4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

https://www.wired.com/story/4chan-soul-of-the-internet

by artsandsci • 8 years ago

65 125 8 years ago

mabynogy• 8 years ago

/g is interesting especially /g/dpt (the daily programming thread). Today's thread: http://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/66170997

Shank• 8 years ago

Yet this cannot last. At 15 years old, 4chan has reached adolescence. Up till now, trolls—children—have been in control. It’s not so funny anymore. After all, even the lost boys had to grow up.

Just because one can write that it cannot last doesn't make it so. Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything. Facebook is 14 and Twitter is 12 and that doesn't say anything about them. They all have their own problems, but if this age metaphor is to work, then 4chan should be "more mature" than its younger siblings. It isn't.

4chan is also not going anywhere fast. Someone seems inclined to still pay for the servers, and until that time stops, it's probably going to say well and truly the same. That's just what you get when you have an anonymous imageboard. But, even if something happened and 4chan shutdown, you'd still have any number of chans that still exist as clones. It's trivial to find them. You can close the pool, but there are infinite pools to close.

zeperoni• 8 years ago

Adding to this, it's not a static group of people on there growing old together. There is a a consistent group of adolescents reaching troll age and joining in.

tossandturn• 8 years ago

Yeah, I was on 4chan as a 16yo-20yo regular lurker starting back in 2004; never an active poster, just commenting randomly and joining in conversations on various boards. It was a decent anonymous community, sometimes I'd wander over to /b/ and it would be like walking past an apartment building at night and seeing completely random (sometimes disturbing) things going on through all of the windows; lurking on /b/ was the online equivalent of being an active peeping tom in a neighborhood without curtains.

When moot sold the domain a few years ago to a former 2chan admin, I noticed it barely changed. But I haven't really visited much since 2009 or so...

creaghpatr• 8 years ago

The more facebook and twitter and youtube censor their users, the more gravity will shift to 4chan, it's the law of conservation of speech on the internet.

SiempreViernes3• 8 years ago

Between 2003 and 2015, the worldwide internet penetration rose from 12% to 44%, that's 2.4 billion more internet users, but somehow there is a "conservation law of speech"?

Density• 8 years ago

Yep! I'm one of the censorship refugees on /pol/.

abhiminator• 8 years ago

Putting 4chan in terms of "human age" and development does little to quantify anything.

Drawing parallels between the two exemplifies poor analogous journalism on the part of WIRED.

The internet makes sense in metaphors. (from the article)

No, it does not. However, it helps immensely in crafting the opening salvo of a clickbait-y article to drive site views.

ekianjo• 8 years ago

poor analogous journalism on the part of WIRED.

Has Wired ever been known for good journalism? It's pretty much always been tabloid level: shallow articles on most subjects with pompous headlines.

taneq2• 8 years ago

Someone seems inclined to still pay for the servers

It kind of seems like a tradeoff between creating a focal point where that kind of individual can congregate (keeping them away from 'normal people') and maintaining a cesspool where that kind of individual breeds. Depending on what's actually happening (and even figuring that out would be an interesting research project) other major sites might even be bankrolling it to help keep their own sites cleaner.

Anon10962• 8 years ago

4chan is paid for by its users through the 4chan pass and through advertisers, both companies and individuals. It is most likely barely more than solvent or losing money. 4chan's funding isn't a secret that needs to be investigated.

lainga• 8 years ago

I got shades of the endless 2016-era "this means Trump is FINISHED" articles.

Brakenshire4• 8 years ago

By any reasonable standards he should have been, the mistake was expecting reasonable standards.

qop6• 8 years ago

Who says it isn't mature? Is it immature because it doesn't fit your content expectations?

Reminder that after 15 long years of chaos, it still exists. It's a very specific, essentially impenetrable market of 4chan users that can't really be pushed away except by catastrophic mismanagement. The features of the site have stabilized and reacted to user demands over the years, and though good boards (/prog/ :( and others) have been terminated, lovely discussion still happens.

4chan isn't selling your identity to data scientists. 4chan doesnt fail whale every few moments, 4chan doesn't have a huge amount of bot accounts relative to human users, though I'm sure there are some.

People love to hate 4chan because there are deplorable users that use it, but it's just disingenuous and dishonest to make the claim that 4chan isn't a good product in terms of capturing their desired users.

