During the Q&A, Poole answered a question from one of the masked employees. After his answer, he asked, "Did that help, Steve?" Shocked, and no doubt a bit intimidated, the employee asked how Poole knew his name. His answer: "Well, I read your name on the badge clipped to your belt."
Poole was smart and thoughtful and I was quite impressed (not just with his eye for detail). Not surprised he lasted so long at Google.
https://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_moot_poole_the_case_fo...
Is it hard to 'last' at google? I have never gotten that impression.
"Rest and Vest" is a thing.
I'm fascinated by 4chan because it is a kind of underground United Nations. It's anonymous so people around the world can express themselves - even in a way I might find horrifying - and I can get an idea of concerns people have, though they might be concerns left unsaid im polite society.
It's anonymous but your national flag is automatically assigned, and if you hide this or use a "meme flag' like a pirate flag, you will be criticized and ignored as a likely troll, trying a "false flag" operation.
4chan/pol/ is interesting, I don't know about the other boards since I don't visit them.
Especially when you consider how anonymous and the occupy movements were all the rage among woke leftists a few years back, and they originated from 4chan.
People don’t spend 9 days creating the perfect YTMND thing because they can spend that time on Instagram, YouTube or whatever in pursuit of enough fame to create a career out of it.
The only reason we still have so many memes and so many (less than an A4 page) blog posts is because of how little effort it requires with modern tech.
I think 4chan is actually one of the places that has changed the least. I mean, /b/ without talented users is just 100% shit instead of only being 99% shit, but /tg/ is exactly the way I left it a decade ago.
Actually we should already have changed it - that's standard practice when one article cribs from another. But I missed it in this case.
Meanwhile I've been at 4 startups, from seed to Series B . I just get bored so easy.. after 3 or so years I NEED a change. Or maybe is because startups dont care about w/l balance and drain you until you quit.
I've never worked anywhere where people were much use before 2-3 years in harness. Too much domain knowledge maybe.
A lot of the time it may be warranted. But just as often, like in this article, it definitely is not.
I mean imagine if Facebook had the option to be anonymous somehow on their platform and called everyone Unnamed who hadn't finished their registration or didn't want to.
You'd see Unnamed responsible for nation-state sponsored terrorism and manipulating the votes of other countries. What a joke.
Eventually they moved beyond fun, simple little social causes to more seriously disruptive and economically/politically dangerous stuff, and at that point, not surprisingly, the alphabet agencies slipped in and broke up the party.
DDoS attacks as well as actual hacks were performed in the name of 'Anonymous', and at the time of the Stratfor hack, various LulzSec members were already in their late twenties...
I don't think it's fair to say this without clarifying that a lot of the Q and other deranged stuff started happening after moot left. Nor is Pepe really a recent meme (somewhere I have Pepes saved from like the mid '00s), nor is Anonymous really a group (but that's questionable and a debate that isn't really relevant)... I know there's very little expectations when it comes to reporting on web subcultures but come on, this is common knowledge (maybe that's why it isn't clarified?).
Yes. This is an extraordinary business case for strategic HCM discussions.
I never try to take for granted when I'm involved in artists' spaces, FOSS projects, hacker spaces, etc. The point is to continue a cycle of learning and contributing back, not consume until all the resources are sucked dry...
On the one hand, no one would blame him for just continuing to drift off into obscurity. On the other, he's a smart guy, and smart guys tend to be restless. Add to this that the hurricane of anti-trust lawsuits happening right now may result in a re-shuffling of the deck when it comes to the landscape of the web in a few years, and there's some real potential for new projects on the world-wide information superhighway, in a way there hasn't been in some time.
Just want to say you did a good job, thanks for being you and doing your thing. I know it's been tough and all, so thanks for the hard work.
Dunno about google maps though, that seemed to have taken a dive since ~2013. Maybe look into biotech and that jazz, it needs people like you.
Still, be good to see what you're doing next. Keep up that hard work and effort, it shows.
like literally what is the point of this to lead people to talk about unrelated aspects of 4chan and maybe how that influenced his time at Google
but the article describes an extremely normal and extremely extended time at Google
what...?
Lol such a dishonest representation of FANG employment. Well above average (2 years) a year past the vesting cliff, and about average in terms of team switches
That spin had so much torque I'm surprised the article stayed motionless.
This is sort of misleading. The 2 year quote often thrown around is a measure of the average tenure of current employees at the company, not a measure of the average tenure of people leaving.
I like to note that a company with exponential growth (and all of the major tech firms, excepting perhaps microsoft since it's been around longer count here) can have a seemingly low tenure by that first metric even if no one has ever left the company.
