The spin in this article is pretty interesting. 4chan has been a cesspool for years. The stuff highlighted in the article, the leaking nude photos of celeb, and harrasing some game developers, is really mild compared to all the nasty stuff that happened before, like someone posting photos of girl they just murdered, or getting scores of people to actually commit suicide, or leaking nude photos of random women, or harassing some new target every other day. The article calls these "the good times", though.
If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.
It's one thing if it's a single crazy posting photos of a murder victim, it's another if it's an ongoing war with the community over unacceptable content. Fappening/gamergate stuff was getting posted and deleted probably hundreds of times a day across several boards, then threads would pop up asking why moot and the moderation team were being fascists. It's the difference between a spoiled apple every few barrels and a truckload of rotting fruit. I can't imagine why ANYBODY, even somebody who embraces the positives of the pure id of the internet, would want to fight that fight alone.
I also think that it's not quite true that 4chan hasn't changed during his tenure; as the population of certain boards have changed the nature and quality of their content has also seen a shift. /b/ once held that sweet spot of being able to generate and propagate large numbers of memes, but it has since grown much larger and appeals more to lowest common denominator type stuff. Meanwhile, smaller boards hit those critical population densities and begin to resemble /b/ of old.
I don't think there's much spin on the article to be honest. The article is mostly giving backstory on moot and 4chan or talking about "reprehensible" things that happened/originated on the site.
> The article calls these "the good times", though.
Actually the "good times" quote is the author referring to moot's "Summer of Chris", or his time away from the site.
> The stuff highlighted in the article...is really mild compared to all the nasty stuff that happened before, like someone posting photos of girl they just murdered
From the article:
"Though Poole does find some 4chan posts 'reprehensible' — like when a murderer posted photos of his victim on the site..."
> If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.
I think the site did change over the years. And I think the article even tries to make this point. I think the idea is that the sort of fappening/gamergate stuff wasn't there in the beginning. While the site has always been full of tastelessness and cruelty, I think it was the acts like this that drew a lot of attention and forced moot to confront 4chan's users. And that confrontation created the conflict and stress that finally drove moot away from the site.
I used to really enjoy /b/ - sure, there was always a lot of shit on there, but it was also the centre of absolutely unrestrained creativity. From memes so funny that they still crack me up, to sorting algorithms so novel that they changed the way I thought about solving problems.
As I see it, two things happened:
- I aged. I was in my mid-twenties when 4chan launched. Now, I'm in my late thirties. You won't understand how much the years 25 - 40 will change you until you've been through those years.
- The community's standards changed. Back in the day, unrestrained creativity was rewarded. The last time I was on /b/, unrestrained cruelty was rewarded. I can't picture Gamergate happening in ~ 2008...
---
The second point is likely a function of the first.
> All of which made his decision to leave 4chan seem so confounding. "I've come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure," he wrote in his farewell post. What he really meant and why he was quitting were a mystery.
Huge amount of pressure from outside to censor "the cesspool"? He, himself, has become a attack target. Something goes wrong -> "need" to censor 4chan arises -> people exert pressure on Moot. Repeat and repeat. And its not really about 4chan - it was mostly about Moot: just too much for singe person to handle.
Nude pictures of celebs were not leaked by 4chan - it was leaked by 4chan user. 4chan was just a medium. Pics could be leaked anywhere with similar results (e.g. more attention to celebs in question). Harassment of game developers goes day and night on Tumblr, and nobody is doing anything about that. All other stuff you've mentioned are just things that happen in real life. Real life once again leaks to the Internet - stop the presses!
As for harassment: its the REAL PROBLEM. But 4chan is guilty no more that Internet in general. Harassment campaigns are happening all the time and even lack of anonymity is not preventing such behaviour. Tim Hunt and Matt Taylor were ripped apart by crowds at Twitter, Tumblr, main stream media publications. People were driven to suicide by harassment on Facebook (and those cases landed in courts).
There are shitty people who love being offended, being angry about some very subjective injustice; dignified agitation gives those people reason to breathe and makes them feel good. Internet brings those people together and helps them validate their own agitation and actions. Next they gang up. Its simple as that. Its a question of lack of empathy and echo-chambers enabling morons.
Solution so far is only one - more privacy, less social networks. Avoiding the danger. Keeping political, professional and personal stuff separated.
To be fair, early 4chan also did some good through project chanology. It's almost as if when you allow people to have freedom, they end up making bad decisions. You make a good argument against democracy.
Christopher Poole is a modern day Warhol. Not in the sense that he is an artist himself, but because he has been so important and influential for modern culture. Nearly everything that you identify today as 'internet culture' originated on 4Chan. And as this culture is quickly becoming mainstream culture now.