The fact that so many other chans exist is a testament to the success of the format. Reddit has an entire sub reddit /r/RedditAlternatives, which I think accomplishes the same thing: letting reddit know "the product is good, I just don't like YOU."

The difference is that 4chan is a very strong anchor of all chan-related traffic, outside of Japan and Germany. "competitors" don't really pose an existential threat, but rather a topical, and therefore fallible threat of feature envy or fashionable content envy.

Disclaimer: I haven't used 4ch since the /prog/ days, but I check in now and then, and lo and behold, it still exists.

tomatotomato374• 8 years ago

4chan isn't selling your identity to data scientists

That's actually questionable now since Hiroshima bought the site. Some weird scripts were added that were heavily obfuscated and killed the CSS if you didn't let them run. Luckily the innate computer paranoia of /g/ meant this was caught and worked around in less than a day, but it's still pretty sleazy.

Also Google captcha is needed to post, so there are the standard two Google scripts running too

xkcd-sucks• 8 years ago

Holy shit, Twitter is just 3 years younger than 4chan?!

no_one_ever• 8 years ago

This is a really sensationalist article. I'm not going to ignore the parts of 4chan highlighted by the article, but there are some really good boards you can visit where the level of discussion is far superior than what you would find in most corners of today's popular forums. Personally I don't participate in any conversations, but I'll read the threads on the boards I find interesting.

If anything, 4chan is an authentic reflection of the internet's user base. You'll find both gold and garbage depending on what you visit and frequent. It is unfair to broadly paint the site as only containing the worst of human nature. If you were to similarly depict other popular websites like Reddit in the same fashion, you would get something just as horrifying.

zhte4152• 8 years ago

There isn’t darkness without the light, it seems. So it’s probably fair to say 4channers are, at least a little bit, right: Their haven is the soul of the internet, the deep source of its sights and sounds, for worse and, occasionally, for better.

I couldn't see much notable in the article, aside from a negative slew at the start, and some 'the other side of the coin' in the above quote.

15 years is noteworthy, however, and I'm surprised so short, as I started visiting it back in 2003/2004; it seemed about as busy then as today. 4chan hasn't changed much from an external perspective. Traffic has probably been at stable levels for years, while the price of traffic has fallen.

I quite enjoy it's existence. There is a great diversity between message boards. Some are the reverse of b and pol highlighted in the article, as is the case on Reddit. Anonymous can be good. a la Hacker News's freedom of registration.

stats-then-now4• 8 years ago

Traffic has probably been at stable levels for years, while the price of traffic has fallen.

Absolutely not! Please take this the wrong way, but I don't see how an old friend could have not noticed the MASSIVE increase in traffic (and the problems it brought).

Here's some official 2005-2013 traffic statistics from the 10 years anniversary panel I compiled just to prove you wrong: https://i.4cdn.org/s4s/1527869817275.png

Cheers.

zhte4152• 8 years ago

The stats - Incredible how anaecdotal observation and recall differs. Bias too: Perhaps I'm not viewing the site as a whole and new boards, increased linking, whatever, thanks for stats.

Old friend - Certainly. The fact the idean of anon is default (though optional) means each post can be besed on it's on value / meritocrious as it carries no internet points of the 'owner'. Anarchy, but the negative that term often brings should not be carelessly and automatically applied.

izzydata2• 8 years ago

As someone who has frequented 4chan for nearly 15 years I don't think you want 4chan to die for many reasons. If 4chan is gone then all of the time people spend there will be spent somewhere else. Maybe the internet is too far gone to be significantly impacted, but I'd rather not test it.

Most of 4chan boards aren't really that bad though.

bluetidepro• 8 years ago

Most of 4chan boards aren't really that bad though.

This is an important note that I feel like not enough people understand. Too many people just think 4chan, and then think of all the messed up stuff on something like /b. There is lots of stuff on 4chan that is completely normal and not toxic/illegal. Although, I will admit that I usually just browse reddit, personally.

pscnv• 8 years ago

There is nothing illegal in 4chan, and if there is, it gets removed quickly.

chillingeffect• 8 years ago

I've been there almost as long, and it's true most boards are boring. I like the diy and music boards, for example.

