It's rather disappointing that the authors didn't talk about the biggest thing that has reshaped discussion in 4chan since years.
The reply indicator.
For people who don't go to 4chan, you can read it on http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-here-s-your-you. Basically, if someone else replied to your post, the post pointer will show a (You) word, showing that the poster replied to a post that you wrote.
Moreover, the post number of posts that replied/quoted you will be attached to your own posts. Much-replied post will have a lot of link to the posts that replied them, and very visible when you skip through the thread.
This one simple feature has changed 4chan. Before, posts are similar and anonymous since they don't have visual distinction between each other. You have to actually read their content to know what's inside. The reply indicator make controversial posts very visible and "famous" in the thread.
Much like Reddit's voting system and Facebook likes or Twitter's retweets/favorites, 4chan now has its own post rating system. The difference is that Facebook likes and Reddit's vote system rewards popular posts that people agree with and liked. 4chan's "rating system" rewards controversial posts that people rebuke or laugh at.
The presence of this reply indicator make people try to post controversial contents, and to be controversial by 4chan standards, your post have to be very, very controversial.
I speculate that the ban on raids had a much bigger impact. Before that they were used for all kinds of things, mostly to cause mischief, occasionally even for a good purpose, e.g. op chanology. So this might have tied up and channeled a lot of the mischievous energy of the more active users. Now that it's banned we get more informal, less organized hit-and-run harassment.
Posts linking their replies in the header has been a feature for a very, very long time. This doesn't have the negative impact you think it does. It's not a post rating system, and only trolls and candyasses pay attention to the number of replies on your post.
There isn't any kind of long-term karma game like on other sites. 4chan is still content-heavy and shit posts are still looked down upon by the larger community. It may not seem that way, but the stupidest people are often the loudest.
No, it's disappointing that 4ch is getting any attention, because attention has always been the cancer that is killing X. I suppose network effects can also work against you...
This sentence -- not to mention the rare pepe collection at the end -- made me pause a bit and wonder if the paper isn't a particularly elaborate chan troll. Clearly "rare pepe" is a chan in-joke.
Remember that arXiv is just pre-print and the last page if not the entire paper is probably nothing more than a lame/distasteful joke. Remember that any nutbag who knows a little English and LaTeX can publish on arXiv. It will likely not make it into a journal.
I've been really surprised how influential /pol/ has been this election, which has been really weird and a little scary. It's not uncommon to post something on 4chan stating that you have inside information on events that are going to happen over the next few days (which is fiction 99.9% of the time). Posts like this in /pol/ have been getting screenshotted and spread elsewhere on the web, where alt-right conspiracy nuts are latching on to them.
I've tried explaining to a few people that it's 4chan and you can't take it seriously, but they're convinced that these posts are real.
"/pol/ is winning because it's funnier than the people that despise it, it's that simple. Being authoritarian isn't funny. Tumblr, leddit, they're funny like a commercial is funny, they can be clever, they can be witty, but they'll never be gut-laugh, -holy shit- funny, because they never confront anything they're not supposed to, they never color outside the lines. They talk like they're resisting something, but all they do is agree with each other. They slay the sacred cows they've been conditioned to hate, and they ignore the elephants in the room they're conditioned not to see, and they'll always be like that because they're clever, educated pussies.
/pol/ is full of angry racist conspiracy theorists, but it's fucking hilarious. /pol/ might not always tell you the truth, but it will tell you the closest thing to an honest truth it can see, and it will laugh at you for being offended by it. The fact that /pol/ is starting to influence 4chan in general means that the sacred cows we're slaying are actually sacred, and people are laughing in spite of themselves. It's stupid and weird and it's too simplistic and old-fashioned to be true, but you're laughing anyways.
Indeed a couple of posts made in the last few months have been prescient of serious and highly secretive information. The motivation behind such posters is likely explained below.
