
A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web - ivarious
https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452
======
ivarious
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](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.

~~~
flgr
Interestingly, Facebook's algorithms also reward activity which has the effect
of bubbling up group posts with a lot of drama.

~~~
NotaSockPuppet8
Facebook's algorithms are far less transparent and outside a user's control
compared to 4chan's bump system.

Just recently it was shown that their automatic news feeds promoted fake news
articles.

------
dogma1138
"9\. RARE PEPES In this Section we display some of our rare Pepe collection."

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...](http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/92612923/a-longitudinal-
measurement-study-of-4chans)

~~~
hacker42
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.

~~~
dylanfw
Seeing "LaTeX" (lay-tech) and "arXiv" together in your sentence made me
finally realize that arXiv is pronounced "archive". I've been reading it as
"arx-iv" for years.

~~~
eclyps19
It's really not pronounced "lay-tecks"? Damn, I've been pronouncing that
incorrectly for years, then.

~~~
adrianN
LaTeX: /ˈlɑːtɛx/ LAH-tekh, also pronounced as /ˈlɑːtɛk/ LAH-tek or /ˈleɪtɛk/
LAY-tek

~~~
mturmon
Knuth, in his book, memorably decreed a pronunciation (and case mixing in the
written form) for TeX, with a hard /ch/ at the end (literally, "your monitor
should become slightly moist"), backed by a clever and erudite rationale
involving the etymology of words like technique.

Leslie Lamport, in his book on LaTeX, decreed a case mixing, but (as you say)
ok'd any reasonable pronunciation.

------
jmcgough
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.

~~~
colordrops
/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.

~~~
gragas
I was in the original thread and got screens of Combetta's history before he
deleted it. I see /pol/ as one of the last bastions of political discussion
that's not flooded with liberal propaganda, though that has been changing
lately with CTR.

~~~
rfrank
/pol/ is fast on a lot of international news that gets picked up slowly in the
states too. they were on the us' accidental bombing of syrian troops last
month [1] pretty much instantly.

1\. [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/18/did-the-
u-s...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/18/did-the-u-s-just-
slaughter-syrian-troops.html)

------
NietTim
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)

~~~
nickthemagicman
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.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
_This means every one is simply judged by what ideas they create and I think
thats a beautiful thing._

And it drives higher quality content because of it. Most people do not realize
that a lot of the popular memes and internet jokes shared on more mainstream
platforms originally came from the "chan" culture.

To your point though the high quality content is often difficult to find in
the cesspool of low-quality spam on these boards.

~~~
bhaumik
Besides memes and internet jokes, what are examples of high quality content
created (or originating) from the "chan" culture?

~~~
NotaSockPuppet8
/g/ makes useful software on occasion for example. after 4chan pioneered webm
as looping gif replacement (long before imgur doing the gifv thing) they made
webmcam and webm4retards for example. The latter by its mere existence also
highlighted github's overzealous application of community policies.

A bunch of indie games started their life there too.

And then there are derivative and mashup works like fanart, translations.

I only visit a few boards, so i'm probably missing a lot.

~~~
pierrebai
But we could apply the reverse Sturgeon's law: in any sufficiently large
community, 1% of content will _not_ be crap. 4chan is not special, it's just
large.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Facebook is my counter example. Its the biggest social media site on the
internet. Produces nothing that gets reified in the form of internet culture.

~~~
internaut
magicman, academia should study why Facebook is a sterile wasteland

4chan, Reddit and HN are Internet natives.

Facebook and Twitter are fucking tourists.

~~~
nickthemagicman
Facebook is what mainstream compares 4chan to. A nice safe sterile place. Good
for family values and advertising.

------
hex12648430
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.

[0]: [https://archive.org/download/archive-moe-
database-201506](https://archive.org/download/archive-moe-database-201506)

~~~
JD557
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.

------
sparkling
By November 8th, /pol/ will have successfully memed a man into the white
house, mark my words.

------
thrwaway656
This paper was shared on /pol/, here's a link to the (archived) thread if
you're interested in reading the responses.

[http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/92760043/](http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/92760043/)

~~~
rhaps0dy
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.

~~~
AssadianSkpe
Zimbabwe was known as South Rhodesia. South Rhodesia, to pol, is very
significant culturally.

------
kyrre
academic shitposting is still shitposting

~~~
Balgair
/thread

------
fingar
These students are funded anyway and decided to add a publication on an area
they love.