But it seems you're "implying" that if we weren't there we'd be somewhere else the same or worse. I suggest there are many better places we could be. What we do there isn't a function of ourselves alone. We are a midpoint between ourselves and our environment. I would much rather go the playground and kick a soccer ball around or play basketball, but there isn't one around open after dark :(

And I can't stand the egoic virtue-signaling/posturing on fb so I go to 4chan to get a more down-to-earth conversation experience. If i melt down on there, no one cares. My FB world is completely uptight and ready to ostracize on a hair trigger. Of course 4chan is also full of people faking badassery, but it's not attached to individual egos. That's what's amazing about anonymity that moot could never articulate: it doesn't make much sense to lie, because it doesn't really increase your standing because no one knows who you are! So people are much more honest and forthright. yes, that's often ugly, but it's better to know about than to fear it.

Now the part that anonymity doesn't solve is that although the individual ego is dissolved, the way is paved for group egos to form. And as we've seen, especially on /pol/, these collective identities have flourished.

izzydata2• 8 years ago

I completely agree about the anonymity. That is really the core of 4chan and what I find appealing about it. Everything that is said there is for the sake of the thing being said and not about building yourself up as a persona.

There needs to be other sites that don't have usernames in any way. Even if you attempt to ignore it, it somehow is always relevant. Somewhere such as Reddit in particular always comes down to being a popularity contest and it will skew what people are willing to say in order to get the most likes.

josefresco2• 8 years ago

Indeed, nearly every evil of the internet begins, or picks up steam, on the site. To invoke yet another metaphor: It’s a breeding ground. (The fact that 4chan has been called so many things suggests a feeble attempt to make sense of chaos.) Many of the recruitment techniques of the so-called alt-right were piloted there; many white nationalists started out as 4channers. It’s unclear if or how one ages out of the site—but it is clear that it unleashes trolls on the real world.

Sounds like a great place.

taneq2• 8 years ago

They're ignoring the fact that much of current internet culture also originated there.

josefresco2• 8 years ago

Current Internet culture is toxic so yeah - I guess that makes sense. 4chan was all fun and games until it started effecting people IRL. Swastikas are only funny when there's no chance they'll infiltrate the real world. When nazis are being elected, it's not so funny anymore.

Brakenshire4• 8 years ago

Seems to be something people repeat for the 'anarchic creativity' narrative rather than an actual truth.

SiempreViernes3• 8 years ago

Yes, I'm sure r/memeeconomy and other very serious and important people are grateful.

deft5• 8 years ago

How many of these anti-4chan articles are written by people that regularly use it? I'm guessing zero. 4chan is an interesting site and has better discussion from a broad userbase than reddit or here. Plenty of interesting projects were born out of 4chan, particularly /g/ but the other boards have created valuable things for humans in general, not just internet culture. The positives IMO come from the whole "FREE SPEECH" attitude, that also leads to the negatives. 4chan's soul is in trolling, memes and productive creativity. They go hand in hand.

Try using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about. It's exactly like reddit, everyone says stay away from the defaults. In 4chan's case, stay away from /b/, /v/ and /pol/ and you're unlikely to see anything graphic or demeaning beyond general discussion boards...

Projects I know that were born on 4chan: tox.im - /g/ TurtleCoin - /biz/ NetRunner - /g/ Others mentioned in the article, notably project chanology.

Editing this comment just to say that my point wasn't that toxicity, racism and sexism are okay to just ignore... my point was we already ignore that everywhere else on the internet. Look at youtube or reddit comments. If you can't see how it's the same you're just better at ignoring it on your platform of choice. I'd say it's more concentrated on 4chan yes, and I've probably gotten pretty good at filtering it out myself. But this problem is all over the internet and writing a piece about how 4chan "needs to grow up" isn't much of a revelation. The whole internet needs to.

llccbb• 8 years ago

Has tox matured into a usable system? I last tried it about two years ago and had too many problems with setting it up to suggest it to friends. Looking for a good non-centralized encrypted video chat.

rarec3• 8 years ago

There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason. Seems that they also contain any outside perspective on the site as well. /b/ and /pol/ are particularly egregious, but they're worth suffering to live if it means I can keep /g/ and /tg/. The open format of the site also, while it does contain a lot of posting, does have a curious cross contamination effect. You may learn about an entirely unrelated thing on accident, for good or ill.

api4• 8 years ago

From what I can see /pol/ in particular is extremely popular and massively influential in the promotion of shockingly vile politics of a sort that until recently I've never encountered anywhere even close to the mainstream.

It is my understanding that it was created as a containment board, but it's popularity and relative power has soured me on the whole site.

