

It’s Official (and Hacked): 4chan Founder Sweeps Time’s Top 100 List - mjfern
http://mashable.com/2009/04/27/time-4chan-moot/

======
dfranke
4chan is like the social equivalent of fuzz testing. If you want to see how
your app holds up against weird unexpected input, you feed it /dev/urandom. If
you want to see how it holds up against weird unexpected people, you feed it
/b/.

------
biohacker42
Nothing against... no wait, I do have something against all of 4chan. It's
f'ing pointless at best.

So why is this 4chan rulez time.com thing so often so high on HN?

Within hours today there's several stories about it and that's in addition to
all the stories we had here when it started. We're as bad about his as the
mass media is about swine flu.

Please, if you're one of the people submitting and/or voting this up, tell me
what makes you so interested in 4chan and their Colbert style mockery of
online polling?

~~~
hack_edu
Anonymous are hackers, just like us. They force us to recognize the limits of
our wired world, and laugh when we fail.

At least their culture beats that of Twitter, amirite?

edit: But I digress, this issue has been bumped to the front page too much.
Definitely.

~~~
biohacker42
OK, maybe they're better then the twitter crowd, but I think > 0.001% of them
are hackers.

~~~
Steve0
I think < 0.001% are hackers.

~~~
biohacker42
Thank you for debugging my comment.

I've done embarrassed myself on the internets. But I will not correct it while
I can, because sir your sharp eye deserves recognition.

------
jnorthrop
For me this is a sad milestone. Internet polls were always suspect, but 4chan
so easily hijacking a prominent poll makes any future argument based on an
opinion gathered on the internet easily dismissed.

You: "Just as I suspected the poll from our website reinforces that we need to
go in a different direction."

Boss: "Pfft. Remember moot winning that Time poll."

~~~
duskwuff
That's a good thing. Internet polls have never been reliable. The Time poll
just confirms it.

------
Zev
So people _on the internet_ can manipulate a poll that was taken _on the
internet_. Is this a big shock? No. Still makes me smile at the thought of it
happening, even if 4chan and time are both hardly "the little guys" in any
sense of the phrase.

------
chanux
But we discussed this long ago. Old news.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=581212>

