The spin in this article is pretty interesting. 4chan has been a cesspool for years. The stuff highlighted in the article, the leaking nude photos of celeb, and harrasing some game developers, is really mild compared to all the nasty stuff that happened before, like someone posting photos of girl they just murdered, or getting scores of people to actually commit suicide, or leaking nude photos of random women, or harassing some new target every other day. The article calls these "the good times", though.
If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.
It's one thing if it's a single crazy posting photos of a murder victim, it's another if it's an ongoing war with the community over unacceptable content. Fappening/gamergate stuff was getting posted and deleted probably hundreds of times a day across several boards, then threads would pop up asking why moot and the moderation team were being fascists. It's the difference between a spoiled apple every few barrels and a truckload of rotting fruit. I can't imagine why ANYBODY, even somebody who embraces the positives of the pure id of the internet, would want to fight that fight alone.
I also think that it's not quite true that 4chan hasn't changed during his tenure; as the population of certain boards have changed the nature and quality of their content has also seen a shift. /b/ once held that sweet spot of being able to generate and propagate large numbers of memes, but it has since grown much larger and appeals more to lowest common denominator type stuff. Meanwhile, smaller boards hit those critical population densities and begin to resemble /b/ of old.
I don't think there's much spin on the article to be honest. The article is mostly giving backstory on moot and 4chan or talking about "reprehensible" things that happened/originated on the site.
> The article calls these "the good times", though.
Actually the "good times" quote is the author referring to moot's "Summer of Chris", or his time away from the site.
> The stuff highlighted in the article...is really mild compared to all the nasty stuff that happened before, like someone posting photos of girl they just murdered
From the article:
"Though Poole does find some 4chan posts 'reprehensible' — like when a murderer posted photos of his victim on the site..."
> If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.
I think the site did change over the years. And I think the article even tries to make this point. I think the idea is that the sort of fappening/gamergate stuff wasn't there in the beginning. While the site has always been full of tastelessness and cruelty, I think it was the acts like this that drew a lot of attention and forced moot to confront 4chan's users. And that confrontation created the conflict and stress that finally drove moot away from the site.
The site has changed, even though the site has always had people posting terrible stuff. If we call "c" the force of the people "crap" on the site, you could say there has been a gradual increase in c_{root-mean-square}, even though c_{peak-to-peak} hasn't changed much.
This is probably an inevitable outcome of any unmoderated forum in the long-term. Small kernels of confrontation, hatred, and faction/tribalism are going to push away the more moderate posters, eventually concentrating the problem.
I used to really enjoy /b/ - sure, there was always a lot of shit on there, but it was also the centre of absolutely unrestrained creativity. From memes so funny that they still crack me up, to sorting algorithms so novel that they changed the way I thought about solving problems.
As I see it, two things happened:
- I aged. I was in my mid-twenties when 4chan launched. Now, I'm in my late thirties. You won't understand how much the years 25 - 40 will change you until you've been through those years.
- The community's standards changed. Back in the day, unrestrained creativity was rewarded. The last time I was on /b/, unrestrained cruelty was rewarded. I can't picture Gamergate happening in ~ 2008...
---
The second point is likely a function of the first.
I've also been on /b/ since the early days, but I can't agree with your assessment. "Old /b/" was the place where posting pictures of animals being tortured (if the words "zippo cat" or "crush cat" mean anything to you - and yes, both of those things are exactly what they sound like) was a common occurrence. Cruelty was never seen as a negative as long as the community found the results sufficiently funny, shocking, or funny because they were shocking (via other people's reactions).
To coin a phrase: /b/ was never good.
If GamerGate were a thing that couldn't happen back in the early days, it's only because rallying behind a cause (regardless of what you think of its validity) that's "serious" rather than one that generates laughs would have never happened - it's got nothing to do with the acerbic nature of the community. Chanology was the first real break from that.
I think these kinds of events became "bigger" and more noticeable because of the evolution of the web.
First people just pointed and laugh.
Then, as more not-so-private information became available, people were able to figure out where the target lived, worked, name and family. Things escalated to prank calls, ordering pizza to their homes or simply showing up at their door to point and laugh.
But then came the social media boom. Facebook, Twitter, and every detail of a person's life was there for the pickings. Gathering information about a "target" got really, really easy. And it became easier to mock/attack too. You have an embarassing video, I'll put it in youtube and show it with all your frinds. I'll bombard your twitter with jokes, hate and all-around trolling. You could simply shut-down a person's online social life (which importance has been growing in the last years).
What once was hard-work, now is easy. And with that, anyone can be an accomplished troll.
I don't know about Gamergate, but if the Fappening had happened 5 years earlier, it probably wouldn't be as big as it got (media wise)
> All of which made his decision to leave 4chan seem so confounding. "I've come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure," he wrote in his farewell post. What he really meant and why he was quitting were a mystery.