How he avoid cancel culture is beyond me
- Anti-vax
- Anti-gay parents
- Goose
- Ben Shapiro praise thread with a dash of anti-semitism and a whole lot of "i hope all ni**rs die"
- Praising George Floyd mural vandalism
- Anti-transgender
- Praising white nationalism/white ethnostate
- Praising 'national rape day'
- Anti-Islam
- Anti-race mixing
- Illuminati
- Celebrating police shooting blacks
- British royals news
- Anti-mask, anti-Biden
- Silver
- Anti-liberal white women as betrayers of the white race
Keep in mind I just am reading the threads in order. This is not diverse at all. Maybe 'diverse' in the sense that these white supremacists are posting from across North America and Europe. This is almost all far right white supremacist and misogynist talking points (strong overlap between the 2), almost surely disproportionately posted by young white men.
Aside from the fact that you pretty much took the bait with /pol/ there, you should take a look at their irl meetups and compare them to average reddit meetups. You would be wildly surprised by how non-white the average 4chan meetups are.
Shibboleths exist to exclude people outside the subculture stereotype - and a good way of doing that is to be offensive. Some subcultures desire to remain as subcultures.
Part of why shibboleths work is because we as a species tend to stop engaging rationally the moment we feel attacked - we switch to being defensive and actually entrench our own values further.
The 4chan shibboleth attacks everyone. No matter who you are or how you identify you're going to be debased and mocked openly - that's kind of the point.
I honestly don't know the answer to complex questions such as "should this be allowed" or things like that, I'm just glad I can discuss other things in peace and know that political discussion elsewhere can be reported and will be deleted, or even have the user banned.
Yet when people mention that they visit 4chan, they talk about the 'very clever people posting there'. It's like mentioning that you regularly go paddling in your local river in order to collect tiny nuggets of gold, without mentioning that your local river is a flow of excrement, nuclear waste, and malignant psychopaths.
Communities with no moderation at all sans removing child porn and copyrighted content (to avoid getting v8 by the feds) will always be overtaken sooner or later by the content you just listed because this sort of stuff gets driven out of communities that care about at least some decency. The exception proving the rule is r/worldpolitics, which has no rules per se but there's enough porn to drown out hate speech.
You would be surprised.
Is this something you have considered?
4chan is the same. They accept anyone from all over the world. The majority of posters are foreign. If you disagree with their narrative or political ideals, they insult you and tell you to leave. Except on 4chan you don't get banned or your life ruined for disagreeing. It's an actual safe space for ideas.
It's hilarious how similar they are.
Looks more like an international white supremacist convention than United Nations to me.
And I'm not saying that just because they love using the n-word so much, but that is one of the reasons.
Most posts on there don't seem to be from a diverse audience. They mostly seem to be from the perspective of a young racist white male audience, which is a very small percentage of the world population.
It's very obvious 4chan pol is disproportionately young white supremacist males with all the n-word, misogynist, anti-Jew obsession, white nationalism obsession that dominates the discussions.
I guarantee you the discussion/perspective there is overwhelmingly dominated by young white males with very few female perspectives (50+% of the population) and non-White perspectives (majority of the population).
All of 4chan, but especially /b/, is built around "haha just kidding ... unless", ridiculing people for getting offended while "trolling" with the most nefarious opinions and defending them "as a joke". This escalated with /pol/ which at some point became mask-off unironically white supremacist.
This is not just about 4chan being too white and too male and everybody self-identifying as NEET (whether as a joke or in earnest). The perpetual "ironic" regurgitation of racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic talking points attracted Nazis because it allowed them to hide in plain sight and they very successfully used it as part of their pipeline by getting people to repeat their jokes until they stopped laughing.
There are a lot of people on 4chan from non-European countries. I've seen vile anti-semitism expressed by someone with a Saudi flag. It's not uncommon.
Considering that we know for a fact that you don't know the ages, genders, nationality, or races of the people with these beliefs, and can only see their beliefs posted anonymously on 4chan, and then you think you have enough information to extrapolate that these people must be white, male, and young, says a lot more about YOUR prejudices than the people on 4chan, quite frankly.
You see hate and just assume the hateful are the gender, race, and age, that you perceive to be the enemy.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/001/975/547/c10...
Always fascinating how they refer to themselves.
You have n-words.
Then potato n-words for the irish (and lithuatians)
Pasta n-words for italians
Bongs for the british
Leafs for canadians
Burgers and Amerimutts
Toothpaste for the netherlands
Gypsy for hungarians and romanians (who are at a perpetual shitposting war against each other)
Hohols for the ukranians
Finngolians
The usual suspects for anyone of any asian country, extra special hate towards the chinese and Xi's internet army.
and on and on
No matter what nation of the world you are from, they will find an insult for you. It's endearing in a way really.