They included their funding bodies because it is required by their funding
agreement.

------
trevelyan
How does it take eight people to write this paper?

~~~
pmyteh
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.

~~~
antisthenes
Three people out of 8 to collect the rare pepes.

------
lake99
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.

> i can't continue reading this, this is insane.

~~~
saint_fiasco
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.

~~~
lake99
I'm in India at the moment, but I have lived in other timezones too. I must
add that I'm not a regular there. I only go there when some promiment thread
makes the nwes... like Tay, or Operation Google, or this. Other than that, my
source for 4chan stuff is /r/4chan.

~~~
AssadianSkpe
Does the poo in the loo deter indian originating posters?

~~~
lake99
I don't know what to say to that. By its nature, 4chan deters nearly everyone!
Indians included [1].

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/55pizd/4chan_users_o...](https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/55pizd/4chan_users_of_randia_why_the_fuck_is_that_site/)

------
Waterluvian
Hate words by country is the most interesting part for me. I really want to
see a deeper study done on that.

~~~
NotaSockPuppet8
"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.

------
norea-armozel
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.

~~~
AssadianSkpe
Richard Spencer once said that politics to culture is mist to a lake. You
cannot have politics without having culture. IRL actions are not gonna do
squat (see: ows, arab spring) without cultural shifts. What pol is doing is
more insidious in effect: it is shifting the culture that will enable the
politics. If 4chan reach in memes is wide, as internet history has shown, and
if the memes from pol become sentiments embraced by others outside of it, pol
is creating the lake for whatever mist.

To change politics, it requires a cultural change. Tumblr is another place on
the internet that is a space for cultural change, albeit the opposite kind.

------
zerognowl
Not forgetting 4chan's evil twin brother 8chan:

[https://8ch.net/pol/index.html](https://8ch.net/pol/index.html)

And for more chans, look no further than:

[https://encyclopediadramatica.se/List_of_chans](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
I know a lot of researchers who avoid 4chan due to fear. Given that context,
in some sense this seems to be a bold step.

~~~
hubert123
You know a 'lot'(!) of researchers who avoid 4chan? What exactly would they be
researching or avoiding to research?

~~~
denzil_correa
They are not avoiding research. Online boards like 4chan are a great testbed
to understand human behavior amongst other things. A lot of people avoid using
4chan as a testbed due to repercussions from conclusions that may not put
4chan in a good light.

Example -
[https://twitter.com/emilianodc_/status/786296689481003008](https://twitter.com/emilianodc_/status/786296689481003008)

------
EJTH
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.

~~~
Vaskivo
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"

~~~
qwertyuiop924
/tg/ had a gentler introduction than most, as the Very Best of /tg/ is
published on 1d4chan, so you start by seeing the very best of what the chan
has to offer.

------
ue_
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
I still remember when moot first created [s4s] a lot of people say that it can
be a reset to the old chan culture.

------
ZoF
Handing over ICANN control to the UN was a mistake.

I have very little faith that this won't be used to censor free speech in the
not-so-distant future.

------
acqq
It really looks like wasted money, if it was really financed and is not an
elaborate trolling.

~~~
rhaps0dy
I think the money was totally worth it, just for the fun we all had. It's a
lot of people having fun.

Although maybe the people who don't know about this (thus couldn't have fun)
shouldn't have paid for it :\

~~~
acqq
So was it really financed from the tax money of Europeans? If it was, I am
really sad. Then the authors shouldn't be proud of such an "achievement."

If it was generated by the 4chan regulars with their own money, then at least
it's not worth discussing it more here...

~~~
rconti
It makes me sad that every time any kind of research is done, someone has to
denigrate it as a waste of money.

While I don't care about "chan" culture (never visited one of the sites, don't
need that in my life), I fully support research into things I may or may not
like. Let the Universities decide where to spend their research budgets. You
never know what will come out of it.

~~~
acqq
This wasn't a real research (to really discover something) though (read some
other comments here like typon's) except to "prove" how successful trolling
is.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12708090](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12708090)