Huge amount of pressure from outside to censor "the cesspool"? He, himself, has become a attack target. Something goes wrong -> "need" to censor 4chan arises -> people exert pressure on Moot. Repeat and repeat. And its not really about 4chan - it was mostly about Moot: just too much for singe person to handle.
Nude pictures of celebs were not leaked by 4chan - it was leaked by 4chan user. 4chan was just a medium. Pics could be leaked anywhere with similar results (e.g. more attention to celebs in question). Harassment of game developers goes day and night on Tumblr, and nobody is doing anything about that. All other stuff you've mentioned are just things that happen in real life. Real life once again leaks to the Internet - stop the presses!
As for harassment: its the REAL PROBLEM. But 4chan is guilty no more that Internet in general. Harassment campaigns are happening all the time and even lack of anonymity is not preventing such behaviour. Tim Hunt and Matt Taylor were ripped apart by crowds at Twitter, Tumblr, main stream media publications. People were driven to suicide by harassment on Facebook (and those cases landed in courts).
There are shitty people who love being offended, being angry about some very subjective injustice; dignified agitation gives those people reason to breathe and makes them feel good. Internet brings those people together and helps them validate their own agitation and actions. Next they gang up. Its simple as that. Its a question of lack of empathy and echo-chambers enabling morons.
Solution so far is only one - more privacy, less social networks. Avoiding the danger. Keeping political, professional and personal stuff separated.
I actually ran a chan: so I think I kind of understand, a little bit. The one I ran is small, chilled-out, and pretty social (well, for a chan). Those two particular storms didn't really wash upon our shores much. There were however still disagreements about moderation policies (we were far from perfect, but we tried to strike a balance between freedom of speech and not being a platform for arseholes). There was someone who had their own opinions about how the site should be run, up to and including trying (albeit failing) to dox me (!); the odd DDoS attack; and, spammers trying to advertise some really horrible stuff (which I expeditiously deleted and passed onto law enforcement - anti-spam on a chan which has a very low barrier to casual entry is quite a technical challenge).
I eventually decided I simply didn't have the time to continue running it myself; the legal risk is also highly significant (I'm in the UK…), and I'm quite happy that part is no longer my problem, and it all seems to have landed on its feet. I still post there sometimes.
It's very different culturally-speaking to other mediums, but there's considerable variation between different chans, and between different boards on a chan (especially with a huge one like 4chan). It's fascinating how much the medium shapes the culture of a discussion environment. 4chan's perception of anonymity is often relevant to the discourse, in that the removal of persistent identity is thought to remove ego (and karma-whoring) from the equation. I don't think the disinhibition of anonymity/psuedonymity is necessarily a negative thing overall; and yes, lots of other, more mainstream sites, even those with "real name" policies, have unwittingly been platforms for just as bad, and worse.
Managing a site with the size, activity, and sheer wildness of 4chan must have been quite a ride. I can't imagine the full scale, but I think I get part of the general picture, and I just don't know how moot handled it. I don't think even moot knows how he handled it! That part I get. One person can only do so much, and I appreciate his efforts.
You seem to be painting it as a choice between a libertarian free speech paradise and a totalitarian social justice hell, as if the problem was always and only in the offended.
> There are shitty people who love being offended, being angry about some very subjective injustice; dignified agitation gives those people reason to breathe and makes them feel good.
Those people are psychopaths, and they're actually not even offended - they're just pretending to be. They just enjoy playing games, fucking with people, causing frustration/anger/arguing/confusion, etc.
> Huge amount of pressure from outside to censor "the cesspool"? He, himself, has become a attack target. Something goes wrong -> "need" to censor 4chan arises -> people exert pressure on Moot. Repeat and repeat.
According to the article, it wasn't so much attacks from outside to remove things that wore him down, as it was attacks from 4channers angry at removals.
"Single point of failure" means something very specific. System is told to have SPOF if there is a point, attacking which would cause disruption of operations. 4channers are ultimate benefactors of 4chan. Talking about SPOF in this context does not make much sense.
4channers were angry because moot has replaced all of moderators, totally changing moderation policies on the website. Their ability to pressure moot were and are limited to voting with legs (8chat) and bitching on boards.
To be fair, early 4chan also did some good through project chanology. It's almost as if when you allow people to have freedom, they end up making bad decisions. You make a good argument against democracy.
I don't think I'm making any argument against anything. There is a lot of good, interesting or valuable stuff that was created or originated at 4chan -- half of the internet culture for one thing, moot being chosen the TIME most influential person of 2009 another. Nevertheless, 4chan/b/ was always and still is a cesspool.
