. I think the Aztecs fudged their calculations somehow, and it was really supposed to be 2016...
Remember that arXiv is just pre-print and the last page if not the entire paper is probably nothing more than a lame/distasteful joke. Remember that any nutbag who knows a little English and LaTeX can publish on arXiv. It will likely not make it into a journal.
Seeing "LaTeX" (lay-tech) and "arXiv" together in your sentence made me finally realize that arXiv is pronounced "archive". I've been reading it as "arx-iv" for years.
Knuth, in his book, memorably decreed a pronunciation (and case mixing in the written form) for TeX, with a hard /ch/ at the end (literally, "your monitor should become slightly moist"), backed by a clever and erudite rationale involving the etymology of words like technique.
Leslie Lamport, in his book on LaTeX, decreed a case mixing, but (as you say) ok'd any reasonable pronunciation.
It is not entirely a free-for all (as in, anyone can submit papers), there is an endorsement system [1]. Of course, it's only networking and who-knows-who - but there is controversy, as in established contributors think that the endorsement system is too high a barrier.
I've been really surprised how influential /pol/ has been this election, which has been really weird and a little scary. It's not uncommon to post something on 4chan stating that you have inside information on events that are going to happen over the next few days (which is fiction 99.9% of the time). Posts like this in /pol/ have been getting screenshotted and spread elsewhere on the web, where alt-right conspiracy nuts are latching on to them.
I've tried explaining to a few people that it's 4chan and you can't take it seriously, but they're convinced that these posts are real.
"/pol/ is winning because it's funnier than the people that despise it, it's that simple. Being authoritarian isn't funny. Tumblr, leddit, they're funny like a commercial is funny, they can be clever, they can be witty, but they'll never be gut-laugh, -holy shit- funny, because they never confront anything they're not supposed to, they never color outside the lines. They talk like they're resisting something, but all they do is agree with each other. They slay the sacred cows they've been conditioned to hate, and they ignore the elephants in the room they're conditioned not to see, and they'll always be like that because they're clever, educated pussies.
/pol/ is full of angry racist conspiracy theorists, but it's fucking hilarious. /pol/ might not always tell you the truth, but it will tell you the closest thing to an honest truth it can see, and it will laugh at you for being offended by it. The fact that /pol/ is starting to influence 4chan in general means that the sacred cows we're slaying are actually sacred, and people are laughing in spite of themselves. It's stupid and weird and it's too simplistic and old-fashioned to be true, but you're laughing anyways.
Indeed a couple of posts made in the last few months have been prescient of serious and highly secretive information. The motivation behind such posters is likely explained below.
I think what a lot of people don't get about /pol/'s influence in the last year is it's mechanism. It is easy to browse the site as an outsider and think it is just shitposting 9000, with no real influence outside. However /pol/ unconsciously and without formal direction has an extremely effective strategy for disseminating information.
Once the essence of some information has been distilled users start disseminating it to the 'normies' via Reddit and Twitter. Twitter is where the real influence comes as they inevitably target journalists in large numbers. As most know, journalists and politicians are extremely engaged in Twitter. Stories frequently then cross the barrier into the mainstream.
Targeting of journalists and politicians, largely but not always via Twitter, is where most of the huge power is derived. People targeted don't necessarily have the internet experience to realise when these things are directed. A lot of what most of them see is a flurry of regular public concern which needs to be addressed.
When a story from /pol/ reaches the mainstream, it goes into a glorious frenzy. It is a powerful feeling when something you have created/discovered and disseminated in a 4chan thread becomes international news because of the boards collective action.
Summarised: when a very large group of people with political leanings on a story/topic informally organise, the effort can take the view mainstream. important to note is the demographic includes a diverse group of users who are highly skilled in programming, social media and politics.
edit: If I was a highly placed politician and wanted to disseminate secret information without attribution, I would run it through the tumbler that is 4chan.
/pol/ uncovered the Paul Combetta posts on Reddit. So it's not all bullshit. Its crazy that they had enough of an effect to get the head of the FBI grilled by a house committee.
/pol/:/sg/ helped the Russian airforce identify rebels positions in Syria and destroy them. It is not all bullshit at all; there is a significant proportion of it that is undeniably childish garbage but there is the occasional gem as well.
I occasionally lurk on 4chan (in particular /sg/ since they aggregate lots of data regarding the Syrian civil war) and I witnessed this one particular event first hand. Now I understand that this is not a verifiable source but I found this as well, that sums-up the whole thing: http://2static.fjcdn.com/pictures/4chan+pol+sg+orders+an+air...
I don't think you will be able to find anything better than that to "prove" it happened.
Giving military "intel" from 4chan is absolutely insane. These were the same people that thought they'd conclusively identified the Boston Marathon bomber, but were totally wrong.