I think what a lot of people don't get about /pol/'s influence in the last year is it's mechanism. It is easy to browse the site as an outsider and think it is just shitposting 9000, with no real influence outside. However /pol/ unconsciously and without formal direction has an extremely effective strategy for disseminating information.
Once the essence of some information has been distilled users start disseminating it to the 'normies' via Reddit and Twitter. Twitter is where the real influence comes as they inevitably target journalists in large numbers. As most know, journalists and politicians are extremely engaged in Twitter. Stories frequently then cross the barrier into the mainstream.
Targeting of journalists and politicians, largely but not always via Twitter, is where most of the huge power is derived. People targeted don't necessarily have the internet experience to realise when these things are directed. A lot of what most of them see is a flurry of regular public concern which needs to be addressed.
When a story from /pol/ reaches the mainstream, it goes into a glorious frenzy. It is a powerful feeling when something you have created/discovered and disseminated in a 4chan thread becomes international news because of the boards collective action.
Summarised: when a very large group of people with political leanings on a story/topic informally organise, the effort can take the view mainstream. important to note is the demographic includes a diverse group of users who are highly skilled in programming, social media and politics.
edit: If I was a highly placed politician and wanted to disseminate secret information without attribution, I would run it through the tumbler that is 4chan.
/pol/ uncovered the Paul Combetta posts on Reddit. So it's not all bullshit. Its crazy that they had enough of an effect to get the head of the FBI grilled by a house committee.
It's fascinating to see how feasible it is to get something — anything — recognized as fact or actual trend by employing social media and excitable media. The 'bikini bridge' phenomenon comes to mind.
Can someone explain to me why they keep focussing on 4chan and not 'chans' in general? AFAIK 8chan's /pol/ has had a bigger impact this time around because they censor less. (Not censoring doxx information and such)
Most average people don't even know what a 'chan' is or even know what 4chan is all about, except for the times it gets demonized by the media. And it becomes just associated with something sensational and negative.
The higher ideal: the philosophical context of freedom through anonymity resulting in great creativity is completely drowned out by the petty stuff.
There's a reason it creates a major portion of culture,memes, and ideas on the internet. It's one of the few places unimpenged by materialism or status or th ability of your boss to find your account. This means every one is simply judged by what ideas they create and I think thats a beautiful thing.
All the chans have pretty different culture. For example, 8chan seems to have a higher rate of reddit cross-posting. Lainchan, as another example, is meant to be closer to older 4chan culture and has very few users who are "new" to chans.
If you are a researcher looking for a 4chan dataset spanning a much longer time period and many different boards, I would recommend looking into the archive.moe database dump[0] that was uploaded to the Internet Archive after the owner decided to stop his activities.
I was recently working on a project to identify pepes in images and dumped a bunch of images from the /r9k/ archive using the 4chan API.
If you are a researcher looking for a 4chan dataset for supervised learning, be aware that labeling the images is not a task for the faint of heart.
When you browse an image board, you will have an implicit image filter: you will probably only open threads that interest you and that have been alive for a while. That does not hold for an image dump of all threads.
Some of the replies to the thread show mistakes in the paper.
For example, Zimbabwe is marked as very active and very hateful. But it's probably just people with a VPN: doing that to get a "controversial" or "funny" country flag is a thing.
Two people collected the data, two did the analysis and wrote the paper, three helped a bit, one got the grant which funded the lab. Or something similar.
The incentives for giving credit to everyone who participated even a bit are quite strong: in most academic disciplines you get more than an eighth of a paper's worth of 'credit' for an eight-author paper.
From my experiences in astrophysics: Second author is supervisor, third, fourth, etc. are previous collaborators of supervisor that somehow have some 'moral' claim to supervisor's work because it remotely thematically touches upon previous work they did, and thus have provided 'inspiration' for the current work. It's a racket ;)
It's quite popular in the NGO/SJW world to do informal "manus manum lavat" deals to gain credibility: you help us with our current campaign, we put your name on our future publications.
