
Moot: Full House - ivarious
http://www.4chan.org/news?all#114
======
moot
I saw this and said "Why the fuck is this on Hacker News?" out loud.

~~~
marshray
I've heard a lot of stuff about 4chan, and this sure sounds important. But
this post is literally the first thing I've ever read on the site.

Should I even try to understand this?

~~~
britta
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/](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](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sage)
or [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sage](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.

~~~
marshray
Thanks. It's still not clear to me what kind of moderation system is in place
(if any). But it's OK :-)

~~~
y2bd
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.

[1] [https://www.4chan.org/rules](https://www.4chan.org/rules)

~~~
marshray
The _only_ off-topic thing is My Little Ponies?! OMFG what has this world come
to?

~~~
mhurron
They're not off topic they belong in /mlp/

~~~
guizzy
Shhh... Mods are asleep...

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cstigler
The ban list ([http://www.4chan.org/bans](http://www.4chan.org/bans)) is
hilarious.

A highlight (besides all the "ponies outside of /mlp/" ones):

"I cant get banned, im 17 and my birthday is tomorrow. Suck it m00t." \-- Ban,
90 days, "Underage User"

------
aspensmonster
From: [https://www.4chan.org/bans](https://www.4chan.org/bans)

Board | Action | Length | Post | Reason | Time

/b/ | Ban | 3 days | View | Global 15 - Pony/Ponies Outside of /mlp/ | 34
minutes ago

Wat? I thought /b/ was pretty much anything goes. How times change.

~~~
oakwhiz
/b/ was almost entirely ponies at one point - an odd example of too much
signal and not enough noise. To solve this, moot set up /mlp/, a containment
board designed to redirect the rapid influx of pony images that was spamming
every board (which was disturbing many of the regular on-topic posters.) Hence
the "no ponies are allowed outside of /mlp/" rule.

~~~
crystaln
A valid argument against determinism in the universe.

How could the Big Bang have predetermined a pony ban on 4chan?

~~~
VonGuard
You're aiming way too big on this. All it proves is that there is only one
thing that can defeat Internet trolls, and that thing is MLP.

~~~
praptak
Trolls were happy to post MLP once they found out it makes people upset.

~~~
krapp
Trolls trolling trolls.

------
lnanek2
Interesting 4chan and Hacker News are going different ways. They decided to
make bans more transparent. Hacker News recently made it impossible to reply
to dead posts, so you can't even tell dead users they are dead any more.

~~~
krapp
Well, one site allows anonymous posting and practices open banning, while the
other practices hellbanning and has the "karma" system which weights a users'
posts as a function of their alignment with the norms of the community. They
have completely different approaches to curating user identity and controlling
conversation which I think are mutually exclusive, though both appear to be
effective in their own way.

It would be interesting to see a post or an article comparing and contrasting
the different methodologies between the two sites.

~~~
asdasf
I don't think the HN way is effective at all. Virtually every hellbanned user
I've ever seen doesn't appear to have done anything wrong. So they keep
posting, having no idea they broke any rules, until they realize they were
banned. Then they make a new account and continue on, not changing their
behavior in any way, as they have no idea what caused the ban in the first
place.

Shadow bans were created originally to deal with trolls. People deliberately
posting garbage. It is counter productive to use shadow bans on contributing
people who happened to break an unspoken rule like "don't criticize pg".

~~~
krapp
_So they keep posting, having no idea they broke any rules, until they realize
they were banned. Then they make a new account and continue on, not changing
their behavior in any way, as they have no idea what caused the ban in the
first place._

The problem with it is it makes one particular set of assumptions about
behavior - you must be a troll, you must crave attention, and in the absence
of attention, you must either get frustrated and leave or else continue
trolling. Because being a troll with no possible valid input to offer or being
a good user is a binary state.

But of course if you look at the comments by most of those users, you'll see a
number of perfectly reasonable banned comments and maybe (if you can find it)
the one infraction which may have started it all. For most of them, I wind up
wondering if a simple warning from a mod might have sufficed.

And yes, as you point out, legitimate posters who just lost their head for a
moment go on talking to an empty room while the actual trolls just burn
another account.

------
fnordfnordfnord
>The public ban log displays a sample of recent bans, which we hope will give
users insight into what content is being removed, and why.

This might be interesting.

~~~
aspensmonster
Yeah. Sounds like a scoreboard.

~~~
ivarious
Some people are already trying to get into the scoreboard.

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Sir_Cmpwn
10 years, god damn. I'm always impressed that 4chan has remained essentially
the same for so many years and has been able to have a huge following the
whole time. I don't think any other website has ever had so much sustained
success.

~~~
chrisbridgett
Reddit?

~~~
uchi
Reddit's userbase grew very quickly after Digg drastically changed, aka
'collapsed', Reddit for a while also engaged in sockpuppeting posts to
generate fake traffic to create the illusion of a userbase before it really
took off.

4chan, in comparison, has always been organic from day 1.

