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JonCole

"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

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They decided to use his website precisely because he allowed that kind of discussion, and that's a conscious decision, as is continuing to allow it. You continually bring up the creation of that one new board as if only actively inserting yourself shapes the culture of a site, but staying away shapes it just as much.

 

allows for a lot of creativity that would have been otherwise shutdown on more heavily moderated sites

 

What kind of creative work are you talking about here, exactly, that's not possible inside places with basic codes of conduct? Also, why does your credo that everything would happen regardless not apply here? Why the need for a big unified platform, suddenly? What about the creative work we are missing out on because marginalized folk (or just plain sensitive people) have been driven away by a culture of needing to tough it out?

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I don't really agree with Leigh there. People exist, you don't make them, at best you can help them congregate, which they would have likely done with or without your intervention. That's the reason Moot made /mlp/, because those people existed and will continue to exist, so the best he could do was use a lightening rod to draw them away from other areas. Moot didn't give birth to these people, they just decided to use his website.

 

Keep in mind he made 4chan when he was a teenager, I don't think you could hold him accountable for not magically knowing what to do to keep bad people from his site. He didn't make /b/ and say, "HEY ASSHOLES, COME OVER HERE, FREE PIZZA".

You ban them and encourage positivity and positive people to show up. This isn't rocket science.

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I just don't see the issue with generalizing a trash thing, and don't see the benefit in defending it.

 

I admit, it also makes me a little uncomfortable to paint all of 4chan with the brush of /b/. I spent about almost years on there, mostly /tg/ and /x/, starting in mid-college and ending after my first year of grad school. It's a fucked-up place with a lot of ad-hoc rules that only work because of a culture of irreverence and fear is so strongly in place, but I also saw a lot of good in the people there, most of whom hated /b/, with its raids and doxxing, and wished it didn't define how the world saw the rest of 4chan. Not that they did anything about it besides pretend /b/ didn't exist and that doesn't excuse any of the awful shit that's come out of it, of which there's a lot, but acting like 4chan (and subsequently 8chan) is anything besides a symptom of the problem is extremely silly.

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 acting like 4chan (and subsequently 8chan) is anything besides a symptom of the problem is extremely silly.

I think it's alot more complex than that. A safe, large and public haven for misbehaviour is more than a symptom. The fact that similar issues pop up in other places points at a common problem, but I do not believe that this common problem is unrelated to 4chan's existence as a figurehead.

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Since the very first time I heard of 4chan, it was in connection with the formation of hate mobs. And, yes, we can absolutely say that it has its own culture. Once I banned a 4chan moderator over at the Telltale forums who was oh so surprised that terrible insults could ever get him banned. Whatever free speech entails, it stops when people gather to coordinate harrassment attacks. That's what happened when gamergate started, naturally, only this time some mods actually got scared. It is not unreasonable of Kerzner to assume that gamergaters were 'surprised' by that censorship because of what they were used to on that forum.

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Where did I say that it was anything more than a symptom?

I know that there are multiple boards there, but they are all shitty and have an extremely shitty culture surrounding every part of the site.

I don't get the need to defend moot when he's profiting off of this shit.

Fuck it.

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I think it's alot more complex than that. A safe, large and public haven for misbehaviour is more than a symptom. The fact that similar issues pop up in other places points at a common problem, but I do not believe that this common problem is unrelated to 4chan's existence as a figurehead.

 

That's diving pretty deep, I feel, and I don't know that either of us can substantiate our arguments there. Is 4chan's influence on internet culture so strong that its very existence shapes user behavior on other sites? Possibly, but at that point the area of effect is so massive that I have trouble laying it in its entirety at Poole's doorstep. He hasn't been proactive at all, for which he is hugely at fault, but who could have foreseen their own website being so culturally significant (and culturally toxic) that it basically becomes a cornerstone of the culture itself?

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He hasn't been proactive at all, for which he is hugely at fault, but who could have foreseen their own website being so culturally significant (and culturally toxic) that it basically becomes a cornerstone of the culture itself?

 

Of course, but it's not like he created the site, then left it alone for ten years and came back to discover it had become a popular cesspit. At some point, he starts becoming responsible for not doing anything about the cesspit.

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With any lightly-censored chat website, you're going to get a lot of shit, but it also allows for a lot of creativity that would have been otherwise shutdown on more heavily moderated sites. 

 

Like Something Awful?

 

I mean, if your argument is that moderation stifles creativity, then the Something Awful forums can't have had the astonishing and long-lasting reach that they clearly had, from early memes like All Your Base to more recent work like the Yogscast and Let's Play explosion.