Figure 15 with heat map of hate speech per post puts India, Pakistan, Thailand, Belarus, Zimbabwe, and South Korea as the leaders of the pack. In my limited experience on /pol, this paints a very misleading picture. I hardly ever see people from these countries posting there. (See Figure 4.) They can't just leave the figure as-is, without further explanation.
The posters on 4chan (see dogma1138's post) are as surprised as I am that India features at all. To the contrary, India is commonly the target of scatological jokes.
Although they acknowledge the use of VPN, they might be downplaying its usage. Without making an effort to disambiguate that (with assistance from 4chan admins) I don't see the point of making charts based on countries. If not disambiguate, discarding posts by Tor and VPN users is easy enough.
I can't help but agree with the poster who wrote:
>>Although it is a bit absurd, /pol/ has, some
>>how, managed to place itself at the center of >world politics.
If you are in the US, keep in mind that those countries are in distant timezones. Because 4chan threads are so ephemeral, they could have entire threads to themselves while you are asleep and you wouldn't notice.
"Hate" is really not the right word in this context, as a lot of them are thrown around casually. Not necessarily due to deep-seated hatred but simply because it is not politically correct to use the words. To gain a sense of being contrarian to the mainstream, to titillate, to watch the reactions of those offended.
For example the "-fag" suffix is applied to everything and practically synonymous with "-person". A namefag is someone who uses a username instead of remaining anonymous. A drawfag is someone who creates original art, it has a positive connotation.
Even when discussing unfair monetary things the term kikes (jews) might be thrown around, just due to the historic association of jews with banking. Even users who present left-leaning positions (e.g. on renewable energy, healthcare or defense spending) use those terms because the associated concepts are ingrained in the conversation structure.
I don't know about /pol/, but other boards use "my nigger" or humorous variations thereof as an expression of endorsement
Use of the words might correlate with the sentiment of the user, but the correlation may be weaker than expected.
I don't like to be mean but I honestly don't see /pol/ has a big influence in the election or politics like some commentors have stated. First, most of the action /pol/ does outside of their board is mostly on Twitter and various open polls. I've never seen /pol/ do anything close to real life action. Not a single event or protest IRL. Not even a letter writing campaign. Just posting image macros. It's all in good fun I'm sure, but they're not going to change the opinions of voter blocs with Rare Pepes that's for sure.
Whilst I appreciate 4chan was the original chan that started all the other chans off, people often forget the alternatives. A common complaint of the alternative chans is that 4chan has become too conservative and is too heavily moderated. Does anyone agree?
To be fair, /pol/ is one of the best places to get happening news (Information about terror attacks that would otherwise be censored by mass media, information from the Syria conflict etc)
There is a lot of shilling and a lot of trolling... It seems to me that /pol/ posts has become >50% shitposting from trolls and shills and less political discussion.
The real influx of users into pol started with the european refugee crisis, not the presidential elections.
Every board in 4chan has it's amount of shitposting. One thing you start developing, as a user, is an semiconscious filter and ways to process the information.
A *chan site has many layers a user must go through to finally fing a decent discussion (or the epic lulz). You have an outdated confusing UI, the sheer amount of useless content, the lingo and the highly offensive content.
After you learn to process and filter all that, you start finding the really good stuff. Or, as I like to say, "Gold floats on shit. You just have to be brave and reach it"
If you look at the remnants of the earlier chans (created between 1 and 3 years after 4chan) which never really gained much momentum, you'll see that they had a much different culture at the time. In a way I wish we could return to this idea of the "small chan", as a way of escaping the grinding politics and hate culture that's on some boards (like /pol/) which tends to leak over (jokingly or not) to the other boards.
[+] [-] ivarious|9 years ago|reply
The reply indicator.
For people who don't go to 4chan, you can read it on http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-here-s-your-you. Basically, if someone else replied to your post, the post pointer will show a (You) word, showing that the poster replied to a post that you wrote.
Moreover, the post number of posts that replied/quoted you will be attached to your own posts. Much-replied post will have a lot of link to the posts that replied them, and very visible when you skip through the thread.
