You can make a village in some interesting ways. 4chan is a village, that's why it's one of the best resources/communities on the internet today. I've learned much of what I know about LLMs and generative AI on /g/. The toxicity/chaos of the place is probably the main thing that enables it to continue to be a village for all these years. There's more than one way to shear a sheep, and I don't think the 4chan method is the best way to make a village, but a village make it does.
I just mention it here because it's probably something that doesn't occur to most people, and maybe it should be something we think about more. I think 4chan has a very interesting property in that the gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth (depending on the board) post being full of slurs. Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's value to that that people miss.
I don't think I agree with the principle of, if you can ignore the hate speech it's actually a pretty egalitarian place.
Like you say, it's not egalitarian towards those who don't have an easy time ignoring the hate speech. And, okay, in principle if the strength of one's stomach for hate speech was randomly distributed to humans with no correlation to anything else, maybe that would not disqualify it as egalitarian.
But it's not. People who face discrimination and hate speech IRL will, on average, surely have less tolerance for it online than people who don't. I have to believe that women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and so on, feel much less welcome on a place like 4chan. They've already spent their "ignoring hate speech points" ignoring someone harassing them on the subway.
So whatever it's virtues -- and I'm willing to believe you there are some -- I don't think that a place with this much toxicity can rightly be called egalitarian.
> I don't think that a place with this much toxicity can rightly be called egalitarian.
You don't make a village by welcoming anyone and everyone. An egalitarian country with strict immigration laws and rampant racism towards foreigners is still egalitarian within its own populace. Likewise, simply because people who disagree with 4chan's abrasive culture don't feel welcome there doesn't make it any less egalitarian within itself.
What does 'egalitarian within itself' mean for an online community where everybody can join? How do you get to have 'rights and opportunities' and how to you keep 'the others' out?
Egalitarian in the sense that nobody is untouchable and everybody gets shit from everyone else. Rights and opportunities are built into the system by anonymity, minimal moderation and the resulting lack of power structure. Others are kept out by self-selection.
Usually, egalitarianism is defined by laxity on the axes most used for discrimination, like race. If your race literally matters less than your tolerance of racism (or free expression of other types of hate speech), and what matters more is the quality of your code in /g/ posts, I would say that's "egalitarian".
Being absolutely egalitarian is a fantasy. No one does that. The government is not egalitarian on the axis of murdering people. Universities are not egalitarian on the axes of failing all your classes constantly and not being able to pay for them. Workplaces are not egalitarian to open racists or people who post on HN all day instead of getting anything done. There's always some elitism at play, relevant to whatever's being emphasized (being a good student, being a good programmer, being a good worker, etc.).
Part of the elitism on 4chan is tolerating horrible cringe banter and opinions. I think that's fair given that the rest of the Internet is elitist on the basis of being as nice as possible and mindful of the algorithmic censors to not upset advertisers' spice flow.
> that the rest of the Internet is elitist on the basis of being as nice as possible
I strongly disagree - tone policing isn't about being nice but about appearing nice. And lately even that pretense is not required when talking about the right groups.
>People who face discrimination and hate speech IRL will, on average, surely have less tolerance for it online than people who don't.
Or maybe its the opposite, because we know words on a screen are not violence. 4chan is egalitarian in that everyone is an n-word, everyone is an r-word and anonymity means we are all the same. There's a reason unnecessary tripcodes are frowned upon.
4chan is what I associate with early 2000s internet. It hasn't changed. The only evolution being having newer, more popular insults, like autist, i guess.
We all called each other various slurs back then and the only reason you'd get mad or emotional over it is because you hadn't been on the internet for long enough. Or if you're getting rekt in a video game and they're rubbing it in, i guess.
The mainstream platforms that have appeared since only brought politically correct faux civility that hid the aggression behind a system of rules that has only made communication less genuine and more toxic. Strip away the identity behind a post and only the content remains. And that's why it works. It shuts down behaviours looking to cultivate a persona, which is bad for engagement, but good for content.
> The mainstream platforms that have appeared since only brought politically correct faux civility that hid the aggression behind a system of rules that has only made communication less genuine and more toxic.
This. I'm not exactly making an argument that slurs increase genuineness, but forcefully stripping them away definitely does not decrease toxicity. Nobody is suddenly a nicer person just because they can't call you a ***. They just find another way to be an asshole, and maybe work a little extra-hard while they're at it.
In some ways it seems to make the waters more difficult to navigate. You try to engage with people in earnest and get subtly accused of all sorts of bs. Sometimes it's easier if someone just drops a few choice expletives at you and you both just move on with life.
I do wonder how much hate speech, especially in the early 4chan years, was a deliberate shield against those _not_ targeted by such speech but still cannot ignore it. Think of white people who would post a "how dare you" rant when they see the n-word or male feminists. It's a way to keep out the moral guardians and cut down on behavior I like to call "dogshitting." Unlike sea-lioning and its "per our previous conversation…" off-topic nature, dogshitters nominally address the parent post… with nitpicks irrelevant to the thread's larger topic.
Really? Would you not think that being anonymous, performative moral actions would be fewer than a social network which was tied to an actual identity?
I don't understand why in your example, the point couldn't be made without specifically using crude language. It doesn't seem like that racial slurs would contribute to the threads topic.
Don't be combative. It's an American website, created with Americans in mind, with conversation conducted almost entirely in (American) English. Yes it happens to be owned by a Japanese national now, but that fact doesn't seem to have altered the culture or the discourse much. The minorities in question are clearly minorities to the US, and to a lesser extent minorities to the broader Anglo/English-speaking-Eurosphere.
You must be unaware of the phenomenon of /int/ :DDDD
First found on the German site Krautchan, you could hardly describe a forum so inclusive as one dedicated to cultural exchange where anyone may flame in any thread in any language. The concept spread quickly among the chans. And so the users of the /int/ boards became worldwide pollinators of memes, the DNA of the soul.
That optimistic era is passed, however /int/ remains the sixth most active board of 4chan.
4chan and others approach to internet discourse is very approachable for most eastern european millennials. It just works well with their distain for faux/internet personalities, which is something you will end up with when anonymity is not a strong element of a community.
But I have no data on visitors or posters, so I might be projecting.
If we're arbitrarily limiting scope to just America, why stop there? Let's drill down further, and say HN is aimed at California, which is only 34% white [1]. Does that get them the coveted minority status?
I don't see why the only perspective allowed should be one that maximizes apparent white privilege, especially since in other contexts, Eurocentrism is something that is decried.
Most internet websites, such as HN only require an email address to register, beyond that they are totally anonymous and indifferent to the country of origin, religion, gender etc. of their poster. The only hard requirement is that you need to speak English somewhat well, and be interested/willing to join in the discussion (of typically nerdy topics).
I'm not sure what are the actual demographics of HN, but I'd be curious to see what is the actual national makeup of people who post here. Probably more info isn't really possible to collect considering the limited data the site has to work with.
You may have noticed that, over the past few years, the term "minority" has been increasingly often accompanied by qualifications such as "underprivileged", "marginalised", "underrepresented", and I've recently seen "underestimated" popping up as well.
I do not think that is a coincidence, especially since how the qualifiers are so exquisitely unfalsifiable. (wer ein Jud' ist, bestimme ich!)
People who are traumatized by something should seek therapy and perhaps avoid places where they are exposed to that (although perhaps the opposite is better). Demanding others to adapt their culture to fit you is a good way to actually be hated.
So someone feels like a perennial outsider because they're referred to with slur words every time they out themselves as gay or non white or a woman, they should all get therapy and deal with it? Absolutely no responsibility for the people perpetuating hate?
Why don't you test your theory by walking up to some people and calling them slurs. See if they all shrug it off because at least you're not a cop shooting them.
"gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth ... post being full of slurs"
Well, and filter out the CP, dead and butchered bodies, nazis & any number of other horrifying things I ran across when I've looked at the site. Granted that was years ago but it's not really the type of thing you check up on to see if things have gotten better...
Sure maybe not on /g/ but that leaves lots of people just one mistaken click away from potential nightmares. That's not a value people are missing, it's a cost they aren't willing to pay for someone else's concept of being egalitarian.
You could fill every post on every site with slurs and I would barely notice. Slurs aren't 4chan's problem though, the crowd of unrestrained sadists is.
People always hype up 4chan nowadays like it's LiveLeak on steroids, but generally speaking any time I browse 4chan it's felt much more mundane. The only major culture shock that most people are in for is the degree of hatefulness and shamelessness that you encounter on 4chan, especially in the memes and vernacular. It's the one place left on the internet where truly Nothing is sacred, and the userbase is happy to make that clear whenever possible.
That said, it's absolutely not worth the time, unless you are bored and feel like most of the internet is too sanitized for your tastes. It's just, unquestionably a big waste of time at best.
I don't think it'll ruin your brain, but it probably won't expand it either.
tbf people even post born on /biz/, they just eat the ban for it, and even when it isn't outright porn it's often very overtly sexual images. The only thing that makes it browsable is the Wingman browser plugin.
Well /b/ is mostly porn, along with few other boards. Relatively "normal" boards are hosted on 4channel.org domain. That said, 4chan is mostly "shitposting" and memes, don't expect serious discussions.
There is an extensive list of boards to choose from with very different types of people, but if porn is all you look for, porn is all you get. The site is like a mirror reflecting your desires and inclinations, reaffirming and reinforcing your fixations.
weeeeeell, people did spam lolicon and gay furry porn in like 2011 for a couple months but the mods swooped in and it's been a well-enforced blue board since
the real problem with /g/ in the current age though is the thought-terminating memes. it's no longer really the bastion of oblique insight it once was. opinions on the board have ossified to the point you're not going to find out about anything cool from them first. this is common across most blue boards these days honestly; they are no longer really tastemakers
Perhaps /g/ is worse, but I feel that applies to most established forums on the internet. It's particularly noticeable if you've bounced around various subreddits that it's just the same 5 opinions rehashed endlessly, and anyone who disagrees has left the building. You just get a different set of 5 opinions when you jump to a new subreddit.
This is why I feel moderation, or perhaps curation is a better word, isn’t a bad thing. A hardcore 4channer might not think so, but I feel the lowest common denominator isn’t. That is to say it just produces a noise that isn’t beneficial at all unless you want to be tickled that way for the lulz.
r/askhistorians is a fantastic example where curation produces high quality insight and debate.
I’m lazily designing a Reddit replacement, can’t really build one while I’m still employed and may never build it.
If you’re not chasing infinite growth, or even if you are but want to set the right culture at the outset, I think the HN moderation model is ideal. Just delete low quality and blatantly offensive posts and ban repeat offenders. You don’t need some complicated mechanism for implementing restorative justice or scaling moderation via community moderation teams, you just don’t want those users to post
4chan is filled with people asking easily googleable questions and the user base generally seems to be about 17. I know that’s the age when I visited the site the most (thank god it was before the 2016 election which irrevocably ruined the site). It has a very low bar for discussion and the signal/noise ratio is terrible unless you’re willing to wade through piles of shit to find a gem here and there.
4chan for sure has useful insights like a very low (captcha) barrier to use the site and a very low-ego culture. But the discussion quality is actually abysmal
I think a central aggregator that is Reddit still produces the less friction. I haven’t felt compelled to sign up for any alternatives sofar. It’s an interesting field at the moment, and with Twitter in flux, a smart player might be able to take advantage of the unique opportunity.
I do too! It’s not just Reddit and Twitter I want to replace. I think Quora and Stack Overflow, even Wikipedia, had some good social ideas as well. Most of these were ruined by chasing growth (diluting out the good original user base) and trying to juice out as much revenue per user as possible. They’ve all been enshittified unnecessarily - even though not all are profitable, in most cases where they aren’t, it’s because of over-hiring. Running a website isn’t that hard
Unfortunately I will need to switch to a non-pseudonymous account to launch and really talk about it, so can’t get into too much detail on this one.
I honestly think that, if these sites had been ok with measly 9 figure valuations and didn’t go chasing 11 figure valuations (or, a huge nonprofit treasure chest, or allowed petty busybodies to exert undue influence on the site), none of them would have gone to shit.
That's an odd example. askhistorians is meant to reflect current American historians' scholarly consensus, and rigidly moderated to stay that way. While this does sometimes produce insight it's one of the least debate-oriented places on the internet.
I've seen plenty of posts in which people had conflicting accounts of historical events, including anti-Western, anti-Eurocentric, and anti-Imperialist ones, and as long as they are well-sourced they are fine.
The bigger issue is that r/askhistorians is an English-language subreddit, and English is the most widely-used language of the Western-Imperialist powers, so it makes sense that if you ask in their language, you are mostly going to get their answers. The people who would have equivalent expertise from other viewpoints are mostly not lurking that subreddit.
And yes, it's not meant to be a place to debate, it's meant to be a place to get access to historians' subject matter expertise. When 2 historians' accounts conflict with each other, they aren't supposed to start arguing about it, they're supposed to each make a separate reply to OP with their sources.
It's interesting how people go to a certain board specifically infamous for posting that kind of stuff then are shocked to see said stuff, then generalizing the entire site off that one interaction. It's as if I equate /r/AskHistorians, a heavily-modded academic sub, to /r/(insert raunchy sub here).
The users from one are going to be around on the other. This is true everywhere. When Reddit banned various hate speech subreddits you stopped seeing those guys "just asking questions" about the inherent inferiority of certain races in unrelated subreddits anywhere near as often.
Holy shit, in what world is /b/ not full of gore and porn today. Outsiders can't help but make confident sweeping statements about a site they don't even use. This comment tree is laden with cringe-inducing posts, you think using 4chan is so cool that you're willing to pretend that you know anything about it?
It's more egalitarian and accessible than any other social media I can think of, yes.
In 4chan a literal nazi, a drag queen, a bona-fide pedophile and a luddite can exchange opinions with no prejudice, because none of them know anyone else's background.
You might think that these people can't talk about certain things, but any subject in which discussion becomes too caustic simply doesn't even take place in other platforms, and not every discussion is a life or death discussion, they can talk about photography just fine.
"In 4chan a literal nazi, a drag queen, a bona-fide pedophile and a luddite can exchange opinions..."
This is overly romantic. I just visited /g/. Less than 1 min in, I see "nigger" and "faggot".
