The reply indicator.
For people who don't go to 4chan, you can read it on http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-here-s-your-you. Basically, if someone else replied to your post, the post pointer will show a (You) word, showing that the poster replied to a post that you wrote.
Moreover, the post number of posts that replied/quoted you will be attached to your own posts. Much-replied post will have a lot of link to the posts that replied them, and very visible when you skip through the thread.
This one simple feature has changed 4chan. Before, posts are similar and anonymous since they don't have visual distinction between each other. You have to actually read their content to know what's inside. The reply indicator make controversial posts very visible and "famous" in the thread.
Much like Reddit's voting system and Facebook likes or Twitter's retweets/favorites, 4chan now has its own post rating system. The difference is that Facebook likes and Reddit's vote system rewards popular posts that people agree with and liked. 4chan's "rating system" rewards controversial posts that people rebuke or laugh at.
The presence of this reply indicator make people try to post controversial contents, and to be controversial by 4chan standards, your post have to be very, very controversial.
There isn't any kind of long-term karma game like on other sites. 4chan is still content-heavy and shit posts are still looked down upon by the larger community. It may not seem that way, but the stupidest people are often the loudest.
Before, that was add-on/userscript feature. Since moot adopted them into 4chan's codebase, everyone has it.
>only trolls and candyasses pay attention to the number of replies on your post
Exactly. This feature encourages and rewards trolls and people who fish for replies.
>There isn't any kind of long-term karma game like on other sites. 4chan is still content-heavy and shit posts are still looked down upon by the larger community.
The dynamic of the discussion changes though. Even a slight nod matters in a long run considering that 4chan's culture evolves in a very rapid pace, thanks to its ephemerality and anonymity.
>
Come on.
Just recently it was shown that their automatic news feeds promoted fake news articles.
For a more detailed explanation: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Things that you have never thought would appear on a bonafide research paper for 800$.
EDIT: 4Chan thread regarding this paper, this is worth the read on it's own. http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/92612923/a-longitudinal-m...
I've tried explaining to a few people that it's 4chan and you can't take it seriously, but they're convinced that these posts are real.
The higher ideal: the philosophical context of freedom through anonymity resulting in great creativity is completely drowned out by the petty stuff.
There's a reason it creates a major portion of culture,memes, and ideas on the internet. It's one of the few places unimpenged by materialism or status or th ability of your boss to find your account. This means every one is simply judged by what ideas they create and I think thats a beautiful thing.
And it drives higher quality content because of it. Most people do not realize that a lot of the popular memes and internet jokes shared on more mainstream platforms originally came from the "chan" culture.
To your point though the high quality content is often difficult to find in the cesspool of low-quality spam on these boards.
[0]: https://archive.org/download/archive-moe-database-201506
If you are a researcher looking for a 4chan dataset for supervised learning, be aware that labeling the images is not a task for the faint of heart.
When you browse an image board, you will have an implicit image filter: you will probably only open threads that interest you and that have been alive for a while. That does not hold for an image dump of all threads.
For example, Zimbabwe is marked as very active and very hateful. But it's probably just people with a VPN: doing that to get a "controversial" or "funny" country flag is a thing.
They included their funding bodies because it is required by their funding agreement.
The incentives for giving credit to everyone who participated even a bit are quite strong: in most academic disciplines you get more than an eighth of a paper's worth of 'credit' for an eight-author paper.
The posters on 4chan (see dogma1138's post) are as surprised as I am that India features at all. To the contrary, India is commonly the target of scatological jokes.
Although they acknowledge the use of VPN, they might be downplaying its usage. Without making an effort to disambiguate that (with assistance from 4chan admins) I don't see the point of making charts based on countries. If not disambiguate, discarding posts by Tor and VPN users is easy enough.
I can't help but agree with the poster who wrote:
>>Although it is a bit absurd, /pol/ has, some
>>how, managed to place itself at the center of >world politics.
> i can't continue reading this, this is insane.