Oh and also there's someone shitposting from a research facility in Antarctica.
That you have to blank that out and none of the others, should tell you everything you need to know about how equal or "endearing" this is.
Bongs, Leafs, Burgers... This is all white supremacy no matter how someone tries to reframe it.
There's so many boards, each with its own culture, but people get out of it whatever bugbear they desire.
Even if it would be the worst game in the world. Cause the really normal response to and small game you don't like is to not play it and maybe write a bad review. Not what happened.
Still go back to /b/ occasionally although the flavor of that board has shifted to a more twitter-like direction that I do not favor. It remains one of the few places online where I can read shitposts with actual artistic merit. Some Facebook groups are only just now maturing to the stage where good satire exists.
I have a theory that forums mature like humans going from childhood name-calling to adult dialectics. But then again /b/ seems to be regressing so maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about.
I almost never have. On /lit/, maybe, but on /pol/ either you get no actual engagement, all the serious replies are drowned by spam and the thread necros, or one of the argumentators when called out simply stops replying or switches to shitposting.
You can sometimes have a good argument to completion, but it's very rare. Unless the argument is something the 4chan hive finds uncontroversial or is empathetic to.
I've spent a fair amount of time on 4chan/pol/
for over a decade and my opinion is moot is a
decent guy who sold it after he tried to reign
in GamerGate and was loudly criticized on the
site for it. I don't think Google would have
hired him if it weren't for that redeeming quality.
Some private pictures were taken from a user's account on my old site, and published to 4chan circa 2007. Chris was very sympathetic and was eager to help take the pics down and/or find the culprit.
Even though parts of 4ch turned into an absolute cesspool, that is not who moot is. He simply created an anonymous free-speech platform.
Most of the other boards hate /pol/ by the way and “Go back to /pol/.” is commonly heard elsewhere, which shows the differing views.
That's an interesting point. How do you tell if something is a real concern that is left unsaid vs just a fake concern? Or the difference between a concern that is quite prevalent vs a concern that is just being astroturfed?
Isn't that hackernews
It's pretty interesting, because as long as I've been conscious on the Internet it's always been posed as an 'inaccessible cult.' Probably due to all the inside jokes, I guess?
That's true on a technical level only. But culture matters.
Attitudes like yours were why 4chan was such a surprise to the rest of us. The culture that we all thought was just "ironic" and "edgy" with its casual racism turned out to be... kinda actually racist when right wingers decided to weaponize xenophobia and bigotry. The groupthink of a bunch of almost-exclusively-male incels turned out to be hiding genuine misogyny once they had an enemy to point themselves at in gamergate.
Culture matters. Being an "open website" just describes how it happens, not why.
To you and I, maybe! But even arstechnica's readership may not be aware of all this stuff.
Media reporting on internet communities, or places that I physically live in that I've seen are invariably very inaccurate.
Propaganda to teach that anything free is dirty/salacious to keep people in their walled gardens.
There was an article in Motherboard[1] how /pol/ is being idealogically driven due to moderation choices. I don't believe moot would have allowed such an ideologically driven moderation changes to continue for so long. (IIRC, moot had deleted /pol/ twice, once as /n/ which he removed for being too much like stormfront).
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu...
/pol/ is a U.S.A. board that takes a firm single side in the U.S.A. culture war.
Most 4chan boards are largely outside of it and the hatred one sees there does not align with any of the two factions in the U.S.A. culture war and the hatred that flows is indeed very diverse in that sense.
eventually all not heavily moderated communities
will suffer their version of Eternal September.
Unfortunately, it's hard to cite 4chan as an example when talking about the merits of unrestricted free speech vs. moderation/curation since most people think it was always that bad.
Typically there’s also a ‘Cliff’ at the start - a period during which no options are available to you.
addendum: the ‘standard’ Silicon Valley stock option deal is: 4 year vest, 1 year cliff.
Eg: first 12 months, no options
Day 1 of 13th month - 25% of your options are available to you
Then the rest of the 3 years vest at a regular pace with the remaining 75% of your options dropping on a monthly cadence
The exception being Amazon who basically give you nothing for 2 years and then ramp up significantly.
This helps them reduce compensation during hard times. Salaries are very sticky; it’s hard to cut salaries. So they offer RSU comp because it’s tied to stock price. When the company is doing poorly, they can pay less. But it also lets the pay high compensation and retain long term talent.