This one simple feature has changed 4chan. Before, posts are similar and anonymous since they don't have visual distinction between each other. You have to actually read their content to know what's inside. The reply indicator make controversial posts very visible and "famous" in the thread.
Much like Reddit's voting system and Facebook likes or Twitter's retweets/favorites, 4chan now has its own post rating system. The difference is that Facebook likes and Reddit's vote system rewards popular posts that people agree with and liked. 4chan's "rating system" rewards controversial posts that people rebuke or laugh at.
The presence of this reply indicator make people try to post controversial contents, and to be controversial by 4chan standards, your post have to be very, very controversial.
[+] [-] the8472|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kakarot|9 years ago|reply
There isn't any kind of long-term karma game like on other sites. 4chan is still content-heavy and shit posts are still looked down upon by the larger community. It may not seem that way, but the stupidest people are often the loudest.
[+] [-] flgr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelGG|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RGamma|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dogma1138|9 years ago|reply
Things that you have never thought would appear on a bonafide research paper for 800$.
EDIT: 4Chan thread regarding this paper, this is worth the read on it's own. http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/92612923/a-longitudinal-m...
[+] [-] mafribe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loeber|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hacker42|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmcgough|9 years ago|reply
I've tried explaining to a few people that it's 4chan and you can't take it seriously, but they're convinced that these posts are real.
[+] [-] Tsugumo|9 years ago|reply
"/pol/ is winning because it's funnier than the people that despise it, it's that simple. Being authoritarian isn't funny. Tumblr, leddit, they're funny like a commercial is funny, they can be clever, they can be witty, but they'll never be gut-laugh, -holy shit- funny, because they never confront anything they're not supposed to, they never color outside the lines. They talk like they're resisting something, but all they do is agree with each other. They slay the sacred cows they've been conditioned to hate, and they ignore the elephants in the room they're conditioned not to see, and they'll always be like that because they're clever, educated pussies.
/pol/ is full of angry racist conspiracy theorists, but it's fucking hilarious. /pol/ might not always tell you the truth, but it will tell you the closest thing to an honest truth it can see, and it will laugh at you for being offended by it. The fact that /pol/ is starting to influence 4chan in general means that the sacred cows we're slaying are actually sacred, and people are laughing in spite of themselves. It's stupid and weird and it's too simplistic and old-fashioned to be true, but you're laughing anyways.
That's how it begins."
[+] [-] alva|9 years ago|reply
I think what a lot of people don't get about /pol/'s influence in the last year is it's mechanism. It is easy to browse the site as an outsider and think it is just shitposting 9000, with no real influence outside. However /pol/ unconsciously and without formal direction has an extremely effective strategy for disseminating information.
Once the essence of some information has been distilled users start disseminating it to the 'normies' via Reddit and Twitter. Twitter is where the real influence comes as they inevitably target journalists in large numbers. As most know, journalists and politicians are extremely engaged in Twitter. Stories frequently then cross the barrier into the mainstream.
Targeting of journalists and politicians, largely but not always via Twitter, is where most of the huge power is derived. People targeted don't necessarily have the internet experience to realise when these things are directed. A lot of what most of them see is a flurry of regular public concern which needs to be addressed.
When a story from /pol/ reaches the mainstream, it goes into a glorious frenzy. It is a powerful feeling when something you have created/discovered and disseminated in a 4chan thread becomes international news because of the boards collective action.
Summarised: when a very large group of people with political leanings on a story/topic informally organise, the effort can take the view mainstream. important to note is the demographic includes a diverse group of users who are highly skilled in programming, social media and politics.
edit: If I was a highly placed politician and wanted to disseminate secret information without attribution, I would run it through the tumbler that is 4chan.
[+] [-] colordrops|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Freak_NL|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awesomerobot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NietTim|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickthemagicman|9 years ago|reply
The higher ideal: the philosophical context of freedom through anonymity resulting in great creativity is completely drowned out by the petty stuff.