I'm sure there are blacks, gays and drag queens that see value in 4chan and are desensitized to those words. But, I'd estimate 99% of the population is white men/boys with antisocial tendencies.
Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with like minded people building a village. But let's not pretend the culture of the site, doesn't instantly weed out a huge chunk of multiple demographics.
>This is overly romantic. I just visited /g/. Less than 1 min in, I see "nigger" and "faggot".
Yes, and if you spend an hour in it, you'll see them dozens of times more. Words hold the meaning we give them, by constantly seeing words like these you stop caring about them. This is part of what makes 4chan so inclusive.
Because rather than having a social agreement not to call someone this or that, everyone calls everyone this or that so, so often that it bears no meaning anymore.
A nice exercise in you thinking the whole world is only what you see for yourself. Here are the actual demographics:
Demographic
Age: 18-34
Gender: ~70% male, ~30% female
Location: United States (47%), United Kingdom (7%), Canada (6%), Australia (4%), Germany (4%)
Interests: Japanese culture, anime, manga, video games, comics, technology, music, movies
Education: Majority attended or currently enrolled in college
"Desensitized to words" is normal mental development; infants may be excited by sheer words - not beyond.
Beyond infancy you (should) have gained filtering and control;
before that and after social experience, you should be able to understand actions as part of "playing" ("non-seriousness", transversality of intention).
It's absolutely not for everyone, but I think the anonymous nature makes it so low stakes it's trivially easy for me to just not care, not engage. You can just ignore things you don't like!
I do think this is one of the big hidden problems with upvote/like systems.
Seeing a post you don't like or disagree with on Twitter/Facebook/Reddit with a lot of likes/retweets/upvotes/etc psychologically puts you on the defensive. 10,000 likes on a post you disagree with means you're up against an army of 10,000 people who disagreed with you! So you do what's natural: you fight back, you summon your own army of people (hoping to get a respectable counter-army of likes). This creates a toxic environment and you can see it play out on Twitter: every Democrat-leaning tweet will have its top reply be a Republican-leaning tweet with a counter-point, and every Republican with a Democrat.
Meanwhile, on 4chan or other old-style message board withouts those systems... yeah, it's just some asshole with a stupid opinion. Just ignore them, no need to waste effort engaging.
It's actually even worse on some sites. For example Reddit does not necessarily show the real sum of votes to begin with, but a different one created in an intransparent manner since the code isn't public. They call this "vote-fuzzing". Arbitrary changes to the ranking algorithm have over the years completely changed what users see when they look at the vote count¹, and I suspect that's just the tip of the iceberg that's made public.
Right, this is sold as a technique against vote manipulators (to not let them know if their bots are working) but it requires a lot of trust in the operator not abusing it.
Arguably, the addition of showing links to all the replies to a comment could have contributed towards 4chan's drift further into engagement-baiting content. It's the closest analogue to the visual, numeric feedback mechanism you describe.
Interesting because from a functional user experience perspective, it's an objectively useful feature for navigating discussions. An obvious addition in terms of web design, yet with unforeseen repercussions. The medium is the message, after all.
Very true! But even then, the dynamic is a bit different. Reply-links on a post that's an obvious joke are analogous to upvotes, but reply-links on a politically controversial topic could be anything, though most likely disagreements. Plus the absolute number is going to be orders of magnitudes smaller than likes.
But I do agree it's contributed to bait posts a lot, yeah. Interesting to see the impact of such a seemingly small UX change.
I think you sort of do it indirectly. You frame your counter-response in a way that is likely to garner the support and upvotes of the opposing camp (opposing to post you're arguing with). Battle lines having been drawn, the internet goes to war.
Sure, which is why I ignore 4chan. I don't want or need to be associated with/exposed to that crowd. I was just very surprised to hear it described as egalitarian and accessible. It's the cesspool that all other cesspools are measured by.
> I don't want or need to be associated with/exposed to that crowd.
Remember Anonymous? That was all derivative of various chan boards and Something Awful. You probably overlap with those users more than you'd like to admit.
A thing I realized was that there's a lot of people who lurk the chans and end up promoting the more mainstream-ready content to their other communities. The chans are essentially the boiler room in terms of their role in the ecosystem of the internet.
The most accessible places tend to become cesspools since being anti-social is one of the main traits that limits people's access to more exclusive places.
> It's the cesspool that all other cesspools are measured by.
The biggest difference to other cesspools is that it has less manners and moderation. But in terms of pure toxicity Twitter etc aren't any better, all the scheming, backstabbing and insults are just more polite and use a lot more emoji, and when someone loses the argument they block everyone.
I think a lot of this is a cultural issue you learn to get over. Outside of pol, it’s just shock-humor teenage boy talk.
I’m Jewish and mentally filter out all the antisemitic stuff without even thinking about it. 95% of the content outside certain pockets is not even antisemitic, it’s just a shock humor phrase used independently of any actual relation to being Jewish like the term “goyslop”.
And yeah, a certain portion of the population does actually hate Jews/transgender people/black people. But when you post nobody knows you are like that. It’s ego-less, you don’t even have an account, so you really don’t even have any reason to care because it’s not directed at you in particular, so it’s just like if you saw something racist on Twitter. Just a very different model compared to the pseudonymous forums/Reddit/hn and fully-linked regular social media.
This is a deep misunderstanding of 4chan, enough so that I find it difficult to believe you've even seen any board on the site you are discussing. The abuse is directed at everyone; no matter what opinion you share, no matter who you are, you will be verbally abused in a variety of ways. Totally innocuous opinions that you would be lauded for or totally ignored for on another site are just cause for being berated and harassed on 4chan, though the extent of it is largely governed by the culture of the particular board.
I think this is what OP meant by "egalitarian" (though I certainly wouldn't have chosen that word) -- equal opportunity abuse. This shared constant toxicity plus no karma/upvotes and no attachment to an online persona through anonymity mean that the playing ground is perhaps uniquely level.
> The abuse is directed at everyone; no matter what opinion you share, no matter who you are, you will be verbally abused in a variety of ways.
Yeah, this is what people misunderstand about 4chan. Obviously my race gets a lot of flak, but I've even seen racial slurs about white Europeans I've never heard anywhere else.
I'm not saying it's morally right, but it feels more of a hazing tactic than legitimate hatred. Once you pass that filter you have access to some interesting information.
And? Imagine, for example, a comedian who pokes fun at all groups exactly equally. There are infinite types of people, he wouldn’t be able to say a word. Different things are different and that’s not inherently wrong.
They're not misunderstanding it they just don't accept your model of its value.
No matter what your ethnicity someone on 4chan will make a joke about genociding you. The difference is that some people in the world actually are doing genocides. And someone from one of those groups, knowing that, is going to experience those jokes differently.
4chan, (and to a serious degree, HN) places the duty and the transgression on the person who has the bad experience with the genocide joke. But a completely valid model is actually that no, the genocide joke is the transgression and the one making it the transgressor.
4chan is not separate from the world it is part of it. And by fostering this environment you're providing cover for atrocities. Because not everyone is there just to have a fun time saying slurs! Some of them really do want us to die, and 4chan isn't just a diversion it is an actual site of conversion and radicalization towards their goals.
> And by fostering this environment you're providing cover for atrocities.
To be clear, I am not "fostering [an] environment" or defending 4chan here at all, I am just pointing out that this is a misunderstanding of what the culture of 4chan is.
Like the person I was replying to, I somehow doubt you have spent any time there. Where on the site are you even talking about? /g/? /lgbt/? /k/? /mu/? /pol/? /bant/? /sci/? /b/? Even though they share the cultural features I was talking about, they are quite distinct otherwise. Many people read threads on a topical board like /mu/ or /g/ and haven't spent any time on the more offensive or stomach-churning parts of the site like /pol/ or /b/.
> Because not everyone is there just to have a fun time saying slurs
I resent this implication that merely because I suggest people understand the things they are talking about that I am on 4chan using slurs. This style of argumentation would be right at home on the worst boards of 4chan...
> it is an actual site of conversion and radicalization towards their goals
4chan is not a person, it doesn't have "goals" or opinions any more than heterogenous online communities like eg HN or Reddit do. I would agree that 4chan as a community does house more polarized opinions than most online communities, though that seems to be largely a function of not having upvotes and allowing anonymous posting.
To your overall point, that this is a value difference between myself and the GP, I fully disagree. I am making a factual (and not value-centric) claim that toxicity towards anyone posting on the site is an integral part of the culture there.
I find it absolutely ridiculous that you keep telling people that they haven't visited 4chan and are wrong. This is hackernews. Most of us are in our 30s and were perpetually online during the rise of 4chan and are not ignorant whatsoever to what chan boards are like. The last time I went there it was full of CP and I lose all respect for people who use that site no matter how you try to spin it.
I'm in my 30s and I don't know which boards you frequented to see so much CP because that was not my experience at all. Most of the criticism around the alleged tons of CP seemed to come from people who had an ideological ax to grind against the site in general.
Yeah, you're right. We all have an axe to grind against 4chan. We're all making up that we saw CP on it.
I'm a former Goon. I've been all over the trashy parts of the internet. It doesn't benefit me whatsoever to lie about seeing CP on 4chan. I even remember exactly what the picture I saw the last time I went to it looked like. It is seared into my memory. That was my last visit to that trash site.
My sympathies. I never spent any time on 4chan. But between doing some desktop publishing and helping friends with abuse on the first web-based chat, I saw a bunch of things I could not unsee. It took me maybe 15 years for that stuff to not come back as what they call "involuntary autobiographical memories". It has now faded to the point that I can't bring the full images back at all, just hazy, untraumatizing vague versions. I hope you get there soon!
What an absolutely stupid comparison. Yeah, goatse was tamer than child porn. Got it, bud. I see where your morals lie. FBI, this guy right here. And who said I saw it one time? I literally said it was full of CP. Good work, man.
Likening Goatse to child sexual abuse photography seems akin to likening an action movie to ISIS execution videos (except even in that case the mere possession of the material isn't a crime so perhaps it's understating the case).
You again. K. No, I don't use the site anymore. I've established that. If you're going to say that I've never used the site, I've also established that I have. More drivel from you. Thanks for replying absolute joke replies to multiple posts of mine. I love that your your username is your name and you post this trash defending CP.
Yikes. On 4chan you'd have just blindly implied that the poster fathered himself in a freak accident with his mother, who is a bovine. Here, on the nice polite internet, you merely implied that a real person, whose name is attached, is defending ch1ld s3xual abuse.
You're so upset about there being a forum you don't like that you've decided to use one of the most powerful accusations you can make about him - one that imho could justifiably get him killed if true - so casually. So much hatred.
Oh sorry bud, I guess I shouldn't be upset that there's a forum that I saw tons of child porn on. And nazis. And trans-hating homophobes. I'm so sorry, I'll try to be better.
The guy has replied to every single one of my posts after I said I quit going to 4chan because of CP defending 4chan. A little odd considering my circumstances for leaving it. That shouldn't even remotely be a debate on why I left.
> That shouldn't even remotely be a debate on why I left.
Sure, you're the definitive source for why you left.
> there's a forum that I saw tons of child porn on.
It wasn't a forum for that though (I hope), it was a forum where people trolled others by posting it. Do you know someone put CP in the bitcoin blockchain?
And yeah, I use a no-images no-JS browser for a lot of things and 4chan would be one. I expect to be blocking 99% gore, but that last 1% is many things I'm also happy not seeing.
> I guess I shouldn't be upset
Upset at who, though? Upset at the people who enjoy an uncensored forum and have accepted that it'll be full of crap, or at the people who feel the need to poison it simply because someone else was enjoying themselves?
> trans-hating homophobes
Anonymous forums are actually one of the first places trans people were free to discuss themselves. You might (will) be flamed and trolled for it, but also engaged with. Reddit seems more free to be trans, except if you look at the forums there's always someone being banned for non-hateful things, such as being the wrong type of trans, or detrans. (Truscum vs Tucutes vs old-school Transexuals ...)
Correct me if I'm wrong but, you and others are saying that posting racial slurs, CP and gore for shock value are an integral part of the culture?
I don't understand why it's important to be flamed at all by people who are anonymous? I might banter with friends, but there's a shared history of understanding there; in an anonymous message board there's none of that so I don't understand what it's trying to achieve?
No, that stuff is gross and you block/avoid it. The integral part is that the forum uncensored - even if a large quantity of that uncensored content is unwanted.
And fwiw, 4chan is only one example of a (nearly) uncensored board, it's far from the best or nicest.
> I don't understand why it's important to be flamed at all
That's not the important part, but that you can have the conversation at all. The idiots running around screaming are like ghosts in Harry Potter, distractions if you let them be but almost invisible if you ignore them.
> racial slurs ... are an integral part of the culture?
Well sometimes yes, actually. Like the now banned subreddit, 2balkan4u, sometimes "hate subs" actually aren't. I'm familiar only via gaming friends, but it's basically people who've come together around "hating" each other for ethnic reasons. It doesn't look friendly but is, with people bonding over their shared history - often dark - and collectively watching the world go by from a cynical pov. It's like therapy and the hanging out with the only people who understand you, something many veterans feel even when meeting ex-"enemy" combatants. A sanitized version of this wouldn't work.
> The guy has replied to every single one of my posts after I said I quit going to 4chan because of CP defending 4chan.
Uh. I replied to two posts; everything else has been direct back-and-forth with you. Every one except this one anyway; this one is because you're directly discussing me. I don't know if that's "every single one of your posts" or not, but it certainly sounds less dramatic when you realize that it's.. two.
> after I said I quit going to 4chan defending 4chan
Go back and read a second time. I didn't actually defend 4chan, and I certainly didn't and am not defending csam. I didn't say anything objectionably about you leaving, either; what I did respond to was your assertion that you're familiar with 4chan. All I really said is, hey, sounds like maybe you don't actually hang out there (which is fine!) --- just like GP was saying in the first place. I also tried to point out that the internet at large is basically unmoderated, and 4chan itself exists within that space. You could just as easily make the argument that the internet itself is dangerous and to be avoided.
You don't have to agree with me. You don't have to like me --- even if I wish you wouldn't make snap judgements about me based off of a few terse exchanges. What I would hope for, however, is that you could remain civil, rather than open fire with personal attacks. Especially here on HN.
I'll leave that one up to you; we can discuss further or not, but I'm not going to engage in an open flame war here.