I am not interested in discussing whether it's worth it to keep a place like this up, and if so, what should be the boundaries. I just wonder how exactly the climate around 4chan and moot has changed throughout the years, during which 4chan didn't change meaningfully.
My experience with 4chan did change. As I mentioned in another post on this thread, I have aged significantly and that may be to blame. But /b/ in particular went from being a community where unrestrained creativity was rewarded to a community where unrestrained cruelty was. For me, the change was absolutely obvious, but again, I was in my mid twenties when 4chan launched and I'm 38 now...
I don't think it has changed really at all. I think you have. I was on in the early days, and it was terrible. It was full of dark people looking to get a rise out of each other. It was full of brilliant individuals using that brilliance to get a rise out of each other. It was awful and amazing, it was brilliant and it was pants-on-head retarded at times. Those people were the closest friends I've never known.
It still is. All of that. For many people. But the difference is that you've aged. 4chan in general, but specifically /b/, was, is, and will forever be the best introduction to the anonymous internet for young people. You can say whatever you want to whomever you want, and you don't really have to worry about being bullied. It gives juvenile individuals a way to express themselves, and experiment with just how horrible and creative they can be.
All that said, I'm in the same boat as you. I used to go there, but I avoid it now, because my tastes have changed. It's still good for a quick chuckle once every three months or so, but that's about it.
You can say whatever you want to whomever you want, and you don't really have to worry about being bullied.
This is a complete load of shit and I can't imagine how stupid you have to be to think it's true other than being an apologist for 4chan. If you said the wrong thing to the wrong person, you wouldn't just get "bullied", you'd be dog-piled by dozens of abusers all egging each other on, doxed, swatted, hounded IRL and anything else the rabble could come up with. That's what Gamergate was: this mob going over the top with how big a bullies they could be when you had the audacity to say the wrong thing, be the wrong gender, in the wrong place.
I believe the NSA (and other organizations) are responsible for this.
I believe there is a force actively preventing people on the internet from organizing political protests/ideas so that they can maintain a status quo.
Even when political protests do happen, they're protests allowed by these organizations to give people a false sense of accomplishing something.
The "RadFems" are a big part of the problem, but so are the "racists". Most of the people who do the dirty work are "useful idiots" who have no idea what's going on.
You've been downvoted by someone, but I think that was premature. I want to hear you expand on this. In particular:
- By what mechanisms do you think that they are preventing protests and ideas?
- Do you think they are trying to be secret doing so? If so, how much manpower do you think they have and how do they prevent someone from defecting in a game-theoretic sense?
Freedom without responsibilities, perhaps. 4chan evolved into what it is because you could claim to be anything and anyone. The only way you can liken that to democracy is if you have canadians voting on US politics or some such. Meaning that the voters were insulated by time or space from the outcome of their voting.
How about representative democracy, where those representatives tend to be connected or rich enough to be shielded from any negative ramifications of how they vote?
How did they get into the position to vote in the first place? But yes, there is a issue there (and why keeping a close eye on the actions of elected representatives is paramount).
In the end it boils down to feedback. If the feedback from actions are too delayed, inaccurate, or non-exitent, bad things happen.
Christopher Poole is a modern day Warhol. Not in the sense that he is an artist himself, but because he has been so important and influential for modern culture. Nearly everything that you identify today as 'internet culture' originated on 4Chan. And as this culture is quickly becoming mainstream culture now.
He needs more recognition for this. And for all the vile hatred on 4Chan, I also know it is a big source of support for a lot of people otherwise left behind by the mainstream
I think you're misinformed: the real source of all internet culture is and was ebaumsworld.com.
Seriously, though, internet culture is more than just /b/. The Something Awful forums (where 4chan was born, after all), Fark and YTMND contributed a lot. More recently, sites like Reddit, Instagram, Vine and Twitter have become much more relevant than any 4chan board.
Also, what about Slashdot? The Jargon file? Usenet?
I've been on the Internet since the mid-90s and have purposefully avoided 4chan since I first heared of it.
At no point has it been difficult to avoid 4chan. I gather it has been very influential in the niche of image memes and I vaguely remember something about teenagers calling everybody a "fag" a few years back, but otherwise I couldn't say what the influence has been.
The legacy of mediums like Usenet isn't jokes but companies, applications, organisations etc. If you grew up during the heyday of Usenet (or BBSes, IRC, some forums, mailing lists) you had a pretty good chance of going on to do something in computing.
Joke can help people come together but they doesn't form the substance of a culture. I guess people from 4chan could go on and be the next generation of marketers or something, but I doubt it.
Not, what I can see, because of 4chan nor because of 4chan culture. By comparison, I know numerous people that started with BBSes, got involved in the demoscene, went on to work for and/or start games companies.