 

I mean, if you want to give 4chan some credit then we can say that its format as an imageboard encouraged propagation of images, so it was an excellent environment for fostering memetic mutation, but I don't buy the lack of moderation as being responsible for the creativity of the community. It's well known that creativity thrives in environments without judgement or conflict, and the 4chan community has no tools to defend itself against subversion, so they developed toxicity as a way to try and out-troll the trolls. In that environment, a lot of potential creativity would have been stepped on just for the joy of upsetting people.

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That's diving pretty deep, I feel, and I don't know that either of us can substantiate our arguments there. Is 4chan's influence on internet culture so strong that its very existence shapes user behavior on other sites? Possibly, but at that point the area of effect is so massive that I have trouble laying it in its entirety at Poole's doorstep. He hasn't been proactive at all, for which he is hugely at fault, but who could have foreseen their own website being so culturally significant (and culturally toxic) that it basically becomes a cornerstone of the culture itself?

Of course a lot of this is speculative, but my point is more that it's not silly to think that way any more than the opposite in my opinion. The way for example in which GG operates is something that's very much an exponent of chan culture and tactics. Sock puppetry is an inherent consequence of anonymous posting and/or lax admins and easy account creation.

 

One of the reasons I only frequent these forums and SA are the active removal of toxic elements and high barrier to entry in the case of SA.

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Of course a lot of this is speculative, but my point is more that it's not silly to think that way any more than the opposite in my opinion. The way for example in which GG operates is something that's very much an exponent of chan culture and tactics. Sock puppetry is an inherent consequence of anonymous posting and/or lax admins and easy account creation.

 

That's fair. I really don't have an interesting in defending 4chan as it is now. It's clearly the foundation for a pretty terrible part of the internet, and there's other sites doing what good it does just as well. I'm just uncomfortable saying fuck the site and all the people on it, just because it enables incredibly toxic behavior among a certain subset of users. That's a brush that would have included me four years ago, and I didn't believe in 4chan at all, but it was a place where I could go to talk about board games with smart and passionate people. A less self-aware Gormongous might still be there, unhappy about the ever-increasing levels of hostility within 4chan as a whole but content to ignore it.

 

Of course, but it's not like he created the site, then left it alone for ten years and came back to discover it had become a popular cesspit. At some point, he starts becoming responsible for not doing anything about the cesspit.

 

Yeah, and in that respect I agree completely. Poole definitely tried to let the problem solve itself, and looking at some of the talks he's given in the past, he thought it had. That's a big mistake on his part and I'm totally willing to see him catch heat for it. I just don't know what to think about the implicit argument that his mistake wasn't failing to moderate 4chan when its lawlessness started to become a cultural problem, but bringing 4chan into being in the first place.

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To be clear, my complaint is that he's done so little to fix the place, rather than start it in the first place. The consequences were obviously unpredictable, but a decade of virtual inaction is way beyond the pale. You don't let a sewage tank in your back yard continuously overflow just because the garbage is only going to your neighbours. Fix it or nuke it.

 

e: I also don't think you enjoying your time there is a particularly redeeming feature; there's tons of great boardgame communities out there in my experience. That you happened to end up at 4chan smacks more of a coincidence than an inherent virtue of the place.

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I also don't think you enjoying your time there is a particularly redeeming feature; there's tons of great boardgame communities out there in my experience. That you happened to end up at 4chan smacks more of a coincidence than an inherent virtue of the place.

 

I don't know, there weren't all that many great board game communities online in 2007. Eight years ago, there was barely an awareness of board games as a thing people do at all.

 

Regardless, my point is that there were (and maybe still are, I don't know) non-toxic communities in 4chan, so generalizing the entire site as a "trash thing" that has done and made absolutely nothing worth saying in its defense is an overreaction, albeit understandable. I am deeply suspicious of people who see the whole of 4chan and everyone who's ever contributed to it as an unmitigated evil. I've never seen that attitude towards Reddit, which has a similar dynamic between its different boards and members, even though it lacks the anonymity.

 

I don't know. I'm regretting speaking up, because it sounds like I'm defending 4chan, when really I'm just objecting to any site being condemned on the basis of being (or appearing to be) "a horrible website that allows awful people to get together and post awful things." That's a fuckin' broad brush that could paint just about any site. Fuck RPS, assholes say gross things in the comments!

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Yeah, and in that respect I agree completely. Poole definitely tried to let the problem solve itself, and looking at some of the talks he gave, he thought it had. That's a big mistake on his part and I'm totally willing to see him catch heat for it. I just don't know what to think about the implicit argument that his mistake wasn't failing to moderate 4chan when its lawlessness started to become a cultural problem, but bringing 4chan into being in the first place.