In addition to the initial grant at year 2 during your review some employees get more shares on top of the initial grant(that vest over a certain time frame, usually 2-4 years), these are called stacking RSU grants and its why people stay at FANG companies a long time as these grants stack higher and higher all the while your career progresses and the company stock goes higher.
Boards have increasingly enacted rules to cater to advertisers as they found out that simple word filters to stop “bad words” from being mentioned improve their advertisement revenue.
I remember Reddit when the purpose of the voting system was encouraging a laid-back approach by moderators on the logic that objectionable content would be downvoted, and hidden, so that those who did not wish to see it could ignore it, but that's long gone now, and moderators are highly zealous and on top of that one has the hivemind voting system to deal with.
Internet indeed became a pursuit of profit, rather than memes for fun.
And indeed 4chan never bowed to advertisers and consequently actually is not that profitable despite being one of the largest websites.
The culture on, say, IRC channels which do not rely on advertisement is very different from on websites that do and typically enforce various language filters.
Just one of many nerd subcultures appropriated and gentrified by the masses.
Back then we cheered when "legit" tech appreciated those of us from the backwater meme-world by hiring our "leader". Now it seems like tons of people get into things with that as the goal.
This is something I've been kind of depressed about lately. I grew up with the internet of the early 2000s, through the blog boom and the early days of YouTube. I used RSS, and was into things like Creative Commons and GPL. Free culture stuff. We had a wealth of cool things that people were making just because they wanted to, and crass commercial motive was hardly something that crossed peoples' mind. Just as app stores killed free web games (far more than the demise of Flash), the growing commercialization of the Web has eroded the wonderful mashup culture that permeated it.
I've been thinking about it a bit lately because I got turned onto actually listening to Hatsune Miku music, and it's a terrific example of what once was: remixing, memetic evolution and building something bigger collaboratively. (Miku has been vaguely on my radar all along, but I never bothered to give the stuff a fair chance until I realized a Wagakki Band song I liked was a cover of one of the most popular vocaloid songs, Senbonzakura.)
* The Leakspin meme was a thing in the early 2000s, combining the Finnish folk song Ievan Polkka with a random anime clip. That was all over the place back then, and I wasn't even a 4chan user.
* Some guy in Japan used the relatively new synth voice bank VC01 Hatsune Miku to release a sort of cover of Ievan Polkka, including a silly redrawing of the box art, which blew up on the Japanese streaming site Niconico and later made it onto YouTube. Which has lead to the character being associated with leaks/spring onions. [1]
* Someone else made the song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya" with the same voice, which was later covered with another synth voice and then paired with a now famous animation of a pop tart cat. [2]
* The growing "memetic velocity" surrounding a character derived from a synth voice and the anime art on the box it came in resulted in an absolutely fascinating music scene where synth artists bill themselves as producers and give a performance credit to the synth, releasing their amateur music for free on video sites (and sometimes getting album deals as they grew in popularity). And eventually you get a worldwide phenomenon with global tours of a hologram performing with a live band, drawing from thousands of songs and visual artwork created by whoever wants to contribute. A "wiki celebrity," so to speak.
Kind of random, I guess, but reading up on how that all connects (and was going on in the background of related memes that I was aware of) has kind of restored my faith in the Internet. I think that if you get enough creative people together, you're going to end up with some cool stuff. The question remains, though...would it happen today? (And if not, what do we need to torch to fix it?)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku#Cultural_impact
I'm sure there are other races posting racist things there as well, but I said disproportionately young white males tend to post white nationalist talking points, which I stand by and this shouldn't offend anyone.
I am in no way implying most white males are white supremacists. I'm saying most white supremacists are white males which is an uncontroversial obvious statement that I stand by.
You cannot convince me that most white nationalists are non-white, that's a silly deflection.
Always reminds me of the classic 1978 Johnny Rotten interview BBC interview where he calls out Jimmy Savile. (Video features a gross Piers Morgan pretending like he never heard about Savile.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OzI9GYag0
We don't need the white supremacy, but we as a society do need the crass asshole who's not afraid to knock down the elites by a peg or two. (And the John Stewart "jesters" of the world do not count.)
They make it sound like he barely managed to get any stock. That's like saying, "person worked at X for 1 year, just long enough to get 1 year's salary." Well, yeah, but if they left in 11 months they'd get 11 months salary. It's not like if Poole left at 1 year or 4 years or anything in between he would have left with anything different proportionally to his tenure.
What an odd article.
The article sounds like the reporter heard a soundbyte about google's typical four year vesting period, and then did zero actual research into what that means.
