Ask HN: What do you think of 4chan?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6748619

by smoyer • 13 years ago

13 10 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Recently there was a link here that I consider to be a brilliant parody of HN. The best parody makes it a bit painful to look in the mirror! I think it's only fair to let 4chan know how we perceive them, so add your best 4chan parody below (I'll get it started).

smoyer2• 13 years ago

* [Any comment] - NSFW

* [Any image] - NSFW

* [Any video] - NSFW

* [Topic worth discussing] - plenty of comments filled with ridicule and venom

Perhaps HN is where you go (from 4chan) when you reach a certain level of maturity?

EDIT: Obviously enough 4chan users here to produce a long and humorous list of our particular "strangeness". Before someone there decides I'm an enemy, I should state that I don't think they should be shut down, I don't hate them and I fully think they should be able to have their fun.

untitaker_• 13 years ago

implying

smoyer2• 13 years ago

I'm just guessing from your vague comment, but I don't think I was implying anything beyond "I'm an old fart, but let the kids have their fun".

perlpimp• 13 years ago

4chan is one of few sites like craigslist surviving through technological fashion waves relatively unchanged, and is largely a foundation of the internet culture onto itself. Culture that was born on the internet however wrong some people count it.

It is a piece of art as a service and and opinions vary about it wildly.

My 2c.

nmbdesign• 13 years ago

Its terrible place to waste your time on..

usling• 13 years ago

OP is [depreciating term about sexual preference]

nessy• 13 years ago

4chan is a place like no other, only because of the anons. It's my guess that most of them have an emotional scarring of some sort and use it as a resort/rehab.

mdisraeli• 13 years ago

Not a parody post, but a serious commentary....

4chan is utterly brilliant, in a "you stay over there, far away from me, and someone else will actually visit you and find the quality posts and link me to them" sort of way :P

This history of 4chan is rather important to internet culture, really. 4chan came from a group of Something Awful Goons love affair with Japanese culture. It was were Anonymous were born, and where, over the years, said group became to be made of a three distinct factions - oldfags, newfags and direct action protesters. The difference between these groups is crucial to understanding a distinct group of security risks faced by internet connected systems today.

4chan has helped drive the discussion of the role of anonymity in online communities. It inadvertently raised the profile of stenography, due to it being used on images being posted to hide less savoury content. 4chan sparked such things as http://1d4chan.org which is a great repository of tabletop gaming culture. 4chan also helped to drive the evolution of many internet memes, especially image macros ('lolcats').

4chan is not without its problems, however. As hinted above, the anonymous image boards have always appealed to people wanting to exchange illicit images. The anonymous nature of the message boards does drive some (many?) of them to be, well, cesspits. The disparate groups that came together in Anonymous pull it in many different ways, causing tension and feuds.

So on second thoughts, let's not go to 4chan; It is a silly place. But I will be sad to see it go, and it deserves to be long remembered.

rm_-rf_slash• 13 years ago

4chan is unique in that it's a flat discussion/image board that keeps all users anonymous and their posts only alive as long as they need to be. This removes the incentive structures of similar discussion sites like reddit, which, through archiving threads and karma, mean that success and visibility itself relies on the opinions of others. 4chan is a place where brilliant threads can be on the exact same level as banality and obscenity, but in doing so encourages people to speak their minds as freely as they please.

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

Nothing.

Ask HN: What do you think of 4chan?

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