> If you're going to say that I've never used the site, I've also established that I have.
So… you’ve no respect for your former self? You see how this works?
Nowhere did I defend cp. Those are your words about me, not my words about anything. And what about my username? Am I supposed to hide behind a throwaway for any sort of contentious take? Does that make me a man somehow?
> So… you’ve no respect for your former self? You see how this works?
You have the strangest arguments. I quit going to it once I saw CP. I don't even remember why I used to visit it occasionally, probably morbid curiosity, or maybe people on somethingawful linking posts on it. I definitely didn't frequent it and I'm sure I never posted on it.
I've seen comments that it's cleaned up a lot and has better moderation. That's good.
I stopped using 4chan 15 years ago when I realized that a huge portion of the people on there are not merely roleplaying nazis, but honestly hold the views they obscure behind the atmosphere of joking.
Up to date knowledge of their internal jargon and shibboleths doesn't discredit my view of the site, it's still right there and it doesn't take long to confirm that my worst opinions of it from 2008 are still valid now.
I never claimed that the site itself has opinions or goals. But its members do! and they emerge in the patterns of interaction and rhetoric eg its culture.
Probably largely the same people but cultures can change even if none of the membership does.
Anyway two points:
- The vicious racism was already enough of a consistent thing in the 2000s that I clocked it as essentially a movement at that point. They always claimed to be joking but even then it was clear that many of them were not. Regardless of what other political affiliations were commonly held there at that time. But I think you got it pretty close, they weren't that politically coherent back then, and certainly not leftist so much as just anti-bush/anti-republican.
- Gamergate was a permanent rearrangement, finally giving a coherent "them" to orient a reactionary antipolitical movement against. I think the sharp ramp up in aggressiveness and frankly violent imagery filtered a lot of people out, while simultaneously inviting people in, creating a new overlap with pre-existing and nascent reactionary groups like (self-identified I don't mean this as an insult per se) reddit incels.
So having kept an eye on it for a while now, I think it has meaningfully changed since 2008, even if a lot of the members are the same and many of the cultural signifiers are intact. Just for one it is much more coherent as an allegiance or identity, as you can see by the dozens of people coming out to passionately defend it in these comments.
> I stopped using 4chan 15 years ago when I realized that a huge portion of the people on there are not merely roleplaying nazis, but honestly hold the views they obscure behind the atmosphere of joking.
How is that not an integral component of equal access?
The sheep are not going to visit in this scenario because a free-for-all is comfortable for the wolves and not for the sheep. I think this is pretty straightforward with a moment of thought.
Here’s another thought: avowed Nazis are not, strictly speaking, stopped from participating in any pseudonymous forum, if they can keep their views on that subject to themselves. Why is this model less “open” or “egalitarian” than one where they’re allowed to barge into conversations and start spewing that stuff?
> The sheep are not going to visit in this scenario because a free-for-all is comfortable for the wolves and not for the sheep. I think this is pretty straightforward with a moment of thought.
Yes, of course. It did seem the clear intent behind your words. Arm the sheep and it may be a different matter, no? Or, as you say, the sheep could simply not show up if they don't like their odds. I'm really not making a value judgement on the situation, just saying that everyone is handed equal tools here.
> Here’s another thought: avowed Nazis are not, strictly speaking, stopped from participating in any pseudonymous forum, if they can keep their views on that subject to themselves. Why is this model less “open” or “egalitarian” than one where they’re allowed to barge into conversations and start spewing that stuff?
Well, the easy answer is that it's less open because it is moderated. Perhaps each is open in different, conflicting ways? I'm not really prepared to perform an analysis on the ethics of each, and please don't take my response as necessarily expressing a preference for the former. Insofar as I spend time on any social platform, it is mostly HN, and mostly because I find the conversation here generally more civil than elsewhere. So in practice, I do seem to express a preference for the latter.
Sea lion shit right here man. We can't stop you from chilling with the nazis if that's what you're gonna be into but we aren't going to believe that it's all in good fun.
Now that I'm home and had some time to look properly, I guess this[0] is what you mean?
That's.. not very nice =(. I also don't see how it applies here, even if you do assume bad faith --- who exactly am I pestering? I asked you one question, then I've been having a back-and-forth with emodendroket --- a simple one-for-one. I'll also have you note that they chose to engage me. I'm certainly not following people even cross-thread, let alone cross-platform, pestering them until I get a response and demanding they justify their personal preferences.
I'm trying to have a legitimate conversation; it was my belief that intellectual discussion was encouraged here. If you don't want to discuss, don't respond, it's pretty much that simple. I'm not going to chase you down. However, if you are going to engage, I would appreciate if you don't accuse me of trolling on the basis of a disagreement and some weak notion of bad faith.
Everyone has been on 4chan. That's a weak way to try to discredit people whose opinions you disagree with.
You act like you're being an anthropologist, but you're just apologizing for a culture we all know and which does demonstrable harm in the world. It's not "polarized opinions", it's celebrating terrible things. You know that, we know that.
Everyone has been on slashdot too, right? I mean come on, it's slashdot.
...except realistically, even though I'm in the age and interest group, I've been there like, a single-digit number of times --- which totally qualifies me as an expert on it, right?
> And someone from one of those groups, knowing that, is going to experience those jokes differently.
This is the absolutely critical point that people are either too privileged to have ever thought of, or too disingenuous to admit.
Yeah, I'm a relatively wealthy (by global standards) white guy of European descent. You can joke about genociding me and I'll laugh because it's a ridiculous thought.
People who grew up genuinely at risk of genocide, or who had recent ancestors killed, don't see that same joke that same way. Worse, the people making those jokes about populations that are currently being exterminated are just doing the old "hey I'm a nazi, ha ha just kidding, can't you take a joke" thing. Which, great, free speech. But at some point if you're goose stepping in jest on a daily basis, that's just who you are.
Kurt Vonnegut said it: we are what we pretend to be.
> This is the absolutely critical point that people are either too privileged to have ever thought of, or too disingenuous to admit.
...or fundamentally disagree with? Yes, you're describing something real. You're also setting a double standard. Is it possible to understand the premises but come to different conclusions?
> white guy of European descent. You can joke about genociding me and I'll laugh because it's a ridiculous thought.
Do you by any chance have any Italian ancestors? It took a large amount of lynchings, a significant public uproar and finally a threat of war from Europe for the US to finally elevate Italians to "white" . Americans ingrained need to be racist against everyone they could almost causing WWI (with all the interwoven alliances) is an interesting thought.
> Americans ingrained need to be racist against everyone
Have you ever been anywhere in the world which you found less racist than the USA? (Bonus points if it actually has a substantial population and racial/ethnic mix to test that, and it's not just theoretical.)
A lot of places have hidden hatred of groups which acts like racial hate, but doesn't appear that way to people from the USA where the divide (black/white) was so stark and visible. Turks/Armenians, Shia/Sunni, etc.
The USA isn't perfect, but I can't think of anywhere else that I could so unreservedly recommend to anyone around the world. Not Canada, not Germany, maybe the UK, sorta Singapore if you're not certain races, etc, etc.
> This is the absolutely critical point that people are either too privileged to have ever thought of, or too disingenuous to admit.
You are also too privileged to think anyone might not be offended by those words, or even allow them the chance to speak for themselves. The banning of r/2balkan4u was a great exercise in the White Man's Burden of freeing the poor helpless "minorities" from Balkan inside jokes
Words can hurt, but that does not mean the formulation of the words is the transgression. Words only hurt when they speak to truth and what underlies a truth that hurts is where you find the transgression. It is your choice whether or not you choose to help work towards ending the transgression. Going about your day pretending something doesn't exist doesn't accomplish anything.
If you need to subscribe to that model to hide from yourself from the fact that you don't actually care, it is your life to live, but it is not a model that works beyond one's self. The disingenuity is out there for everyone else.
I disagree. Words can certainly be transgressive given certain company or context. Being sensitive to the feelings of others doesn't have to be mutually exclusive to fighting against hatred and injustice.
The fact that trigger warnings exist and are in use in many places is evidence of the existence of this model.
There is only so much time in the day. Every minute spent in idle chit-chat where one might blurt out the wrong thing is time not spent dealing with the actual problem. Indeed, it is a mutually exclusive situation. It is not possible to do both at the same time.
There is no denying the existence of the model, but it is used to try and hide from oneself that one doesn't actually care and would rather take the fun road of talking about it instead. Which is fine. It is your life to live and if that is what it takes to get through the day, so be it. It is not the altruistic behaviour you are trying to make it out to be, however.
I'm not arguing for or against any model of behaviour. Like I said above these are choices that people are free to weigh up and do as they see best.
I'm simply responding to "There is no model where reminding someone of the existence of something is a transgression" but we seem to have reached an agreement that there is.
We have always acknowledged that people will set up walls to hide from themselves. It is not clear how you think that equates to a transgression. It is likely a fundamental aspect of the human experience.
It can be seen as a transgression because you're knowingly choosing words that will cause someone distress.
In my experience people are normally careful about what kind of jokes they make around someone who has suffered a traumatic experience, an "there's a time and a place" kind of thing.
I believe many people would find it transgressive to make jokes about public transport around someone whose child had recently been killed by a bus.
You can see this even in popular culture. I'd give the famous "Don't mention the war" episode of Fawlty Towers as an example.
I think it's part of the human experience to exhibit sensitivity towards others and to reflect that in your language.
> It can be seen as a transgression because you're knowingly choosing words that will cause someone distress.
Who? On internet forums, there is only you. Any words you write are done so to stroke your own thought processes. There is no expectation of anyone else being on the line. In fact, most comments you write will never be read by anyone. And even when something does reply, there is no belief that it must be human. It could just as easily be a GPT model, and that's fine. It wouldn't change the experience.
Again, forum usage is solitary activity. If there are other humans involved behind the scenes to make the software work, that is merely an implementation detail that is not of concern to the user. Any care for the words you choose is only for your own benefit, and as it pertains to the discussion, most likely because you don't want to accept some truth about yourself.
Not true. As a member of one of the largest, mainstream segments of America, I constantly feel attacked while browsing 4chan. Your choice to engage is entirely based on your ability to filter and rationalize
Huh. I don't hang out on 4chan but I've spent time there, for instance as a would-be draw, ah, 'friend'.
Doesn't matter who you are, you constantly ARE attacked while browsing 4chan. That's kind of the point. Nobody gets to be the in crowd and protected: the closest I've seen of that is for instance literal Trump and Putin, and I don't believe for a second they are truly exempt: the more certain /pol/sters try to make them be protected, the more it backfires with 4chan.
Whether it is in ANY WAY USEFUL to go to a place where everybody hates you and you hate them right back and that's what the community is, that's another question. Looking back on my relation to such things, part of the reason I drifted off was that I found things to care about or be interested in, didn't matter what, and having any arbitrary interest was as good as 4chan, at dealing with the worthlessness and ennui.
4chan is a really good place to spend time if you haven't killed yourself yet.
If you can connect with pretty much anything else in the universe, the other thing has a pretty easy time showing its appeal compared to 4chan. For instance, I got into MLP fandom, bronies. That came off 4chan, a great example of how channers can be redirected into anything else no matter how inappropriate, just as a relief from being channers.
It's always gonna be there at the end of the line, when there's nothing else but death. But then, there are actually plenty of other things, 4chan is only one angle a person can take. It's not entirely about choice, though. As choice erodes, 4chan beckons (while flipping you off).
Yup. Go measure how often someone is accused of being a groomer pedo, simply because they're trans or have trans kids, vs how often someone is accused of being a groomer pedo, simply benzoate they're cis or have cis kids. The ratio is not 50:50. It isn't even 95:5.
I really value places where discussion can happen without gatekeeping. The worst is 2FA or a phone number IMHO, however nothing compares to being able to jump straight into the pool. IRC is one such place and 4chan is another. Even the HN crowd appears to agree[1].
For everything else there is documentation, experimentation, social clubs and entertainment.
1. There is a 'account system' for reputation, but it is trivial to auto generate throwaway accounts for 'hot takes' or counter group-think. There are even simple mirror websites that allow for browsing without hiding flagged posts. No Edit:[I don't think any] attempts have been made to reign this behavior in, likely for good reason. Perhaps it keeps the discourse interesting and encourages lateral thinking?
I would call the tone of 4chan (insulting everything and anyone) to be gatekeeping, specifically against those who wish to have more moderation/"nicer" discourse.
IMO gatekeeping (by the community) is a good/necessary thing for spaces to not become completely gutted/become kicked out of what was formerly your space.
Not arguing that, but generating smurfs on HN is pretty trivial compared to a few social media platforms I can think of. Luckily there isn't much money to be made from doing it here, unless you want to play the long game and try and push an investment agenda, but again, that isn't really hot-take territory and more like creating many false identities over a long time.
Still, HN could make a couple of changes to email verification and make smurfing much less trivial. I think it is good they don't
You can have a freedom or order, but not both at the same time. Most social networks decided for the order, suppressing freedom. Freedom brings some positives and many negatives, that's life I guess.
It's a deliberate gatekeeping mechanism. 4chan isn't a monolith, either. Some communities are tucked well enough away that it isn't _as_ needed. Furthermore, it isn't hate of "others" so much as it's a hate of all.
You will never find a more self-loathing bunch, in fact! However, there are several recurring threads, some older than Reddit, dedicated to self improvement and escaping neetdom. There are also threads openly embracing it.
Yes. It's anonymous, so no one knows who you are. It's unfiltered, so anyone can post. Some community members can be assholes, but that doesn't change those two basic ground rules.
Those problems you list are present on every online forum and are orthogonal to being free and egalitarian.
4chan is the perfect example of what society looks like when nobody plays control nazi with a zen stick! The people that can't stand it are more fucked up than the ones on it. They just don't know it yet or bothered to look.
None of those things prevent you from using the site or limit any of its features (accessibility), and your voice is exactly as loud as everyone else's and their judgment of you is only a judgment of what you've just said (egalitarian.)
Just listing a bunch of unrelated shit that upsets you isn't responsive to the comment you're replying to.
There's definitely smart people on 4chan, but accessibility only exists insofar as there's enough of a culture to punch through the noise floor. Mentally filtering posts only gets you so far, if there's any sort of counterculture then discussion becomes impossible as people actively attempt to derail the thread, see any thread about Rust in the past couple of years for an example.
