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Comment by trianglem | Hacker News Reader

4chan needs to go sooner rather than later

why should the last bastion of actual free speech be gone? Specially since there isnt but one particular board that is the cause of most of the conmotion. If you hate the liberty of those that disagree with you just say it instead of hiding behind vague threats about place you dont know anything about.

i'm sorry, are you suggesting that we don't have free speech without 4chan?

Your free speech is not what others call free speech, hate to tell ya.

Try saying something heavily against the current discourse, worse yet, in a way that the current discourse sees as unacceptable. For clarity, avoid any calls to violence. How many places would not deplatform you, suspend you, or at least downvote you into oblivion?

Not many. Anonymous boards are some of such places.

Even if you think that some people are patently wrong on the Internet, dangerously and irredeemably wrong, it's more useful to be aware that such people exist, than to hide this fact from yourself in order to have a quieter sleep.

Freedom is, by definition, also freedom for those you disagree with, despise, even hate. If either side forces their (doubtlessly, virtuous and well-founded) views on the other (doubtlessly, misinformed and stubborn), I have a hard time calling it freedom. It's a standard ideological oppression.

Check out the paradox of tolerance and Goebbels's thoughts on the matter:

https://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/goebbels-on-the-reichst...

This is a good quotation.

One thing is just speaking, another, speaking and voting in a parliament.

OTOH I like the idea that every new Parliament member should bring an idea which is currently illegal, and work on integrating it into the legal framework. Thus is how all change (to the bad and to the good the same) occurs in a peaceful way.

It's interesting to note how many now-mainstream ideas were fringe 30 years ago, and outright scandalous 100-150 years ago: universal suffrage, social security, gay marriage, legal marijuana, etc.

You can say most things against the current discourse on many forums as long as it’s not illegal/viciously bigoted. I feel that amount of “freedom” is enough as any more freedom takes away others freedoms.

I didnt suggest that, you framing of my words id quite mmm peculiar to say the least, but I wont assume dishonesty from you. Rather what I said is that 4chan is probably the last big place that still resembles a little bit the freedom that internet was supposed to bring us. Yes it has a couple places some people dont like, but HEY we dont have to like them. WHat I said is that 4chan is the last place where people cna have an honest debate that rarely takes place anywhere on the internet. Is the last place that still has that "Hackerculture" that places like this were supposed to embody, you know sharing leaks, discussing what society looks with disdain and so on. 4chan is mm not like what you suggest a magical place that holds freedom of speech. However it is the last bastion of the visible freedom of speech that internet was supposed to bring. If 4chan dissapears fredom of expression will not suddenly disappear, however it would be a clear symptom of the fact that sillicon valley won. And we are back to manufactured consent, we are back to the days of tv when only a couple millonaires dictated what could be discussed and what could not be discussed. I dont want that simple as.

I am happy to say that I do and would not give a single, solitary shit about a hive of racists and hatemongers losing their platform for spreading those things. Liberty is irrelevant to this, nobody is owed a platform owned by somebody else, not even 4chan, and until 4chan/8chan/8kun and the like are running their own datacenters, their platform is not fully theirs.

Where is 4chan hosted then?

I commend you to visit the place and you will discover that you are mistaken. There is one ONE place where there is racism and is literally called a containment board is /pol/. Outside of that honestly it seems you have a personal problem with people that you dont know like I doubt the people of /origami/ are "hatemongers" but what do I know. And while people arent "owed" a platform. Given the actual and the factual characteristics of modern web infrastructure, what you are saying is " Yes I would like to spread my buttchecks such that Mr Zuckerberg, Mr Bezzos and five more guys control what can and cant be said.". I dont want to give a shit about that people either but not caring about this is what is going to entrench the power of ZUckerberg and cronies, and I dont want silicon valley assholes in charge (even more)

I’ve been on 4chan since before 2008, was the “mod” of a board and even met moot a few times irl. Fun and games for a very short time followed by immediately realizing how cancerous what was happening was. Using humor to poison minds, that place should burn in hell.