I left my last job pretty much on the day of my 4 year anniversary because I'd otherwise be taking a 25% comp hit in year 5. It's definitely a thing.
I see plenty of posts attacking and calling for the killing and complete extermination of non-Whites, Jews, homosexuals, and women all over the place but 0 posts attacking straight white males for being straight white males.
Gee, I wonder why that is? I really wonder who is posting all these white nationalist talking points, it's truly a mystery. Could be anyone.
Because that's already done on Twitter; it would be quite boring to pretend that it's something taboo.
"White people have poor taste in food!" isn't very punchy, is it?
They tell jokes about white ethnicities, but don't speak unironically, constantly, and at length about why whites should be racially exterminated like they do towards non-Whites, Jews, Muslims.
It's not much fun trolling in alignment with the status quo. People already consider it passe.
I have never seen this kind of content on Twitter or Facebook, in my own feeds or in trending topics. I would have to actively look. I have however seen a ton of real diverse content from a diverse group of people. This is a lie that where the intent is to downplay the white supremacist content.
It really fucking sucks that you're in my industry.
As usual, it isn't the crime, it's the coverup that gets you, and GamerGate was a great example of that.
And no, the whole issue was not about quality of single indie twine game. That is just nonsense.
Call it SJW-Colonialism and it was repelled by the natives. To go to battle to tell people what they should accept as their escapism, from up high, was a new low.
Using the 4chan JSON API, I looked at the /pol/ and /int/ boards to see the range of countries posted. /int/ has posts from 99 unique countries. /pol/ has posts from 100 unique countries, but many of the 'countries' are just labels naming a specific flag, for example "LGBT". (Note that "White Supremacist" is literally a flag/label you can choose... But so are "Tree Hugger", "Anarchist", "Facist", "Hippie", and "Black Lives Matter".) I tried to make a pastebin but their filters didn't like the word "white supremacist" so here's the code instead: https://pastebin.com/9FhDM8Ch
Given the list of countries, I'd say it is nearly impossible that most of these people are white. Some of these people are definitely using VPNs to change their country code, however it's also important to note that many VPNs are banned from posting without a 4chan Pass. They cannot all be VPNs.
Without spending too much time on it, I found two pictures of /pol/ meetups online:
https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/7qt0h5/4chan_pol_mee... https://www.reddit.com/r/Cringetopia/comments/b3ggfx/4chan_m...
(Trigger warning, the second picture shows Nazi symbolism.)
In both pictures people of color are present, and in one picture white people make up 50% of the crowd. This doesn't make what /pol/ says OK and that I don't condone racist speech online, but it does suggest many of the comments in this thread are incorrect about 4chan's demographics. Ultimately we do not know what 4chan's demographics are.
Why did I bother? For a few reasons: I like Chris Poole and to my knowledge, he's never supported bigotry directly, he just strongly believes in the value of online anonymity. It pains me to see people painting him as a racist. Nobody calls Jack Dorsey a racist when racist things are posted on Twitter. I also don't like it when people imply that people who post racist things must by default be white, or that white people are inherently racist, e.g. "4chan is a racist website so they must be all white". I also am quite interested in the topic of online moderation and how we can create spaces that allow for privacy/anonymity while curbing bad actors. For something else interesting on this topic, this paper is about white supremacy present on Twitter: https://extremism.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/zaxdzs2191/f/downloa... Note that the paper is from 2016 and white supremacy is still in full-force on Twitter, and really any popular social media site.
First time you go there is a Chaotic mess that feels you went back to 90's.
Then in shock you start to see the subs like /pol/ then you click and bam More chaos.
Threads and threads you are more lost.
Then you click catalog and set order Reply-by-count.
Then it does start to make sense. You read people talking in two ways. On the text and on the image attached.
It is full-duplex com.
In the 90's I used to read my Mainstream media + Pravda (the other side) jornal.
Now I read the local MSM and 4chan (the other side ) jornal.
Do many HN users actually frequent this website or should I be reinstalling my OS right about now??
You are safe... don't worry. Unless you started downloading stuff from random users on 4chan. But if you did that i'm not sure we can help you!
4chan's indeed a cesspool, and /pol/, /b/, among some others are the worst. In fact, they're called "containment boards" for this very reason.
oh my it's like watching a baby taking the first steps.
You gotta ask yourself "by whom?". Actual users of the site, people having serious discussions about the site, writers of pop articles aimed at non-users of the site, or someone else?
Even then, you have this conflation of /b/ (or I guess these days /pol/) and 4chan at large. Some communities are more welcoming than others.
It's just reddit for people who hate
It is a smart hire in that aspect, but Google+ was going to be an also-ran and I don't think M00t alone could save it.