If you're lucky there won't be a counterculture, but the culture of the board won't always be conductive to discussion. I stopped browsing /g/ years ago but I remember a distinct decline in the quality of discussion around Linux and FOSS topics as the board shifted to more towards more general consumer technology, FOSS threads naturally became lower effort and more memetic* as a result to compete with the influx of new users who didn't care about this subculture. When Linus Torvalds announced that he would try to be more polite it gave some ammo to the anti-Linux culture and things deteriorated more. There was a particularly pertinent post around the attitude of NixOS users on /g/ that reflects this period pretty well I think.
* This sort of trend isn't unique to 4chan of course, the quality of discussion on hobby subreddits tends to decline when mods start allowing memes and low effort posts. Even if discussion continues it's never the primary focus and becomes harder to find.
> but the culture of the board won't always be conductive to discussion.
A friendly nitpick: the word 'conductive' is a physics term. The term which means 'tending to cause or bring something about' is conducive, with no t, and is pronounced 'cundoosiv'.
I think 4chan's "solution" to the moderation problem is more or less the way it will end up being at most places which have a long-term (approaching two decades) survival rate.
Absolutely nobody can agree on what should and should not be moderated to some perfect degree, and here the perfect is not only the enemy of the good, it's the enemy of sanity. It always starts off with some easy low-hanging fruit, and then it ends up with people rage-quitting because some moderator has taken the "wrong" stance on discussions about Israel and Palestine, something small like that. The more control, the more that needs to be controlled. It just invites people to filter ever-finer, based on the narcissism of small differences.
Ideally, offer some kind of client-side filtration. Let the user maintain it, let them run into the Scunthorpe Problem for themselves. Rate-limit the spam, and be robust about that, but everything else is up to the individual. And frankly, the people who have selected fragility as a kind of lifestyle rarely have much to offer a community anyway.
I say this as an Old who has watched communities arise, develop, and fold over decades, on platform after platform, protocol after protocol. Most deaths are the kind of slow-motion suicide that in humans would be reflected in lousy lifestyle choices. And one I see so, so very often is becoming intensely rulebound so that everyone will behave. It never works.
When I try to think of a real world village analogue of 4chan, the only thing that fits is hazing. To people who participate in hazing, it builds character and brings people together. To everyone else, hazing is horrifying as it has led to enough suicides over the years.
Except an environment that is highly toxic does not attract decent people with good community intentions. While you have learned a lot about LLMs and generative AI for instance, it is extremely unlikely you have learned from the most well informed sources. It's definitely a community, but nobody can reasonably argue 4chan is a community that creates the best/most useful content.
I don't know about that, there's info there that's unavailable anywhere else. I've on a few occasions found that an anon I was interacting with was the primary author on a project I was contributing to or had written a paper on the subject. It's a very diverse bunch.
> While you have learned a lot about LLMs and generative AI for instance, it is extremely unlikely you have learned from the most well informed sources.
4chan is certainly not the best source compared to, say, scientific papers or technical conferences, but is there any evidence it's any worse than Reddit? A lot of the work pushing Stable Diffusion forward came out of 4chan IIRC. I believe the most popular UI (automatic1111) came out of 4chan.
> While you have learned a lot about LLMs and generative AI for instance, it is extremely unlikely you have learned from the most well informed sources.
You are talking about tools that can be abused to make infinite porn. I am not sure anyone wants to know how much time 4chan users invested into learning about them just to be able to modify and fine tune their models.
People hugely underestimate how big of a factor motivation is when it comes to research and building things. Some are motivated by money, some are motivated by the feeling of being needed and helping others. And then there's some boys who're really dedicated to figuring out how to fake nudes. The reason why they do it is unimportant, what matter is the amount of time they spend on tinkering with it. In the end they still acquire skills.
Interesting choice of words. Why would it be an "abuse" of a tool that can be adjusted to generate nearly anything, to use it for a relatively specific subset of anything?
Would you also consider it an "abuse" if they were, say, attempting to generate new works in the style of michaelangelo or picasso instead?
You really need to reevaluate where a lot of the tooling and focus is on by the community. It's a ton of porn and 4chan is really big in the space and absolutely creates some of the best content.
That's far from the only point, though. Motivation is almost moot. (not mootykins, either!).
Something developing this way is brought forward best by intensely disagreeable nerds with too much time on their hands, exploring in an undisciplined but persistent way.
I think 'the most well informed sources' in many things will NOT be the consensus opinion, but vanguard thought trying to get somewhere else beyond the sum total of what's currently known. This is fundamental to science and truth generally.
Disagreeableness is overwhelmingly a quality of such thinking, in the technical psychological sense: agreeableness leads to complying and ceasing to seek alternate thoughts/points.
I run Airwindows and have recently put out a Console system based on applying the absolute minimum alterations to the mantissas of floating point words, just to see what I'd get. That's internal algorithms, volume, and I added panning, doing nearly everything with bit-shifts for this purpose. Got a very interesting sound out of full mixes done this way.
I am as nice as pie, and putting videos on YouTube where I must talk about 'shifting of bits' because Youtube will always think I said 'bitch' and draw conclusions about my video from what it thinks I keep saying. And yet, at the same time, I am intensely disagreeable, because I'm persistently exploring ideas in digital sound that STARKLY contradict what's taught as common knowledge.
I'm not doing this on 4chan, but if I was, it would be every bit as supportive a community to my unusual directions as the 'normal world' is, if not more so. I wouldn't be one bit surprised to know that 4chan had pockets of research or content creation that are leading the world. It wouldn't be the first time 4chan led the world, for good or ill.
Ok, so mostly ill :) but that is because influential is not the same as useful. And the ability of 4chan to put any idea or content into effective practice is grossly stunted as 4chan cannot govern, or organize worth a damn by real-world standards. But it's probably the most likely source for whatever is going to be moving the world twenty years from now, compared to normal sources. It will just immediately lose control of anything that achieves escape velocity.
Think 'petri dish', or perhaps 'rainforest swamp'?
from the perspective of average redditors, intelligence is obedience to social norms. obedience is their highest virtue, and the more intelligent you are, the better at obeying you can be.
My only interaction with 4chan is when one day I discovered a /d/ thread devoted entirely to insulting me. I had never posted on it before, never posted after.
So, I think there is some additional gatekeeping: ability to ignore the fact that the one day the community decided to personally make me a target of their vitriol. :(
This was my experience on Twitter for telling someone they were getting angry, and starting an online mob, at someone who was clearly in the middle of a psychological breakdown. This persons feed went from normal tech stuff for almost the past year replete with good spelling and sentence structure to a sudden flood of reactionary and misogynistic content, 90% of which the structure of sentences barely made sense. While I'm not a mental health professional one of my best friends at the time was a schizophrenic - the behavior is pretty telltale.
This woman captured the image of me with my dog and posted it for her feed calling me a slue of slurs and various labels. I spent the next few days in bed and was afraid to leave my house. I had to delete my Twitter, scrub the internet of that image, and get a new email address because her followers would not stop trying to contact me to continue what I could already see them saying on that Twitter thread. It took Twitter over a week to remove the thread, even though it clearly doxxed me and violated their policies barring inciting harassment.
Personally, I think some people just wake up and choose violence, and other minds can't help but dabble. Sorry this happened to you.
I just found the original Google alert from 2011 and it was actually dis.4chan.org/read/prog/ - maybe I misremembered dis as /d? And it was actually in /prog? I don’t use 4chan so not sure the url templating scheme. The URL now 404s fortunately.
> I've learned much of what I know about LLMs and generative AI on /g/.
I was about to say "I keep hearing this" but then realized you are the same person I heard it from last time. Every time I go to /g/ I find it hard to believe you can distill actual useful information from there. Maybe it's just me who don't know how to navigate it.
Generally the technique is to be wrong about something and then get the vibe for the territory from people correcting you. I've found it's really helped me focus on where the innovation is being done and to stay on top of a very quickly moving field. Obviously YMMV, using 4chan is a skill.
To give a concrete example, a few months ago I was trying to parse through what's necessary to train LoRAs and how best to format a dataset for doing so. Google/Youtube/Reddit weren't giving me good results, and asking on 4chan I was pretty immediately linked a lengthy rentry that had a setup guide for the relevant tools as well as anon's notes on their exploration of the space. It helped me get up an running in a couple hours and avoid a lot of trial and error. Generally the quality is far better than your average medium post. I think largely because people write medium posts for clout and clicks, anonymous rentrys exist out of the goodness of people's hearts and for no ulterior motive.
> The toxicity/chaos of the place is probably the main thing that enables it to continue to be a village
How so, are you thinking?
After reading OP, my guess is that maybe you're suggesting it's the way the toxicity/chaos keeps too many people from joining, that helps keep it a village? Helps keep it smaller, or less rate of newcomers, since so many find it distasteful?
But maybe you mean something else? What are you thinking about how the toxicity/chaos might be the main thing that enables it to continue as a village? How might it do that?
4chan isn't a village, though, not in the way the author describes. Important characteristics of a "village" as defined in this piece are that you can develop systems of trust through reputation (by interacting with the same people over time) which leads to incentivizing pro-social behavior (there are consequences for acting like a jerk).
The author is specifically talking about places where you go to interact with people who share your interests and _aren't_ jerks.
I would argue that 4chan develops a reputation as a community-as-a-whole, and pro-social (if you can call it that) behavior is encouraged (in some ways) because of the "good of the community".
People on 4chan are jerks if viewed from an outsider. But 4chan regulars probably think nothing of it
There's a real time experiment happening right now on 4chan. What happens when echo chambers meet and cant censor each other. Left and right are clashing and they cant ignore one another or run away. They're having to talk to each other for the first time in years probably. This is what the internet was like before the siloed communities of social media platforms and their harsh censorship and moderation.
But 4chan is precisely the kind of “train station” Viktor is talking about. You’re talking to an ever-changing population of anons. The tiny communities that form over this layer sometimes, around generals or because of anons recognising each other, don’t last very long.
I've gotten actual sources and explanations I used for my master's from /h/. I don't even go on anything there except /hdg/. Surprisingly helpful bunch.
It's kind of like Burning Man in that regard. If you're overly sensitive and can't handle something that is in no way a first class resort experience, and where you have to bring all your own food and water, you're not going to have a good time.
My impression of 2ch and 4chan is that the anonymous-by-default nature means we bring less of our own personalities to those boards, and the lack of individuality made them village-like.
The fact there isn't any kind of karma system might also have something to do with it.
Yeah, this is the main problem. The offensive shibboleths you can train yourself to ignore, but there’s no getting around filtering past hundreds of low effort comments per insightful one.
True. 4chan is FAR superior to any other community, including (perhaps, especially) HN. It will still be there after everything else is long gone.
I believe the lack of magic internet points and very hands off moderation is the key. Also, I think it's some kind of addiction to raw unfiltered truth. It's not a place for people who get offended, you have to grow past that and have a thick skin. Say it like it is.
> Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's value to that that people miss.
Let's be real - what people miss is being able to act like racist edgelords on the internet without consequence, and they confuse that freedom with something profound, when it's just a deeply ingrained culture of immaturity. But apart from that one aspect, there's nothing to the accessibility of 4chan that isn't available elsewhere, certainly not quality of conversation.
I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all seemed to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on everything. There was the occasional Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, but back then, even they tread _very_ carefully - they would deviate maybe a little bit from the maintstream opinion but not much, at least not looking back on it.
I didn't see things the way the news saw them on almost anything. At the time, I thought I must be the only one who disagreed on so many points - after all, if anybody thought like I thought, there would have to be at least some newspaper somewhere that was printing it. But there wasn't.
Then the internet came along, and people could chat and argue with each other without a newspaper or magazine or TV editor getting in between. I found out that there were a lot of people who thought the way I did. A lot of people who disagreed with the dominant news media viewpoint that was 90% identical.
I think there was an initial rush of people who took voicing that disagreement to a bit of an extreme when the internet was new, but that's sort of subsided now - there are full grown adults with college degrees and jobs and mortgages who've been on the internet their whole lives and can't _remember_ when all media was as tightly controlled as Reddit's /r/politics subreddit.
Now the push back is becoming more serious, less "edgy" and more potentially disruptive and even a threat to the people who've made their livings and fortunes censoring debate - it should come as no surprise that there's such a push to get the genie back into the bottle.
> I remember reading newspapers and magazines and watching TV in the 80's and 90's and for the most part, they all seemed to have a unified (left-leaning) perspective on everything.
This was the era of satantic panic[1], D&D being controversial due to devil worship, and when democrats and republicans joined hand in hand to try and outlaw vulgarity.
The 80s was absurdly conservative.
A regular talking point on 90s TV newscasts was about if it is ok for a man to kill another man who (romantically) hits on him. That was an actual topic the country was divided over.
1990s America, also not a bastion of radial left thinking.
If that's the way you remember it (I don't remember it that way, but to each their own) then an unfettered medium like 4chan is still a positive break from a handful of stodgy old ideologues controlling the conversation.
(I even disagree with both the left and the right on some things).
Censorship of music and art was a bipartisan push.
My entire point was that the entire country was more conservative, a point I was demonstrating by showing a time when Democrats and Republicans joining hand in hand to censor music from black musicians. (They also tried to censor violent video games, and the entire internet!)
> Um... you do know that Tipper Gore was and still is an adamant leftist,
I don't mean to argue that you should go on 4chan or whatever, but as someone who's been on the site on and off for 15 years now I don't even see the hateful stuff really, it just slides past my brain. I think you're wrong about the level of humanity that exists on 4chan, but if it's not for you that's totally fine. 4chan runs the gamut, that's what I'm trying to get across, the good comes with the bad. There's a cost associated, there are tradeoffs, but to paint it the way you have is not matched to the reality of the situation. There are incredibly kind, thoughtful and well intentioned people on there, and I think the anonymity and lack of consequence is one of the things that enables that. What's more, I have a high degree of confidence they're genuine, there's no point in chasing clout on an anonymous messageboard.
You misunderstand my point. Kind, considerate, thoughtful and well intentioned people can be found anywhere online. Bringing them up as an example of the unique nature and power of 4chan's community is disingenuous. 4chan is unique in its tolerance for hate speech, but with any other kind of speech, it's no more or less free than elsewhere.