He needs more recognition for this. And for all the vile hatred on 4Chan, I also know it is a big source of support for a lot of people otherwise left behind by the mainstream
I think you're misinformed: the real source of all internet culture is and was ebaumsworld.com.
Seriously, though, internet culture is more than just /b/. The Something Awful forums (where 4chan was born, after all), Fark and YTMND contributed a lot. More recently, sites like Reddit, Instagram, Vine and Twitter have become much more relevant than any 4chan board.
I remember people "trolling" on usenet back in the 90s. It was way more tame back then however. Usenet and even BBSs were frequently full of pretty horrid material (gore, child porn and the like) as well as predators hiding behind a terminal.
He alone didn't influence the culture. He just created a place with very few rules and let people do their thing. It was the users of 4chan who created and spread that culture.
TL;DR: It was stressing to have to deal with all the illegal or harmful (for victims) stuff posted on 4chan which people then got angry over that it got removed. Some hackers were looking for his personal information and posting it if they found. The site is also expensive with no profit model. And finally, if something actually did happen to him, there was nobody who could take over. This move put other people in charge. The fappening and gamergate incidents were the straw that broke the camel's back after the most stressful month yet.
I don't think you can't make money out of 4Chan. Give this website to Kim Dotcom and you have a few millions a month later. Also ad providers... there are certainly a lot of them who don't care about legal and serious traffic. Think about all the illegal things marketing departments do to get the ad to your browser and your data back. Reading this article I think moot was just too nice a person for what 4chan was.
My only question for Moot has always been this:
How did he host the site on a pc in his room for years without getting into trouble with the law with all the dubious content being uploaded to the server?
The article answers this question by saying that Moot has always fully cooperated with the law as far as possible, far beyond other social media sites. Just because users were anonymous never meant there was privacy.
The history of 4chan is always whitewashed/demonised depending on what point you want to make. Moot is not a saint and not the victim he's trying to paint himself to be.
As to 4chan itself, it's a message board - it's the people that used it that have done all these things and if 4chan goes away people will just move to 8chan or other places so all this agonising over whether or not to censor/shut it down is pointless.
The thing is that most people here will agree with you that its the posters responsibility what content they upload. But the law says otherwise, at least in my country and I guess in the US as well.
Still i prefer a place like 4chan where there is true freedom of speech and not a place like reddit ruled by facistic mods.
On HN you also can't really say many things cause it is moderated, I've experienced it many times that people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything.
"Freedom of speech" doesn't mean the power to not be moderated by an Internet forum, it means that you can speak your mind and your government can't arrest or censor you for it. If someone invites you into their home and you start calling their family names and pissing all over the carpet, the homeowner is well within her rights to throw you out and shut the door on you. Similarly, if you go onto an Internet forum that is owned by someone who is not you, they can moderate you into oblivion because it's their forum.
> On HN you also can't really say many things cause it is moderated, I've experienced it many times that people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything.
That is the community doing that, not the owners of HN, so I don't understand why you'd have a problem with it. You are free to post what you want here, and other users are free to up/down vote you, or reply to you, as they see fit. That is the very freedom you're crying for here, right?
I get it though: You want a fully unmoderated soap box to say whatever you want and don't want anyone to censor or moderate you. You're never going to get that using someone else's forum, so the solution is simple: Build your own! Buy a domain, learn to code or use a premade platform, launch a VPS or CoLo box, and post to your heart's content. If you are able to build an audience and get people to listen to you, great. If you choose not to censor or moderate your users, great. But I think your eyes will then be opened to exactly how difficult it is to maintain an Internet forum without some sort of rules and moderation.
Yet somehow the quality of the discussion/information is better in reddit and even moreso in heavily moderated subreddits such as r/askhistory or you know... simply on here.
Even on 4chan, amusingly, the best boards are the ones ruled most strictly.
Just the mere fact of people downvoting you for what you wrote validates what you've said:
I agree with you 100%. After reading so much social media which is designed to increase one's professional reputation, ego and social status like facebook and HN (as well as main stream news about celebrities and politicians), it's grounding and humanizing to go to a place like /b/ where you can't maintain a reputation. You can actually be honest and get an honest human response.
This was one of moot's main reasons for keeping it going. I chat there with suicidal people, people afraid to go to doctors, people abused and neglected by their parents, people trying drugs, people seeking spirituality, homosexuals from small towns, all afraid to speak up in public, their doctors, their schools.
I hate the racism there. The sexism is not great. I especially the deplore the animal torture. But even real-life socializing isn't as intimate and bold as anonymous socializing. And what people need to remember is that a .gif of a scumbag who rigged a clothesline to drown a dog every time it moves is just a picture. The disgusting act has already been done. Moreover, these images are evidence that bad things happen and we can feel justified in doing something about them in real-life instead of only acting on fear.