For example the "-fag" suffix is applied to everything and practically synonymous with "-person". A namefag is someone who uses a username instead of remaining anonymous. A drawfag is someone who creates original art, it has a positive connotation.
Even when discussing unfair monetary things the term kikes (jews) might be thrown around, just due to the historic association of jews with banking. Even users who present left-leaning positions (e.g. on renewable energy, healthcare or defense spending) use those terms because the associated concepts are ingrained in the conversation structure.
I don't know about /pol/, but other boards use "my nigger" or humorous variations thereof as an expression of endorsement
Use of the words might correlate with the sentiment of the user, but the correlation may be weaker than expected.
To change politics, it requires a cultural change. Tumblr is another place on the internet that is a space for cultural change, albeit the opposite kind.
https://8ch.net/pol/index.html
And for more chans, look no further than:
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/List_of_chans
Whilst I appreciate 4chan was the original chan that started all the other chans off, people often forget the alternatives. A common complaint of the alternative chans is that 4chan has become too conservative and is too heavily moderated. Does anyone agree?
Example - https://twitter.com/emilianodc_/status/786296689481003008
There is a lot of shilling and a lot of trolling... It seems to me that /pol/ posts has become >50% shitposting from trolls and shills and less political discussion.
The real influx of users into pol started with the european refugee crisis, not the presidential elections.
A *chan site has many layers a user must go through to finally fing a decent discussion (or the epic lulz). You have an outdated confusing UI, the sheer amount of useless content, the lingo and the highly offensive content.
After you learn to process and filter all that, you start finding the really good stuff. Or, as I like to say, "Gold floats on shit. You just have to be brave and reach it"
I have very little faith that this won't be used to censor free speech in the not-so-distant future.
Although maybe the people who don't know about this (thus couldn't have fun) shouldn't have paid for it :\
If it was generated by the 4chan regulars with their own money, then at least it's not worth discussing it more here...
But I still can't believe that there is a research paper out there where there is a section which describes the researcher's "collection" of rare pepe memes with visual aide samples.
Germany is full of surprises so far.
"/pol/ is winning because it's funnier than the people that despise it, it's that simple. Being authoritarian isn't funny. Tumblr, leddit, they're funny like a commercial is funny, they can be clever, they can be witty, but they'll never be gut-laugh, -holy shit- funny, because they never confront anything they're not supposed to, they never color outside the lines. They talk like they're resisting something, but all they do is agree with each other. They slay the sacred cows they've been conditioned to hate, and they ignore the elephants in the room they're conditioned not to see, and they'll always be like that because they're clever, educated pussies.
/pol/ is full of angry racist conspiracy theorists, but it's fucking hilarious. /pol/ might not always tell you the truth, but it will tell you the closest thing to an honest truth it can see, and it will laugh at you for being offended by it. The fact that /pol/ is starting to influence 4chan in general means that the sacred cows we're slaying are actually sacred, and people are laughing in spite of themselves. It's stupid and weird and it's too simplistic and old-fashioned to be true, but you're laughing anyways.
That's how it begins."
I think what a lot of people don't get about /pol/'s influence in the last year is it's mechanism. It is easy to browse the site as an outsider and think it is just shitposting 9000, with no real influence outside. However /pol/ unconsciously and without formal direction has an extremely effective strategy for disseminating information.
Once the essence of some information has been distilled users start disseminating it to the 'normies' via Reddit and Twitter. Twitter is where the real influence comes as they inevitably target journalists in large numbers. As most know, journalists and politicians are extremely engaged in Twitter. Stories frequently then cross the barrier into the mainstream.
Targeting of journalists and politicians, largely but not always via Twitter, is where most of the huge power is derived. People targeted don't necessarily have the internet experience to realise when these things are directed. A lot of what most of them see is a flurry of regular public concern which needs to be addressed.
When a story from /pol/ reaches the mainstream, it goes into a glorious frenzy. It is a powerful feeling when something you have created/discovered and disseminated in a 4chan thread becomes international news because of the boards collective action.