> The Something Awful forums (where 4chan was born, after all)
Would you mind explaining this? I have read that moot was originally an SA user and posted on there to announce when he first launched 4chan. Is there any connection beyond that?
moot was active on Raspberry Heaven, SA's anime forum IRC chat/DC hub, when 2chan.net was really popular there. He didn't start it in isolation and decide to post on SA - most or all of the original mods and users were from RH.
I don't have logs from when it was first started but here's a fun quote from a few weeks after:
[2003-10-14 02:51] <rizzou> hey moot - there's this cool website at http://www.4chan.net/ you should check it out. it's really looking like the next big thing, you know?
A few days later 4chan started killing the shared server it was hosted on by fellow SA forums member nem (I remember seeing load averages of like 80000), and had to find its own home.
A lot of ADTRW moved because SA had draconian policies against so much as discussing stuff like piracy, sexy anime babes, etc, except to condemn it and talk about how you're totally not into all that stuff.
The history of SA was all very interesting. There was a culture of very long decent posts I always wondered how to replicate - you still have the user base with too much free time these days, but they might have too many demands on their attention span.
In 2000 or so, SA was set up as a sea of quality in an internet whose users really weren't ready to be good forum posters. (Like: children, racists, perverts, really angry teenagers, people with signatures of anime characters holding huge swords, furries) The anime forum was opened because nobody else wanted to read the threads, but they mostly left it alone.
As the years went on quality went down as the user base got too large, so the admins started effectively a left-wing death squad called Helldump dedicated to finding reasons to ban everyone. It was pretty puritanical in the American sense, so nearly all the long time anime posters got banned for being "probably a pedophile". One person I knew was banned for a slightly too sexy image posted 10 years before and had since become the pilot of Marine One. It's a little surprising they were never sued for libel.
SA inspired the rarely-used "user was banned for this post" label, but mostly showed the importance of not having a post history.
ebaum actually just copied everyone's stuff. The original start of this fun was ytmnd.com, created by Max, the same person that actually developed 4chan's test servers before it was launched. Ytmnd was too complicated for many folks (to make an animated gif and an mp3 that would sync together) so people flocked to the 'anonymous' boards. It's too bad really, because ytmnd was a lot of fun.
SA is dead and YTMND was never more than a flash in the pan. Vine and Twitter are certainly more important today but reddit and instagram have a serious dearth of original content. The best they can hope for is internal drama and popularizing stuff 4chan came up with.
Go check out Know Your Meme and just browse around a bit. A vast, vast, vast majority of content that started exploding across the internet back when we were all young and innocent either originated on 4chan or was quickly picked up and shared on 4chan.
I'm not saying that 4chan is the be all end all- Something Awful can probably be said to be even more influential as a whole- but I think 4chan was the very first example of the modern anonymous internet watering hole that spawned international media attention and completely changed how information was disseminated across the world.
I think the point was that "Internet culture" is much more than just image memes. Internet culture as a whole has been around as long as the Internet itself and it's constantly evolving, like a living thing. And I'm talking back before the Web; BBSes, Usenet, and e-mail all had their own cultures that stayed around and evolved as the Web was born, and their influence can still be felt today. That's a concept that I feel is lost on anyone born in the 90s or later.
You are confusing the "the internet" with "the web".
The internet has been around for about as long as it's been sensible to describe an online culture. While in the early days (e.g. 70's, 80's) the internet certainly wasn't the only network to be influencing culture (c.f. FidoNet) it was a primary source, particularly via university campuses.
Exactly - the internet had been a big contributor to online culture through the 70s. Of course this stuff all had precursors in things like ham radio, model trains, etc. but it's not really sensible to identify those as "online". Nothing springs from the void.
Nice to get called "young man" though, it's been a while :)
it must be summer. You think there weren't memes on the internet before 4chan? All you're doing with this comment is showing your age. I'm you first started using the internet in the early 2000s. The internet and places for people to gather and fool around on it existed long before 4chan.
I love the idea that a site dedicated to explaining image macros is somehow a comprehensive repository of "internet culture." A ton of "internet culture" is not image-based because it originates from a time when downloading images was so slow and difficult that you'd only do it for content that was truly worth the effort, like pictures of Neptune taken by Voyager 2, or photos of naked ladies.
Is there really much connection from modern Internet culture to back then? Do you really remember any of those memes? James "Kibo" Parry may have invented trolling, but nobody knows that guy now.
By the way, here's the only Usenet joke I remember:
It makes me sad to see culture equated to simply a collection of catchphrases.
Some of the stuff is still around, and embedded so deeply it probably doesn't come to your mind just because it feels like part of the environment.
For example, do you ever use emoticons? :D That's a fundamental part of Internet culture that originates from long before it was practical to send images around as part of casual conversation.
Another example would be acronyms like LOL or ROFL. Some have died out, but LOL is still extremely common.
