It's worth mentioning that nearly every board on 8chan IS moderated, by the board owners. Its exactly the same as the Reddit model, paid admins only enforce the few site wide rules and board owners are left to moderate their boards however they see fit. That might be heavy or light moderation, but if people are upset with the moderation style they just make another board.
Have you ever tried to seek treatment for depression? I and others I know have found it incredibly hard to get any sort of treatment other than the SSRI at the top of their list.
4chan partially solved this problem by using inside knowledge to identify 'newf*gs' and push them out. Triforce, fingerboxes, etc. The weirdly complex boardculture was self sustaining because new people couldn't even keep up with the conversation without lurking for a year or so.
And then of course, the newcomers started taking the abrasive and politically incorrect culture at face value.
4chan has largely been a place where people can express counter-culture views. Whoever and whatever could not be criticized in public, that was the place to do it it.
The left is currently unable to directly admit to themselves that they are in power (they teeter on awareness of it: where once they were concerned about tone-policing and voices being silenced they now say things like "deplatforming works") in the universities, the news, the entertainment media, and so on. And so 4chan (although largely /b/ and /pol/) is the place where you can tweak the noses of the left just as it was once the place to tweak the noses of the Scientologists, the right, and so on. Should the pendulum actually swing the other way, you would see the shift.
My archives of the chans dates from 2005 onward. You can see the expression of what was "naughty" shift one way or another tacking into any political or cultural wind.
In any case, 4chan's "solution" has been to simply embrace the idea of Eternal September and say, "it's up to YOU to ignore things you do not like." Having watched various communities succumb to stifling moderation like HOAs descending into controlling nightmares, I would say that there's a very crude wisdom to the approach.
"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."
4chan was started by people too awful for Something Awful, and I mean you're self-aware enough to recognise that they used slurs to scare people off, so you _know_ it was always a horrible place.
My impression is that 4chan did a Mother Night on itself. They started with ironic Hitler memes and edgy teenage shit, but eventually people took that seriously and all that were left were edgelords and nazis.
I know it's comforting to believe that there were never any real racists on 4chan until relatively recently, and that it was all naive shitposters and kids making edgy memes, but it's far more likely that actual racists have always hidden behind the pretense of 4chan's ironic culture and anonymity, and have always been active there.
In the olden days you could read between the lines to see people mocking the very culture their post was supposedly glorifying. Later this nuance disappeared as the board was overrun with actual Neo-Nazis.
The folklore was that the neo-nazi forum Stormfront saw an opportunity and started astroturfing legit Nazi views on boards like /new/, causing this transition (and thus changing the course of western politics for years to come).
I never looked deeply into it, but I don't think the transition happened entirely naturally.
I recently split a restaurant bill with 7 other early-twenty-somethings. I think 5 of us had Monzo (making things much easier). They have been immensely successful among the younger demographic. Monzo have been doing a lot of advertising on public transport in my city (can't speak about online ads because I don't see them).
I know one person who uses N26 but he's from Germany, where I believe it's a lot more popular.
Starling, Monzo, Revolut and N26 seem to basically be at feature parity with each other and their apps are incredibly similar.
Not for me; it just tries to show me Joe Rogaine videos all day. One damn video did this! I want to punch the guy who sent it to me. Oh wait, guess I've been radicalized.
FWIIW all the chimping in the threads about death threats: these were extremely common in the old days of Usenet too. I've lost track of them; from all kinds of arguably insane people, satanic cults even; more recently lunatic grad students mad I made fun of their field on my blog. So was doxxing. Nothing ever happened, and I have no respect for people who report them like it's news. While it's probably happened by now that someone's internet beef turned into actual violence, the ratio is absurdly low. If you can't abide some idiot being mad at you, stay off the internet I guess.
> What about open sourcing, say, windows 95? That seems more achievable, and probably more helpful.
The Windows NT4 source code leaked a while ago and can be found all over the internet. Of course that doesn't really help ReactOS because they officially can't use it, but that's probably the closest we will get to MS open sourcing Windows.
Windows 95 is a kludge by today's standards and it's been the little brother of the more complete Win32 implementation in the NT line. As a result, it is missing a ton of things that are essential parts of modern Windows. I don't see any value in that.
Arguably, the kludge is supporting Win32 on an NT kernel. The win32 layer on top of NT is a mess of backwards compatibility hacks with more modern NT and NTFS features hammered in. The native NT layer is much better but officially it's unstable.
Compared to that, Windows 9x was less kludge and more a straightforward implementation of Win32, though of course lacking modern features.
It seems like most of his grievances are with macOS and not his monitor.
For a long time I've been using tiling WMs (currently awesomeWM) and I could never go back. Yes there is a bit of a learning curve while you settle on a good configuration for you, but the productivity gains are worth it since you spend so much time interacting with your WM.
Obviously your options are more limited outside of Linux, but there is a WM tool in Microsoft's Powertoys repo which looks intriguing.
I've tried tiling WMs a few times and liked awesome but at least at the time there were too many problems.
Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator?
Do all Windows open normally?
Do you get any crashes?
Are there any WM-specific settings/fixes you have to tweak more often than once every 6 months?
