Does anyone else feel it? There's a new paradigm afoot that's taken hold here, the places we frequent and the Internet in general.
There used to be a general cohesiveness, a sense of community. That we were truly in a way, as we used to say, a band of brothers. A shared purpose, a shared history. That we were more alike than we were different, even during feuds. We belonged. I'm not sure if it's the new nature of the net, which is more diverse and inclusive, displacing the white male nerd. Or the younger generation co-opting and usurping our culture taking it for their own. Perhaps both. Maybe we've matured and have moved on with our lives (let's not kid ourselves, most havent).
I can't help but feel as I sit here typing this on my smartphone, like an old man, sitting in a diner alone, wearing a cap with the insignia of the military unit he was once a part of. Eating my meal with a sense of loss and a profound melancholy. We've been through so much together and it seems to amount to nothing these days.
What can we do? Will we ever feel that sense of belonging again? Are we waiting for a new site, a new community, another paradigm shift? Or just rotting away at the end of it all, time to pack our bags.
I hate to add another depressed note on the matter but it's an issue that's been on my mind. As one anonymous said, the only solution is to become tastemakers ourselves, but I no longer have it in me and I'm sure it is much the same with most.
I don't have much hope for it. If anyone's out there, maybe they are content to just watch. In the end, I think the outsiders stay outside. The forgotten remain forgotten. The world offers no happy endings
yes I feel somewhat similar but there are concrete problems we can address.
the new paradigm is having your real life legal name tied to your internet posts about how sensitive you are inequality. websites like reddit are so popular that they take away from textboards - if you want to stay updated on news it's all going to be there first.. so textboards aren't as efficient and go out of favor. japan is lucky that they have 2ch instead of sites like that and facebook.
Another thing that i feel is fragmenting boards is excessive moderation and censorship. primarily the reason I ever went to places like 8ch was because I wanted to be able to post threads without the being deleted like you know where. Well isn't true anymore. You can't rely on the existing imageboards to not censor your posts unfairly. I could run a new one that only deletes spam and moves off topic threads out but how will I get more than 2 people to even visit my site? Anyway I feel this fragments because there are a lot of people that thank the mods for deleting stuff (god knows why), "rulecucks" they are called. I don't see the point, if i wanted my shit deleted i could just post it to reddit.
All that said I think there will always be a demand for anonymous boards. There is a modern one atob.xyz it's pretty fun and interesting - I'm not a fan of all the wacky web 2.0 stuff in general but on atob it's a lot of fun. I think we could improve some stuff about existing chans too and make them accessable to a wider group - primarily just having one that isn't run by jerks.
For a sense of belonging, I don't know. I really feel more astranged than ever before. I'm always looking for new people that I can relate to and/or get along with. I definitely haven't been able to find my place, or people who value me on 4chan or whatever though.
>>3
I feel moderation/censorship is an overrated concern. Part of the problem of imageboards is insufficient good moderation.
But with sites like 4chan and 8ch you get locked into a problem: who wants to moderate sites like that? Power hungry people with poor senses of humor and ego problems, and site creators who'll soon be disillusioned. These people will delete good posts while making bad ones themselves.
Like Plato's philosopher king, in an ideal world we would have moderators who will delete unfunny shitposting while leaving up amusing things. In boards intended for serious discussion, they would punish people who resorted to lazy arguments without any humor to them. (Because as we can see with many 4chan boards, when you don't do this you end up with boards where any legitimate logical argument will be beaten down by people who can't actually refute the point and resort to replying memetically, and where the illusion of consensus is far more powerful than any other force.)
I've never thanked mods in posting for deleting things, but I have defended their heavy-handed behaviour in the past when going after a certain avatarfag. This avatarfag would (as many are wont to do) contribute very little except attempts to draw attention to themselves and feed their own ego, then complain greatly if they were deleted. When they made complaints they were being unfairly picked on, I made a pedantic point of finding every technical rule violation I could to draw attention to just what the rules actually were. (Amusingly with the notionally incompatible dual-goals of drawing attention to just how absurd the rules can be and using them as a justification to remove a problem poster.)
A big part of the value of anonymous boards is that what you say matters more than who is saying it, but since it's possible to manufacture consensus on a board one can introduce elements of judging the speaker instead of what is spoken to otherwise fine arguments. Worse still is that the few people who realize that consensus-manufacturing is a thing are usually those who advocate adding IDs to threads. (Not so much a problem on 4-ch because posting takes so long your ID will change anyway, but a miserable compromise of anonymity that fixes nothing on 4chan and 8ch.)
The community you refer to has not been divided. It has been displaced by newcomers who pretend to be part of it.
