I used to go on a curated version of 4Chan via Telegram. Yes there is a lot of racism (although it flies in every direction, between every ethnicity you could imagine) but there is also (due to the anonymous nature) some genuinely interesting discussions. I remember one thread about aircraft carriers being of no use being debated by US and UK submarine officers.
There are also some genuinely funny bits. There was a guy in Greece who had found out that as long as he never graduated, he could live a basic life for free at university. His nickname was Dormogenes.
It is the freedom that comes from being anonymous.
To mock and ridicule, yes. to speak your mind, sure, But first and foremost to discuss between true equals, because you can only be judged by what you write, because the value you are bringing to the discussion comes from your words and not from your reputation as the real-world human you are.
Being free to discuss controversial topics without having repercussion to your job or family (which is why doxxing was so frowned upon back then)
Being free to do some stupid childish fun, just for laughs.
Something we still had when it was just forums, even though we did have accounts they did not represent our whole persona, and we could be different people on different platform.
Something that was almost lost for good when normies invaded the internet due to social networks. It's not completely lost yet, and we must fight to keep it.
Unless it was someone else larping as him, as recent as feb this year he posted that he's still living there (apparently got an extension or something). He was arrested, but he got released within a few days.
there is a great clickhole headline that your comment reminds me of
"Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point"
4chan has produced some hilarious/interesting stuff, and they have also driven people to suicide. i suppose it is up to everyone individually to make the value judgement there.
yes, you are repeating the "what about" part. my comment has literally nothing to do with other social networks.
if it helps, feel free to apply the original quote to facebook or whatever when they do something good. but this article and comment chain is about 4chan. so i am talking about 4chan.
lol, what are you talking about? i said i was reminded of a quote, that is it. no one disagreed, they just said “other people do it too” and put words in my mouth so they could argue about something.
like, what “stance” do you think i am even trying to take?
Well, much like HN, 4chan is a couple dozen boards of different topics frequented by something like 22 million unique users every month. So of course there's going to be good things there. And of course there's going to be bad things there. You don't get to pick and choose.
Trying to make a "value judgment" and boil the whole thing down to "4chan good" or "4chan bad," seems with even the most generous interpretation... incredibly reductive and foolhardy.
i wasnt trying to make any sort of profound point. i was reminded of an applicable quote i like, so i posted it.
and of course my comment is reductive, it is a total of 3 sentences. i dont really know what nuance you were expecting to get out a 3 sentence comment.
everything is gray, with both good and bad. 4chan included. there we go -- more true, less interesting.
I mean that's pretty vacuously true, since (the community of) "4chan" is a subset of (the total population of) "humanity in general," but it's a stronger and more interesting claim to make about the subculture in question.
If anything, the person you were replying to was intentionally describing how 4chan is less dissimilar to humanity in general than its typical portrayal, so responding with a dismissal that that makes them just the same as everyone else is really just affirming their point.
I haven't gone on in many years, almost decades. I feel like it was both a huge waste of time but also useful. I eventually lost interest in keeping up with it all. I am surprised anyone's mind can handle being there for long. Even m00t himself left and I don't think ever came back.
While there's plenty of legit, true racism throughout 4chan I was always struck by how incredibly specific it could get. Like "Congolese Bantus subjugating pygmies" kind of specific.
Roger Stone had a history of making violent threats and long association with an armed paramilitary group. There was also the tape recording of him appearing to plan violence against two Democratic elected officials.
Just swap mac address if you have to use such a wifi. Or set up Xray[0] with the captive portal as domain if you have a VPS and are so inclined. Can also use this on locked down airplane wifi.
Just get a good 5G plan? On the ground in a busy metropolis like London, I can't imagine why or how you would need to consider using satellite communication for connectivity. Then again the last time I was in London the cellular service was by and large pretty bad.
Also, "science" isn't some sort of dogma that you should trust, it's a process you should follow.
"Trust the science" is anathema to the process. If anything, the chant should be "Doubt the science! Give it your best shot, refute it with data, with logic, provide a better explanation!"
Realistically, the vast majority of people will not have a real chance to "refute" or even evaluate scientific claims. Maybe given a lot of time and foundational work to learn the field, some percentage of people can usefully think about them, but the vast majority can't. A lot of people are functional illiterates. They will pick based on trust and gut feelings either way.
For example, when deciding whether to give your kids certain vaccines or not, you really can't expect that new parents will read the primary literature and try to refute or confirm the conclusions based on the numbers and will trace through the citations and so on... Any of those claims will also have some online account on social media refuting it with equally scientifically sounding words. In the end it will come down to heuristics and your model of how the world works, which set of people operate with what kind of intention. Like maybe you know people working in the field who you trust and hear from them that generally this sort of stuff can be trusted. Or maybe you had some bad experiences getting screwed by "the establishment" (maybe even unrelated to medicine) and now you lump all this together and distrust them.
Which is why we need people "doing science" to also focus on getting rid of bad ideas rather than just coming up with more. The present incentive structure is such that we reward people for coming up with shocking new ideas even if they are obviously rubbish and don't do enough to reward the ones who put in the effort to debunking existing bad ideas.
Coming up with ideas is the easy part of science, but most new ideas are wrong. Getting rid of the ones that aren't actually correct is hard, yet we shower praise on people doing the easy part and ignore the ones doing the hard part.
Mucking around with autoexec.bat, config.sys, emm386 etc to get 1-2-3 to load was fun. Lots of TSRs using up memory. The amount of times I had to tell people to create a "clean config" by commenting out most of autoexec.bat...
We also had to post people floppy disks with the correct printer driver on. No downloads in those days.
"What would a piece of software have to do today to make you cheer and applaud upon seeing a demo?"
I was at LotusSphere when Lotus Notes 4 was announced and demo-ed. That got a standing ovation.
I remember making floppies with customized autoexec.bat and config.sys and telling users "put this floppy in and reboot if you want to do X" (usually a game, but sometimes a big program).
DOS 6 added menus in config.sys IIRC that removed the need for this.
CompuServ was used more for corporate software downloads in those days than a BBS. Companies generally don't want to rely on some random person with an extra phone line in the basement for product support; CompuServ was 'corporate BBS' and owned by H&R Block, so had biz cred. Driver downloads were pretty much the reason I had a CompuServ account, since we had a bunch of otherwise great local BBS for the other on-line things I cared about back then.
That said...files from Compuserv usually ended up on some BBS somewhere eventually, and FidoNet let you get them if they weren't on your local BBS. Maybe...if you could find them.
Oh sure...some companies had their own setup. I think one of the disk drive manufacturers had their own BBS (Western Digital?). But I think most companies looking into this kind of service saw the Compuserv infrastructure (in particular, all the ways to access it...dial, X.25, leased line, etc., with huge numbers of local PoPs) and said "I'll take that because building ourselves it would suck".
And...there was a time between this and "Internet for all the things", when for consumers, AOL was the place to get drivers and such. But that's an even farther digression from the BBS topic (other than to point out AOL started out with BBS software).
Same in the UK. Instead of us generating electricity via coal, we get other people to do it less cleanly and import it instead. That way our hands are clean.
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