This is how I understand it as well. There was a case of a monkey taking a selfie and the photog attempting to assert copyright. Courts determined (if I remember correctly :p ) that only human works are copyrightable and therefore the monkey's selfie could not be copyrighted at all.
"gatekeeping is only your ability to mentally filter every Nth ... post being full of slurs"
Well, and filter out the CP, dead and butchered bodies, nazis & any number of other horrifying things I ran across when I've looked at the site. Granted that was years ago but it's not really the type of thing you check up on to see if things have gotten better...
Sure maybe not on /g/ but that leaves lots of people just one mistaken click away from potential nightmares. That's not a value people are missing, it's a cost they aren't willing to pay for someone else's concept of being egalitarian.
You could fill every post on every site with slurs and I would barely notice. Slurs aren't 4chan's problem though, the crowd of unrestrained sadists is.
People always hype up 4chan nowadays like it's LiveLeak on steroids, but generally speaking any time I browse 4chan it's felt much more mundane. The only major culture shock that most people are in for is the degree of hatefulness and shamelessness that you encounter on 4chan, especially in the memes and vernacular. It's the one place left on the internet where truly Nothing is sacred, and the userbase is happy to make that clear whenever possible.
That said, it's absolutely not worth the time, unless you are bored and feel like most of the internet is too sanitized for your tastes. It's just, unquestionably a big waste of time at best.
I don't think it'll ruin your brain, but it probably won't expand it either.
tbf people even post born on /biz/, they just eat the ban for it, and even when it isn't outright porn it's often very overtly sexual images. The only thing that makes it browsable is the Wingman browser plugin.
Well /b/ is mostly porn, along with few other boards. Relatively "normal" boards are hosted on 4channel.org domain. That said, 4chan is mostly "shitposting" and memes, don't expect serious discussions.
There is an extensive list of boards to choose from with very different types of people, but if porn is all you look for, porn is all you get. The site is like a mirror reflecting your desires and inclinations, reaffirming and reinforcing your fixations.
weeeeeell, people did spam lolicon and gay furry porn in like 2011 for a couple months but the mods swooped in and it's been a well-enforced blue board since
the real problem with /g/ in the current age though is the thought-terminating memes. it's no longer really the bastion of oblique insight it once was. opinions on the board have ossified to the point you're not going to find out about anything cool from them first. this is common across most blue boards these days honestly; they are no longer really tastemakers
Perhaps /g/ is worse, but I feel that applies to most established forums on the internet. It's particularly noticeable if you've bounced around various subreddits that it's just the same 5 opinions rehashed endlessly, and anyone who disagrees has left the building. You just get a different set of 5 opinions when you jump to a new subreddit.
This is why I feel moderation, or perhaps curation is a better word, isn’t a bad thing. A hardcore 4channer might not think so, but I feel the lowest common denominator isn’t. That is to say it just produces a noise that isn’t beneficial at all unless you want to be tickled that way for the lulz.
r/askhistorians is a fantastic example where curation produces high quality insight and debate.
I’m lazily designing a Reddit replacement, can’t really build one while I’m still employed and may never build it.
If you’re not chasing infinite growth, or even if you are but want to set the right culture at the outset, I think the HN moderation model is ideal. Just delete low quality and blatantly offensive posts and ban repeat offenders. You don’t need some complicated mechanism for implementing restorative justice or scaling moderation via community moderation teams, you just don’t want those users to post
4chan is filled with people asking easily googleable questions and the user base generally seems to be about 17. I know that’s the age when I visited the site the most (thank god it was before the 2016 election which irrevocably ruined the site). It has a very low bar for discussion and the signal/noise ratio is terrible unless you’re willing to wade through piles of shit to find a gem here and there.
4chan for sure has useful insights like a very low (captcha) barrier to use the site and a very low-ego culture. But the discussion quality is actually abysmal
I think a central aggregator that is Reddit still produces the less friction. I haven’t felt compelled to sign up for any alternatives sofar. It’s an interesting field at the moment, and with Twitter in flux, a smart player might be able to take advantage of the unique opportunity.
I do too! It’s not just Reddit and Twitter I want to replace. I think Quora and Stack Overflow, even Wikipedia, had some good social ideas as well. Most of these were ruined by chasing growth (diluting out the good original user base) and trying to juice out as much revenue per user as possible. They’ve all been enshittified unnecessarily - even though not all are profitable, in most cases where they aren’t, it’s because of over-hiring. Running a website isn’t that hard
Unfortunately I will need to switch to a non-pseudonymous account to launch and really talk about it, so can’t get into too much detail on this one.