This is true. I remember firsthand the #scanner hashtag on Twitter and various re-streamers broadcasting the scanner online, as CNN and other outlets were trying to confirm facts and keep up coverage.
It was a surreal experience, and it showed both the strengths and weaknesses of crowdsourced tweets as "news". You get a lot of info, about how people think and feel but the facts being thrown about can be faulty and need to be confirmed independently. It wasn't until the unfortunate events in Ferguson a year and a half later than a similar kind and intensity of social media coverage ensued.
It's not like they could send UAVs to verify if the claims are legit? It's literally written on the screenshot that the Russians sent drones; and Ivan is obviously a Russian intelligence officer. Breathe!
Russians have demonstrated time and time again they will shoot first and ask questions later, and many times they don't even bother asking questions.
US intelligence is not always as rigorous, either, don't get me wrong, but the Russians in Syria seem to have very loose definitions of what qualifies as a target.
Can't find a better source. But this was the second time RuAF bombed the rebles camp after third party analysis (might be a coincidence ofc). There was a different image with Russian MoD's report on the matter.
I was in the original thread and got screens of Combetta's history before he deleted it. I see /pol/ as one of the last bastions of political discussion that's not flooded with liberal propaganda, though that has been changing lately with CTR.
/pol/ is fast on a lot of international news that gets picked up slowly in the states too. they were on the us' accidental bombing of syrian troops last month [1] pretty much instantly.
That's part of the frustration for me - 0.1% of the time they uncover something of real value that no one else noticed. It's just that 99.9% of the time it's just noise, memes and conspiracy theories. I guess that's why people keep coming back to the forum.
It's fascinating to see how feasible it is to get something — anything — recognized as fact or actual trend by employing social media and excitable media. The 'bikini bridge' phenomenon comes to mind.
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.
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.
Lets be honest: memes aren't high quality content when compared to the types of free content available on the net.
4chan has spawned a lot of memes because it was one of the earliest places people appreciated that sort of low-effort anyone-could-do-it content, but to say it drives high quality content is to decry any competently drawn stick figure as bourgeois.
Considering that one of internet's strength is the democratization of content creation, low-effort anyone-could-do-it contents are inherently high quality.
/g/ makes useful software on occasion for example. after 4chan pioneered webm as looping gif replacement (long before imgur doing the gifv thing) they made webmcam and webm4retards for example. The latter by its mere existence also highlighted github's overzealous application of community policies.
A bunch of indie games started their life there too.
And then there are derivative and mashup works like fanart, translations.
I only visit a few boards, so i'm probably missing a lot.
But we could apply the reverse Sturgeon's law: in any sufficiently large community, 1% of content will not be crap. 4chan is not special, it's just large.
But it's size together with the temporary aspect of it's content greatly accelerates the iteration process, culling bad content and refining the good one.
All the chans have pretty different culture. For example, 8chan seems to have a higher rate of reddit cross-posting. Lainchan, as another example, is meant to be closer to older 4chan culture and has very few users who are "new" to chans.
HN isn't so bad... Reddit, that's debatable. Some think it's too PC, and others think it's not PC enough. Myself, I miss the days when communication platforms like Usenet could be common carriers.
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.
I was recently working on a project to identify pepes in images and dumped a bunch of images from the /r9k/ archive using the 4chan API.
If you are a researcher looking for a 4chan dataset for supervised learning, be aware that labeling the images is not a task for the faint of heart.
When you browse an image board, you will have an implicit image filter: you will probably only open threads that interest you and that have been alive for a while. That does not hold for an image dump of all threads.
Some of the replies to the thread show mistakes in the paper.
For example, Zimbabwe is marked as very active and very hateful. But it's probably just people with a VPN: doing that to get a "controversial" or "funny" country flag is a thing.
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.
From my experiences in astrophysics: Second author is supervisor, third, fourth, etc. are previous collaborators of supervisor that somehow have some 'moral' claim to supervisor's work because it remotely thematically touches upon previous work they did, and thus have provided 'inspiration' for the current work. It's a racket ;)
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.
Figure 15 with heat map of hate speech per post puts India, Pakistan, Thailand, Belarus, Zimbabwe, and South Korea as the leaders of the pack. In my limited experience on /pol, this paints a very misleading picture. I hardly ever see people from these countries posting there. (See Figure 4.) They can't just leave the figure as-is, without further explanation.
The posters on 4chan (see dogma1138's post) are as surprised as I am that India features at all. To the contrary, India is commonly the target of scatological jokes.
Although they acknowledge the use of VPN, they might be downplaying its usage. Without making an effort to disambiguate that (with assistance from 4chan admins) I don't see the point of making charts based on countries. If not disambiguate, discarding posts by Tor and VPN users is easy enough.
