10% of people posting is actually exactly what you should expect in a thriving community. Several studies of web communities have confirmed the "90:9:1" ratio of Lurkers:Contributors:Creators. Lurkers just read. Contributors will respond. Creators will initiate.
See the wikipedia article at [1] but there are also (I think) several old USENET studies and corporate email list studies which confirm this that I didn't notice in the footnotes of wikipedia.
For some reason I've placed him in this completely parallel place in my mind to the tech community. He's like a mythical creature of some secret world of my childhood with untold powers.
But now that I'm older and am making a career out of coding websites, I look at 4chan as something that I could feasibly create. I've seen the man behind the curtain o_O
Same, but I'm ok with it. I haven't been on 4chan in years, but I still love it and everything that it built/made in internet culture (well - maybe not EVERYTHING). It's good that the community would be sure to vote up the very most important posts IRT it, because I wouldn't find them any other way.
/d/ can be a pretty nice community considering the focus. I don't know if I can put into words the effect it had on me, but in retrospect it seems to have been mostly positive.
Thanks for running the site for so long, moot. It's great fun.
/u/'s always been a pretty nice community too, and is unlikely to offend anyone except social conservatives. (/y/, on the other hand, has always been fairly hostile. Don't ask me why.)
No problem. I'm in my 50's. I didn't see my first porno until I was 19 at a drive-in. I didn't see my first super-gore picture until I was in my 30's. It seems very weird to me that kids see all this at a very young age. Now Hentai is another weird thing to me. I do know humans are adaptable, but don't know in what way kids have adapted to it. My poor father, he heard Jimmy Fallon mention 2 girls 1 cup so he looked it up. He was visibly shaken when he told me about it. I have managed to avoid that one.
If nothing else, I suspect children of the Internet generation have learned not to blindly Google things they heard about from their friends. So perhaps a bit of wisdom is trickling down :-)
That's true. The last time I made that mistake was many years ago with goatse. I also laerned to check links that might be cleverly disguised. Would that they were all as innocent as rick rolls. If I really want to be safe, I open a link up and only look at it with my peripheral vision. It works surprisingly well to classify something as bad without actually taking it all in.
There is this pretty cool research project at Stanford (it's headed by Andrew Ng of the Coursera fame) that uses NLP and machine learning to detect content that the user might prefer not to see. It's still pretty rough around the edges but this demo is pretty cool.
I actually really like that song, maybe because I came of age in the 80's. The funniest thing about it is that Rick Astley seems pissed. He should lighten up because nobody remembered anything about him before rick roll and now he's a household name.
This was from an interview a few years back. It could have been because he wasn't making any money from it. I haven't kept up, but glad he's embraced it.
Astley participated in a rickrolling himself, at the Macy's Thanksgiving parade a few years ago. He popped out of a float in the middle of another musical performance and started singing Never Gonna Give You Up. It was a staged stunt, with a canned background track ready to go, and the TV announcers obviously feigning surprise.
I've thought about something like applying a threshold filter to thumbnails to distort them sufficiently so they're not potentially "offensive" but have it still be apparent if they might contain bad content. It's too difficult a problem for me to actually implement though, and I suspect it could be easily hacked somehow.
I don't know if there is a service to rate images. Google seems to have the best technology. It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to programmatically upload an image using an api and get a rating back. This might be a way to curtail teen sexting, which is against the law. A parent could for example, admin a setting to change nudie selfies to a Sesame Street character on their way out. Or maybe better yet, process any photographs taken with the cell phone at the time they are taken and make all nudie images turn into Sesame Street characters ;-)
I don't know if anyone's actually doing it either. I could see Google having the power to pull it off. Though i'm not entirely sure given the current climate of paranoia I'd necessarily want Google keeping track of knowing exactly what and how much inappropriate material can be (even tangentially or erroneously) associated with me. A third party application would be nice but I think it would need to be anonymous - a concept Google seems dead set against.
Why not! This post is about moderating a very large and very complex forum, which can be interesting to anyone who participates in forums, or anyone interested in social software and online communities.
I'll attempt to explain some of the jargon.
The part about "proud to call ourselves /v/irgins and /k/ommandos" refers to the nicknames that people on various boards (topic-specific forums within 4chan) have invented to call themselves, as a kind of in-joke. For example, "/v/" is shorthand for the video games board (because its URL is http://boards.4chan.org/v/), so people on the board extend that and call themselves "/v/irgins" (because that's much more amusing than "/v/ideogamers").
When he says "sage is now invisible", "sage" means the feature that lets you write a comment that doesn't bump that thread to the top of the board. People use "sage" in order to write comments like "this post is terrible" without promoting that post. See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sage or http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sage for more explanation.
"/q/ will be retired and replaced" - this was a board that moot had set up for talking about 4chan itself (asking him questions, providing feedback, etc).
"Post timers" prevent you from writing tons of comments in rapid sequence, which is usually spammy/abusive behavior.
There is a list of global rules, as well as some board-specific rules [1]. Generally boards just require you to stay on-topic (unless you're on /b/, where the only off-topic thing is ponies, which is the only on-topic thing on /mlp/), refrain from spam, and not post anything that could get 4chan in legal trouble. Rule offenses result in IP bans, usually for a certain time (from a day to month to forever).
All of the boards have mods of various rankings (people who delete off-topic posts vs people who actually ban/temp-ban users) and various degrees of moderation. According to the post (and agreeing with my personal experience) moderation has generally been on the rise as of late, although apparently this is due to better moderation tools rather than an increase in moderators.
Prior to the new ban-list, most moderation (I've seen anyway) is pretty quiet, save from the infamous USER HAS BEEN BANNED FOR THIS POST that you sometimes see.
The post is interesting but it's fundamentally about 4chan culture (and I'd say there have been more important changes in the past). I don't think it will make sense without being at least a little familiar with that culture - you'd be better off visiting the actual boards and getting a feel for the place first.
Then how about adjusting the cooldowns back to how they were? 4chan is still supposed to be a collection of imageboards, and the new cooldowns make image posting extremely time-consuming with large amounts of images (which can be very much on-topic and valued content). Shitposters are not suddenly going to stop shitposting just because they have to wait longer between posts, so ultimately this just seems to make life for legitimate posters worse.
