For me, the most eye opening connection to humanity:
> Through our investigation of /b/, we hope to contribute to scholarly conversations about data permanence. For example, Grudin (2002) suggests that we evolved to live in an ephemeral world, yet our technology takes us from the “here and now” to the “everywhere and forever.” Similarly, Mayer-Schonberger (2009) emphasizes the value of “societal forgetting,” where “the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten.”
As a long time 4channer, there's some "naturalness" I feel in the off-the-cuff discussions on the site where I know my stupidity won't be saved forever. The ephemerality taps into FOMO, requiring that you be there for a thread event that is unfolding, and that is addicting to some.
As another person who spent a long time on there, I now feel like the opposite effect ends up happening.
Sure, it's anonymous. But the short-term nature means that the prime objective when posting something is to get replies. So you get some troll bait or other things sure to get replies.
Everyone else is doing the same, so you develop a vocabulary based primarily around saying and responding to memes.
If the communication were natural, why is 80% of it memes?
Because of the FOMO, you get an effect similar to many MMOs. In order to participate, you must spend a lot of time on the image board, on IRC, making sure that you're doing your thing.
So you end up with a bunch of people who spend their (usually teenage) lives online absorbing as much image board culture as possible to "get good" at it. It's the ultimate clique. Everyone wants to be part of the secret club (sometimes quite literal: the IRC channels like #/v/ would spend their time creating private sub-channels to have "real talk").
I know on some of the lower-traffic boards you'll find some "real talk" happening, but even then it's usually layered underneath snarky "contrarian trueisms".
It's the ultimate secret club for people who think they get the internet, and gets pretty close to a religion. Remember: don't say you came from reddit.
This is definitely a lot of what goes on today. Despite the anonymity, there's a metagaming, social signalling aspect that comes from adhering to the tropes and catchphrases, being mean to newbies, displaying the mandatory -isms, playing up the bravado and machismo of a veteran, or for maximum trolling, roleplaying different people in sockpuppetry. I'd love a study that explores these motivations, of getting nameless credit and validation solely in one's own mind.
In fact, in response, a different board, /s4s/ "shit 4chan says", was created to absorb some of this deliberate behavior. Despite that, /b/ is considerably more meta than it used to be, but most of it is due to market segmentation: there are specific sub-boards with their own distinct cultures that differ from those on /b/ and manage to be useful for information exchange. Posting on /b/ is very much a conscious choice on part of the author, and comes with all the risks and rewards: perhaps your content will be appreciated, perhaps it will be ridiculed. Perhaps you're inflaming actual people's passions, or perhaps you're being fooled.
> Sure, it's anonymous. But the short-term nature means that the prime objective when posting something is to get replies. So you get some troll bait or other things sure to get replies.
This can be traced to updates to 4chan's post linking system that highlight replies to your post with a (You). Like upvotes, (You)s are a feedback signal of attention.
I'm certain it goes back much further than that. Replace that feedback with the feedback of bumping up threads - it's the same thing, only slightly less convenient.
>I feel in the off-the-cuff discussions on the site where I know my stupidity won't be saved forever.
Meanwhile on HN, regret goes from actionable to permanent in two hours.
Personally I think we should be able to kill one old post with no replies every 500 or 1000 karma. For old posts with replies, maybe just allow an append-only edit so it's possible to create little notes such as: "Hi! Please disregard; I can't believe I wrote this trash either."
One way to work around this is to not cling to a permanent pseudonyms identity, and instead drop and recreate them occasionally. No one will care if you said a stupid thing for very long if you never build up an identity.
Obviously, that doesn't work very well if you're some kind of celebrity wishing to make a statement or want to build up e-friends over time.
Could you clarify what are you getting at when you say "actionable to permanent in two hours"?