As someone who only frequent one of the tamer niche interest board where there are seldom trolls posting slur/gore/porn, my view may be biased, but I would argue that the anonymity that allowed hate speech also enables people to be more candid in their posts and therefore leading to a sense of community.
As long as I don't put anything personally identifiable in each post, the chances of them being linked together to point back to my real identity is miniscule, so I can share stuff I would normally want to keep private.
I have bonded over deeply personal trauma with anons that I will never knowingly meet again but also know they are out there on the same board as me. I've commiserated over health concerns that I wouldn't share on social media in fear of seeming unprofessional nor with friends to avoid making them worry.
Hell, I made a throwaway just to post this since I don't want people to look at my profile and go "that guy is a 4chan user" since that could be an issue professionally, yet nothing I said here is a hate speech. That's an example of how anonymity allows for more honest speech in ways most sites elsewhere don't offer.
I personally disagree with the parent but you are misrepresenting their argument. The person you are responding to is referring to the thesis of the article which is 'as a community grows and strangers saturate the regular encounters, so declines the ability of that community to exist in a meaningful way'. They are using 4chan as an example of this thesis in action since the community of 4chan has a self-imposed growth limit due to the nature of its culture (most people couldn't handle it).
I beg to differ. There are genuine, profound, even Socratic conversations which freely happen on various threads that essentially can not occur elsewhere on the clearnet. No idea is invalid, no topic taboo, and each thread and each post must stand alone on their own merit. This is all on top of a large number of deep and wide recurring hobby generals that are both beginner friendly and highly technical.
It is more free than any website you can think of off the top of your head.
You're right that 4chan has a high level of tolerance for hatespeech, but that's a secondary, derived characteristic from the anonymity and free speech absolutism. There's a level of humanity enabled by that that you don't see elsewhere.
Another aspect I would note is honesty. Because there is no long game, interactions are much more raw. A lot of social meta game like dogwhistling, virtue signaling, sockpuppeting largely loses its meaning and is jarringly obvious when someone brings it verbatim from other communities. The experience is closer to shooting shit with friends than a council meeting of HN or a talent show of Reddit.
Kind of reminds of Urbit where Yarvin has hinted that some of the political controversy and inscrutable design were on purpose to keep away leftists. That also goes along with Peter Thiel's (who funded Yarvin) efforts since college to build and nurture rightwing-only networks of techies.
Agree with it or not, it does make some sense I guess.
Entryism has been a fairly effective strategy for subverting conservative institutions, and I don't think McCarthy style communist hunting was actually in the long run an effective solution. It just ended up creating martyrs and justified a persecution narrative that bolstered the left-wing cause.
The logical solution for the right is to form institutions with such a "stink" from a leftist point of view, that nobody wants to associate with them for fear of permanently tarnishing their reputation.
> You’re in a train station, you’re not part of it.
Thank you for posting this. This captures something that I had trouble putting into words.
As someone who started using Reddit back in 2006 pre-Digg migration, this is probably one the best explanations of the immense loss I have felt in experiencing Reddit change over the past decade and a half. All the parts I enjoyed were pushed to the periphery, and while you could still find "villages" there, the bulk of the experience was "just passing through". This isn't a "get off my lawn" sentiment, it's about what value you place on the places you inhabit, whether in person or online. Whether I kept returning to Reddit out of habit or because I was still looking for that old experience almost doesn't matter, because it's not there anymore.
As someone who was on reddit for about as long, I miss that. But I wonder if it's really reddit I miss, or the naive web we had back then, that allowed people to get excited? Back when everything was not engineered specifically to grab the most attention, I felt more like we were actually communicating. Nowadays we're just collectively filtering noise it seems.
I miss the long posts that explain a thoughtful, technical, essay on a subject. I vaguely remember from the ~2010s internet reading some very informative posts on bulletin boards and reddit.
Mostly gaming stuff, but there was some great work on math, science, and DIY. Today even the "Reddit gold" posts are garbage by the standards of those days.
Once phones became the default device for browsing and commenting on Reddit, comments began to grow shorter. (Some people might claim they can type on their phone just as comfortably as on a keyboard, but this clearly isn’t the case society-wide.)
The sad thing is that even if you are using an actual keyboard and type well, you look like a weirdo on Reddit today if you type longform text. I have seen someone posting merely a couple of solid paragraphs get reactions like “LOL wall of text bro”.
The average person’s use of a phone today is also one reason why it’s not easy for PhpBB-style communities to make a comeback.
> The sad thing is that even if you are using an actual keyboard and type well, you look like a weirdo on Reddit today if you type longform text.
I still do this on occasion if I think what I have to type is worth reading. But usually when I do, I include a tl;dr to act as a hook/summary to get my main point across.
I remember a lot of similar thoughts and remarks at the time about the Internet ca. 2000, so I feel like maybe people are just getting older. When people dig up old Something Awful posts from 2002 they aren't as funny or engaging as I remember but I was a kid when I first saw them so they isn't surprising.
I remember taking part in an early Reddit gift exchange. People were gifting members in need computer monitors and and pizza. There was the jackdraw facts biologist guy. The website definitely felt smaller back then. It was toxic, but still cozy.
> In July 2014, Eisenkop's Unidan account was banned from Reddit for using alternate (or "sockpuppet") accounts. The accounts were used to upvote his own submissions and downvote submissions made by other users that were posted around the same time and were potentially attracting attention away from his own.
A community that can support a secret Santa and not have it devolve into a shitfit of scamming and backbiting is still a village. Once it’s bigger than that, it starts to fall apart.
In some ways Reddit is like the club. In your 20s you're meeting all these new people and the interaction feels amazing. In your 40s, you're still meeting all these new people, but you are bored of it and just want to go home to bed.
I realize your probably leaning towards "naive web", but I think it might actually be reddit you miss, or at least the club that you identified as reddit. I say this because I felt the same 10 years before that about watching the decline of usenet. Or irc. Or metafilter. Or niche sites that I can't even recall the names of. It's not just "kids these days" ruining a more innocent time, but the feeling of being in a community with a shared ethos that's eroding as the community's values change.
The first time I saw this happen was clear back in 1997 with an IRC system called "Talk City". It was a dot-com startup that grew out of the incredibly vibrant, close-knit chat-room community which developed on Apple's short-lived "eWorld" service, carrying forward most of its people and culture... right up until the company signed a couple of big money-making deals, one with WebTV and the other with some ISP in India, connecting their customers to Talk City's network.
It was amazing to watch, in a kind of natural-disaster way, as hordes of strangers showed up practically overnight - far too quickly to be assimilated - and the whole social fabric dissolved. A community I had spent at least an hour a day on for several years simply disappeared under the flood.
I was in the world record secret Santa and it was the funnest coolest thing ever (they sent me my world record letter even!)
Pre-subreddits, it felt very similar to HN (which they ofc have the same birthplace) and the real gold was in the comments, which made it stand out from all others and made it less about you and more about us.
When subreddits started it was totally game changing and from there on it was great.
The Condé Nast thing was weird but it didn’t really change anything, but slowly it felt like it was trying to always “grow up” but never figured out that it didn’t need to
All this nonsense going public is expected but it’s sad and another victim of late stage thunderdome capitalism.
It hasn't been there for many many years. I loved how open and free it was. Everyone really had a place there and you could read and interact with every idea, viewpoint, etc. Then as it got popular, it got corporatized, politicized, etc. Journalists attacked it to make reddit align with their version of hell. Corporations attacked it to make it more amenable to foreign markets. Political actors attacked it to further their political interests. It became an insufferable propaganda shithole. Movies, music, sports, nfl, etc subs used to be interesting places for discussion. Then it became publicity platforms for movie and music studios, sports teams, etc. News subs used to be interesting places for open discussions. Then journalists got their meat hooks into it and now they are state propaganda. Even political subs used to be diverse places for political discussion. Now they are purely political propaganda probably run by political parties.
But I guess that's the way it is with all social media. Once it gets popular, the corporate, news and state entities want control over it. Now, most major subs are just advertising platforms. Which is ironic since most of the subs ( news, movies, politics, etc ) started as a reaction against advertisements masquerading as news articles, movie reviews, sports commentary, political commentary, etc. Money/power ultimately won and reddit became what it hated.
>Journalists attacked it to make reddit align with their version of hell
I mean yea, you see it that way because you grew up with small reddit. But by the time journalist's were on to it, that small reddit was dead and a much larger city existed with all its dark and danger filled corners. Even by that time reddit was bleeding money fast and was looking for further investor handouts to survive.
Reddit never wanted to be small. This was always set to happen. I think you just have too thick of lenses in your rose colored glasses to see that.
> The central thesis is that what these villages can’t tolerate is a sustained large influx of strangers [...] A slow trickle of strangers is tolerable, a brief large influx is fine; the strangers’ average interaction is eventually stabilizes and biases toward the a stable group of members, and they quickly find shared values and become villagers too.
The tragedy of Reddit is that I believe this thesis is fundamentally wrong. Reddit has shown that villages can tolerate a sustained large influx of strangers if they are given the tools to scale the onboarding process - ensuring people understand those shared values, and ensuring that bad-faith actors are identified and prevented from destroying the fabric of the overall community.
These tools exist - they are the ecosystem of API-based moderator tools! People have been iterating on them for years to serve the needs of the moderators of Reddit's diverse communities. And these are the very tools that Reddit is destroying without providing sufficient replacements, without providing time to adapt, and with a remarkably sardonic and vitriolic corporate communication strategy.
I'm a member of multiple subreddits that are shutting down indefinitely because the thinly-stretched moderation staff is constantly under attack - by everything from karma bot farmers to politically motivated aggressors (including would-be infiltrators applying for moderation positions). The moderators' ability to use third-party apps was the only thing keeping the effective DDoS at bay.
And I truly don't think that those moderators would ever say that the number of strangers was the problem, because the tools did scale, and they were able to provide supportive and positive communities to thousands of those "strangers" who would never have had access to those communities before.
I always saw Reddit as a model of how communities could scale beyond physical constraints - and how some of the learnings of scalable community governance could perhaps be ported to real-world scenarios. Now, people will read posts like OP's and simply think that this was always impossible, and that's just sad.
The article stated that explicitly as its central thesis, yet I came away with a different insight.
> In this context, the defining trait of a village is that it’s group of people where the average interaction over time is with people you’ve seen before.
What I find especially insightful in this description is that it applies to lots of communities at all scales, both online and off, as diverse as a childhood friend group, a technical project team, a corporation, or an alliance of world superpowers. What defines the village is that the members you interact with are mostly the ones you have been interacting with. Change happens, but it is gradual.
What destroys the village is whatever upsets that defining trait. In the article's telling, a sustained influx of strangers is one way to kill it; there are others (for example, a large set of village members exiting, or the village splitting in two would also work.) And as you rightly point out, a way to effectively manage that change can allow the village to survive, be it tools to manage onboarding, or gradual acceptance (ala SO's points-based permissions), or a well-led corporate merger where changes are introduced gradually and with the buy-in of all participants.
I think the thesis is wrong. It’s not that the average interaction is with familiar individuals. I’ve been a mod, lurker and commenter on a lot of subreddits. And on each of those, there are maybe 10 users I recognize and whose comments I see occasionally.
What is the case, is that on short timescales, the average interaction is consistent with what I expect from the community. The anonymity of Reddit has show that the specific face or individual doesn’t matter. It has a ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ option that I’ve never used and really never felt like I needed to use it.
Reddit actually became less familiar to me when I saw users tag other users in a post to share them with other users. The same with user specific subreddits. It’s when Reddit moved from content centric to user centric.
Interesting. I had a superficially similar thought, which is that subreddits look like a path to keeping "villages" while letting the platform grow. That would tend to entail multiple "villages" for the fast-growing interest groups, which is weird. I don't know how well that could work/be worked around.
Many groups and identities (e.g. geographical areas, marginalized groups, and various large fandoms) each have a variety of subreddits (and corresponding Discord servers) with their own unique roles: memes & humor, meta memes & humor that elevate obscure in-references to a type of absurdist canon, serious support groups for various situations, places to gather and coordinate social events and remote gaming sessions, places for non-members of the group to ask questions and be answered seriously, etc.
Each of these "villages" have different subcultures and distinct moderation needs, especially to the extent they are targeted in different ways by bad-faith actors and repost bots. And it's good that they have different needs! No single moderation team should need to maintain all those subcultures with one single set of policies, nor do they have the same on-ramps and levels of traffic. Together they form a web of meta-communities. Web platforms can easily allow overlapping spheres to coexist; the dimensionality of the platform, so to speak, is practically infinite.
But part-and-parcel with this is that the number of potential moderators in any group is spread across those sub-groups. If Reddit wanted to continue to grow, it would make sure the barrier to entry to maintain these communities was low. It is doing quite the opposite at this precise moment.
Yeah I agree with you. The thing that makes a village a village isn't (necessarily) seeing the same people over and over, it's seeing the same types of content over and over (which is something "seeing the same people" tends to do, so I can see how OP got them conflated)
To me, on the internet, I mostly recognize "people [I've] seen before" via the username. Most of the good internet villages I venture to, a username is secondary to me. I care about the content first, which can come from lots of people, and the users/faces/people second, which are mostly just the extremes of my (dis)favor.
I think mod tools are huge. I also think voting on content is big, though. Finding a village that aligns with my value of content is more important than recognizing specific people online.
If I were a VC with investments in Reddit who saw it was going nowhere, and on top of that learned that my other investment OpenAI had been gobbling up all its data entirely free of charge for the purpose of fencing it without any significant legal consequences, I would:
1. Try to cut off any upstart rivals of my better performing bet from playing the same trick by sabotaging easy data extraction
2. Cut my losses and rid myself of future ones by somehow sizing Reddit down a notch, not so much that it dies though - I'm a sentimental guy, bite me
3. Ensure no one finds out I had anything to do with this by throwing someone else under the bus and buying them off if they ever figure it out (lucky for hypothetical VC me, Reddit's CEO seems arrogant, impulsive, and greedy enough that he probably wouldn't even realise having been played before its too late + easily convinced to take the fall for far less than that'd actually be worth)
Wouldn't it be something if I could have the subject of step 3 take care of step 1 and 2 for me, perhaps together in one single master-stroke of a go?
You assume that Reddit forms the core of OpenAI's data mining. While it may be large, I suspect that OpenAI has read alot more of the internet than that.