If you don't want your wild Fursona to be associated with the same account that you use for your highly conservative church groups then putting them on the same account is not a good idea.
It was really just copied from a formula that was long popular in Japan, and being the first it became the biggest.
An interesting matter is that Lainchan follows largely the same formula and is very civil in comparison, despite not enforcing it, perhaps because it's main focus is technology and not entertainment.
Then they hire the first guy they find, even though his site and G+ are almost polar opposites. G+ fails shortly afterward.
Not exactly a fair assessment of the situation.
e.g. if nobody ever leaves the company, but you always double the number of employees every year by very aggressive hiring, the average tenure according to that metric is 1 year.
However, it's also unclear exactly how 1.1 number is calculated. It looks like it comes from PayScale, which doesn't give, as far as I can tell, a methodology:
Is that the median amount of time that all current employees have had with the company so far?
Or is it the median of all of the employees that used to work there & moved on, which would exclude people that have continued to work there?
Or is it some type of survival analysis that takes such factors into account?
I'm not saying all this to imply that /pol/ is even handed but they simply don't talk like "white people have bad food! Lol they season turkey with water!". The entire self justification for their behavior in many cases revolves around believing others hate them as much as they hate others, and people are liable to spread anti-white hate speech just to agitate.
That other stuff? That got you mad. You've got multiple threads running about how terrible it is - and there's a good chance you don't even identify as one of those groups.
But let's assume for a moment that 4chan really is concentrated evil. You do realize you are basically advertising for them right now?
Does one have to be non-White to be opposed to the mass murder of non-Whites? Shouldn't every non-racist psychopath White person be offended by the idea of mass murdering non-Whites?
The bait is this silly narrative that the reason they talk in depth and at length everyday about exterminating non-Whites is because it's elaborate "trolling" to own the libs, until they start sprinkling in enough "justification" and repetition to radicalize you into becoming a white supremacists.
Sadly many young men are taking the bait and becoming radicalized online.
It's true in that yes they are agitators and trolls.
But it's false in that the line between unserious troll and serious activist was blurred or erased long ago, and most recently with Trump being elected president.
It's no longer possible to distinguish between unserious troll attempt and serious statement when such a large audience subscribes to the trolling as their actual reality.
Ken White’s rule of goats:
“The Rule of Goats applies. Slightly paraphrased — for this family newspaper — the rule states: If you kiss a goat, even if you say you're doing it ironically, you're still a goat-kisser.”
You don’t get off scott-free just because you say “I was only being ironic“.It's not that I'm a 'snowflake' or 'I don't understand chan humor', what they're doing is actually fucked up and dangerous even if they justify it as 'trolling' or 'irony' that should be ignored.
There is nothing normal about that boards pre-occupation with calling for racial extermination. I don't give a damn if they're posting that 'ironically', there is nothing normal about that type of constant, obsessive 'joking' about mass murder behavior to that degree, and repeating those things so much can lead to people truly becoming obsessed with those ideas, then justifying and actually carrying those actions out (like the Christchurch racial terror attack).
One of the goals of his bloodshed, he wrote, was to “agitate the political enemies of my people into action, to cause them to overextend their own hand and experience the eventual and inevitable backlash as a result.” He said he wanted to “incite violence, retaliation and further divide.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/new-zealand-gu...
I mean this is just flagrantly wrong.
>what you're doing is gaslighting
How does me saying that the 4chan isn't as white-dominated as you say it is (with a hard proof, given that you can literally take a look at pictures from irl meetups from both 4chan and reddit, and then compare yourself) count as gaslighting?
>There is nothing normal about that boards pre-occupation with calling for racial extermination.
Will it make you feel better, if I told you that you can go and see those threads in many directions, including Indian-poster threads getting into extermination-tier shitfights with Paki and Israeli posters, as well as threads where Italians and Polacks call for mutual genocide? And let's not forget the asian continent shitfight threads, where there is an eternal argument between Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean posters trying to prove to each other who should've genocided whom at which point in history, with occasional oil being poured into the dumpster fire by Vietnamese and Indonesian posters.
The board isn't pre-occupied with racial extermination. It is pre-occupied with edgy content that you cannot find elsewhere. Given that knowledge, it is understandable why most of it ends up being just wild trash. But there are definitely occasional gems in the rough that can be found there that cannot be found elsewhere.
Can you give an example of a gem? I've only seen the racist trash side (that's certainly what's on the board as of right now).
And why would I judge an online community based on the offline actions of a very small sub population?
Should I be impressed that non-white people also go there to spew hatred unrelated to white nationalism?
