For all the uneasy feelings I get about the triggerhappy banning by these platforms, there's probably a light at end of the tunnel. Boot enough people and the better alternatives might actually flourish with network effects.
Yep, this is for me very exciting. I like banwaves. They're digging their own graves, they'll go the way of Blockbuster soon, and the internet, public discourse, information availability and dare I say humanity will be better for it. I wish they'd do it faster.
The fact that 4Chan itself has not been the target of deplatforming efforts is confusing to me. If I were to put my tinfoil hat on for a bit, I might speculate that it’s a honeypot that shares data with the feds.
Both also have a very undeserved reputation. I saw news reports on 8chan as if it were something similar to Stormfront. The front page was mostly video game and pornography and one had to search very deep into it's hidden circles to find racial supremacy content.
ISPs could just drop their customers' traffic to that server. This happens all the time and has happened to 4chan before.
Or they could go further and refuse to peer with any ISP that doesn't block 4chan, or lobby to have the government compel ISPs to block it, likely on think-of-the-children or think-of-the-terrorism grounds.
Self hosting definitely isn't some magic way of preventing all censorship.
My mobile internet provider actually did this for about a year after the New Zeeland shooting. Was quite annoying and I considered switching to another company because I quite enjoyed shitposting about bicycles on /t/
You won't be able to post on 4chan and probably many other anonymous communities while on vpn unless a friend of your sets it up from a residential ip.
With TOR you have to hire someone to fill captchas just to read things.
That's a decent workaround if you're technical and stubborn, but there needs to be a solution for this that's available for everyone with just a few clicks.
Even if 4chan host their servers, if they're not in someone's basement, they'd be in colocation, which can then be targeted, since I don't think 4chan own the full datacenter.
Oh it's not a secret, 4chan is and has been for decades actually proactive (or at least no supoena needed) with sharing data with LEO and has strong (albeit US free speech levels of) moderation across all of the site.
If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested. The site doesn't give protection.
I steer clear of it, but wonder if with more EU like moderation a better site could be formed.
> but wonder if with more EU like moderation a better site could be formed.
> If a UK citizen were to post as offensively as a US citizen they would and have been arrested.
The idea of posting something and being arrested disgusts me. The bar around the world for such an action should be just as high as it is in America. If I post that I'm going to come and kill you, thinkingemote, at 10:17 a.m. at your place of work located at <insert address here>, then by all means I deserve to be arrested. I've made a credible threat with credible information, verified by the fact I know your name and your workplace address.
However, saying something "mean" to you, or "misgendering" you, or even calling you a racial slur, should never be enough to arrest someone.
It reminds me of one of the few (maybe only...) great lines from Ghostbusters 2: "Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God-given right!"
So it should be online as well. If you don't like it, you can absent yourself from the platform(s), and in almost every case, if you don't want to do that, you can block the other person.
I thought you were a troll the first time you posted some ridiculous bullshit to one of my posts, but now I'm sure.
The sad part is, you forgot your own rule. You got your feefees hurt (which was clearly bullshit also) and said you were "done communicating" or some such nonsense.
That's the great thing about a troll. They're also liars.
The advice has always been and continues to be to use services such as Tor (and a properly secured computing environment) to access the less mainstream areas of the internet.
4chan rejects posting from Tor, but accepts browsing from it.
There are other anonymity networks that it doesn't filters out as well. But in principle, it does not allow posting from anonymity networks.
4chan is also quite mainstream and one of the largest websites on the internet, certainly larger than Hacker News. Similar Web ranks it around 800 world wide, but it's probably even higher, given that it's split into two domains that remain separate for advertisement reasons.
The same way ThePirateBay and Sci-Hub haven't gotten deplatform even while having far more powerful forces after them. It's because the people hosting it aren't incompetent, and unlike what these people crying foul lately will have you believe, censorship on the internet isn't really a thing. You may not get a free megaphone like Twitter, but as long as you know what you're doing, you can have a voice online just fine.
4chan has been responsible for turning so many kids into racists using humor. I remember a whole period in like 2010 when there was a — before 4chan I used to see black people as “black person in a suit”, now I see black people as “terribly racist caricature”. I would hate to see it go but boy is that place the true breeding ground for hate.
No offence here, but if 4chan making racism "fun" was sufficient to make some kid hate real people including their neighbours or friends then it's was never a problem with the platform. It's just indication of larger problem in both society and / or upbringing.
People who can be easily radicalized or manipulated is just indication that they wasn't educated well enough to think on their own with their brain. And in any case chan culture is far better than some actual criminals or cultists who are much better at brainwashing people.
I'm not trying to justify some of chan content, but
I consider that it's greater good that some people get a lesson about how easily they could be manipulated.
What I sure about is that no one force a person to have continious exposure to such propoganda on 4chan. It's not like it's some government funded website that everyone has obligation to visit due authorities requirements.
Being exposed to this kind of "humor" is deliberate choice. And even 4chan is not some single entity: there are plenty of boards on other topics that nowhere as extreme and sometimes they better moderated than e.g reddit , facebook or linkedin.
That kind of discourse is addictive and even though you have a choice, we as a society don’t always allow kids to make their own choices — especially around addictive, societally harmful issues.
The way bans on reddit have tended to work is that by dispersing the group, there's an additional barrier created to stop the spread of the idea. This has happened with fatpeoplehate, the trump reddit, and with the red pill reddit among others. Its not just a group of people of a similar knowledge level and similar ideas coming together, it is also new users happening across the subreddit and deciding to take part. Take away the new users and it becomes an echo chamber.
This is what makes Youtube, Reddit and Facebook so powerful. They can choose who can stay on their platform, and how much discoverability their ideas have if they are allowed to stay on the platform.
The only way to deal with it is through splitting these companies up - that's the only constitutional way, and we must start immediately. They're too big.
They're not going to be too big for very long. Their size depends on people being there, and if they keep banning people they'll just get smaller. Once all the interesting people are banned the regular people will go where the interesting people are. They're about to have their blockbuster moment and no bailouts can stop it.
I hope you're right - I truly believe that post 2012 social media has been a cancer on society, in addition to the 24/7 newscycle. But I somehow am not as optimistic as you are. People far underestimate the power of twitter/fb/youtube.
The power in those sites is that they are not siloed and at scale, meaning you can reach a much broader audience. Parler would never be able to influence the mass market because it was so specialized - making it ineffective at evangelization. WSB would never be what it is without the platform of reddit. Going to a small specific site will not have the same power, even though I think it is better to host your own hardware and do that.
But this approach has diminishing returns. Sure, for the past few years this had the effect of isolating these groups from polite society. But eventually, when they start banning large, main stream groups like, say, people that want to make money in the stock market, people that dislike wall street, and one of two political parties in the USA, all they're going to do is lose market share and therefore their ability to police the internet. People don't use YouTube because they like the logo, people use YouTube because they like the videos on the site. At some point all the cool kids are on other websites, and once the herd follows you've lost control over anything.
I'm very excited about it personally, I like disruption.
I agree with you but I don't have any uneasy feelings -- these are private companies doing whatever they want with their resources. The sooner everybody wakes up to this fact, the sooner all this pointless hand-wringing will be over.