Here's the problem: /pol/ gets so much traffic that I can't imagine that its visitors do not cover a fairly broad subset of 4chan's entire user base. This means that if I contribute to any of the other boards I am contributing in some way to the intellectual capital pool drawn upon by the sorts of people who hang out in /pol/.

No thanks.

I'm not the only person who feels this way. I've heard others say this kind of thing too. There's a lot of people who once visited the site who no longer do so. Boards like /pol/ seem to be killing 4chan as anything other than a more Internet-cool satellite of Stormfront.

krapp• 8 years ago

There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason.

I don't think there actually are, in practice.

How do you have any sort of "containment" on an anonymous forum? There's nothing at all stopping /b/ and /pol/ from stepping into any other board and either playing along or not. The only containment there is a state of mind.

pjc50• 8 years ago

Well, nobody's going to keep using a site they hate unless they have to.

ignore the crap you don't care about

The problem is that plenty of people seem to use it for recruiting to make the world worse for non-users, whether by campaigns of organised harassment or disinformation, or other means.

deft5• 8 years ago

First point: then why write an article about it? Get someone who knows what they're talking about.

For your second point, how is that unique to 4chan? Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that.

samuraijack• 8 years ago

Are we going to just ignore how bigoted and racist 4chan is in general?

fein2• 8 years ago

Understanding why it is that way would probably be more useful than trying to get brownie points for your signaling.

It's like that because people with your outlook have deplatformed so much discourse that 4chan is the last bastion of a truly free exchange of ideas. Voat comes in a close second.

Calling something bigoted and racist is just an attempt to deflect and ignore the conversation. Offending people is generally the backbone of controversial discussion.

deft5• 8 years ago

No. I'm not saying we should. I'm saying it's no different than other places, the racism on 4chan is on reddit. It's all over the internet. 4chan isn't especially bad in my experience. I don't go to the boards devoted to racism and I don't go to the subreddits and forums devoted to it either.

qop6• 8 years ago

/prog/ used to have an incredible amount of good discussion about programming. The perfect blend of memery to break the monotony with the perfect amount of puzzles and challenges and debate to keep it stimulating.

RIP

ihsw2• 8 years ago

/g/ still has daily programming threads

aspaceman14• 8 years ago

using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about.

Can you even imagine using 4chan as a woman or a black man? Like not only in real life do you have to deal with people being racist as hell, but hey here's this forum that's entirely shameless about it too.

You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them.

The only people who can go to 4chan and just ignore the toxic stuff are the people who aren't affected by the toxic stuff.

jabn762• 8 years ago

On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.

microcolonel• 8 years ago

You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them.

They can't? Almost no matter who you are, somebody somewhere is musing about your death, if you can't handle that in words, I doubt you could live much, regardless of your identifiable characteristics.

uhdihsjhr• 8 years ago

Given the Alexa ranking of 4chan lots of women and non white people use the site so no need to imagine it because it's happening.

jimmies2• 8 years ago

Although I am not black, I am Asian, and can be described by a word started with C (/csg/ if you lurk /g/), and more accurately G. I would be offended if someone calls me that in real life.

On 4chan though, I myself really don't get offended in any way. Someone explained it this way: you're only supposed to be offended if someone calls you a n* f* in a setting that not everyone is. On 4chan, everyone is already a n* f* so it kinda levels the playing field.

I get it that others minority people might not share the same view.

uncletaco• 8 years ago

Black occasional user here who recently turned 30.

I used 4chan heavily when I was in college and early 20s. Back then most of the hate in /pol/ was directed at religion in general and scientology in particular and /r9k/ hadn't quite became a cesspool of incels. But as I got older I started to see the change. It became too "safe" (for lack of a better word) for people with social stigma to express their frustrations as anger and eventually misogyny and racism. I mostly stick to /tg/ and a few of the porn boards now but I'm hyper aware of who my peers might be. I know the simple answer is to "ignore the stuff you don't like" but that shit leaks everywhere and I still run across the occasional racist comment when I visit, even when I try to stick to the places that aren't literal cancer.

boratsagdiyev• 8 years ago

My perspective (21/M/Black Canadian): the people who say we can just ignore it are right. That’s because you pretty much have to learn to deal with it as an avid internet user (even on more ‘vanilla’ sites like YouTube).