What would be great is an LLM trained on that pirate library we all use, Z Lib I think, with all the books of the world, not just forum opinions.
To me, the data cat is out of the bag, and no single corp will ever put it back again.
> You assume that Reddit forms the core of OpenAI's data mining
Not at all, it's the only source mentioned simply for the fact that no others bear any relevance to the story.
Frustrating other parties' capability to access as much source material as possible makes sense if you forget about common moral values for a second and reduce everything down to a zero sum game: their loss equals your gain.
For additional evil comedic value, regarding your mention of ZLib: I just recalled it was taken down (for a while anyway) by US authorities not too long ago, and it would be extremely sadfunny if that takedown ever turns out to have coincided (taking into account government/bureaucratic slowness) with OpenAI having finished downloading or processing all of the library's content.
They'd have to hack it, or pay/donate a lot to get all those books, though. Z Lib only allows you to download 10 books a day as a free user. The problem now is that the only way to donate seems to be crypto, or some Chinese gift cards. I'm not sure how much of this is because of US authorities directly vs. how many "high risk processors" were taken down by disconnecting Russia from SWIFT, but either way, it's not convenient to support them anymore. Not that people don't, of course.
About the same amount as the number of wheels on a tricycle ;)
Just to be clear it wasn't meant as an allegation and no proof exists. I consider to resemble something closer to a terribly written fanfic more than anything else, really.
This really resonated with me, and I'm wondering what the practical implications are for the development of a sane social landscape for the modern internet.
We seem to all agree that VC-funded platforms are the wrong bet, and I would take it further and say that that means that no centralized platform can be the answer. You simply can't run something on the scale of Reddit with any other funding model.
I would like to think something like the fediverse could work—instances can in theory function as small villages, they can gate membership so that they can control the rate of new additions. An instance can be small enough in scale that it can be paid for out of pocket by a single admin, maybe with help from the members, which eliminates the perverse incentive for growth. Federation can (in theory) provide links between communities that aren't possible with a traditional bulletin board forum.
I do wonder, though, if the fediverse is going to suffer for straddling the middle ground between village and platform. A lot of people seem to want all the benefits of the village without losing the intensely-connected feeling of a place like Reddit or Twitter. Is such a thing possible, or are they mutually exclusive?
Villages used to be the norm on the internet, when far more communication happened on forums.
The great promise of the fediverse is that you can have both, even at the same time. You can be part of a single small group where you know the people around you and would notice someone new. But you can also have massive instances without any of those connections.
I think social networks and community driven websites/applications simply have a lifecycle. They all eventually crash and burn, only for a newer (note: newer is not the same as better) one to grab the share of users. It's a slightly stretched analogy, but each social network is a bit like a country/state. With a long view of history, it's rare for one to last a long time. History is riddled with failed states or once grand countries that everyone thought would last forever.
I have a burning question about the Fediverse... how does privacy work? Who guarantees it? Because trusting anon server owners is not in my book. At least centralization puts it under the direct scrutiny of US and EU.
Is Reddit a village? I’m part on some of the “smaller” (maybe less large?) communities like the Blood Bowl subreddit, but it’s still mostly just a bunch of strangers talking with each other for a while. It’s frankly similar to this place isn’t it? Chances are you’ll read this post of mine, and then never see another of my posts again.
That’s not really what I’d consider a village, or even a real community. I think a lot of the things a lot of people miss about the “old web” is really just things being smaller. You’d go into an IRC channel and it would be the same people that was there every day. This made it possible to actually create a community, where people knew each other.
Sure it’s fun to be on HN or Reddit or similar and sometimes bump into someone “famous”, but it’s not like it’s really “social” when you’re just talking to a new bunch of people every time you post. That is, if what you post is even read by anyone.
I think this site is somewhere near the boundary, IMO. I don't recognize every commenter, but in most comment sections I'll see posts from someone I recognize. There's also a pretty consistent culture (or, more accurately, two cultures, devs and tech entrepreneurs), though, compared to say a Reddit comment section. It's definitely not an intimate social space like my private Discord servers are, either, though.
Sports reddit is the most village-like, and in my view one of the few topics that actually scale within the reddit framework while maintaining that quality. Each league has its main subreddit, each team has its own sub, and the usual adversarial nature of reddit tribalism is far more subdued and good-natured, as at the end of the day it's all about games.
> Is Reddit a village? [...] it’s still mostly just a bunch of strangers talking with each other for a while
"Online community" and social media are in some way social, to the extent that there is communication, something that defines humanity and that humans enjoy doing.
It just isn't high-value communication in most instances. Much of it is short affirmations and expressions of good will.
Our species survived through social grouping. A real village (or even larger community in meatspace) is an anchor for social trust.
A real village differs significantly from online community in the simple fact that in reality, people are in a group for the survival benefits that the group offers. People will avoid talking nonsense or uttering threats because there are reputational and/or legal consequences that could deprive these people of group benefits. People will nuture their absurd opinions and resentments, but they tend to suppress expressing these because membership in the group is more valuable than their opinions and resentments.
People do unleash their resentments and talk garbage on the Internet. In a real village, talking garbage will have consequences. In most cases, people in a real village understand to be careful in how they express themselves. In the days of the "old Web", people extended their "real village" values in the interactions on the Internet.
In a real village, the way for people to feel confident about their resentments is to try to find a group where they can feel impunity. This is harder to do in a real village than it is on the Internet.
One or two generations later on the Internet, with full penetration by marketing, ranking, and malicious participants (sometimes even at the scale of state-sponsored propaganda), the strong foundation of social trust is gone. All that remains is "enshitification" and Harlow monkeys[1].
Now, in an ironic twist, real communities are shaken by the artifical world of the Internet, and some people aspire to make the Internet be community in a way that it can never be.
The anime subreddit has a couple of million people on it and I still recognize lots of people who are active in the episode discussion threads. Depending on your own engagement, people might start to recognize you too, even if you don't post that much.
But how likely are you to meet up any with those people whom you recognize, if you passed through their town? Do you even know what their town is? For me, the general lack of IRL meetings with other members is one of the clearest things setting Reddit (even its small subreddits) apart from traditional internet forums.
I desperately hope Reddits recent changes kill it. It's nothing personal towards reddit, but I can't think of anything else which will dissuade enshittification of other online places.
Enshittification is caused by greed, so unless you've fixed greed, it's going to continue. Every site that has deliberately made their site shitty probably has some "math with dollar signs" to back it up. We're lucky that HN is pretty much a side-show for YCombinator. If there was even a remote chance that it could make a significant amount of money (compared to YCombinator's actual business), I guarantee you we'll be reading "Announcing HN's Redesign" pinned to the top one day.
It'll continue iff it actually works to satisfy greed. If platform builders and funders see there's a limit to enshittification before a platform breaks, then they'll stop crossing that line out of self interest. I guess there will always be a few just trying to sell the platform to a sucker before it crashes, but you'd at least see the shit diminishing.
I would put a slight caveat on that: it's caused by bad behavior being _perceived_ to be profitable. That doesn't mean it necessarily is. Nor that the bad actor necessarily has the tools (or desire) to evaluate the effectiveness of their behavior in realizing their greed.
A small family-run coffee shop can be profitable. It might pay for your kids' college and a comfortable retirement one day. But everyone (or everyone's investor) wants to be the equivalent of the next Starbucks.
It seems to me that users should _want_ their community platform to be profitable in order to sustain, but not "too profitable" (=greed) or the sense of community vanishes.
If that is true, is it the responsibility of the online citizen to interact/transact on a platform with the "right" degree of profitability (not too small, or it'll close tomorrow, but also not to greedy, or enshittification occurs)?
PS: How profitable exactly is "right" - reminds me of the family game where the winner is the "most average" person - scoring points closest to the arithmetic mean instead of the person with the max. score.
The problem is less "profitability" and more "increasing profitability". The problem is a publicly traded company, or a VC-backed firm trying to target an IPO, doesn't care about how much money a company makes today. They care about their investment continually increasing in value, which demands the company be growing in profits.
Enshittification is a direct consequence of this mindset being applied to companies who reach something resembling market saturation. Once your user growth starts slowing down, you need to show that you'll continuously make more money per user than you did before. And that path can only lead to shit.
Yes, and? What I'm saying is that there's probably a limit to how profitable enshittification can be. Certainly it can't be the basis of a long-term sustainable business, so it's limited to the kind of zero-sum profits of a pump and dump. Even investors get tired of this eventually, when enough of them get stuck holding the bag.
There is of course the option that the "math with dollar signs" is wrong. The "math" is often based on old-world ideas of how to make money, which is basically "screw the user" is no longer valid in the internet age when a new behemoth can arise in months. The supply chains of the past are not the same as the always on internet with is extreme fluidity.
Maybe Ycomb has done some math, possibly a litte more up to date, and the people, culture and cred this site gives them is worth more than selling it?
Your main point remains valid of course, but we don't all suffer evenly - the internet is still a great place for many and a new home will be found or at least the next generation will find one.
I'm afraid Steve Huffman made the correct calculation that Reddit's network effect is large enough that the wound it'll sustain with the API lockout won't be enough to imperil the platform.
On the scale of other platform enshittification (Digg in particular), this one isn't directly user-hostile enough, and the aren't any good enough alternatives.
Enshittification is basically inevitable for (venture)capitalist-funded online platforms. My biggest disappointment is that Reddit went that venture-capitalist (or adjacent, whatever) route, I thought/hoped their "Reddit Gold" approach was good enough to be sustainable.
The strongest theory I've seen for this killing reddit is that moderation quality goes down enough that being on the site is no longer fun. Even if Reddit replaces all the moderators who quit (which, yes, won't be hard), Reddit itself doesn't provide tools with the same power as what mods were using, to say nothing of the new mods' lack of experience and questionable motives and judgment (if you're smart and have good motives, you at least think really hard before going into a position left empty by mass resignation).
But yes, long term it's on We The People to fund our own communities.
>moderation quality goes down enough that being on the site is no longer fun.
I'd say that Reddit (and really the internet as a whole) hit that years ago. Another user said this on a different thread, but Reddit has this deep depression inside it that isn't really noticeable until you leave. Like, you don't ever really see happy people on there anymore, just people with varying levels of misery. I don't think that's really unwanted by Spez and Co, either. If there's something that the internet has taught me, it's that it's easier to retain audiences by keeping them miserable and afraid than it is by keeping them happy.
> but Reddit has this deep depression inside it that isn't really noticeable until you leave. Like, you don't ever really see happy people on there anymore, just people with varying levels of misery
Well put, I've also noticed this. Be it games, movies or sports. Whenever I enjoy something, I just know that the moment I go on Reddit (or Twitter), there will be a shitstorm complaining and crying about mundane details. And without fails those threads gain thousands of upvotes, while the positive threads die with 12 upvotes in new. Outrage seems to be the best way to drive engagement and clicks.
Not sure if this is something that scales with the current number of users, but the moderation quality appeared to be better before some of these powerful tools.
For example, things like automatically banning based on activity in other subs is not necessary a power that improves the site.
I suspect many of the more disappointing echo chamber effects (that steer something like a local subreddit into a political one) are due to over-moderation.
People (for obvious reasons) like to compare Digg to whats going on at Reddit. It seems a lot closer to Facebook
Facebook has always lead the fight to monetize users to the max. If its sudden API changes or shutdowns, or suing 3rd party app developers. Yet they still generate Billions and people are fine using them, instagram, or Whatsapp, even though they fully understand the enshitification the timeline has gone through throughout the years, and how aggressively they monetize their user base
I also see Reddit as extremely similar to Facebook groups, which can also have millions of users, and are moderated for free by volunteers
I think it's a mistake to confuse the health of Meta, the company, with Facebook, the platform. I think as a company they made the right decision in the acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp because they captured some of the platforms that were stealing their important demographics. I think if they hadn't made these acquisitions and were still just Facebook.com, we'd be looking at Facebook the company not as a FAANG giant but as a Yahoo or IBM or similar.
Unlike Reddit, most of Meta's apps are commonly used on mobile. Furthermore, all the apps you listed actually bring long term value in the form of real life social and business relationships. Emotionally and economically Reddit has not nearly as much of an impact.
One of my first online experiences (around 1996 or so) was the chat room that my local (dialup) ISP hosted. There might have been a couple dozen or a hundred people that hung out on that chat room back then, but it was fairly diverse in terms of age ranges and experience...at least as far as tech/net early adopters could have been back then. I think I only met one person IRL from that chat room, but it was, in comparison to today, surprisingly chill. Not only that, but people just as a matter of course used pseudonyms and were careful about privacy. Knowing someone's (temporary) IP address was already a lot.
But as the internet grew forums and news sites and blogs, I bounced around, and through, many. I lost interest in most of them before they got enshittified, but it does, in retrospect, seem that most suffered either of two fates: irrelevance, stagnation, and evaporation, or enshittification to one degree or another. I count among my past lives the past online communities that I participated in. I don't long for those pasts but I do feel a loss that not only are those specific ones gone, but the striking inevitability of them all dying. It seems like a law--a tragic one at that. Anyway, RIP <nostalgic online forum>.
This brings back memory of one of the first BBSs I ever joined. It was a tech support/news/sales channel for a local computer store. It was fairly heavily moderated, but still, it had a small community. At some point, the moderation stopped, and the community flourished. It also, for some insane reason, had an upload area that would cycle files on its own, which because a great source of games.
I only meet one person from it IRL, and that was the moderator that vanished one day. And I only meet him when he sold a fancy modem and told me about the BBS being a great way to test it out.
I eventually moved away, but still dialed in (with long distance, even) and felt like I knew people online, if only via pseudonym. One day it all died. No doubt either the PC it was running on finally died, or someone said "what's this computer in the corner do, anyway?"
There needs to be a way to incentivize long-lived, stable corporations. Maybe going public simply makes that impossible, but the target of consistent profit rather than infinite growth is so much heather. I guess that don't make VC money though huh.
The problem is, theres just no ramifications for pumping a company to its death.
I think corporate involvement is part of the problem, not part of the answer. Corporations have very different, and sometimes very opposed, goals to those of community.
Still need to solve the problem of how to fund these public services. Not really plausible to expect their devs and admins to live like the desert fathers.
A corporation is nothing but a community. I expect what you mean is that when one community operates a service and a different community uses the service, there will be competing interests? That is certainly to be expected. Although, there is a clear solution: The community who uses the service can also run it.
