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Comment by kaiokendev | Hacker News Reader

I had some of the best and worst conversation on 4chan. When the only means of expressing yourself is by virtue of your ideas, it really breed an atmosphere you can't find anywhere else. It just a shame, you can really tell there is a lot of... intelligence activity on the site.. from many nations, lol

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I only started visiting 4chan after Hacker news gave recommendation few years ago. I would say that in the past few years, since the 'intelligence activity' went up, it really started teaching the smart people on the Internet to identify that as quickly as possible. To put it in terms of another old meme, Redditors never learned how to identify GameOfTrolls threads (because Reddit Admins banned it successfully as soon as possible), therefore, this still remains as an attack vector on Reddit. On the other hand, being able to identify "slide threads", and "glowies", is an important skill every smart person needs to learn. it's not like back in the golden days you're remembering fondly, intelligence activity and slide threads didn't happen, it's just that they were limited to newspaper articles and media events.

What if Richard Nixon was a good guy, or at least no worse than any other president, but he stepped on the wrong toes, and the deep state took care of him?

When you say intelligence a activity, do you mean activity from intelligence agencies like the CIA? Would be curious to hear more if so.

Yes, it's full of "glowies." (We can thank Terry Davis of Temple OS fame for that term.) Occasionally, a nutcase who intends to do harm will have been found to hang out there[1], and the glowies don't want to be the last to find out if said nutcase posts their intentions in advance. Which is fair enough. That's their job, after all.

[1] like the recent Rotterdam shooter

https://nltimes.nl/2023/09/29/rotterdam-shootings-suspect-ex...

https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/436995585

4chan loves the term "glowie" in part because its full expansion incorporates a racist slur, but its shortened form can be used in contexts like this, in which it seems merely irreverent rather than racist. Thanks, Terry. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glowie

Also because typing "glow-in-the-dark CIA [neighbors]" all the time takes too long. I mean, /pol/ doesn't really shy away from using the odd slur. Just occasionally. Only in between the casual misogyny, gigachad fetishism, and soyface posting.

Russian state has used 4chan as an influence operation to seed social media since around 2008, supporting isolationist Republicans and extreme views that cause civil strife and weakening of a unified US. Internet Research Agency is the big one but Russia has done this since the war they had with Georgia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

the only means of expressing yourself is by virtue of your ideas

what do you mean by that?

how is it any different on HN?

4chan enforces anonymity even across posts (at least on /b/) and with missing nesting, you can lose track of replies fast. So you're basically reading ideas only. Altough I do agree HN's post system is one of the most similar. HN has a more coherent culture and moderation, though.

Any forum with up and downvoting cannot be called most similar to 4chan lol. Discord is probably more similar, not to mention the usual phpbb boards.

i don't know what you are comparing. phpbb boards maybe, but i don't see how discord fits in here. anyways, the point was about identity. not about voting. that's entirely irrelevant.

If you don't see how up/down voting completely changes how forums work, how people post, the environment it creates, etc etc etc, then you don't really know anything about internet forums.

i didn't say that voting has no effect. i said that it is not relevant to the point we were discussing which is the establishing of a personal identity. the identity is dependent on the amount of anonymity provided by the forum.

sure, voting does affect how and what people write, but it doesn't affect the fact that it is practically not possible to establish an identity on 4chan, and that it is still difficult on hackernews, because names of posters do not stand out, and in my own experience it very often escapes my notice if i am responding to the same person as before or to a different one.

i also can not see if a message has been upvoted or what the posters reputation is (unless i go look up the karma points, and count the number of messages and links they posted) so i can't seek out or avoid people or messages based on that. whereas in other forums that information is readily visible with each post, which in turn affects who and what i pay attention to.

on hackernews this results in me focusing on each message by itself just like i would on 4chan, and it is independent of the voting that goes on here. btw, i also read dead messages, which means i even ignore the downvotes and make my own judgement of the message, which further reduces the effect of voting, at least for my person.

another interesting point is that when i first joined hackernews i used to close all my messages with a greeting like a signature, which was not welcome and shows that standing out, which is something that would help establish an identity, is not desired here.

Well ignoring the voting thing, which I do think is relevant, what you're describing is pretty much exactly reddit and not 4chan. Also there are a good number of famous/known personalities in HN. Also I'm pretty sure if you've been selected for the YC, you can see who else is in the YC club in HN, like your name gets highlighted or something. So the reality in HN is not at all how you describe.

Also there are a good number of famous/known personalities in HN

sure there are, but unless you know who they are and what their HN account names are and pay close attention to that name on each message then you won't notice them. and, those people are not famous for their writing on HN.

as far as i remember, reddit used to show awards next to the nickname on each message, so you could easily see who the high quality posters were. this appears to be no longer the case. they still have an avatar though, which can make particular users easy to recognize. neither HN nor 4chan have that.

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