>>5
Its not quite the eternal summer. We were all newcomers at some point but, it's perfectly possible to be a newcomer without being annoying or pushy. I'll agree that there was no division though, but more of a flattening of users. Less websites overall and more ease-of-use stuff that lets you feel like you're browsing without actually browsing.
I can still enjoy posting to boards here and there and lurking the larger ones like 4chan/8ch but nothing feels the same. I am often guilted into deleting more words than i post as if i'm talking face-to-face. Having such a broad scope of the internet, social experiments are even more obvious. I force myself to look away most of the time, like i've seen some obscene thing that shouldn't be seen.
The pandora's box has been opened, and it can't be closed again. The best you can hope for is for a new tech to catch the public and commercial eyes, and the best you can do is to eject back to reality or to keep hopping around the sparse expanse of social media (eugh, that word). It's not a disasterous situation but it's pretty damn uncomfortable.
> I can still enjoy posting to boards here and there and lurking the larger ones like 4chan/8ch but nothing feels the same.
Were you honestly expecting it to? 4chan is a perfect example of a community that got displaced by hordes of newcomers until its culture became diluted beyond recognition. In fact, I don't know of a more perfect example of displacement than that in recent history.
> The pandora's box has been opened, and it can't be closed again.
There's always hope of a partitioned internet in the future, where ICANN is not the default provider of IP address space and where refuge can be found from the more mainstream web. In fact, that future is becoming more and more probable especially now that Obama is expressing the desire to hand over ICANN to the UN.
If not, then there's always overlay networks like Tor, I2P or Freenet.
jfc op this is making me sad as fuck
What "community"? What "fragmentation"? Speak not in riddles, child, for I am an old man and am weary of this world. Say the websites' names, give out the addresses, and recount your exact tale of a supposed sundering. Use picturesque diagrams if deemed necessary.
Speak plainly, and let your foolishness be known.
>>9
He either speaks of the 4-ch and world2ch users or the early 4chan/SA crowd, or the general users of the pre-mainstream internet, I dunno.
Old men like you, >>9, are the ones that speak in riddles. Much like you, we have run out of answers.
I'll bite. It's late and I just spilled coffee all over myself and the table, but I'll take a moment and try to whip up a thought on the subject.
This is not another run-of-the-mill "nobody is posting on 4-ch, the sky is falling!" narrative that we've seen countless times before and in fact still suffer through every other week. Nor is it me just idly pining for the old days, throwing it out there for others to passively agree with (though what more can we do?). You reveal your unfamiliarity with this website >>9, by asking for examples, as it's obvious to us what I'm speaking of. It's nothing arcane, and if you've been around, you'll see it too.
Here's something. Though it's only a part of the puzzle, I could count on one hand the websites in the chaniverse that have survived as long as 4-ch. I've seen the rise and fall of websites large and small. What really got me thinking about this was the demise of iichan/Wakachan last year. It's happened before but it never left me with such a bleak feeling. It was one of the few places that still clearly resembled "our hangout" - a comparatively undiluted culture not that far removed from 4-ch's new imageboard. Which to me feels a little too stale, a little too haphazard, though a welcome diversion. Only a few users have stayed on with the intention of continuing the site and what was already an extremely slow pace has trickled down into nothingness. We've seen the same here. We've seen the same in other places. We've seen 4chan finally succumb to the cancer almost completely. I know next to nothing about 8ch as it's long after my time and have only heard about it from people like the ones posting in this thread. To be honest, I think some of us have really struggled to define why we post here.
Anyway, before the current age of the internet, there was always an inherent belief that we were "going somehwere" and while some of us were content to just take the ride, it now feels.... anticlimactic? The internet never owed us anything, but now there's not only no destination to speak of, but a denial that there ever was one to begin with! The current culture that now dominates HATES people like us and marginalizes and ignores those who made the internet great. The quiet type. The ones likely to value anonymous discussion and expect nothing in return except perhaps a knowing glance, a shared joke. The unmistakable pleasure one gets at knowing there was someone else out there that actually knows what the fuck you're talking about.
It's the feeling of making it to our once distant destination and reflecting on both how beautiful it's been and how ultimately meaningless it was. A bit transcendent, a bit sad, but mostly pondering HOW WE GET BACK. I want that feeling again. I'm like a junkie that's been told they don't make my drug anymore.
Now I'll step out for the night and light up a smoke.
>>12
there's a saying: "The amount of effort required to refute bullshit is a hundred times higher than the amount needed to produce it". This might sound of kind tin foil but I think on major sites there are people being paid2post who say disruptive things and ruin discussion. Basically there is an economic imbalance that makes it extremely hard for high quality discussion and posting to survive. Almost like the physical law of entropy - everything grinds down into fucking dust eventually.
>I'm like a junkie that's been told they don't make my drug anymore.
I never thought about it this way but it's so true. I have no reservations admitting im an internet addict, but the high is gone. there's no website i care about or am excited to go to these days. it's not the same at all.. but I am restlessy searching.