 

I have never noticed that argument, here or in any other discussion of 4chan, but I suppose being implicit can do that.

 

This has put me to wondering though, once Poole realized that his site had become a cesspit, what is he supposed to do about it? He can't shut it down or someone else will just restart it to recapture most of the community, so if he doesn't have the time and inclination to handle moderation himself, is he morally obligated to hand the site off to someone he trusts to moderate it?

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I think its important to remember that m00t believed in anonymity the way Hotwheels believes in free speech: its a good unto its self and the bad things are the cost of doing business. It's my understanding that the verboten nature of doxxing (to 4chan) is not the safety issue so much as it is antithetical to capital A Anonymity. It's also brought up in Jay Allen's chan culture article; part of the reason 4/8channers go after individuals, and women in particular, online is that they are identifiable as individuals, and individuals can't be anonymous and, as such, cannot be tolerated. 

 

https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online

 

The Q&A is pretty prescient. Ironically, (this video was made in 2010), the TED audience claps when he talks about the doxxing and arrest of the cat abuser made possible by the same MS Paint conspiracy methods made famous by gg. 

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As someone who used to lurk and infrequently post on 4chan, the way that the community moderates itself is remarkably cultish: it values uniformity above all else, even if the template to aspire to is reprehensible; and you don't know how fucked up your behaviour is is until you leave.

 

 

 

(for anyone who's curious, I used to frequent /co/ and /v/ semi-regularly and eventually worked down to just checking into /vp/ and the porn boards now and then before leaving for good around the time this whole thing started)

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I got the same impression when I was lurking in /d2g/ in 2012 during The International.

Everyone told same jokes the same way, expressed themselves the same way, ridiculed the same way. Anyone not adhering to the unspoken style guide was mocked and ignored. It was ironically performative.

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There is a reason I keep fucking pointing to A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy because the stifling of individuality on 4chan is a direct consequence of the way the community is designed. To the 4chan social software, there is no difference between someone attempting to influence the group and someone trying to subvert the group: everyone is anonymous, every post is an individual. Therefore, influencing the group is identical to sabotage.

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As an ex user I find it hard to defend the site. I think that the mentality that made /b/ what it was, wasn't contained in a vacuum and that other boards displayed a similar patterns to a lesser extent.

I'd argue that the hive mind confines more discussions than it enriches.

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I've been browsing 4chan since 2004. In high school I was really into it, and then I grew out of it and instead transitioned into being a casual lurker.

I keep coming back to it because as a community I find it very fascinating to watch. The strange hive mind that's present, the clear patterns and social norms that is engrained in everyone, and the gradual mutation of memes. It's a strange strange place.

To adress the point made above. Yes, I agree that it's hostile community is very stifling to creativity. But what I've observed is that it leads to people trying to circumvent the rigid social structures which can lead to some frankly rather brilliant subversive humor. I hear people describing it as a site with a very low signal to noise ratio, but I kinda disagree. I don't think it's noise, it's too homogenous for that. It's more like a stream, with the occasional ripple and the very rare massive splash.

And I disagree that lack of moderation is the driving force behind its creative output. I think it's the low amount of effort required to post there. Not to be confused with low barrier of entry, quite the contrary since as was pointed out you will be laughed out if you don't stick to the script, or as they say "lurk more". Rather, it's the fact that you don't need to register an account, don't need to worry about any kind of reputation or follow up, and unless you start a new thread you don't even need to post an image. It's very easy to just fire and forget.

Now that said, I'm not trying to whitewash the site. It has its few gems, but overall it's well deserving of its reputation. A lot more horrible things have come out of it than good. And its community is the most toxic and elitist I can imagine.

The argument that these people would exist and be horrible elsewhere if they were banned or the site was closed doesn't really hold water in my opinion. 4chan has in many cases functioned as a breeding ground for horrible internet culture. A perfect example is /pol/ which was essentially a containment board in the same vein as /mlp/, but it ended up magnifying the problem instead. Just all the absolute worst bigots of 4chan were allowed to sit there and stew and bounce off each other until it grew to the point where it's started to spill into every other board. /pol/'s influence on /v/ and /co/ I feel has been instrumental in the genesis of GamerGate. In particular its irrational fear/hate of feminism and social justice.

I find the place deeply fascinating, but I don't think we'd be worse off without it. Still, I think the damage has been done already. If it were to be closed now the lurkers like me would just scatter off to forums like neogaf or other relevant communities, while the ugly core would most likely migrate to 8chan and become even more concentrated in their vileness.

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