The 'chans seem almost like a leaderless cult. I've also seen people get completely sucked into them in this really honestly creepy way. I suppose it's like a subculture but minus virtually everything positive like socializing with real human beings and having real experiences.
As someone who unashamedly frequents 4chan it saddens me to see this sort of view. I'm neither for or against 8chan's banning but I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of the *chan cultures.
The problem with most of the internet is that there are so many psychological incentives to repress unpopular opinions and to fit in with the hive mind. Reddit is the pinnacle of that where your opinion is literally shown or hidden based on its popularity. Now this is good for lazy content consumption since most of the time the popular content is what you want to see. But it's also very dangerous. Very very dangerous. Not only because it discourages changes in thinking but also because malicious entities can literally manipulate what you're thinking.
So yes, I may not always like what I read on 4chan. It may act as a platform for mentally ill people. But a lot of greatness also comes from it too. I mean it's no coincidence that a disproportionate amount of internet memes originate there. But a lot of thoughtful discourse also occurs there, often inciting interesting arguments where elsewhere on the internet it'd be buried by downvotes or deleted by moderators.
The antidote to social media ad populum isn't social media anarchy. They're both bad, but they're not equally bad.
It's like asking if you'd rather eat your own poop or a handful of one inch nails. As unpalatable as the former certainly is, the latter is unambiguously worse.
I never claimed it was a solution. I just said it helps you to avoid it. If it were the solution I wouldn't be on Hacker News right now.
Although I strongly disagree regarding 4chan being unambiguously worse. Maybe if you're talking about just /b/ and /pol/ I'd agree but the site is so much more than that.
For instance, the game development community there much more human and helpful than most other communities I've participated in. But there's a hundreds of other micro communities that are really great if you know where to find them.
There are tons of non-gamified and non-surveillance-capitalist forums out there about all kinds of topics. I realize not everything and everyone on the chans is toxic, but there is quite a lot of toxic presence there.
I think the chans were cool and interesting back in the early-mid 2000s but since then they've been taken over by not-actually-ironic trolls, political propagandists and astroturfers, and other nasties. Since the forums are anonymous there's no real way to police it or even tell who you're talking to or whether they're a "real person" or a sock puppet of some kind.
I distinctly remember what to me felt like the chans' shark-jumping moment: Ebola Chan.
When that appeared along with a thread full of seemingly not actually ironic comments like "maybe Ebola will de-populate Africa," I felt that the chans were done.
There's plenty of actual racism around, which of course I don't like, but most of this is limited to /b/ and /pol/ which are not representative of the entire site. They just happen to get in the spotlight more because of how controversial they can be.
A lot of people on 4chan view these boards as a sort of filter to scare away outsiders. The majority of the site isn't nearly that edgy and largely discuss the various relevant topics for each respective board.
What's tragic is that they convince cat lovers to post cat pictures on "Caturday", when they should be posting them every day! That needlessly reduces their positive contribution to society to just 14.28% efficiency.
There are definitely leaders on the chans. The site operators know who log in the most, post the most, and what they post. This sort of info is inherent to running a message board. Moot was upfront about this when he ran 4chan, and he cooperated with law enforcement when they came looking for specific people.
The idea that these movements are leaderless collectives is part of their propaganda and should not be passed on without skepticism.
Maybe those games where you control a Western European country in the middle ages and have to defend your civilization against religious, cultural and ethnic rivals?
>Prior to the start of Rawitsch's history unit, Heinemann and Dillenberger let some students at their school play it to test; the students were enthusiastic about the game, staying late at school to play. The other teachers were not as interested, but did recommend changes to the game, particularly removing negative depictions of Native Americans as they were based more on Western movies and television than history, and could be problematic towards the several students with Native American ancestry at the schools.
But they partially addressed that in the 1974 MECC version:
>He also added in more positive depictions of Native Americans, as his research indicated that many settlers received assistance from them along the trail. He placed The Oregon Trail into the organization's time-sharing network in 1975, where it could be accessed by schools across Minnesota.
Now the developer, Don Rawitsch, would like to create a version of the game from the Native American perspective.
>But developers still field questions about the game’s stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans. During a recent gaming conference, Don Rawitsch, one of three aspiring teachers who developed The Oregon Trail, said he has dreams of reimagining the game with a Native American perspective.
>“If I were to create something like Oregon Trail today, I would create the Native American version,” he said during a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference in March. “What would it be like on the other side of the wall, so to speak?”
But even the cowboys-and-indians-movie 1971 version of Oregon Trail was a far cry from 8chan.