The loss of iichan/Wakachan was a big deal. Another thing that hit me hard was secret area of vip quality too vanishing. Especially with no archive of the site. At least we have a replacement.
>there's no website i care about or am excited to go to these days. it's not the same at all..
We all feel this way. But that begs the question－what are we gonna do about it, if anything? Why aren't we rallying behind the cause to restore what once was? Have we accepted defeat? Or has our internet addiction grown so far that no matter what we do, we'll never experience that same "high" again, as we did in the past?
>Anyway, before the current age of the internet, there was always an inherent belief that we were "going somehwere" and while some of us were content to just take the ride, it now feels.... anticlimactic?
This is a good articulation of a way I've been feeling for a while. I think communities truly die when they lose that feeling of actually heading in some kind of direction. Once you lose that, contributing valuable content, etc, tends to be less appealing because it doesn't feel like there's a point to it.
The biggest problem is that when you artificially try to set up a community to try and avoid this malaise, everyone is already feeling it and the community will fail because people enter already cynical. Pandora's box and all that.
I think maybe it's like being on a train. Even if you're only going to some pointless stuffy business meeting, it feels bad when the train isn't moving. Even if the train was moving in the wrong direction anyway, it felt good to see scenery go by and feel the carriage shake a bit. Now that it's stopped the illusion has been lost.
>The biggest problem is that when you artificially try to set up a community to try and avoid this malaise, everyone is already feeling it and the community will fail because people enter already cynical. Pandora's box and all that.
Don't refer to it as though it's irreversible. Yes, the state of the internet (and arguably, the state of the entire civilization) is in a bit of a pinch right now. Yes, there's no purpose for us to rally behind, and that sentiment is echoed by multiple generations of all walks of life, but that doesn't mean we can't find something. If we work together instead of wailing and gnashing our teeth at what was lost, we might just get the train going again.
>>7
I'll agree on that first point but; the problem cannot be fixed by only overlays, but with added cultural obscurity aswell. No amount of encryption on its own will keep someone from content they really really want to find, if they believe it to be "viral".
4chan was only a obscure site for nerds until it wasnt, just like youtube was just a place to upload and watch average user's videos until it wasn't. The new cultural and economic emphasis on qualities of uniqueness, virility, easier living through computing, and novelty, create a machine of events that can bring any subculture to its knees before the mainstream in a month or less. Unique ideas get run through the wringer and retired to the recycle bin in the name of progress; creating a vacuum that only new cultures and memes can fill
It would be cool if there was a symbol or something to use in the wild, to just talk with other browsers on the street, but with the speed that things get appropriated these days it's effectiveness and novelty would be short lived.
>>13
Without getting too chatty, i believe you about the disruption. Maybe it'll be a phase, like adbots. Maybe. I hope...
I never got a chance to see iichan/Wakachan in action but i enjoyed SAOVIPQ for about six months, finding it after the universal disruption during and in the wake of GG. The SAOVIPQ replacement is decent, i suppose.
>the problem cannot be fixed by only overlays, but with added cultural obscurity as well.
Added layers of obstruction create obscurity because the average internet user has no idea how to set up the things necessary to visit a site hidden from Google's indexes, much less from ICANN's IP address space. Hell, anything more complicated than typing a URL into an address bar or installing an app is increasingly becoming too difficult for the average internet user. This is partly because the internet userbase is ever expanding to include more of the lowest common denominator, partly because uncustomizable mobile phones and tablets have become the majority of internet-connected devices (on the user side anyway).
>4chan was only a obscure site for nerds until it wasnt, just like youtube was just a place to upload and watch average user's videos until it wasn't.
That didn't happen by chance. The sites' respective administrations never put a brake on things, but in fact encouraged further growth and change. Because both were motivated by money to do so. Moot could have easily cracked down on the unwanted behaviors that exposed 4chan to the vast multitudes of people who should not be there, but he didn't because he saw opportunity in growth no matter how much he denies 4chan ever being profitable. YouTube/Google could have easily not created the partnership program and kept more sincere and original content made by the average person alive, but they saw opportunity and went for it.
Why hasn't the same thing happened to 4-ch? Because, quite frankly, the site's administration doesn't go out of its way to pander to new users, nor to give them what they want. 4-ch and its culture are presented as is, for new people who discover it to either take it or leave it. Moot on the other hand allowed the hordes of newcomers to decide what direction 4chan takes.
>The new cultural and economic emphasis on qualities of uniqueness, virility, easier living through computing, and novelty, create a machine of events that can bring any subculture to its knees before the mainstream in a month or less.
I don't think there's a cultural or economic emphasis on uniqueness anymore. On instant gratification and hype sure, but not uniqueness. Most things that go viral are incredibly low-brow, run of the mill and low effort. The problem is the prominence of social media websites which permit this viral sharing of content. It is thanks to them that nothing on the internet makes sense anymore, that everything goes by so fast and that the average internet user has such a short attention span. Because popularity is given not on the objective merit of a thing, but based merely on the number of people who shared it, with no regards for the quality of each individual sharing it. This, in turn, creates an environment in which the lowest common denominator or "the masses" decide what's good and what isn't.
What we as a community have to do is remain under the radar of that. What we must do is learn from 4chan's example of what not to do. Namely refuse to accept behaviors that lead to global exposure, such as e-activism. We must also refuse to accept people in our midst who use these viral sharing platforms even if they don't necessarily exhibit the associated behaviors, so they don't make us viral by exposing us to the wider internet. Remember how 4chan users used to shun people who use Facebook? That was a good thing. Well... before Facebook users eventually outnumbered them on 4chan, but that's beside the point.
>The new cultural and economic emphasis on qualities of uniqueness, virility, easier living through computing, and novelty, create a machine of events that can bring any subculture to its knees before the mainstream in a month or less. Unique ideas get run through the wringer and retired to the recycle bin in the name of progress; creating a vacuum that only new cultures and memes can fill
Adam Curtis (BBC Documentary maker. Watch all of his stuff now, read his entire blog, then watch his stuff again, he's wonderful.) Wrote a nice piece on something along these lines.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/855b6a7f-72a3-31c9-a037-43ae1c49293c
>"Bernbach's enthusiasm for the idea of 'difference' became the magic cultural formula by which the life of consumerism could be extended indefinitely, running forever on the discontent that it itself had produced"
One has to wonder if the internet (and with it, theoretically near-instantaneous communication of what's cool and what isn't) has taken this little cycle of consumerism and sped it up to the point where it risks tearing itself apart from centrifugal forces. Stuxnet for culture.
But perhaps the key part - the part that stuck with me - is this line:
>But one could argue that it is precisely that continual search for difference that has led us into the static world of today. If consumerism continually scours the margins of society for rebellious or contrary notions and then immediately turns them into stuff to sell - it ironically becomes very difficult for new ideas to change society. Instead they tend to end up reinforcing it.
I'm very drawn to Curtis' tendency to draw some analogy to the Soviet stagnation (more apparent in his other posts and particularly in his film "Bitter Lake") - the loss of faith in their rigid system, cultural decline, idealists heading to Afghanistan only to come back more jaded than ever. Unlike the Soviets, though, no alternative seems clear to us. But at this point we broaden out from internet culture and into the intertwining of politics and culture, so i'll silence myself here.
"Finally, the rain stops, and a rainbow appears there" means world peace in knowledge which a Japanese tourist needs.
>The SAOVIPQ replacement is decent, i suppose.
It's not "decent", it's "the only thing there is".
Kind of difficult to figure out what happened. I'm a little on the younger side than most people in this thread but I do remember a time when the internet was mostly a nerd thing and when memes actually died. I think it's mostly the internet going mainstream that has caused this massive shift in culture. Before it was just nerds doing dumb things, sharing stories and creations, and was small but somewhat purposeful. Hostilities were way lower, and everyone was just a screen name.
Now look at what has happened. You have to attach all of your personal info to everything, most content is shallow for the purpose of pandering to the lowest common denominator, and people attention whore despite not actually doing anything of value. Also, because people have to know absolutely everything about each other, politics have become intertwined in places that they really don't belong. It's gotten to the point where people's politics determines the sites they go to, even if the site isn't inherently political. Are you far left? Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook. Do you dislike the far left? Reddit, 4chan. It's gotten so bad that people outright refuse to go to places because "there are too many of X people that have different political views than me". But you're just going to a place to look at art, shitpost, and maybe get porn, who cares about people's politics? Yet it has become integral. People's politics define them.
Thanks to the social justice people of the far left pushing so hard to sterilize everything and make it as inoffensive to their noble sensibilities as possible, they have bred a counter-movement that tries to make everything as hostile and offensive as possible. Whereas years ago hostility was a mere possibility, now it's a guarantee. Many popular youtube channels exemplify this, with their humor stemming from being as irreverent and offensive as possible.
Furthermore, the mainstream audience is much more shallow than the nerd audience was. While the internet was certainly a place for dumb random humor, that has been amplified and combined with people's cripplingly low attention span. You can see this with sites like Vine and Twitter, where the purpose is to make short, random, "relatable" quips in 6 seconds/150 characters.
Combine all of this and you get the shallow, hostile internet we have today.
The question is what can be done. The biggest problem is that before, everyone knew where to go. Even if new sites or networks were made or used, who would know to find them?
>social justice
>far left
You're a fucking retard.