I need to look past all of that crap in order to have actual human connections I can't get in real life or online. And so do the people on the other end of my connections. Because mainstream social life has failed us.
When I said you can't maintain a reputation on /b/, though, there are some workarounds: People create labels for their groups like gamergate and anonymous that leak out into the rest of the world. There are plenty of those people who obviously aren't satisfied to have intimate, anonymous conversation and have bigger axes to grind. They wreck the environment and as the saying goes, "This is why we can't have nice things." I could see all of that being too damn much of a toll to take on moot, and I don't require of him that he maintain any particular ideals. I also heard other things, but who knows.
> people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything
Yes, especially on HN and reddit, voting is not used to eliminate spam and off-topic, but to indicate consensus values and idols. So even if you're right, if you don't validate the hivemind, you get downvoted. You could tell the world the Earth is round during the dark ages and get downvoted. If you're a recognizable name on HN, you instantly get upvoted. It's the same chickenshit conformity that creates the capitalistic hierarchy in mainstream social life.
Actually, everyone knows what happened, he got tired years ago paying hosting bills and supporting board, abandoned site, then SJW attacked and he broke down. That's that.
[+] [-] xyzzyz|10 years ago|reply
If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.
[+] [-] Kapura|10 years ago|reply
I also think that it's not quite true that 4chan hasn't changed during his tenure; as the population of certain boards have changed the nature and quality of their content has also seen a shift. /b/ once held that sweet spot of being able to generate and propagate large numbers of memes, but it has since grown much larger and appeals more to lowest common denominator type stuff. Meanwhile, smaller boards hit those critical population densities and begin to resemble /b/ of old.
[+] [-] breadbox|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khalilravanna|10 years ago|reply
> The article calls these "the good times", though.
Actually the "good times" quote is the author referring to moot's "Summer of Chris", or his time away from the site.
> The stuff highlighted in the article...is really mild compared to all the nasty stuff that happened before, like someone posting photos of girl they just murdered
From the article:
"Though Poole does find some 4chan posts 'reprehensible' — like when a murderer posted photos of his victim on the site..."
> If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.
I think the site did change over the years. And I think the article even tries to make this point. I think the idea is that the sort of fappening/gamergate stuff wasn't there in the beginning. While the site has always been full of tastelessness and cruelty, I think it was the acts like this that drew a lot of attention and forced moot to confront 4chan's users. And that confrontation created the conflict and stress that finally drove moot away from the site.
[+] [-] hluska|10 years ago|reply
As I see it, two things happened:
- I aged. I was in my mid-twenties when 4chan launched. Now, I'm in my late thirties. You won't understand how much the years 25 - 40 will change you until you've been through those years.
- The community's standards changed. Back in the day, unrestrained creativity was rewarded. The last time I was on /b/, unrestrained cruelty was rewarded. I can't picture Gamergate happening in ~ 2008...
---
The second point is likely a function of the first.
[+] [-] StavrosK|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exo762|10 years ago|reply
Huge amount of pressure from outside to censor "the cesspool"? He, himself, has become a attack target. Something goes wrong -> "need" to censor 4chan arises -> people exert pressure on Moot. Repeat and repeat. And its not really about 4chan - it was mostly about Moot: just too much for singe person to handle.
Nude pictures of celebs were not leaked by 4chan - it was leaked by 4chan user. 4chan was just a medium. Pics could be leaked anywhere with similar results (e.g. more attention to celebs in question). Harassment of game developers goes day and night on Tumblr, and nobody is doing anything about that. All other stuff you've mentioned are just things that happen in real life. Real life once again leaks to the Internet - stop the presses!
As for harassment: its the REAL PROBLEM. But 4chan is guilty no more that Internet in general. Harassment campaigns are happening all the time and even lack of anonymity is not preventing such behaviour. Tim Hunt and Matt Taylor were ripped apart by crowds at Twitter, Tumblr, main stream media publications. People were driven to suicide by harassment on Facebook (and those cases landed in courts).
There are shitty people who love being offended, being angry about some very subjective injustice; dignified agitation gives those people reason to breathe and makes them feel good. Internet brings those people together and helps them validate their own agitation and actions. Next they gang up. Its simple as that. Its a question of lack of empathy and echo-chambers enabling morons.
Solution so far is only one - more privacy, less social networks. Avoiding the danger. Keeping political, professional and personal stuff separated.
[+] [-] jordigh|10 years ago|reply
This one is mentioned in the article.