How about this one. Ever see people quote parts of other people's comments by leading them with a > character, then reply bit by bit? It's pretty common, and is enshrined in the markup support of sites like Reddit. That's ancient Usenet culture.
Heck, the very use of the word "trolling" as a way of describing someone who deliberately antagonizes people online is a piece of internet culture from that time. The originator may be forgotten, but nearly everyone knows what a "troll" is.
Long after all the current "memes" are forgotten, I wager people will still know what emoticons are or what LOL means. That's culture too.
The Internet existed before 2000. It also existed before the World Wide Web was created in 1993. And so on, and so on. Each generation influences the next, but after a couple of generations have gone by, the newest generation comes to think of the one directly before theirs as "the original". I say that as someone who was on Usenet in the late 80s/early 90s as a teen, and that was when that particular corner of the Internet was in decline.
All 4Chan has managed to do is recycle the same level of inanity that permeated the Usenet and BBS spaces before it. You are "standing by" a rehash of a rehash of a rehash.
I remember people "trolling" on usenet back in the 90s. It was way more tame back then however. Usenet and even BBSs were frequently full of pretty horrid material (gore, child porn and the like) as well as predators hiding behind a terminal.
He alone didn't influence the culture. He just created a place with very few rules and let people do their thing. It was the users of 4chan who created and spread that culture.
TL;DR: It was stressing to have to deal with all the illegal or harmful (for victims) stuff posted on 4chan which people then got angry over that it got removed. Some hackers were looking for his personal information and posting it if they found. The site is also expensive with no profit model. And finally, if something actually did happen to him, there was nobody who could take over. This move put other people in charge. The fappening and gamergate incidents were the straw that broke the camel's back after the most stressful month yet.
I don't think you can't make money out of 4Chan. Give this website to Kim Dotcom and you have a few millions a month later. Also ad providers... there are certainly a lot of them who don't care about legal and serious traffic. Think about all the illegal things marketing departments do to get the ad to your browser and your data back. Reading this article I think moot was just too nice a person for what 4chan was.
My only question for Moot has always been this:
How did he host the site on a pc in his room for years without getting into trouble with the law with all the dubious content being uploaded to the server?
The article answers this question by saying that Moot has always fully cooperated with the law as far as possible, far beyond other social media sites. Just because users were anonymous never meant there was privacy.
The history of 4chan is always whitewashed/demonised depending on what point you want to make. Moot is not a saint and not the victim he's trying to paint himself to be.
As to 4chan itself, it's a message board - it's the people that used it that have done all these things and if 4chan goes away people will just move to 8chan or other places so all this agonising over whether or not to censor/shut it down is pointless.
The thing is that most people here will agree with you that its the posters responsibility what content they upload. But the law says otherwise, at least in my country and I guess in the US as well.
Providers are safe carrying most content as long as they comply with legal requests as they come in and aren't actively conspiring to keep illegal content up. The only thing you're required to proactively report and delete is child pornography.
Still i prefer a place like 4chan where there is true freedom of speech and not a place like reddit ruled by facistic mods.
On HN you also can't really say many things cause it is moderated, I've experienced it many times that people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything.
"Freedom of speech" doesn't mean the power to not be moderated by an Internet forum, it means that you can speak your mind and your government can't arrest or censor you for it. If someone invites you into their home and you start calling their family names and pissing all over the carpet, the homeowner is well within her rights to throw you out and shut the door on you. Similarly, if you go onto an Internet forum that is owned by someone who is not you, they can moderate you into oblivion because it's their forum.
> On HN you also can't really say many things cause it is moderated, I've experienced it many times that people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything.
That is the community doing that, not the owners of HN, so I don't understand why you'd have a problem with it. You are free to post what you want here, and other users are free to up/down vote you, or reply to you, as they see fit. That is the very freedom you're crying for here, right?
I get it though: You want a fully unmoderated soap box to say whatever you want and don't want anyone to censor or moderate you. You're never going to get that using someone else's forum, so the solution is simple: Build your own! Buy a domain, learn to code or use a premade platform, launch a VPS or CoLo box, and post to your heart's content. If you are able to build an audience and get people to listen to you, great. If you choose not to censor or moderate your users, great. But I think your eyes will then be opened to exactly how difficult it is to maintain an Internet forum without some sort of rules and moderation.
> "Freedom of speech" doesn't mean the power to not be moderated by an Internet forum, it means that you can speak your mind and your government can't arrest or censor you for it.
No, it's the First Amendment which means that the government may not arrest your for what you say or censor your speech. 'Freedom of speech' means exactly what it says on the tin: that you may speak freely. In the United States, the government must respect your freedom of speech, and private entities have no such restriction.
> If someone invites you into their home and you start calling their family names and pissing all over the carpet, the homeowner is well within her rights to throw you out and shut the door on you.