4chan /g/ is basically an uncensored 2003 version of Hacker news. In fact, they often discuss the same topics. I saw the 'gnome DE' article posted there last week - after it was shared with HN it got 1k+ upvotes. The 'blue boards' are probably very similar to you in terms of worldview

Yes, nothing wrong with the “censored” version of hacker news here. There is clearly a lot of good or 4chan but it’s not worth it.

4chan is protected by LEO. It proactively reports illegal postings to LEO, shares logs proactively, responds quickly and is heavily moderated. Additionally most of the site isn't troublesome.

The rules are US freedom of speech which is much more liberal than Europe and hate speech definitions so the content on the adult boards is shocking to me and some may be illegal in Europe, but it's not illegal in the US.

There are worse sites but this one is the one that enters the less well informed public's consciousness ironically.

It’s definitely troublesome. Racist memes may not be illegal but they are hugely damaging to a multi ethnic society.

hydra[1]. if you remove 4chan I guarantee you well get 3 in its place.

[1]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hydra-Greek-mythology

There are already many smaller chans, with varied attending demographics. I think this is referred to as "the webring." 4chan would sure be a shame to see go, though.

Why do you say that? What do you mean by that?

If you take an online community down, the people that made up that community will not all end up in the same place, they won’t bring the entire culture of that community with them, and some of them won’t make the jump.

Maybe you end up with three new chans, but you end up with three smaller, more fractured chans. Organization and relationships will evaporate because people won’t have alternate ways of recognizing or reaching their friends, may not use the same handles, may not end up on the same sites, etc.

Site administrators will get worn out and tired of dealing with it, and may run out of money to keep the site up.

I’m not saying that you should take down 4chan, just saying that if 4chan did disappear, it would leave a big hole that would take a long time to fill again. That, and any new chans would have a hard time claiming to be THE chan. There are already like twenty active “chan” sites or more. Besides 2channel and 4chan, the other sites don’t have much credibility or “pull”.

I think 4chan is different. It has a unique user base with a lot of internet history. If you take it down it will create a new energy in the free speech movement that will gain incredible momentum. 4chan is definitely functioning as a containment site right now. It hasn't changed in years, so a replacement would likely be more innovative.

Containment sites are not necessary. Instead of containing people, you can ban them. It works better than containment.

>>If you take an online community down, the people that made up that community will not all end up in the same place, they won’t bring the entire culture of that community with them, and some of them won’t make the jump.

Parler was the top 180 website in the USA according to alexarank, before it went down the other day. This is just from mostly middle aged americans being frustrated with their facebook groups being deleted. It's pretty easy to start chans out of the box and the userbase will eventually congregate to one place

>>Maybe you end up with three new chans, but you end up with three smaller, more fractured chans. Organization and relationships will evaporate because people won’t have alternate ways of recognizing or reaching their friends, may not use the same handles, may not end up on the same sites, etc.

This is pretty irrelevant to anonymous communities. Mostly they just move to like boards, i.e. 8chan, 16chan, 2ch, 4ch, endchan, infinite chan, and more all have an /anime/ board. The point being that the board is more relevant than the chan site itself.

> […] the userbase will eventually congregate to one place

There’s a big catch, though. “Eventually” is the key word. It takes a long time, and the disappearance of one forum does serious damage to the community, and the community has to go through the work of recovering from that damage.

I’ll say that I’m not sure it happens.

We often get this idea that these online communities are like magical cockroaches that will keep coming back. Being a /pol/ user is not the same thing as being a cockroach. You’re just a person. At some point, if being a /pol/ user is inconvenient and frustrating, then maybe you give it up. Site operators go broke or get tired of the community.

The internet does not make communities immune to attack.

That could be true 10-15 years ago. Today you can't run these off a $50/month VPS, you'll be DDOS'd out of existence the moment someone uses a slur someone else doesn't like.

Until a week ago colo providers, reverse proxies and ISPs have been neutral but just you watch the next few weeks.

Yeah like tpb is a hydra right? Torrent offerings are dismal now, a shadow of what they used to be.

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