~~~
ivarious
But many OPs of 4chan threads sockpuppet their own threads in order to make
their thread gain traction.

~~~
simias
It's not made by the website owner so it still counts as organic

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nness
Ha, well there's a URL that's never going to get through the corporate
firewall...

~~~
lotyrin
Strangely enough, my corp allows 4chan.org requests. It seems fairly sensitive
otherwise.

~~~
anotheraccount7
Flagged and logged. They'll discuss it at your next performance review ;)

------
ivarious
The decision of making sage invisible is interesting to discuss. Like with the
quote function (or greentexting), many of 4chan's basic functions have been
used for more than intended function. This creates things that sometimes are
not what you want to get, but should you take away the new functions from your
users?

~~~
krisgee
Yes, because sage isn't a new function it's one that was taken from 2chan and
like the post says sage never was and never will be a downvote. It's just a
way to reply without bumping the thread.

~~~
parliament32
...which, based on how the boards work, is essentially a downvote.

Each thread can have x posts before new posts no longer bump it. If you sage,
you are using up that thread's available space (1/x worth) without bumping.
Although this doesn't "downvote" in the sense that the thread is
penalized/lowered, it "downvotes" because it takes up thread space with no
benefit to the thread. Not to mention, sageing is a way to express your
dissatisfaction with the thread, which I think was always the point (rather
than trying to actually hurt the thread).

~~~
asdasf
>Each thread can have x posts before new posts no longer bump it. If you sage,
you are using up that thread's available space

Few threads approach that limit. Idiots saging threads was purely a "look at
me saying I don't like this thread!", nothing else.

>Not to mention, sageing is a way to express your dissatisfaction with the
thread, which I think was always the point

Which is a bad thing, hence fixing it.

------
redcap
What's the story? 4chan.org is blocked for me.

~~~
zalzane
[http://bsamuels.net/upload/paste0051](http://bsamuels.net/upload/paste0051)

~~~
redcap
Thank you.

------
jokoon
Does that mean 4chan is a victim of its success ?

I'll always view 4chan as a website who refused to grow up and expand, because
it is afraid to since it might lose its very special flavor by doing so.

It seems anonymity is quite hard to implement and make us of properly.

~~~
agoandanon
4chan lost its very special flavor about 7 years ago, when it stopped being
possible to follow threads without noko'ing them.

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davexunit
Posting in a moot thread.

<3 from /g/

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lcasela
>bans list

>Global 2 - Underage User

Why not ban the shitposters and not the underage users.

------
chadwickthebold
Nice try, HN. You almost got me to visit 4chan while at work! You rascals ;)

~~~
krapp
Why are you on HN at work... >_>

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burgerz
I congratulate moot for the job. 4chan's change over the years has been
minimal. The biggest change was probably the captcha - initially it was a
temporary fix to flooding and spam at the time, but it stayed since there
doesn't seem to be an alternative. Those that use 4chan enough for the captcha
to get annoying, the $20 yearly pass was a great way to get around it and to
allow us to support the site as well.

Also the introduction of some of those boards was simply to get shitposts out
of other boards (e.g. /soc/ was created to cleanup /b/ and /r9k/). Worked
great.

However, I have to disagree with the sage thing. While originally the term was
used to not bump a thread (implying that your own post was not worthy of
bumping a thread back to the front page), in the last five years (and before
that, to some extent) it HAS been used as a way to 'down vote' a thread.

~~~
prawn
Can someone explain how the sage thing works as a downvote? I'm aware of
4chan, its style and run a forum (with anonymous posting too) myself, but I'm
not familiar with any karma/scoring 4chan might have. Keen to stay aware of
options to keep my forum on track.

~~~
pyre
When you add a comment to a thread, it bumps the thread to the top of the list
for that board. If you add 'sage' into the email (?) field, it will add the
comment without bumping the thread. Each thread has an image post limit that
will max out the thread and prevent the thread from bumping anymore (letting
it slowly fall down the listing and eventually die).

So, using sage as a way to 'downvote' is just a way of adding towards the
thread limit without bumping the thread. It's a round-about way to do it
though (vs. direct downvoting).

"sage" originates from 2chan (aka Futaba Channel), which was the inspiration
for 4chan. 'sage' is short for sageru.

[http://www.4chan.org/faq#sage](http://www.4chan.org/faq#sage)

[http://www.eudict.com/?lang=japeng&word=sageru](http://www.eudict.com/?lang=japeng&word=sageru)

~~~
diydsp
iiuc sage comes from sageru which is a Japanese word meaning "lower." Its use
is a polite way of saying "my comment is not important enough to bump the
thread to the top of the page."

If this is true, sage can not be used to downvote at all, EXCEPT if there are
enough sages to make the thread expire. However, that limit is something in
the 100s. No one has the time and dedication to "sage a thread into non-
existence," even though they sometimes call for it.

~~~
pyre
As was alluded to with "SAGE GOES IN EVERY FIELD," people hope to cause a
snowball effect where others join in an sage the thread (by announcing loudly
that they are sage-ing). In general, the idea of using sage as a downvote has
been around for a while, even though it's anything but.

------
induscreep
kebab plz

