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Comment by grenoire | Hacker News Reader

An HN comment the other day mentioned how most Americans, no matter how high reddit was up the Alexa rankings was, rejected knowing what the website was. I just feel like 4chan was much more influential in individuals' lives, no matter how large its userbase was at the peak; yet people reject it in the same exact manner...

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Are you saying that 4chan was much more influential than reddit? Because I'm not sure that I'd buy that without some serious data.

4chan isn't small potatoes. It's reasonably big potatoes. But intuitively it isn't reddit scale potatoes.

4chan is to Reddit as Xerox PARC was to Apple. It's the baked potato to Reddit's buttery mashed potatoes. It takes a little more work to get what you want out of it, but sometimes that's part of the draw.

Does that make geocities Bell Labs?

With regards to internet culture, 4chan and SomethingAwful are definitely way more influential than reddit.

I was on SomethingAwful for years (2004? 2003? regdate). There was a period of time when that was true, but I'd definitely say it's no longer the case.

Yeah SA is definitely past its meme-making prime, but it was the beginning of so much that it holds a special place.

Maybe were, but not are.

You don't say that a scientist lacks influence based on his/her current papers, or even based on whether they're currently alive.

What we do now is based on SA, 4chan then. Reddit is the influence of those sites, it didn't eclipse them, it amplified them. The part of reddit that isn't SA and 4chan is pretty much Digg, which is why censorship of even the most horrific speech represents an existential threat to the company.

SA is definitely past its influential period, but to this day stuff that starts in 4chan ends up in national news.

I have the feeling reddit is more like reconstructive surgery than actually something totally new being born.

I think most memes originated on 4chan and spread to Reddit. That's probably what's meant by influential.

Not sure what you are trying to say, but I'm sure most people rejected knowing 4chan as well. It depends on where you are in life though, I guess in a college dorm people would speak more openly about it than in a large enterprise, with start-ups somewhere in between, depending on culture.

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