Note that this is the same argument used by a monarch to justify restrictions on speech: it's his home, and you're welcome to leave.
I think that it's fine and proper that private entities are free to regulate speech on their properties, but I also think that it's often inadvisable and unfortunate that they do so.
Agreed. Freedom of speech doesn't begin and end in the Constitution. Its an American ideal, embodied in the Constitution to show we mean business. But at every level, we mean that everyone is born with the right to speak their mind. Opposing that is un-American at core.
To say "I suppressed their speech but it wasn't unconstitutional" is a very poor defense - that what you did can't be punished by the supreme court. I'm supposed to respect you for that? Its not just inadvisable and unfortunate; its wrong. At least here in America.
> Freedom of speech doesn't begin and end in the Constitution.
And I never said it did. I was refuting the illogical leap from "First Amendment" to "I can say or do whatever I want and not suffer any consequences, period".
Everyone is indeed born with the right of free speech, and I will staunchly defend that right. However, that doesn't mean I or anyone else can walk into someone else's demesnes and start verbally abusing them without at least being told to leave, which is their right. Or if they like the abuse, they equally have the right to let me stay and continue abusing them.
To put it another way, your right to swing your fist stops at my face.
And I never said it did. I was refuting the illogical leap from "First Amendment" to "I can say or do whatever I want and not suffer any consequences, period".
You were the first person to mention the "First Amendment".
Agreed. In America, people don't self-censor out of rational fear that the government will take them away in a black van in the middle of the night. People self-censor out of rational fear that they'll lose their jobs.
I'd argue that institutional opposition to free speech is a critical threat to freedom of speech. What you say outside work hours should be especially protected.
Sure, but you can also understand how your speech and other actions outside of work, while not prohibited by law, could also create a conflict with your employer (whether it's because you pissed off a bunch of customers or shareholders or went around posting things online that could harm your employer's reputation or business).
In such a case, would it not be your employer's right to terminate your employment? I'll give a hamfisted example:
Let's say I work for "E Corp". I also have very strong opinions on interracial marriage. In my opinion, people of different ethnic backgrounds shouldn't mix because it pollutes the gene pool of "superior" races.
Now let's say I start a blog where I regularly post essays and editorials which describe my opinions and I critique various media and public figures based on their adherence to my worldview.
One day, after a particularly impassioned post, my blog is noticed by a columnist at the New York Times who writes an opinion piece on modern day race relations. The public debate quickly spreads and soon my blog and opinions are being condemned by millions (and praised by several as well).
Now, E Corp knows I'm one of their employees and despite what you may have heard, the executive board is actually a pretty level-headed bunch. They typically seek to maximize profits but draw the line when it comes to things that make the company look bad or could hurt their public image. In fact, the CEO is currently the spokesman for a well-known minority rights group.
Now, while the state cannot force me to take down my blog, no matter how unpopular the opinions posted there may be, they also cannot force E Corp to keep me (a non-contracted employee) on the payroll. In fact, many public figures have stated their opinion that in keeping me on staff, they're essentially saying that they're OK with my opinions.
Can the state compel E Corp to keep me as an employee since I make my blog posts outside of work? Would that not be compelling E Corp to make the statement that my publicly broadcast opinions are OK? They may not be illegal but I'd wager that just as The Man can't shut down my blog for being unpopular or "offensive" to many, they also can't force my employer to make a statement by standing with me.
> "Freedom of speech" doesn't mean the power to not be moderated by an Internet forum
The amazing benefit of the internet was the solution to this. In network protocol that doesn't distinguish between different classes of network hosts, each network peer has the ability to publish on their own. Sure, there are technical details in figuring out how to run your own server. The cost of learning that or paying someone else to handle it is a normal cost of publication (which isn't particularly expensive). The point is that there is no authority standing in the way.
As you say, if someone doesn't like how they are moderated on someone else's forum, they have the same ability they had to run their own forum where they get to be the moderator. The catch is that Freedom of Speech doesn't guarantee an audience, so getting people to participate is a problem for the individual publishers to solve on their own.
Unfortunately, we have lost a lot of this freedom, and that loss is accelerating. NAT has created multiple classes of hosts, some of which cannot publish on their own. This created a culture of software where connections that should be peer-to-peer are brokered through a central authority.
We need to regain the true right to publish - where network peers are equal - before these rights are lost completely. The imprimatur[1] is almost finished and the discussion is focused on how people moderate (or don't moderate) various forums, when the focus should be on making sure the right run those forums still exists in the future.
I'm glad you've made this post because all too often there's an odd streak of this good-whatever-you-want-even-if-it-harms-someone mentality on the Internet. It's like some people think the use of an electronic broadcast medium some how mitigates or eliminates the actual harm that comes from their actions.
