> 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.
I actually ran a chan: so I think I kind of understand, a little bit. The one I ran is small, chilled-out, and pretty social (well, for a chan). Those two particular storms didn't really wash upon our shores much. There were however still disagreements about moderation policies (we were far from perfect, but we tried to strike a balance between freedom of speech and not being a platform for arseholes). There was someone who had their own opinions about how the site should be run, up to and including trying (albeit failing) to dox me (!); the odd DDoS attack; and, spammers trying to advertise some really horrible stuff (which I expeditiously deleted and passed onto law enforcement - anti-spam on a chan which has a very low barrier to casual entry is quite a technical challenge).
I eventually decided I simply didn't have the time to continue running it myself; the legal risk is also highly significant (I'm in the UK…), and I'm quite happy that part is no longer my problem, and it all seems to have landed on its feet. I still post there sometimes.
It's very different culturally-speaking to other mediums, but there's considerable variation between different chans, and between different boards on a chan (especially with a huge one like 4chan). It's fascinating how much the medium shapes the culture of a discussion environment. 4chan's perception of anonymity is often relevant to the discourse, in that the removal of persistent identity is thought to remove ego (and karma-whoring) from the equation. I don't think the disinhibition of anonymity/psuedonymity is necessarily a negative thing overall; and yes, lots of other, more mainstream sites, even those with "real name" policies, have unwittingly been platforms for just as bad, and worse.
Managing a site with the size, activity, and sheer wildness of 4chan must have been quite a ride. I can't imagine the full scale, but I think I get part of the general picture, and I just don't know how moot handled it. I don't think even moot knows how he handled it! That part I get. One person can only do so much, and I appreciate his efforts.
You seem to be painting it as a choice between a libertarian free speech paradise and a totalitarian social justice hell, as if the problem was always and only in the offended.
> 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.
Those people are psychopaths, and they're actually not even offended - they're just pretending to be. They just enjoy playing games, fucking with people, causing frustration/anger/arguing/confusion, etc.
> 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.
According to the article, it wasn't so much attacks from outside to remove things that wore him down, as it was attacks from 4channers angry at removals.
"Single point of failure" means something very specific. System is told to have SPOF if there is a point, attacking which would cause disruption of operations. 4channers are ultimate benefactors of 4chan. Talking about SPOF in this context does not make much sense.
4channers were angry because moot has replaced all of moderators, totally changing moderation policies on the website. Their ability to pressure moot were and are limited to voting with legs (8chat) and bitching on boards.
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.