After 4 years, unless you got refresher grants, your compensation is just your salary, so you effectively make less money than during the first 4 years. At that point the incentive is to move to some other company and start the 4-year clock again...
Thank you for the explanation ;)
Post #1: Comment using the N word
Post #2: Someone using "fag" to insult people who, presumably, use Arch linux. (The term was Archfags)
Post #3: In response to something about headphones: "that deaf faggot [n-word]"
So it's funny. I've been browsing 4chan for 5 minutes and couldn't avoid racism & homophobia in the very first things I saw. Maybe you should actually visit the site instead of just spreading misinformation.
You mentioned /g/ -- there is a daily programming thread on that board with a very long history. I've seen some really interesting projects posted there. Some even made their way here eventually. SerenityOS for example.
it's offensive to outsiders....to keep them out lol
It's definitely there. Not in /pol/, but /pol/ is a subset of 4chan.
very clever people posting there
Nobody denies the extreme cesspool-like aspects of some corners of 4chan.
The one thing you can uncontroversially say is that 4chan is diverse. It's almost like reddit, where each subreddit has its own distinct culture, mods, etc.
I would say that overall, 4ch does attract... a pretty clever crowd. Almost everything there is layer upon layer upon layer of self-reference and iteration. Meta on top of meta on top of meta. Not saying you have to be a genius to "get it" but I don't see a dummy enjoying it.
I'm also saying this as somebody who doesn't particularly like the place. I grew out of that shock humor stuff about two decades ago.
Although I'm also not sure how clever a person really needs to be to understand multiple layers of meta: "Meta" is so ingrained in cultural DNA at this point that anyone born in the last 25 years will understand all of it on nearly an intuitive level, and anyone over that age will still have been bombarded by it for decades-- long enough to mostly still get it.
This is very strictly enforced in practice, one doesn't see any nudity or gore remain up on those boards for more than ten minutes before a janitor catches it.
Pornography is allowed on all boards that aren't designated “safe for work”, but gore is only allowed on a very select few.
In general I have much less of a problem with porn or gore than I do with raging hatred.
If you can't, or rather won't, see beyond that. Then it's just not for you. And that's fine.
But what people have "kindly" explained have merely been justifications for racism and other hate speech that all seem to ultimately boil down to it being normal for 4chan. That, and the excuse of "oh but they don't really mean it" is pretty thin justification.
If you find that hard to understand, maybe stay away from HN where we try to have at least some minimum of reason in our discussions: you either lack that by minimizing racism and hatred to "bad words" or you are a troll arguing in bad faith.
There's no other way to use these words. They're always racist and homophobic. That's the point, /pol is a cesspool of racism and homophobia.
A thought provoking message. Just quoting it for posterity. Carry on.
Or when they had "journalists" from big publications trying to go there and interview people on the boards, they got fed so much misleading and obviously bs info on purpose before being chased away, it was definitely entertaining to observe. Especially given how obvious it was that the "journalists" in question came in there with a very specific narrative in mind already, and it all got crumbled pretty much in real time.
Not even mentioning stuff like a solution to a novel math problem (which other commenters have already mentioned), which ended up being cited and is relevant to actual ongoing research in a specific math area.[1]
Do those things count as "gems"? That's purely subjective. But that's the kind of stuff I personally appreciate seeing there.
0. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-journalist-convi...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...
The Peter Bright article you posted has no mention of /pol.
It wasn't supposed to, I just posted it for the context of the court case I was talking about. It would be more weird if the court decision included those, since they didn't contribute to his arrest or anything.
If you are curious, you are welcome to go to any 4chan archiver websites and search for his name to see those conversations.
>Trolling journalists doesn't sound like "gems", it sounds like a waste of time (and I'm no fan of most journalists).
What sounds like a waste of time to you might sound like good entertainment to others. If anything, I would say that the "journalist" going directly to 4chan and attempting to "interview" people there was much more of a waste of time.
Edit- it had live (think chat room) but threaded comments and was anonymous (temporary, randomized identites)
I haven't had the heart to completely decommission it yet so I've stood it back up so you can see what I am talking about .
Second, names could be more distinct. The fact they all begin with the prefix "user" (from what I saw) is redundant. Could you mix and match from a short-words list to create unique and memorable names? e.g. RedFoxFun.
Anonymous posting prevents weird popularity cliches from taking over, and post linking via ID allows multiple conversations to flow much smoother than reddit's tree-structured comments. I'd also say that sequential ranking over popularity upvote would prevent as many low-effort hot takes/jokes from always being at the top of each thread, but I'm practice that doesn't really seem to play out like it should.