I honestly think that, if these sites had been ok with measly 9 figure valuations and didn’t go chasing 11 figure valuations (or, a huge nonprofit treasure chest, or allowed petty busybodies to exert undue influence on the site), none of them would have gone to shit.
That's an odd example. askhistorians is meant to reflect current American historians' scholarly consensus, and rigidly moderated to stay that way. While this does sometimes produce insight it's one of the least debate-oriented places on the internet.
I've seen plenty of posts in which people had conflicting accounts of historical events, including anti-Western, anti-Eurocentric, and anti-Imperialist ones, and as long as they are well-sourced they are fine.
The bigger issue is that r/askhistorians is an English-language subreddit, and English is the most widely-used language of the Western-Imperialist powers, so it makes sense that if you ask in their language, you are mostly going to get their answers. The people who would have equivalent expertise from other viewpoints are mostly not lurking that subreddit.
And yes, it's not meant to be a place to debate, it's meant to be a place to get access to historians' subject matter expertise. When 2 historians' accounts conflict with each other, they aren't supposed to start arguing about it, they're supposed to each make a separate reply to OP with their sources.
It's interesting how people go to a certain board specifically infamous for posting that kind of stuff then are shocked to see said stuff, then generalizing the entire site off that one interaction. It's as if I equate /r/AskHistorians, a heavily-modded academic sub, to /r/(insert raunchy sub here).
The users from one are going to be around on the other. This is true everywhere. When Reddit banned various hate speech subreddits you stopped seeing those guys "just asking questions" about the inherent inferiority of certain races in unrelated subreddits anywhere near as often.
Holy shit, in what world is /b/ not full of gore and porn today. Outsiders can't help but make confident sweeping statements about a site they don't even use. This comment tree is laden with cringe-inducing posts, you think using 4chan is so cool that you're willing to pretend that you know anything about it?
I'm amazed that they can call it "expected" and "anticipated" after it took their site down, the very definition of something unanticipated and unintended happening.
My 50G plan is currently running at 44G and I was investigating FOSS options since much doesn't technically need to be in dropbox. This saves me some tech time ;)
Disclaimer: former MCSE who quit administering windows altogether.
A minor aesthetic change which requires a minor intuitive leap for the power user is a major change for most home users. Sure, the steering wheel is on the other side of the car, but thats minor. Except that now the user has to learn how to drive on the other side of the road.
I loaded up windows 7 to look. Where's add/remove software? Wait, that changed and I need to set the control panel to classic to see it. Uh, where's classic mode at. Turns out you select the drop down box to Large/Small Icons for it to change the icon selection entirely. What? I spent a while longer searching for where to install OS components (IIS, etc). Minor irritants to me. Major headaches for my Father, Sister, Brother, etc. Even moreso when they call the family tech who can't figure what the hell they're talking about.
I change to the interface IS a change to the OS as far as all by %1 of users are concerned.
When you click Start and see a textbox which is labeled search, do you not think, what if I type "add remove". Google has taught me this, so when I see search I expect to enter keywords or search criteria and that expected results are returned.
Guess what it works.
Classic what? Click what? Where's what?
Just search for it.
Implying the rest just seems archaic, especially from a user perspective.
I'm one of those people. I switched to OS X somewhere around XP SP3. Have never used Vista on any of my own machines, and only run Win7 on a VM to get access to IE 8 and 9.
Search on Windows is horribly broken. One of the first "shortcuts" I learned on OS X was Cmd+Space and typing out the application I wanted to run. Spotlight immediately brought up what I wanted. Windows never did that for me, or spent 45 seconds or more with a spinning hourglass to return a document that happened to be named similar to a program I wanted. I don't care if it works better now, they've set a precedent in my mind that it is broken, because it was broken for the ~15 years I used their OSes.
I agree that when you're very familiar with the control panel, it's frustrating to have to adapt to the non-classic categorised view. However there are clear advantages to some changes, and I would argue that the Windows control panel is more usable now than it has been in the past. The large directory of icons with no clear grouping by function is a user interface nightmare, and it's only because we're familiar with it that we can navigate it.
And for reference, if you go to the control panel in Windows 7, "Uninstall a program" is right there on the bottom left. If you want to install a program (like IIS), clicking "Programs" takes you to a convenient menu that lets you "Turn Windows features on or off".
It's not quite how it was, but it's actually more intuitive. I'd imagine that you learned the old way of doing it by trial and error. The new system makes that process easier.
You're advocating the retardation of progress for the sake of familiarity, which has never worked for any company at any point in history, and I fail to see why Microsoft would willingly fall into that trap.
You innovate or you die, and Microsoft is dying. The iPad is killing them. Maybe not quickly and obviously, but it will end Microsoft's dominance in less than a decade.