The part that affects me isn’t the word itself, and I don’t personally feel offended by a stranger using it. It’s just over time when you see so much vitriol directed towards your race even in places where it should be irrelevant (like gaming), I noticed I began to think that pretty much all white people were consumed by a hatred of blacks (why else would I see the n word being used so often?). It's hard to remind yourself about how big the internet is, maybe it's just the particular communities you visit, etc.

Edit: since this a throwaway anyway, I did develop a distaste for associating with white people for a period of time. In my mind, they were two faced and probably wouldn't hesitate to call people like me n*gger online.

deft5• 8 years ago

If you look at my comment history I've made this exact point about politics. I agree with you. 4chan as a whole isn't any more racist than any other forum. The boards are separated by topics just like reddit for example. My purpose behind my comment was simply saying if you avoid the parts you don't like (exactly how you do on the internet in general, stormfront is a thing), you don't experience that toxicity. I rarely see racism on the boards I browse. And I'd say I see a lot more racism on average on reddit.

temporaryacc61• 8 years ago

Where is this idea coming from that black or women are somehow special cases that need to be handled with care [0]? I know the answer is "America", but plenty of people around the world have been killed, enslaved, displaced, humiliated and any number of things. And every one of them, whether they are from Scandinavia or Africa, will get insulted and ignore it or leave.

Some of the best memes come from India and they get plenty of abuse on the site...

[0] https://youtu.be/qCj6YNIpqmA?t=123

optimuspaul2• 8 years ago

Free speech is great and all, but I prefer to spend my time with people that have the wisdom to keep some thoughts to themselves, or maybe not have the thoughts in the first place. I'll probably never go on 4chan because I don't have the time or desire to have to sort through it all, not just because it is a cesspool of human indecency.

mikec30105• 8 years ago

"Some thoughts" == the ones you (or most people) find offensive.

So you keep repeating that and raising the censorship bar until nobody is offended anymore. And what you have is a whitewashed, sanitized forum with less creativity, originality, and free association. That's not what everyone wants. Some people want the uncensored version.

implr• 8 years ago

/pol/ has grown a lot louder and prominent in the past few years though, to the point where even many seasoned 4chan posters are annoyed by them. "go back to /pol/" is a complaint you can now see on almost every board.

local_yokel• 8 years ago

Summary: grouchy suburban dad who realizes he isn't cool anymore shakes fist at rebellious neighborhood kids, shouting that they need to grow up.

Why is it that whenever a mainstream site like Wired pumps out an article looking down their noses at some "problematic" online community, it's immediately obvious that the author has never been part of said community and instead bases their overly simplistic views on an hour of research.

0x00000000• 8 years ago

Purely optimized for clicks and shares. Also, any amount of perceived approval of something controversial will get a nuclear reaction from Twitter demanding the author's job or going to the advertisers saying "look at this stuff that they are okay with!"

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

It's on the font page of HN so clearly it works

mikec30105• 8 years ago

a nuclear reaction from Twitter

Ironic isn't it? Author can't express a particular view about a website that became popular because it protects people from the consequences of expressing unpopular views.

_mlxl• 8 years ago

"The design remains proudly undesigned"

I've always thought 4chan was beautifully designed. Its hyperfunctional in a way that wired.com designers will never know because they are too busy injecting ads into every inch of available space.

Ono-Sendai• 8 years ago

It's not that well designed. Replying to comments, for example, is not very intuitive.

bluthru• 8 years ago

I wish the comments would nest, even if it's just one level like Stack Exchange.

matheusmoreira2• 8 years ago

There are 4chan browser extensions which have this feature.

m0ck• 8 years ago

wow, this is an example of some horrible, horrible journalism.

I could tell after first two paragraphs, that the author did not spend more than 15 minutes on the site itself and most of her "facts" come from lazily googled trivia.

I spent more time, than I'd like to admit on this and similiar imageboards. I still visit it semi-regulary (only fitness board nowadays), but this description as place where only edgy teenagers go to bully other people is plain wrong and misdirecting. Will you be judging Reddit next, solely by /r/politics, or /r/The_Donald, which both are terrible communities? Because that's what you did, with mentioning only /b/ and /pol/ as the core of 4chan.

My advice for the author: LURK MOAR :)

fareesh• 8 years ago

So many of these "journalists" are just filing stories with barely any research because there are no consequences. When you pick a topic like 4chan and you are criticized, absolutely nothing will happen to you. In fact, all you need to do is say "racists and misogynists are after me" and you will become the next story. There will invariably some subset of clowns who say hateful stuff on social media, and they will be held up as the norm.