But if we remove the notion of "it's only the Internet" from the equation the same behavior comes under harassment and anti-stalking laws in the US. So, how it is any different if you stalked a person online from that doing it in person? How it is less of a threat because the Internet makes it easier to do? The possession of a firearm makes murder easier to do but it doesn't make murder less of a crime either. I just think some people are looking for an excuse to break the core values of civil society for the sake of some sadistic pleasure of harming another human being.
Yet somehow the quality of the discussion/information is better in reddit and even moreso in heavily moderated subreddits such as r/askhistory or you know... simply on here.
Even on 4chan, amusingly, the best boards are the ones ruled most strictly.
If you want mindless brain candy, to giggle at absurdity, or revel in the filth that is humanity - then the larger boards on reddit, and /b/, and /r9k/ are the place to be, and in that context, are better.
If you want curated debate and discussion, then more moderated boards and places like hn are where to go, and would be called better in this case.
I would say that the discussion quality is better on more heavily moderated boards, but the exposure to varied topics is definitely stifled. The flip side of heavier moderation is that it is much easier for dissenting opinions to be stifled. And even if it's not intentional, or not even occurring, knowing that there is heavy moderation will always lead a very vocal minority of users to claim discrimination and censorship.
It's harder to avoid being just an echo chamber, too.
Example?
/tv/ sucks
Yet all the content is seen, including the good stuff - I think a filter reduces good stuff and shit stuff and you get a crappy middle
More like i don't bend myself to fit the hivemind/status quo. Maybe Copernicus also didn't contribute nothing of value cause the comunnity thought so? As I said most times there is no sensible rebuttal to the facts/thesis given, it's only "i don't like your opinion so go away". After some time the board/comunnity degenerates to a echo chamber where the nails that stand out are quickly hammered in
That can happen here and in other forums, but it still doesn't mean your rights are being trampled. You go into a polarized community and start speaking against the status quo; what did you expect to happen? I'm not saying it's right, but it's the way of society. But being modded down or +gasp+ having to hear someone's opposing position does not equal your rights being trampled. You make it sound as if you only want your opinion heard, and anyone who doesn't agree with you is "trampling your rights". There's a ton of irony there.
> but it still doesn't mean your rights are being trampled.
Where did jsf666 say their rights are being trampled, you've just invented that unless they've edited their post. This is like strawman the post. On topic it's hilarious that he/she's complaining about downvotes for airing opinions against the hivemind then gets downvoted for that opinion. Way to prove them wrong. (jsf666 comment is currently greyed out)
Just the mere fact of people downvoting you for what you wrote validates what you've said:
I agree with you 100%. After reading so much social media which is designed to increase one's professional reputation, ego and social status like facebook and HN (as well as main stream news about celebrities and politicians), it's grounding and humanizing to go to a place like /b/ where you can't maintain a reputation. You can actually be honest and get an honest human response.
This was one of moot's main reasons for keeping it going. I chat there with suicidal people, people afraid to go to doctors, people abused and neglected by their parents, people trying drugs, people seeking spirituality, homosexuals from small towns, all afraid to speak up in public, their doctors, their schools.
I hate the racism there. The sexism is not great. I especially the deplore the animal torture. But even real-life socializing isn't as intimate and bold as anonymous socializing. And what people need to remember is that a .gif of a scumbag who rigged a clothesline to drown a dog every time it moves is just a picture. The disgusting act has already been done. Moreover, these images are evidence that bad things happen and we can feel justified in doing something about them in real-life instead of only acting on fear.
I need to look past all of that crap in order to have actual human connections I can't get in real life or online. And so do the people on the other end of my connections. Because mainstream social life has failed us.
When I said you can't maintain a reputation on /b/, though, there are some workarounds: People create labels for their groups like gamergate and anonymous that leak out into the rest of the world. There are plenty of those people who obviously aren't satisfied to have intimate, anonymous conversation and have bigger axes to grind. They wreck the environment and as the saying goes, "This is why we can't have nice things." I could see all of that being too damn much of a toll to take on moot, and I don't require of him that he maintain any particular ideals. I also heard other things, but who knows.
> people will just try to ban/downvote you into oblivion instead of discussing anything
Yes, especially on HN and reddit, voting is not used to eliminate spam and off-topic, but to indicate consensus values and idols. So even if you're right, if you don't validate the hivemind, you get downvoted. You could tell the world the Earth is round during the dark ages and get downvoted. If you're a recognizable name on HN, you instantly get upvoted. It's the same chickenshit conformity that creates the capitalistic hierarchy in mainstream social life.
"Speech" is a subset of a more general category of "action", and it's not a clearly defined one. Most people do not believe in freedom of action, and since it is so easy to dress actions into speech, you have to moderate speech.