[+] [-] zxcvcxz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] worklogin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puranjay|10 years ago|reply
He needs more recognition for this. And for all the vile hatred on 4Chan, I also know it is a big source of support for a lot of people otherwise left behind by the mainstream
[+] [-] panic|10 years ago|reply
Seriously, though, internet culture is more than just /b/. The Something Awful forums (where 4chan was born, after all), Fark and YTMND contributed a lot. More recently, sites like Reddit, Instagram, Vine and Twitter have become much more relevant than any 4chan board.
[+] [-] rue|10 years ago|reply
That’s an… uh… bold claim.
[+] [-] werid|10 years ago|reply
do you think it's healthy to stay in an echo chamber for long periods of time?
[+] [-] mark_integerdsv|10 years ago|reply
I also very much enjoyed his thoughts on privacy/anonymity and the multi-faceted nature of human personalities.
You can find some quotes here: http://observer.com/2011/10/4chans-moot-facebook-and-google-...
Those concepts are more important in my opinion, to the gestating human identity that we will all be part of via technological evolution.
[+] [-] tootie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] typon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benihana|10 years ago|reply
He alone didn't influence the culture. He just created a place with very few rules and let people do their thing. It was the users of 4chan who created and spread that culture.
[+] [-] lucb1e|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saurik|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ablation|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ionwake|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chippy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bunderbunder|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justtopostthis2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jusssi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debacle|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lawl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Paul_S|10 years ago|reply
As to 4chan itself, it's a message board - it's the people that used it that have done all these things and if 4chan goes away people will just move to 8chan or other places so all this agonising over whether or not to censor/shut it down is pointless.
[+] [-] erikb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsf666|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] morganvachon|10 years ago|reply
> On HN you also can't really say many things cause it is moderated, I've experienced it many times that people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything.
That is the community doing that, not the owners of HN, so I don't understand why you'd have a problem with it. You are free to post what you want here, and other users are free to up/down vote you, or reply to you, as they see fit. That is the very freedom you're crying for here, right?
I get it though: You want a fully unmoderated soap box to say whatever you want and don't want anyone to censor or moderate you. You're never going to get that using someone else's forum, so the solution is simple: Build your own! Buy a domain, learn to code or use a premade platform, launch a VPS or CoLo box, and post to your heart's content. If you are able to build an audience and get people to listen to you, great. If you choose not to censor or moderate your users, great. But I think your eyes will then be opened to exactly how difficult it is to maintain an Internet forum without some sort of rules and moderation.
[+] [-] gbanfalvi|10 years ago|reply
Even on 4chan, amusingly, the best boards are the ones ruled most strictly.
[+] [-] mratzloff|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] t2015_08_25|10 years ago|reply
I agree with you 100%. After reading so much social media which is designed to increase one's professional reputation, ego and social status like facebook and HN (as well as main stream news about celebrities and politicians), it's grounding and humanizing to go to a place like /b/ where you can't maintain a reputation. You can actually be honest and get an honest human response.
This was one of moot's main reasons for keeping it going. I chat there with suicidal people, people afraid to go to doctors, people abused and neglected by their parents, people trying drugs, people seeking spirituality, homosexuals from small towns, all afraid to speak up in public, their doctors, their schools.
I hate the racism there. The sexism is not great. I especially the deplore the animal torture. But even real-life socializing isn't as intimate and bold as anonymous socializing. And what people need to remember is that a .gif of a scumbag who rigged a clothesline to drown a dog every time it moves is just a picture. The disgusting act has already been done. Moreover, these images are evidence that bad things happen and we can feel justified in doing something about them in real-life instead of only acting on fear.
I need to look past all of that crap in order to have actual human connections I can't get in real life or online. And so do the people on the other end of my connections. Because mainstream social life has failed us.
When I said you can't maintain a reputation on /b/, though, there are some workarounds: People create labels for their groups like gamergate and anonymous that leak out into the rest of the world. There are plenty of those people who obviously aren't satisfied to have intimate, anonymous conversation and have bigger axes to grind. They wreck the environment and as the saying goes, "This is why we can't have nice things." I could see all of that being too damn much of a toll to take on moot, and I don't require of him that he maintain any particular ideals. I also heard other things, but who knows.
> people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything
Yes, especially on HN and reddit, voting is not used to eliminate spam and off-topic, but to indicate consensus values and idols. So even if you're right, if you don't validate the hivemind, you get downvoted. You could tell the world the Earth is round during the dark ages and get downvoted. If you're a recognizable name on HN, you instantly get upvoted. It's the same chickenshit conformity that creates the capitalistic hierarchy in mainstream social life.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anon3_|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] phpnode|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Giorgi|10 years ago|reply