Summarised: when a very large group of people with political leanings on a story/topic informally organise, the effort can take the view mainstream. important to note is the demographic includes a diverse group of users who are highly skilled in programming, social media and politics.
edit: If I was a highly placed politician and wanted to disseminate secret information without attribution, I would run it through the tumbler that is 4chan.
https://youtu.be/6_b7RDuLwcI?t=13s
And if that doesn't work, someone else reproduced the same work here:
1. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/18/did-the-u-s...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/55pizd/4chan_users_o...
While I don't care about "chan" culture (never visited one of the sites, don't need that in my life), I fully support research into things I may or may not like. Let the Universities decide where to spend their research budgets. You never know what will come out of it.
Summary: 4 chan users identified a training site of ISIS and pinpointed it on google maps. One of the users knows a friend of the Russian Minister of Defense and sent him the information, resulting in an air strike.
Not that 4chan cares about these things. They just want to see people blown up.
You understand 4chan isn't a single hive mind right? Each board has its own culture, and even moreso: each general thread has it own subculture. /sg/ (Syria General) is one of the best place to get data on the Syrian civil war. The folks there aggregate data from a massive set of sources and include people who actually live in Syria or can speak arabic.
So you know, instead of parroting the same spam all around this thread. Maybe you should take two seconds to appreciate that you neither understand nor are willing to make an attempt at understanding what goes on there.
But yeah, I agree it's ridiculous how the Clinton campaign took the bait and now apparently a cartoon frog is a "hate symbol".
I don't think you will be able to find anything better than that to "prove" it happened.
Can't find a better source. But this was the second time RuAF bombed the rebles camp after third party analysis (might be a coincidence ofc). There was a different image with Russian MoD's report on the matter.
[1] http://www.vocativ.com/326039/how-one-4chan-board-is-trying-...
4chan has spawned a lot of memes because it was one of the earliest places people appreciated that sort of low-effort anyone-could-do-it content, but to say it drives high quality content is to decry any competently drawn stick figure as bourgeois.
A bunch of indie games started their life there too.
And then there are derivative and mashup works like fanart, translations.
I only visit a few boards, so i'm probably missing a lot.
Leslie Lamport, in his book on LaTeX, decreed a case mixing, but (as you say) ok'd any reasonable pronunciation.
Same. You've blown my mind!
There's clearly even some overlap with HN.
You can make a case that /sg/ is a good source of news, but it's part of 4chan. I'd rather follow individuals doing reporting on something more neutral like Twitter.
Astrodust, I think your understanding of politics and journalism is naive and one that deserves a thorough rehabilitation through a deep deep engagement with pol.
/sg/ teaches anyone who dare engages with it that information, collection, dissemination, acting upon it, appreciating it, comes from collective intentions (not attitudes, reddit cultivates attitudes; 4chan cultivates intentions, the dynamic of the whole raiding culture, the whole you must do to participate instead of merely like/solicit likes aspect) and, if you become acquainted with pol, you will learn viscerally what collective intentions look like, you will see it elsewhere.
Reddit is for the cuck, it is a circle jerk. the lack of identification, liking mechanism, and the culture of anonymity makes it less about affirming attitudes and more about intentions and the lack of moderation on chans is why/how intentions compete.
to repeat: intentions vs attitudes. narratives vs bias.
the differences between these concepts become incredibly illuminated if you engage with pol.
Plus, if you're going to play the "cuck" card, this conversation is over. I'm so tired of that shit.
4chan, Reddit and HN are Internet natives.
Facebook and Twitter are fucking tourists.
[1] http://wayback.archive-it.org/3649/20130422194045/http://www...
It was a surreal experience, and it showed both the strengths and weaknesses of crowdsourced tweets as "news". You get a lot of info, about how people think and feel but the facts being thrown about can be faulty and need to be confirmed independently. It wasn't until the unfortunate events in Ferguson a year and a half later than a similar kind and intensity of social media coverage ensued.
US intelligence is not always as rigorous, either, don't get me wrong, but the Russians in Syria seem to have very loose definitions of what qualifies as a target.
ok big boi