I can't help but agree with the poster who wrote:
>>Although it is a bit absurd, /pol/ has, some
>>how, managed to place itself at the center of >world politics.
If you are in the US, keep in mind that those countries are in distant timezones. Because 4chan threads are so ephemeral, they could have entire threads to themselves while you are asleep and you wouldn't notice.
I'm in India at the moment, but I have lived in other timezones too. I must add that I'm not a regular there. I only go there when some promiment thread makes the nwes... like Tay, or Operation Google, or this. Other than that, my source for 4chan stuff is /r/4chan.
"Hate" is really not the right word in this context, as a lot of them are thrown around casually. Not necessarily due to deep-seated hatred but simply because it is not politically correct to use the words. To gain a sense of being contrarian to the mainstream, to titillate, to watch the reactions of those offended.
For example the "-fag" suffix is applied to everything and practically synonymous with "-person". A namefag is someone who uses a username instead of remaining anonymous. A drawfag is someone who creates original art, it has a positive connotation.
Even when discussing unfair monetary things the term kikes (jews) might be thrown around, just due to the historic association of jews with banking. Even users who present left-leaning positions (e.g. on renewable energy, healthcare or defense spending) use those terms because the associated concepts are ingrained in the conversation structure.
I don't know about /pol/, but other boards use "my nigger" or humorous variations thereof as an expression of endorsement
Use of the words might correlate with the sentiment of the user, but the correlation may be weaker than expected.
I don't like to be mean but I honestly don't see /pol/ has a big influence in the election or politics like some commentors have stated. First, most of the action /pol/ does outside of their board is mostly on Twitter and various open polls. I've never seen /pol/ do anything close to real life action. Not a single event or protest IRL. Not even a letter writing campaign. Just posting image macros. It's all in good fun I'm sure, but they're not going to change the opinions of voter blocs with Rare Pepes that's for sure.
Richard Spencer once said that politics to culture is mist to a lake. You cannot have politics without having culture. IRL actions are not gonna do squat (see: ows, arab spring) without cultural shifts. What pol is doing is more insidious in effect: it is shifting the culture that will enable the politics. If 4chan reach in memes is wide, as internet history has shown, and if the memes from pol become sentiments embraced by others outside of it, pol is creating the lake for whatever mist.
To change politics, it requires a cultural change. Tumblr is another place on the internet that is a space for cultural change, albeit the opposite kind.
Whilst I appreciate 4chan was the original chan that started all the other chans off, people often forget the alternatives. A common complaint of the alternative chans is that 4chan has become too conservative and is too heavily moderated. Does anyone agree?
They are not avoiding research. Online boards like 4chan are a great testbed to understand human behavior amongst other things. A lot of people avoid using 4chan as a testbed due to repercussions from conclusions that may not put 4chan in a good light.
To be fair, /pol/ is one of the best places to get happening news (Information about terror attacks that would otherwise be censored by mass media, information from the Syria conflict etc)
There is a lot of shilling and a lot of trolling... It seems to me that /pol/ posts has become >50% shitposting from trolls and shills and less political discussion.
The real influx of users into pol started with the european refugee crisis, not the presidential elections.
Every board in 4chan has it's amount of shitposting. One thing you start developing, as a user, is an semiconscious filter and ways to process the information.
A *chan site has many layers a user must go through to finally fing a decent discussion (or the epic lulz). You have an outdated confusing UI, the sheer amount of useless content, the lingo and the highly offensive content.
After you learn to process and filter all that, you start finding the really good stuff. Or, as I like to say, "Gold floats on shit. You just have to be brave and reach it"
/tg/ had a gentler introduction than most, as the Very Best of /tg/ is published on 1d4chan, so you start by seeing the very best of what the chan has to offer.
Summary: 4 chan users identified a training site of ISIS and pinpointed it on google maps. One of the users knows a friend of the Russian Minister of Defense and sent him the information, resulting in an air strike.
This is disturbing to say the least. Which group of "rebels" is this? There's a lot of factions here in play, some of which are downright scary, but others of which are just fighting to survive.
Not that 4chan cares about these things. They just want to see people blown up.
>Not that 4chan cares about these things. They just want to see people blown up.
You understand 4chan isn't a single hive mind right? Each board has its own culture, and even moreso: each general thread has it own subculture. /sg/ (Syria General) is one of the best place to get data on the Syrian civil war. The folks there aggregate data from a massive set of sources and include people who actually live in Syria or can speak arabic.
So you know, instead of parroting the same spam all around this thread. Maybe you should take two seconds to appreciate that you neither understand nor are willing to make an attempt at understanding what goes on there.
The problem with communities, online and otherwise, is they develop a certain prevailing attitude. These can either be weak (e.g. Reddit, 4chan) or strong (e.g. /r/The_Donald, /pol/) depending on how you delineate these.