I disagree. A corporation is a machine for economic production. It is not a community, it is a mechanism. Communities can exist within corporations, of course, but the community aspect is secondary at best.
A corporation is merely a legal recognition of a group of people who have decided to work together towards a common goal. That's a community, plain and simple.
There is nothing about a corporation that implies economic production. In fact, many (most?) corporations are negatively productive until the community decides to disband, and some corporations are established with explicit intent to not be economically productive (e.g. non-profits).
> A corporation is merely a legal recognition of a group of people who have decided to work together towards a common goal.
I don't think so. There are tons of corporations that consist of one person, after all.
Corporations are legal entities that are distinct from the people that are involved with them. That's the whole point.
But a lot of this depends, I suppose, on what you mean by "community". People who are part of a corporation are a community by the strict dictionary definition of the term, but they aren't necessarily a community in any meaningful sense. A community works together, collaboratively, to support each other. Typically in a corporation, the people are working to support the corporation rather than each other.
> There are tons of corporations that consist of one person, after all.
That can be true. Certainly communities have to start somewhere and not all efforts by one person will see a community form. While this is a fun point for the sake of pedantry, it doesn't change much. One person running the service and a different person using the service results in the very same competition of interests. It's all just people at the end of the day. Even the legal system itself is just people.
> Typically in a corporation, the people are working to support the corporation rather than each other.
Typically people work to support their own interests. This is true in communities of all shapes and sizes, including communities which have been legally formalized as a corporation. In all cases one's own interests may help another's, but that's ultimately incidental.
No different in this community. When we write comments we are doing it because we derive some kind of individual benefit from it. Most likely the entertainment value in thinking about something and putting it words. If someone else takes something from a comment, that's merely a bonus. It was never really for them.
For internet services this is possible through permanent decentralized storage and web apps building on top of that. Look into 'Arweave' for example, it already functions today, although there's still a lot of work to do to make it mass adoption ready.
Not a corporation in the classic sense but I guess what you actually care about is the product, not the company, correct? Such web apps exist and continue to function even when not maintained anymore, for years and possibly decades. The only thing that's tricky is storage payment, to be truly independent and not reliant on any outside input, I suspect there is no way around users having to pay for it.
Why do they have to be for-profit corporations in the first place? Wikipedia, Internet Archive, and Archive of our Own are nonprofits that are capable of handing a large numbers of users creating and accessing a large volume of content.
> If you want to absolutely destroy a website that is all about building communities and meeting new people, then aim for the site and all communities to always be growing as much as possible.
the paper, "Optimizing human community sizes", abstract:
We examine community longevity as a function of group size in three historical, small scale agricultural samples. Community sizes of 50, 150 and 500 are disproportionately more common than other sizes; they also have greater longevity. These values mirror the natural layerings in hunter-gatherer societies and contemporary personal networks. In addition, a religious ideology seems to play an important role in allowing larger communities to maintain greater cohesion for longer than a strictly secular ideology does. The differences in optimal community size may reflect the demands of different ecologies, economies and social contexts, but, as yet, we have no explanation as to why these numbers seem to function socially so much more effectively than other values.
Human communities DO NOT SCALE, which is counter to the usual tech startup ethos. If you take a human community of 100 people and grow it to 1000 people, it's not the same community anymore.
I sometimes think about this also when people are hostile towards other people who want to limit city/neighbourhood growth via NIMBYism. If a city is somehow so nice that more people want to live there, it's not going to be the same city anymore after you double the population. People who are against building more housing in their neighbourhood have a point; they don't want whatever it is that they find likeable in their neighbourhood to be killed.
This was the remarkable thing about Facebook. It felt like, and encouraged people to act like, it was only you and Dunbar's number of your friends. A 10^9 machine with a 10^2 interface.
That also explains the wounded anger from users whenever the mask slips or the abstraction leaks.
I'd like to add to this; I believe it's more based in the fear of the unknown. People are generally very resistant to change, good or bad, "better the devil you know" and so on.
That's why some people stay in abusive relationships, dysfunctional families and lousy corporations.
Sometimes resisting change in a community, a startup or organization is more a case of very strong risk-aversion than anything else.
Same with products, most people say that their favorite brand of a consumer product is what they're currently using, this is why telco's incentivizes switching carriers, because people stick around...
I forgot where I read about it, but there are some limits to certain human social groups we all share (paraphrasing from what I remember):
---------------------------------------------
Best friends: 2-3
Close Friends: 15-30
Friends / "Friends": 100-200
Acquaintances: 1000-2000
---------------------------------------------
Something along these lines. With the biggest kind of aha moment for me being that the army (notorious for optimizing everything to the highest degree) has organized itself in similarly sized groups:
It absolutely doesn't. A friend of mine was a [player authority] (I forget the term) in the early days of Asheron's Call. As I understand it, that's basically what happened to them, and most of them went from passionate volunteers to just throwing in the towel. He's still bent about it if it comes up in conversation for some reason.
> the defining trait of a village is that it’s group of people where the average interaction over time is with people you’ve seen before.
This finally made it click for me why I stopped playing online multiplayer games when dedicated servers were abandoned in favor of matchmaking. All the villages were gone.
I rarely visit Reddit or any other panopticon (this one however - HN - keeps tricking me into posting)
Anyway, I recently contacted the mods of deGoogle to see if they would like to add to their side bar the ad-free search engine I have been working on all the time for a couple months now
They basically said they didn't trust me (again, no karma) but asked me to post on the board to see feedback
The post quickly drew ire from a user who accused me of disrespecting the community (although he later calmed down once he learned that the mods had "given their blessing" for me to post)
Anyway, even though the post largely received positive feedback and was really upvoted (and user retention from that post has been amazing), the mods ended up dismissing me in a pretty cold way
That's why I fail to feel sympathy for anyone involved in these "villages". As a "stranger", I fail to comprehend their struggle for fairness and virtue. As a side note, HN is starting to feel a bit alienating too. Lately, I find myself not posting for fear of being downvoted - or worse - downvoted and search indexed
Here is the post I am talking about anyway (subreddit is currently on strike)
Thanks for the free accusation. I did try to join the community because I don't want to simply post and leave. For example, I posted on the sister subreddit deMicrosoft and engaged other users on how to best set up my daughter's first linux PC
I suppose you failed to read the bit where the mods specifically asked me to create the post. Either way, the overwhelming majority of the village enjoyed the post
We've banned this account for crossing into personal attack. That's not allowed here. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
How does that work with a app like Discord, which is more like a huge group of villages and not one big village? Will they be able to continually grow by adding more servers without destroying the community? Is that model more sustainable?
Nothing is worse than joining a Discord server and finding out it's enormous. You go to any given channel and the discussions are flying by so fast only people who are regulars can catch all the content but even then it's basically just noise.
Thread support was added to alleviate some of the noise problem but in communities that actually use them there's so many threads it's easy to lose track and everywhere else they're basically just strange ways of isolating yourself from the rest of the people in the community.
I'm not even sure what the point of a giant Discord server is. Like, I use Discord for organizing (online) activities, asking a question and getting it answered by a real expert, hanging out with friends, etc.
None of this scales, it's totally unworkable if you have 100+ people actively chatting, let alone thousands.
They can be useful as funnels into smaller, more intimate servers. During the pandemic, a couple of friends and I would play a fair amount of Among Us, which basically requires a full game of 10 people with at least moderate communication skills to be fun. You'd hop into one of these mega servers, join a voice call to fill in your missing players, and often times, if you weren't a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic, you'd end up being invited to a smaller server to play future games. Once such a server gained critical mass that they no longer needed to resort to randoms for extra players, these private servers would start only growing via mutual acquaintance.
I never would have found the smaller servers, where at this point no one's playing the game we initially met through but are all friends, if not for bigger servers meeting the need of that entrance to the pipeline.
Conversely, I had a YT snowboarding person I followed start a Discord server with a few channels for chat, meetups and equipment swaps. Really cool, lots of good discussion and the community was really welcoming.
I stepped away and came back like a month later.
It had grown so fast, with so many users, there were suddenly like 50-60 channels, it was unreal how hard it was to keep track of anything happening. Even the original three channels were completely overrun with so many discussions and chats, I couldn't keep track.
So I had the experience of joining a small server, only to have it blow up when I came back and I just had to give up and moved on.
> How does that work with a app like Discord, which is more like a huge group of villages and not one big village?
Reddit is/was also arguably a huge group of villages. It still feels that way, if you are only subscribed to sensibly small subreddits and you experience it through the prism of old.reddit and third-party apps like Apollo. Reddit doesn't think that that model is the future, though, and the mainstream Reddit experience has evolved away from that and toward the algorithmic feed model.
I would be wary in assuming that Discord's interface and community model will remain the same as it seeks ways to monetize.
Discord can be multiple things, for some it is just a teamspeak server (village), for others it is facebook groups for under 30s (city).
Both seem to work and people are able to choose. I think it is also important that reddit facilitates a very different model of interaction, a discord server with a thousand users can be extremely active and engaging, while a subreddit with a thousand people tends to be quite "empty".
I think that model is more sustainable, if we do assume that discord will sunset eventually I would guess two possible avenues. First one is feature creep - different communities want different features and eventually discord forms into everything app that new users find confusing. Maybe there is a new simple, cool, and hip competitor that takes off. Second one is rotting of each community from the inside by overwhelming them with information. I've gone through plenty of servers that I've fully engaged with, but that had grown too big. These servers are on permanent mute and I never read any messages because keeping up with the traffic is impossible. The result of this is that instead of keeping discord running in the background I switched to opening it only when I want to game with friends.
The premise is wrong. New York City is hardly a "village" and any given person knows a tiny, tiny fraction of anyone else there - but to the extent it's adhered to a capitalist model (ever decreasingly), it's been extremely successful. That's because strangers trading value for value (i.e. the essence of capitalism) without the use of force, is peaceful and productive. This extends to the entire planet. You're reading this on a computer using at least some components made halfway around the world, sourced from materials acquired all around the world, from people who don't have any idea about the people who make stuff from them or ultimately use them.
It's the system and people able to act peacefully within it - not their personal relationships.
The problem with Reddit is that it's run by a guy who doesn't respect the people who make it possible. He isn't a trader of value for value - he's a parasite.
Sadly, force has certainly been used, but that's ultimately to the detriment of all involved. Voluntary trade for mutual benefit is what grows economies and resources.
I miss the Atomic MPC forums. Facebook effectively killed that village, rather than huge growth; the print magazine it was ostensibly based around died, Facebook groups took off, Reddit killed forums for good, and my 2004-onward online experience disappeared. And now Reddit is doing it's best to kill Reddit, which is amusing but sad, so the remaining villages I'm a part of online (various smaller subreddits where people know each other) are going to die too. I wonder where people will go next.
> "Everyone stays strangers, ... It’s no longer a village, but something like a train station. The default mode of being is passing through. People come and go, and there’s no real sense of belonging."
> "It’s an oppressive, alienating, and disempowering environment."
Strongly disagree. For me, the absence of 'social baggage' in large stranger-to-stranger boards like HN is liberating, while village-style boards are intimidating. I do not want to 'build community', i want to discuss topic.
HN is a lot more like a village. HN users may be strangers, but share a large common denominator, namely people with at least some tech knowledge or background. This enables more intelligent discussions that you don’t find in other online boards.
Reddit seems to be dying for me for completely different reasons. Meme dependency for lack of a better word. Not the images with one liners though there are an annoying amount of those as well, but a standardized repetitiveness of responses to any input that tend to linger toward the top of the thread if sorted by best. This is much more prevalent in threads off r/popular or r/all than smaller subreddits, but as an example, any rape or sexual assault story on r/news or r/politics will always have the Brock Turner SEO peppering within the top five threads, sometime multiple. Any Trump thread will have the long, long list of misdeeds with links and then some one liners that the wording has become standardized. This then extends in to related subreddits where the meme pops up when the triggering subject is talked about.
This kind of thing is what kept me off of Reddit all these years. People would say "you just need to find the right subs", but any of the ones in topics I was interested in were all like that, and I was never interested in using Reddit just to use Reddit. Reddit is what Reddit is, and there is no finding "the right sub" if that metaculture is what you don't like about it.
I don't disagree. There's a few subs that are (were) distinctly different, like /r/askhistorians, but most mods don't put in the effort to cultivate a distinct community so it trends towards the metaculture. The few subs that do (did) have their own distinct culture were often pretty great though.
Reddit has been a place for clever people to talk, but as it and its reputation grew, it started to attract not-so-clever people too. Cleverer people don't respond as well to advertising, so if you want to make more money from your users, you want more of the less intelligent ones, and fewer of the more intelligent ones.
The standardised comments you mention are a way for the less intelligent to participate, and the upvotes they attract reflect the numbers of these users. The ones you've mentioned sound like a case of aping one's betters; the ones I see most often are the vacuous 'Putin must be defenestrated' comments that litter the Ukraine war daily threads, and are the worst kind of performative virtue signalling.
Reddit as a loss-making assembly of communities is dying; Reddit as a profitable set of curated feeds, a sort of TikTok that's not just for short video, is rising.
I disagree that intelligent people don't buy things or respond to advertising. I would compromise and say that they respond to different kinds of advertising.
It is very insighful of you to point out that Reddit will be more profitable as a set of curated feeds.
Yes, the people, not disembodied anonymous avatars.
It is too easy to ostracize members of a group in online forums, too easy to silence dissent.
My physical neighborhood has a diversity of lifestyles, backgrounds and opinions that just does not exist in a place where people are quick to act on their shallow judgments.
A middle eastern immigrant family, an elderly black couple, a flag and sign maximizing Trump supporter, a Black poet and his African Studies professor wife, a Facebook PR team lead, a retired HP programmer.
To me, this a community. People living together in peace with very different opinions and lifestyles. We’ve all got each other’s backs.
A couple of months ago I marched over to the Trump sign household and had a three hour long conversation with the wife… who surprisingly happened to be a bit of an old hippie and pot head and said she didn’t realize how upsetting some of her husband’s flags were to people. Since then it’s just been an American flag with a “Jesus Loves You” flag beneath. No more crossed AR-15s with skulls!