A few of the things I like about HN is are:
* there are experts in many fields lurking that sometimes jump in on discussions and offer valuable opinions
* the site rules, moderation, and downvotes encourage people to think before they write and have respectful discussions - I notice a lot of people bring their A-game here when they comment
I'm always so surprised when users edit their comment to complain that they are accumulating downvotes. Karma is just a counter that got decremented a bunch of times. It says that people did not like what you wrote - process the feedback, move on, and try to do better next time!
I've found that when I have an opinion I know others will consider odious, if I'm gentle with my approach and give some rationale, I don't get too harshly downvoted. A handful of "I DISAGREE, JERK" downvotes never hurt anyone.
I don't think they meant editing to complain about downvotes, but rather editing to disavow or delete a comment you wish you hadn't made (usually days or weeks later). I have lots of old comments that I find embarrassing now.
>As a long time 4channer, there's some "naturalness" I feel in the off-the-cuff discussions on the site where I know my stupidity won't be saved forever.
Not sure how true that is anymore these days, with the existence of so many third-party 4chan archive websites. Although your stupidity probably still won't be easily linked to your identity, so there's that.
Even with the archive websites, the sheer volume of posts means that any single one is likely to be forgotten unless it's particularly kek-worthy. Plus as you mentioned it's still disentangled from your identity and other posts (though I recall a report somewhere on de-anonamyzing 4chan users through semantic analysis)
The archives are so vast that the data in them becomes mostly meaningless; the only point in reading them is to either check out threads that happened recently, or look at legendary posts (which would've been screencapped anyways)
I like 4chan because it is as close to a meritocracy as exists online. There are no "reputations" or "karma", your ideas and opinions stand on their own merit. It's one of the last bastions of free speech and anonymity that exists.
> It's one of the last bastions of free speech and anonymity that exists.
Well... for certain definitions of free speech and anonymity. Let's not forget that people have left 4chan because they didn't consider it nearly free enough.
>Let's not forget that people have left 4chan because they didn't consider it nearly free enough.
People come and go from 4chan constantly, yet it remains. I've posted there since it was launched in 2004 and seen many different waves of new users in that time. The moderators have always held a strict line of no illegal pornography, but essentially anything else is allowed. There's really no other large internet community that is so laissez faire in it's limitations on free speech.
Why always /b/, though? I get that it's the most popular board, but its culture is so different from the rest of 4chan that it might as well be its own website.
I'd like to see an analysis of multiple boards, comparing culture differences between them and why they're so different between being on the same website with a lot of crossover. Someone here (I assume jokingly) suggested analyzing /jp/, but I feel as if there's actually a lot that can be learned from studying the jay.
/b/ is still the most infamous board, nearly a decade after one Fox affiliate station called it the "Internet Hate Machine" in response to its antics. Even though the days of "old /b/" have long past, its memes live on.
The election certainly brought more attention to /pol/ in recent months, given time we'll all be grumbling about how all the other boards are ignored.
Since I'm a long time /fit shitposter and lurker when I read that list of acronyms I laughed a bit, but then it dawned on me "that's a pretty good bunch of definitions, but still it doesn't really truly convey the whole meaning of the words". You actually have to experience those things to completely "get" the meaning of some of those words.
This makes me sad because one of my other hobbies is classical literature and I don't think I will ever properly understand Plato either no matter how well I read the definition of an Attic Greek word or see it appear in 10 different contexts. Something is irretrievably missing and unconveyable. I find the same problem when I try and translate words from my second language to English.
The conclusion section illustrated, indeed, nothing of value was learned. From a dataset of 2 the conclusion is that they are different for each context.
> Through our investigation of /b/, we hope to contribute to scholarly conversations about data permanence. For example, Grudin (2002) suggests that we evolved to live in an ephemeral world, yet our technology takes us from the “here and now” to the “everywhere and forever.” Similarly, Mayer-Schonberger (2009) emphasizes the value of “societal forgetting,” where “the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten.”
As a long time 4channer, there's some "naturalness" I feel in the off-the-cuff discussions on the site where I know my stupidity won't be saved forever. The ephemerality taps into FOMO, requiring that you be there for a thread event that is unfolding, and that is addicting to some.