The media has also turned up their "if you criticize our work it means you hate a free press" sensitivity meter, so as such there will never be any consequences for poor quality journalism unless the problem is fixed at the editorial level. There is no incentive to do it though.

Nadya• 8 years ago

4chan has never been a nice place. Most people don’t spend time there

Imagine a place where people don't take things that seriously and things are just weird enough that the inside jokes keeps all the outsiders out and alienated. Everyone else is sitting around the virtual campfire telling jokes and sharing stories. 4chans all reaching (and not-just-/b/-and-/pol/) bad rep comes largely in thanks to people who obviously don't browse 4chan or have only taken a look at /pol/ or /b/. They took a passing glance, maybe for a day or two, saw nothing but inane bullshit, and (justifiably) moved on with their lives. 4chan has a lot of shit, I don't deny that and I don't blame anyone for not having the desire to wade knee deep in it. Although wading through only the deep end of it skews perspectives heavily.

Notice how this article purposefully cherrypicks boards like /pol/, /h/, and /y/ instead of the less egregious boards /g/ (technology), /o/ (automobiles), /his/ (history), or /co/ (comics). One would leave with the idea that 4chan is nothing but a place for hentai and alt-right hate groups. Even among itself /b/ and /pol/ are disliked among the site. They're considered containment boards that prevent other boards being shit up. But one wouldn't understand the concept of a "containment board" if one doesn't browse 4chan. In fact - most articles about 4chan don't even use the term "containment board" because the authors never lurk long enough to discover the term.

There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online

Are they talking about pre-Usenet days? I don't remember a time online when trolls didn't really exist.

And because each message board is limited to 10 pages of posts, most messages get bumped off the server within a day, if not hours. It’s pretty much unusable for the uninitiated.

This is by design. Hence "Lurk more." Imagine trying to jump into an hour old conversation having heard only the past 10 seconds of it. Nothing you have to say at that moment could have any relevance to the conversation because you still don't know what the conversation is even about. Now imagine that conversation has been going on for 15 years and you've only just showed up an hour ago. Oh - it's also in a language you can only half understand and can't speak yet. Nothing you could say is important, you're missing any useful information, can't identify greentext and copypasta from actual opinions and information. The concept of lurking before contributing to a discussion is seemingly lost in a post-Usennet, post-forum internet.

And Gamergate, the smear campaign against female game developers?

Audibly laughed. They're still sticking with that? Gamergate has, and you can count yourself, has "harassed" far more males than females. Almost all journalists - and almost all peddling bullshit. Saying someone is spewing bullshit isn't harassment. Although I do love how Elon Musk became an alt-right, anti-Semitic, GamerGator because he dared speak out against the media.

matheusmoreira2• 8 years ago

Not that you’d want to be there. The most popular boards on 4chan are typically /pol/, a place for what they say is “politically incorrect” (read: racism, misogyny, homophobia)

So this is what the article is about. /pol/ offended some journalist's sensibilities. I bet they're laughing at him right now.

myf01d• 8 years ago

4chan is the last and only bastion of free speech on the internet. I know most here still think it's about trolling/racism/sharing shocking images, but I've seen there the most interesting discussions that cannot be found anywhere else. I agree that /pol/ is full retards, but there is also /his/, /g/, /sci/ and /mu/

forgottenpass2• 8 years ago

When did new immigrants to the internet stop learning about the things we long-considered to be emergent phenomena of social interaction on the Internet? Eternal September eventually became known as a breaking point where what "is" and what "ought" will never be the same again. It seemed like we resigned to mapping/understanding the ways conversation breaks down so we could practice good mental hygiene of recognizing it, and stopping ourselves from accidentally getting sucked into it. Why did we loose the collective wisdom of social systems at scale?

tl;dr: Who am I to blame for the fact WIRED of all places is writing hot takes about social dynamics of the internet like a Dad that just got their first smartphone?

danmg• 8 years ago

In related news Wired Magazine is 25 years old and doesn't understand 'kids these days.'

forgottenpass2• 8 years ago

There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online

To put this in context, Eternal September was in 93, and Slashdot was started in 97. But apparently moot imported trolls from Japan in the early 2000s?... or something? I didn't really bother trying to understand.

4Chan Is Turning 15–And Remains the Internet's Teenager

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