Language is powerful. It is so powerful that almost every significant human achievement has been driven by it. It is so general that there are no actions that cannot be mediated through speech. By saying the right words in the right order at the right place to the right people, you can cause anything that is possible to happen.
There are people who will not exercise judgment with this power, and they will employ it to harm others. And considering that the main justification for supporting free speech is that it enable good decision-making, it should be revoked when bad decisions are clearly being made in its name.
You have a right to communicate your ideas, share your intent, express yourself, inform others of your experiences, and participate in your society. That is our freedom of speech. It is not a right to perform arbitrary actions through the use of language. It is also not a right to be heard.
I'm kind of uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, and definitely uncomfortable with this statement:
> '"True freedom of speech" is an awful thing.'
That is, a good use of freedom of speech is to "speak truth to power". Yes, it's awful when freedom of speech is used to kick someone when they're down, but we need to preserve that freedom so that we can kick someone when they're (wrongly) up.
The entire point of "freedom of speech" is to protect the rights of the person you hate when they say things you find the most dangerous or offensive. You don't need to create a "right" to allow nice people to say nice things to other nice people.
Sure, there are type of speech that I find very damaging to society, but they still have to have the right to speak their mind, or we open a Pandora's Box of troubles when we try to decide which types of speech are "bad".
This really is the real test of any society that describes itself as "free". Do they allow their enemies and troublemakers their equal right to speak? Or is Freedom Of Speech de facto only enjoyed by the classes that already have the power to speak, while others are prevented form having a voice? In the later case, "freedom" little more than marketing.
Also, remember that allowing someone the freedom to speak does not require us to give them a stage or an audience.
It's rather difficult to come back to life after you've been murdered.
The old saying "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is a lie. Words can severely hurt people, and even if they don't break their bones directly, they probably will incite people to actually break their bones.
> It's rather difficult to come back to life after you've been murdered.
I can't recall the last time I heard about words murdering someone. Incited murder/suicide? Perhaps, but at that point you're just shifting blame around to try and make a point.
In the case of suicide, the "victim" would have had any number of chances to disconnect from the source of the speech that was hurting them.
> they probably will incite people to actually break their bones
In the case of murder/assault, well, last time I checked that's already a punishable crime.
Your argument does not further a case for the repression of free speech.
Those limits are - by definition - set by the powerful and at their most effective on the powerless, because the ability to control what kinds of speech are allowed in a way that affects large numbers of people is in itself a huge form of power. If anyone claims otherwise, you should take a good look at their motivations.
All true. But FoS is also a normal behavior used by people everwhere, to make themselves clear. The guy standing on a stump in the park, complaining about his sister-in-law has the same right, for the same reason. Its not just a political-action-tool. Its supposed to be a human right, like life and liberty.
Let's be a little more honest here. You say this, but like everybody else that makes this statement, it only applies to things that align with your narrow view of the world.
It's a common tactic to root out and silence opposing view points used in dictatorships and non-free nations. As long as someone isn't making death threats or something similar, speech should be free.
But I think people like you need to have their livelihood and speech taken away for good for something they said on the Internet to fully understand why speech needs to be free and protected for all, not just the chosen few.
If I donated some money to a pro-gay marriage proposal, I shouldn't get fired from my job (or bullied online)..so why did the ex-mozilla CEO get bullied and then fired for donating to what he believed in? Because it's against the narrative? This isn't how freedom is supposed to work...
How about gangsta rap groups of the late 80s? Local law-enforcement and many other people used the exact same words that you use today: The freedom of speech has limits. Should they have been prevented from going on stage?
How about occupy Wall street? Why should specific types of speech be allowed in the name of freedom and others deemed conflicting with 'human rights'????
I suspect you and many other people posting here will
attempt to come up with reasons why the examples I listed should be accepted but other forms of free speech (which happen to be against your personal views) are wrong and need to be silenced.
This bullshit only creates a divide between us and if our society weren't so lazy, it would lead to another war.
Only tyrannical totalitarians despise Freedom of speech. So that they can rule with impunity. The concept of hate speech cannot co-exist with freedom of speech. Either it's all acceptable or it means nothing. That's it.
Acting like people cannot control themselves or react reasonably to unsavory opinion is infantilization. The incitement argument doesn't apply to free speech because it isn't just speech. It's speech plus action & it's the action that hurts. The only human rights that exist are the ones you give yourself.
Actually, everyone knows what happened, he got tired years ago paying hosting bills and supporting board, abandoned site, then SJW attacked and he broke down. That's that.
If leaking nudes of celebs and gamergate was really what made moot give up on 4chan, it would be much more interesting to read the longer story, what changed in him throughout the years that made it no longer acceptable for him to be the admin of the place that hasn't really changed during his tenure.