There's a reason it creates a major portion of culture,memes, and ideas on the internet. It's one of the few places unimpenged by materialism or status or th ability of your boss to find your account. This means every one is simply judged by what ideas they create and I think thats a beautiful thing.
[+] [-] nv-vn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hex12648430|9 years ago|reply
[0]: https://archive.org/download/archive-moe-database-201506
[+] [-] JD557|9 years ago|reply
If you are a researcher looking for a 4chan dataset for supervised learning, be aware that labeling the images is not a task for the faint of heart.
When you browse an image board, you will have an implicit image filter: you will probably only open threads that interest you and that have been alive for a while. That does not hold for an image dump of all threads.
[+] [-] sparkling|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrwaway656|9 years ago|reply
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/92760043/
[+] [-] rhaps0dy|9 years ago|reply
For example, Zimbabwe is marked as very active and very hateful. But it's probably just people with a VPN: doing that to get a "controversial" or "funny" country flag is a thing.
[+] [-] kyrre|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Balgair|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fingar|9 years ago|reply
They included their funding bodies because it is required by their funding agreement.
[+] [-] trevelyan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmyteh|9 years ago|reply
The incentives for giving credit to everyone who participated even a bit are quite strong: in most academic disciplines you get more than an eighth of a paper's worth of 'credit' for an eight-author paper.
[+] [-] egjerlow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Millennium|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mafribe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contergan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackcosgrove|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lake99|9 years ago|reply
The posters on 4chan (see dogma1138's post) are as surprised as I am that India features at all. To the contrary, India is commonly the target of scatological jokes.
Although they acknowledge the use of VPN, they might be downplaying its usage. Without making an effort to disambiguate that (with assistance from 4chan admins) I don't see the point of making charts based on countries. If not disambiguate, discarding posts by Tor and VPN users is easy enough.
I can't help but agree with the poster who wrote:
>>Although it is a bit absurd, /pol/ has, some
>>how, managed to place itself at the center of >world politics.
> i can't continue reading this, this is insane.
[+] [-] saint_fiasco|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NotaSockPuppet8|9 years ago|reply
For example the "-fag" suffix is applied to everything and practically synonymous with "-person". A namefag is someone who uses a username instead of remaining anonymous. A drawfag is someone who creates original art, it has a positive connotation.
Even when discussing unfair monetary things the term kikes (jews) might be thrown around, just due to the historic association of jews with banking. Even users who present left-leaning positions (e.g. on renewable energy, healthcare or defense spending) use those terms because the associated concepts are ingrained in the conversation structure.
I don't know about /pol/, but other boards use "my nigger" or humorous variations thereof as an expression of endorsement
Use of the words might correlate with the sentiment of the user, but the correlation may be weaker than expected.
[+] [-] norea-armozel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerognowl|9 years ago|reply
https://8ch.net/pol/index.html
And for more chans, look no further than:
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/List_of_chans
Whilst I appreciate 4chan was the original chan that started all the other chans off, people often forget the alternatives. A common complaint of the alternative chans is that 4chan has become too conservative and is too heavily moderated. Does anyone agree?
[+] [-] denzil_correa|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EJTH|9 years ago|reply
There is a lot of shilling and a lot of trolling... It seems to me that /pol/ posts has become >50% shitposting from trolls and shills and less political discussion.
The real influx of users into pol started with the european refugee crisis, not the presidential elections.
[+] [-] Vaskivo|9 years ago|reply
A *chan site has many layers a user must go through to finally fing a decent discussion (or the epic lulz). You have an outdated confusing UI, the sheer amount of useless content, the lingo and the highly offensive content.
After you learn to process and filter all that, you start finding the really good stuff. Or, as I like to say, "Gold floats on shit. You just have to be brave and reach it"
[+] [-] Senji|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ue_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZoF|9 years ago|reply
I have very little faith that this won't be used to censor free speech in the not-so-distant future.
[+] [-] typon|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] acqq|9 years ago|reply