I'm not sure how that implies that the term "online community" is an oxymoron. As I'm typing this comment I'm watching some friends in a Discord server engaging in a passionate discussion with varying viewpoints on an issue close to them. I'd consider most of them good friends despite the fact that I haven't met half of them in real life. What makes that not a community?
I said “feels like” not “is”. And you’ve also qualified your statement by saying you know half of these people in real life meaning it isn’t purely an online community.
So how do you know these people? And how do those people know the people you don’t know? How did everyone meet? What’s the organizing factor around this particular Discord? Is it purely topical and open to the internet at large or is it an extension of a friend group that met offline?
The problem of online communities is not solved. We have a lot of data points of failure but I am not sure we have a good overview of why everything failed.
There should be like a wikipedia table like this one [1] but where explanatory factors (funding model, corporate structure, moderation tools, algorithmic timelines, discovery modes, anonymity, upvoting/downvoting mechanisms etc etc) would be tabulated against failure modes (toxicity, inanity, obsolescence etc etc)
You then run an ML model and find the pattern. The problem is that our sample is totally imbalanced. We don't know what good looks like.
The solution might be to take life expectancy before enshitification into account.
> Many people go online to find a sense of belonging and community, and in the right circumstances, they can find it while they may struggle to do so offline.
I understand it’s true, but it doesn’t apply to me. I find it sad that people struggle to get a sense of belonging offline and have to resort to ersatz communities like Reddit, which commodify the users’ identities and are generally low trust.
Reading that line puts a flicker in my mind, a thought that I might be an “enshittification accelerationist” when it comes to Reddit (Facebook too). Let it kill itself, because it’s not that good anyway.
I was a fairly avid user of Reddit as a late teen / early 20’s person, when I was forming my identity. But now I’m done doing that, and I find Reddit overall to be of low value, especially now that LLMs have scraped most of the good stuff.
The sad thing is, people won't do the one thing that could probably create the community or village they crave. They won't pay a fee to belong. If the business model was a small profit - not growth - paid communities could offer a lot. One that comes to mind is the old BB The Well. It definitely had community and longevity.
People want free, so they flock to the new free thing that replaces the old free thing that got bad because it either had no business model and collapsed, or the business model drives it to sell user data and eke out every dollar it can for its investors. Inevitably, the free things go bad. Sometimes, people tolerate it for a very long time, but it seems eventually they all implode.
I really dislike "enshittification" suddenly appearing in essays everywhere. Why don't we use established words to describe this concept that aren't going to date the piece and make it embarrassing to read in a few years?
Cory Doctorow[1] came up with a catchy way of talking about a ubiquitous phenomenon that didn't have a word to describe it before, I'm not too surprised it rapidly became successful.
And I hope you're right and it will be embarassing to read in the future, because it would mean this trend of user-hostile behavior has stopped, but I'm not holding my breath.
Enshitification: The process of making something shit
To shit on: To cover in feaces from above
Shit: The refuse, rubbish, that which comes out the other end. As opposed to mana or fodder.
In conclusion, new words are great. A word for new words is neologism, it is a very nice word. I think enshitification really hits the mark here - something good is made bad. And it is visceral, you can feel the process slipping through your fingers as you try and hold on to the past.
I'm not a big fan of the word per se but it has been coined to describe the _exact_ concept that's happening here. What would be an established word for it? Deteriorating? Diluted? I'm not an English native, but the internet has always been a bit of a vulgar place and all that so enshittification seems about right.
"Degradation" or "crippling" are some that come to mind. My issue is less that it's vulgar and more that I think it's going to read in the near future the way people calling everything they liked "teh secks" years ago online reads now.
I think it's more like "grok"[0], where it's a weird little in-group signal that makes some small portion of people who read it cringe inwardly, but never becomes outdated because it never had a date in the first place.
[0] Which is functionally identical to "understand" whenever it's used, except 99% of the population has no goddamn idea what it means and 1% of the population can read the subtext that the person using who said it is a nerd
Some of the most lasting culture is laden with references to contemporary culture and events. This goes for Shakespeare and it goes for Dante Alighieri.
We're all a product of our time and circumstance. Trying to wash that away in order to write something timeless means we just write something bland instead.
Surely you recognize some middle ground between trying to remove oneself from time and circumstance altogether and glomming onto every meme and short-lived trend.
Fair enough. I've never come across that saying and spend a considerable amount of time online, but I get what you mean.
Well, seeing the path many of the big social media players chose, I could imagine that the term enshittification will be around for a little longer, unfortunately.
Having a distinct word for this process, hideous as it may be, having a distinct word is useful in that it lets us be specific about what we're talking about, otherwise one might mistake it for other forms of decline.
"Making it shit" doesn't really seem that much clearer. "Enclosure" might more specifically capture the sense of formerly "common" or free elements being closed off and set up as stations to collect rents.
> The best thing that could happen to Reddit, in terms of the website not being shit from a community perspective, is that it stops growing, maybe even shrinks a bit. This will let communities stabilize and become more like villages again, and the site will be better for it.
This is what happened to Tumblr. After the large exodus, the community was a lot smaller, the site got purchased by another company (Automattic, the guys behind Wordpress). They did revert the rule changes that started the whole mass-migration, and now it's again a village with a coherent and shared culture. Smaller than before, but somehow cozier.
We're told that the man who has to say out loud he is king isn't truly king, and more and more I feel like if you have to keep saying "the community" in some setting, then there isn't one.
Huh, that's weird, when I used to use reddit often, I didn't care at all which users are posting the content.
Its a part of why I liked it, if the content is good, it doesn't matter if you have zero followers, or a superhero, you just post it into the right subreddit.
I needed subreddit-specfic user descriptions to know that a user is the developer or whatever, the person posting the content was never important.
Same thing with HN, there are always exceptions, but the user posting the comment/link doesn't have to be important on such platforms, reddit isn't Twitter.
This opinion may be unpopular, "gatekeeping" is good, at least to a certain degree. It essentially forces people to integrate. Now this can, of course, be really toxic, but on the other hand, it can help to preserve quality (and culture).
Most "communities" nowadays aren't gate kept, and they actively try to tear down gates and general entry barriers, maybe it should become more acceptable again to put barriers up for self-preservation.
> This is one of the great things about the Internet. It’s so large that no matter how weird and unconventional you are, there’s always more poeple just like you. ... The central thesis is that what these villages can’t tolerate is a sustained large influx of strangers. A stranger in this context is a nothing more or less than an unfamiliar face.
How can I meet my mirror image freak if he's in another village?
> You’re in a train station, you’re not part of it.
This makes a lot of sense. Then again, people flock to the largest communities because that where they are most likely to get quick answers or just find a stream of novelty. Being in a small forum feels like "missing out". I think the fediverse can solve it, if it allows for aggregated communities.
villages scale up to cities successfully, however. Some media like reddit do not grow beyond the village culture. The villagers are imposing their politics on every subreddit, even if it is about obscure crafts. Maybe there is something wrong with the medium, or it is too simplistic.
The poke feature is still there, just hidden away. If you do find it, using it will send a poke notification to someone bringing them to the page where they can then poke others.
I can't claim to remember this personally, but I've heard that Usenet, in the pre-Web days, had a period every September when a big rush of new college students joined up, and had to be taught the rules.
That was before it turned into a cesspit, I guess.
Not only USENET, but the internet in general. It's where Eternal September comes from (as in, you're describing the pre-cursor). When AOL came along, that September influx never ended...
For better or worse, the net was overrun. Given the size of things back then, it actually seems a decent example of the article topic.
VC angle and usual shortsightedness that comes with boundless profit motive one correct angle in there.
OTOH I don’t think the train station analogy holds as eg funnily enough NYC subway stations to me usually show everything that can be great about “big city scaled up village culture where strangers meet strangers”.
I’m not sure if still the case but I do miss NYC just for this sense of belonging, everyone being in conversation with everyone and general readiness to help out (“I <3 NY” isn’t just marketing). To me a clear testament that this can work IRL and it probably works online as well (and did, for a long time, on Reddit actually).
Although not “permaculture” per se these “free open / public spaces” remind me a lot of it (again, even / especially NYC): No over-bearing central organizing force (VC/capitalist, what have you) will be able to “let go” enough in order to “let it grow” from common experience so far.
Fediverse etc hence to me the only potential way out at this point.
A corporation's obligation is to generate shareholder value. Not user value, but value for the owners. This can be done a variety of ways but the two big ones are: generating profits and distributing those as dividends or raising the stock value. Technically the former doesn't require growth, but the later definitly does. VC funded companies are basically founded with the promise that the value of the stock will rise and that the VC can cash out its ownership eventually, either through a sale or an IPO.
Also, growth doesn't necessarily mean size, but it does imply long term increase in value for owners. If I buy stock in a company, I want to get richer for owning that stock and that means either the dividends need to be high enough to recoup my investment or the stock needs to rise in value, making me richer when I sell it (starting the cycle again). Both of those outcomes sort of imply some sort of growth over time. If I expect that time to be short, as one might with an internet company, I'd like that timeline accelerated so I get as much value as I can in as short a time as possible. That's what leads to moves like this.
It's true that as a small and intimate community grows, it will deteriorate.
Once upon a time there was this optimistic idea that as we add voices to the internet it becomes exponentially better, like a super brain developing.
This has become true in some parts (Wikipedia, open source software, stackoverflow, the like) but it doesn't seem to apply to social networking. On social networks, the larger it gets, the worse it becomes. The large size making it an attractive target for scammers, divisive posts, trolling, dunking, pile-ons, influencer tactics. It ends with the worst of us winning, the unreasonable ones.
The size of the social network is a factor, its algorithms (what is amplified), but also the underlying dysfunctional political system. I've come to the conclusion that a large scale social network is near impossible to keep healthy, stable, useful. Or this slowly becoming clear at this point in time.
My advise would be to not obsessively search for the next new thing, instead to pause and critically evaluate what you're getting out of it anyway. Make your goal as narrow and tangible as possible.
As an example, say you have a particular professional/hobby interest. You follow experts on social networks. Instead you could just subscribe to the endless amount of newsletters that come weekly. Find the good one. Read it once per week and you're up to speed. No need to spend hours per day listening to noise. I cannot recommend this enough, it's so calming.
The perhaps more controversial tip is about people "finding community". I respect and understand that in particular situations, people can find like-minded individuals that they would otherwise not find in the real world.
Fine, but I'd also argue that this isn't true for many people, and "finding community" strongly aligns with being chronically online. If so, now would be a good moment to ask hard questions about this "community". Do you even know whom they are? Have you ever met any of them? Would they help you if something happens to you? Have they ever shown an active interest in you? Has the community in any shape or form tangibly improved your life? Do they like you unconditionally or drop you like a stone when you say the wrong thing?
Perhaps your community is just a bunch of randos that do not care if you live or die, that happen to have the same suspiciously precise opinion, and you're just there to see it validated, for hours on end, day by day, without this making any difference whatsoever to anything at all.
My point being, optimize your social network usage. Go to direct sources, exit communities where there is no real personal stake, then walk the dog in the nearby forest. Reclaim your real life.
And yes, I'm hypocritical for posting here. I'm just as flawed in wasting time online. But I genuinely believe I should just exit 90% of it for the simple reason that it offers no tangible value, and quite a lot of negative value (lost quality time).
What comes after Twitter and Reddit? How about fucking nothing?
The thing is, sometimes online community is real. And we want it back. I have travelled the world, stayed for free, got jobs, paid for others medical needs and had the most interesting times one can have. Free exchange of information with compatible social groups is a big deal.
Finally, all you HN people are coming around to my critique of capitalism and venture capital. It leads to this almost by design, and much more… also leads to the polarization of our society: https://rational.app
I think the model demonstrate how the ’enshittification’ process is an inevitability with any social media that is run on a venture capital model.
Yes, it is called “extracting rents” in economics, and it is why, say, Uber drivers pay 50% of their salary to a company with 1 worker per 1 million people. It’s the shareholders. You see, to build Uber requires a few million dollars, but the “dream” is sold to entrepreneurs that they can become billionaires. VCs discover the startup and “reduce friction” with money-losing economics until it goes IPO. Then the whole thing is dumped on the public, and everyone who bought at X dollars a share wants the price to go up, and that means extracting rents from all the sides of the market.
There is a far better model of funding projects without this failure mode of shareholders, namely utility tokens, where the community owns the network. I know, I know… “web3 sux” and all that. Well, it doesn’t have to be Web3. Check this: https://qbix.com/Twitternomics.pdf
If you’re interested in joining us in building an open source alternative to all this venture-funded stuff, email me (details in bio).
I deliberate refrain from using facts in most of what I say. They make people stop thinking and questioning. I want you to engage with the idea and find out if it's right on your own.
The main argument is that (sub)cultures have to do at least some gatekeeping to stand a chance of not dissolving into the mainstream, and being replaced by "$thing lite" that's more amenable to the average passer-by.
People seem to be under the impression that Reddit is a good place, unless the new API changes take place. I'd like to take a stance... contra to that?
- Reddit is a collection of echo chambers where users pile on and moderators ban those who disagree even on fair points.
- Reddit is a politically biased organization that banned the subreddit associated with former president and current candidate Donald Trump.
- Reddit uses shady tactics to hide the fact that they are banning a subreddit that has content they find disagreeable such as clearing out the moderation team and replacing them with a hostile mod that bans the normal users of the sub.
- Despite all this censorship there remains tons of creepy behavior hosted on Reddit such as adults hanging out on /r/teenagers pretending to be teenagers and trying to lure teens into sharing nudes and such.
The difference between a well run subreddit in a niche topic or with a smaller community vs. a huge default sub can be huge. Both can have their problems, and moderation is always an issue with online communities; but I think people are less insistent that Reddit is a "good" place and moreso that as it currently exists, warts and all, Reddit is useful and provides an enormous amount of utility to the internet, for better or worse. For some people using Reddit is "going on the internet" and they'll go to very few other websites --- the two are linked.
The recent changes to Reddit, to a certain extent, highlight a trend in the internet where the things that people find extremely useful end up transitioning in a way that seems actively user hostile.
I just mention it here because it's probably something that doesn't occur to most people, and maybe it should be something we think about more. I think 4chan has a very interesting property in that the gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth (depending on the board) post being full of slurs. Outside of that it's egalitarian and openly accessible to a greater degree than anywhere else on the internet, there's value to that that people miss.