You can make a case that /sg/ is a good source of news, but it's part of 4chan. I'd rather follow individuals doing reporting on something more neutral like Twitter.
pol has a general stance towards the war in syria: america needs to GTFO it and let russia and syria deal with it (this stance predated Trump's). The rebels, and whom they are, are seen just as rebels. /sg/ is pro-assad. The fact this 'bias' exist doesn't mean it isn't a good source of information. Many neural parties quote something known as the Syrian human rights observatory, or participate/gain information from networks of dissemination more aligned to western narratives of the war, information that cannot be de-intermediated from those who pass them along. /sg/ is not aligned to that narrative.
Astrodust, I think your understanding of politics and journalism is naive and one that deserves a thorough rehabilitation through a deep deep engagement with pol.
/sg/ teaches anyone who dare engages with it that information, collection, dissemination, acting upon it, appreciating it, comes from collective intentions (not attitudes, reddit cultivates attitudes; 4chan cultivates intentions, the dynamic of the whole raiding culture, the whole you must do to participate instead of merely like/solicit likes aspect) and, if you become acquainted with pol, you will learn viscerally what collective intentions look like, you will see it elsewhere.
Reddit is for the cuck, it is a circle jerk. the lack of identification, liking mechanism, and the culture of anonymity makes it less about affirming attitudes and more about intentions and the lack of moderation on chans is why/how intentions compete.
to repeat: intentions vs attitudes.
narratives vs bias.
the differences between these concepts become incredibly illuminated if you engage with pol.
If this is some hack-ass pitch for /pol/ and how great it is, you're failing. If there's anyone there that knows what they're doing, they're drowned out in a sea of idiots.
Plus, if you're going to play the "cuck" card, this conversation is over. I'm so tired of that shit.
>so tired of that shit
>ugh, why am i cuck
>screw this person's points, he thinks I am a cuck therefore his points are invalid
>ugh pol makes me resent myself
If you look at the remnants of the earlier chans (created between 1 and 3 years after 4chan) which never really gained much momentum, you'll see that they had a much different culture at the time. In a way I wish we could return to this idea of the "small chan", as a way of escaping the grinding politics and hate culture that's on some boards (like /pol/) which tends to leak over (jokingly or not) to the other boards.
Yes I have read the paper. It seems like a lot of pandering to 4chan and /pol/. It's a clear example of an effort troll for the lulz.
> recent events have brought the discussion board
site 4chan to the forefront of the world’s collective mind
Err, try polling even the American population and see how many know about the existence of 4chan. It is NOT at the forefront of the world's collective mind.
> Even
though 4chan has long been viewed as the “final boss of the Internet,”
By whom?
> Perhaps the least rare pepe.
Really? A sarcastic/jokey remark in a caption for no reason at all.
They have also embedded overtly racist images throughout the paper, which I'm not sure were necessary. This is another clear example of 4chan trolling: embed racist or offensive or funny imagery surrounded by serious sounding stuff so its 'hilarious' to watch someone discuss it seriously.
I've been on 4chan since 2005 and pretty much grew up on it. This is just so obvious. In fact, I'm not even saying this isn't real data and actual work. I totally believe someone went through the effort of doing this work just so they can get "normies" to read through the paper and laugh when people take it seriously.
Also, I've noticed that this .pdf crashes my Android Acrobat reader as well as my Chrome PDF reader. I would check for embedded scripts or weird stuff going on in this PDF.
It makes me sad that every time any kind of research is done, someone has to denigrate it as a waste of money.
While I don't care about "chan" culture (never visited one of the sites, don't need that in my life), I fully support research into things I may or may not like. Let the Universities decide where to spend their research budgets. You never know what will come out of it.
This wasn't a real research (to really discover something) though (read some other comments here like typon's) except to "prove" how successful trolling is.
The reply indicator.
For people who don't go to 4chan, you can read it on http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-here-s-your-you. Basically, if someone else replied to your post, the post pointer will show a (You) word, showing that the poster replied to a post that you wrote.
Moreover, the post number of posts that replied/quoted you will be attached to your own posts. Much-replied post will have a lot of link to the posts that replied them, and very visible when you skip through the thread.
This one simple feature has changed 4chan. Before, posts are similar and anonymous since they don't have visual distinction between each other. You have to actually read their content to know what's inside. The reply indicator make controversial posts very visible and "famous" in the thread.
Much like Reddit's voting system and Facebook likes or Twitter's retweets/favorites, 4chan now has its own post rating system. The difference is that Facebook likes and Reddit's vote system rewards popular posts that people agree with and liked. 4chan's "rating system" rewards controversial posts that people rebuke or laugh at.
The presence of this reply indicator make people try to post controversial contents, and to be controversial by 4chan standards, your post have to be very, very controversial.