Anonymous textboard written in Crystal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
though the world is probably better off without a lot of those, they are not all literal nazi subs.
Trolls can always take over unmoderated forums because while they can drive the reasonable users out by reducing the signal to noise ratio down to a useless level, the reasonable users have no power drive them out. It's a completely imbalanced power dynamic. All forums need some sort of moderation or they will always collapse once they grow beyond a fairly modest threshold.
Nothing has more of a "Whoever fights monsters ..." vibe than the endless fixation on Nazis. I suppose we will have to amend the Four Horsemen of the Infoacalypse from "drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists, and pedophiles." My vote is that we put "Nazis" in place of "terrorists," given that a well-known anti-DDoS service decided to revoke protections for Stormfront while still providing services at the time to ISIS. Yes, that ISIS, the slow-motion, lovingly filmed execution of infidels ISIS.
Because it never stops at just filtering out the Nazis.
A very simple pattern of 4chan posting culture is to offend others in order to provoke a debate about what you actually want to discuss. It's the 4chan version of clickbait. The /g/ catalog is absolutely filled with people doing this. Want to talk about Linux? Pretend you're a superior Windows user and mock Linux for not having some feature. File picker thumbnails are a common example. This happens all the time and can generate some rather unique discussions.
Because it's anonymous, you'll see a lot of frowned-upon behavior which can nevertheless be interesting. Everytime some drama happens on GitHub or LKML there might be a random 4chan thread discussing it in the usual offensive tone. It's interesting to read about what people think, especially opinions they wouldn't express if they had to sign the post with their real names.
I do this with investment ideas on /biz/ regularly, particularly in the stock market general thread and have had some very enlightening debates as a result.
This is the main point of contention. No one denies that such words are a common occurrence on 4chan, but you believe these words are automatically indicative of racism.
Are you open to the idea that someone who refers to himself as “an Archfag” is simply communicating on his being an Arch Linux user, and not otherwise intending to communicate his sexual orientation, and certainly not to proffer a negative view of his own sexual orientation?
The way this thread progressed was very fascinating to read.
First, an absurd baseless generalization was made. Then, when challenged, the generalization was narrowed down a bit. Then it was narrowed down again and again until we got this comment which asserts an outright lie.
These words aren't always used in a racist and homophobic way. 4chan is proof of this.
Try to step back and move into another level.
What are words?
What is this "vibration of air molecules" hitting my ear?
What is the meaning behind them?
Why so?
Do these certain "frequencies" always mean a certain meaning? Always?
If you wish to still call that “racism and homophobia”, then neither of which necessarily has anything to do with race or sexual orientations, or even disdain. — you should also know that your usage of these words is then quite nonstandard, and does not align with what most mean with them.
The word “nigger”, in particular, has been of particular interest of study in how depending on context the word can very much be about race, and negatively so, to a simple form of address that has no implications of race.
Some of the other forums on 4chan might be better examples, but even those have some moderation. Forums like /tg/ have managed to hang on alright, although their total post volume per day is quite small compared to /b/.
and some people enjoy that. you don't have to go there if you aren't one of them.
you're not describing some platonic ideal of an internet forum. you're just describing what you personally want out of one.
There doesn't seem to be anything "deeper". Just straight up white supremacy.
[EDIT] (since I'm now throttled for some reason)
You can go on /pol right now and see it's full of white supremacy and hate. You claimed there's some deeper meaning to all of that. There's not though, it is exactly what it looks like.
You seem to be hyperfixating on one out of 3 examples I mentioned. Did you miss the part about a proof for an unsolved math problem or early allegations against someone who went on to be charged for that exact same thing years later?
Not even mentioning other boards that are hobby-specific, like /o/ (car-related stuff) or /fit/ (fitness related stuff). If you see no value in it, that's fine. But "everything i don't like has no value" is not the way to live life.
There should be a "BS Law" were someone claims to have evidence, then refuses to present it no matter how pressed.
He claimed they had a math proof, as we see from the other comments, that wasn't /pol.
He claimed they trolled journalists. Whatever.
He claimed they had something to do with convicting a sex criminal, then provided zero evidence to back that claim up.
In no way is any of this justification for the racism that is the central message of /pol.
I never said it was from /pol/, it was from another 4chan board (/sci/). And I also brought up other boards as well, so I don't know what to tell you.
You also say that my claim about Peter Bright allegations is unverified, but again, I literally was there when those conversations took place, and you are also welcome to go to any 4chan archiver website, search for that name, and you will see the results from those years.
I have no horse in this race, but the only one moving goal posts here is you.
Here's the OP: