
4chan: Beyond one billion - dmarinoc
http://www.4chan.org/news?all#106
======
Swizec
While I no longer visit 4chan regularly, I love its extensive influence on
human society.

* lolcats

* rage comics

* anonymous

* a lot of the 1% movement

* getting random people in jail because they think animal cruelty is funny

* making Moot TIME's person of the year and getting him a TED talk -> [http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...](http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online.html)

While most of what goes on there hinges somewhere between vile and horrible.
4chan has a lot of good in it, plenty of times there can be surprisingly good
and high quality debates.

And come on, it's where all the memes are born. That's _profound_. What other
startup can claim to be such a big influence on western society?

PS: 4chan has also invented a clever sorting algorithm -
<http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1295544154>

PPS: sometimes they even manage to count to 10. I think the record was 100.

edit: when I say meme, I mean "A meme ( /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is "an idea,
behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A
meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which
can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures,
rituals or other imitable phenomena." ... I _don't_ mean, "funny picture".

A lot of responders misunderstood this, I think.

~~~
RollAHardSix
Influence on Western Culture? Why don't you go read the news, the Patterson
break-up has had more of an effect on Western culture then 4Chan could ever
hope to succeed.

Some people spend way too much time on the internet; I can guarantee you that
99% of America, has no clue what 4Chan, Rage Comics, lolcats is. Anonymous and
the 1% movement (but you may have to say Occupy Wall Street to the 3 million
remaining people) may be the exceptions because of the media coverage.

And meme's are far from profound, humor, yes you could argue to be considered
profound, but meme's? A silly time-waster at best but generally worse then a
joke told among friends. You can't find a meme and share it with friends with
the same impact (whether online or in person) as:

One day little girl comes home from school, "Mom, today some boy showed me his
penis." Mother exclaims "What?!" Little girl says "Yea, and it sort of
reminded me of a peanut." Trying not to laugh, mother asks "Is that because it
was so small?" Little girl laughs says "No. Because it tasted so salty."

~~~
enko
I can't believe I'm saying this but it's almost offensive to me that you're
comparing 4chan to celebrity news. 4chan is friggin' high art compared to that
shit. Celebrity news is the lowest of the low; nothing but easy-to-read brain
candy for bored, boring housewives.

And I think 4chan has a huge influence. It is a very powerful site in tech
culture, which is pretty large I think. Tech culture might be smaller by
numbers than the so-called mainstream but it's plenty large enough to be self-
sustaining and have its own sense of identity.

~~~
jmduke
The argument isn't that 4chan doesn't have its own identity, its refuting
this:

 _And come on, it's where all the memes are born. That's profound. What other
startup can claim to be such a big influence on western society?_

I think 4chan definitely has a huge influence on the tech sector, but in terms
of straight-up 'influence' vastly more people follow celebrity gossip than
memes. That might change (it probably won't -- we're prone to hero-worship,
whether or not its movie stars or tech icons).

 _Celebrity news is the lowest of the low; nothing but easy-to-read brain
candy for bored, boring housewives._

I don't really read celebrity news, but I have read rage comics and memes back
when Reddit had them frontpaged, and if you think they're more than easy-to-
read brain candy, I think you're mistaken.

~~~
Torgo
There is a chain. There is the World Wide Web, which is a mass indiscriminate
content creator. Then you have 4chan, which functions as both an individual
content creator on the WWW, and as a giant aggregator. 4chan users aggregate
funny pictures they recontextualize from bad advertising, screenshots of
incomprehensible dialog in TV shows, the best webcomics, etc. 4chan is a
mostly a massive dumping ground filled with garbage, but because of the
ephemeral nature of threads, result in only content that frequently gets
reposted has a chance to survive the churn. Most people cannot stand this, and
stay away. But 4chan is populated by content-addicted denizens, who process,
filter and promote good memes. And then turn right around and push this
content back out onto the more "respectable" and filtered, less-chaotic sites
like Reddit and CheezeBurger Network, Facebook, which are meme-propagating
machines in their own right. But they primarily get access to the content that
was subjected to the vicious selection process of 4chan to begin with.

I think the process by which 4chan operates in media is far more
sophisticated, less centralized, less commercial and (perhaps surprisingly)
less cynical than celebrity gossip that is created en-masse for money by large
national media corporations for top-down consumption. By the time a meme makes
it to facebook it's been largely stripped of its participatory power and
becomes a one-way medium, but that's just at the periphery of the meme-
propogation, the people that just consume it with their electronic feed tubes.
But the process of creating this content before it gets to the edge web is a
chaotic, churning process of evolutionary competition, mutation, selection.

This is worthy of study. It is participatory culture in the making, what the
creative commons and the free culture movement always wanted. There may not be
a lot _fundamentally_ new here, except in the context of the 'net in which it
is being created. And the medium shapes the message. The web is a "new place."
and there are people in it that are, right now, creating the native language
of a place that has never existed before. These are exciting times. I think
that the messageboard one day will be recognized for it importannce in the
history of the WWW, and the Internet in general.

~~~
Swizec
My comment is a bad one in its merit.

But I wish I had more than one upvote to give.

------
jeffool
The thing that strikes me is how... Ubiquitous as it is, and at the same time,
unknown to so many more. "Browsing 4chan" truly is the "reading Rolling Stone
magazine" of its day. And somehow, it retains that while being huge.

I say this as someone fired for visiting it[1], and finding it impossible to
get a job in the news industry a year later. Now, the news industry is hardly
considered cutting edge, but people hear "now, the site has pornography, but-"
and that's it. (Especially in this employer's market!)

Conversely, I applied to two tech companies over the past year, and being
forthcoming as I am, I share this with them. Both were mystified at my being
fired for visiting 4chan. ("What? Where do you LIVE?")

[1] I found out about the site from news coverage years ago (the NFL thing;
"Don't mess with football!".) As Anonymous rose, it became interesting from a
news standpoint. And yes, I casually just visited as well. I understand many
consider this fire-able, and don't argue. That's kind of my point though, that
divide.

~~~
dnpfwfyuta
Did you get fired for browsing it at work, or because they found out you
browse it at home?

~~~
jeffool
At work. Sorry if that was unclear; I didn't mean to be.

------
Paul_S
I would be surprised if there wasn't an overlap between HN and 4chan (same as
with SA). Being run in diametrically opposed way it fills its role rather
well, I think. There is no reputation system, no limits, no censorship, etc..
This means it produces many utterly vile posts - but all of them are true
expressions of people as they are, not as they pretend to be. I think people
often don't appreciate this. It's not just people being dicks on the Internet,
it's people saying what they think with no regard to social acceptance or
basic politeness. And since there are no credentials, your posts are just that
- some text and images conveying ideas. The only authority comes from the
content.

Here's to another billion.

~~~
jgrahamc
"This means it produces many utterly vile posts - but all of them are true
expressions of people as they are, not as they pretend to be."

I'm not sure that that really makes sense. I can be very charming or utterly
vile. Are you implying that I'm only truly me when I'm vile (for example)?
Aren't we all pretending all the time?

~~~
angersock
EDIT: Reading over this, it came out a bit more windy than intended, but
hopefully is still useful.

    
    
      "Aren't we all pretending all the time?"
    

That's one of the great things about having reasonably anonymous message
boards--there exists the very good opportunity to perform communication
without the overhead associated with being polite, reasonable, or even
civilized.

On Hacker News, I expect that my posts will (for better or worse) someday come
back to haunt me. Indeed, if you apply to YC, I believe one of the application
questions asks for your HN username. This being the case, there are certain
arguments and jokes that I have had to refrain from making. I've even had to
apologize OOB every so often to people here for being hot-headed (I believe I
once said some nasty things to one of the senior Apache folks...awkward).

On 4chan, these "vile posts" are honest expressions of either the poster or of
the facade the poster wishes to maintain--and in a completely anonymous
setting, it's easier not to pose at all. An interesting research question
would be to compare the normal posters to the non-anonymous "tripfags" and
"namefags" (users who post under the same username and signature--terminology
is as found on the chan), but I honestly have no idea how that might be done
in any useful sense.

The entire mindset of interacting with complete strangers, and especially
knowing that you may well never share a thread with them again, is hugely
liberating. You can make and laugh at jokes that otherwise would be in poor
taste. You can discuss trivial things very seriously, and serious things very
lightly, and be assured that you won't be tagged/branded permanently as a fool
or a fetishist--consider what we've done to losethos here, and how at this
point even if he started posting coherently he'd still downvoted into
oblivion.

    
    
      "Are you implying that I'm only truly me when I'm vile 
      (for example)?"
    

As explained above, I imagine that the proper insinuation here is that you're
only truly you (publicly) when you have no incentive to put on a
ruse/pleasantries--and that if you do so anyways, that is part of the true
self.

My experience, for example, is that I am just as much the humble helpful
hacker given debugging help and useful links on the /pr/ programming board as
I am the mean-spirited hateful troll on /adv/--and on any given day, I may do
the opposite. Seeing my behavior when held to no external standard has been
enlightening, and proven to be a useful data point in self-discovery and self-
betterment. I try to help more and troll less now. :)

------
risratorn
Moot really deserves praise for sticking around for 8 years and keeping the
site running. I can imagine a lot of people giving up after a couple of years.

~~~
unkoman
I don't know what I'd do without it. It's been a fun ride since the very
beginning (although I can do without the summer invasions).

~~~
jgeorge
Used to say the same thing about summers on Usenet. :)

------
zitterbewegung
I personally like that 4 chan has done so well. I didn't expect that it did as
well as it has. Also, I like moot's position on anonymous identify.

------
DigitalSea
Considering the somewhat objective nature of a lot of 4chan's content I am
surprised it is where it is now. Very interesting article, I really enjoyed
reading the history behind 4chan, will be interesting to see where the site
heads next.

------
mproud
BLOCKED! (At work.) Not that I expected any differently, of course, heheh.

~~~
path411
Anyone able to paste the text? I'd rather not visit the 4chan domain while at
work.

~~~
bandwevil
Here you go. <http://pastehtml.com/view/c7fxyfuan.html>

------
ghiculescu
Wow, nice.

Many years ago I rewrote the 4chan wikipedia article, and got it to featured
level. It appeared on the Main Page a few years later, but by then I had lost
interest. It's nice to see it's still in good shape, though not as popular as
the site itself - <http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/4chan>

------
TazeTSchnitzel
As I was reading that post, I was screaming "moot, make a questions board!".
And then he actually revealed he was making /q/. Heh.

------
january14n
Congratulations to 4chan, I find their facebook campaign helps pretty well for
making their community bigger.

------
brador
Anyone know 4chans main revenue streams? How's he paying for all that hosting?
Donations?

~~~
Sodaware
I'm pretty sure it all comes from advertising.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Much of it Adult, too, since it is, well, 4chan.

~~~
zumth
4chan is not only /b/ and porn, there are surprisingly good SFW boards too.
Well, maybe "SFW" is pushing it a bit, since the tone is still 4-chaney, but
then look around the technology, cooking, or traditionnal games boards: you'll
be surprised.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Oh, I'm well aware of that. /b/ is (arguably) the worst part of 4chan. 4chan
has much more than porn, but it also has a lot of porn.

~~~
brudgers
The world wide web has much more than porn, but it also has a lot of porn.

This was also true of Usenet.

------
rnernento
OP IS A FAG.

inb4 this is hacker news not 4chan inb4 be polite

~~~
rnernento
Ahahah so much hate, def rustled some jimmies.

