I don’t know… riding shotgun over that place for so long… maybe he did his penance already! 
Seriously, I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to deal with some of the more unsavory elements of 4chan on a daily basis.
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Yeah… if you can’t tell… i’m pretty sick of the he said/she said BS. One side is accused of whoring themselves out, and the other side accused of hate crimes. Neither side is going to win. Just move on and it’ll all go away FFS.
The author (Rob) definitively “jumped the shark” with their “colors of hate” article about this. He lost all GG credibility with that post.
I didn’t know there were “sides”! Now you tell me!
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It’s important to hear from both harassers and their victims, after all. Y’know, both sides.
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Gamergate actually talked about choosing Vivian James’ colors to match the Daily Dose rape meme on 4chan. You can read the transcripts.
And “he said, she said” only applies when one side of the argument is not provably correct.
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I wouldn’t argue that he’s totally at fault, either, or should be treated so.
This gets into some difficult issues with how to understand freedom, I think: a complex set of relationships often imagined to be very simple. To start with, there’s freedom, in the sense of agency, and freedom, in the sense of liberty – the ability to do things and the lack of restrictions on what you may do. Sometimes talk of freedom will obscure this critical distinction.
For instance, I’ve been in public meetings in which people complained of limits on speaking time as suppression of their free speech. The purpose of the time limits, however, is to strike a balance between giving many people a chance to speak, and giving each speaker enough time to speak effectively. And, of course, you only want one person speaking at a time, so everyone can hear them.
Internet forums work differently, of course, but you need some sort of constraints in order to have reasonable discussions. There are, and probably always will be, arguments about what sorts of constraints are reasonable – and a major consideration is, what sorts of discussions do you want to encourage, and what sort of people you want to see participate. You may want everyone to participate and to discuss anything and everything, but that’s not how it’s ever going to work.
As we see in the article, Poole did, in fact, establish and enforce constraints on discussions on 4chan. And he spent years of unpaid labor on 4chan. Online communities take work, whatever form they take. And if you’re providing a service to others, it’s reasonable to ask, who is it you’re serving, and why are you serving them?
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The amazing thing about 4chan is the way anonymous users are capable of such concerted efforts compared to other sleaze bag site that require registration. I imagine it has to do with the ease of use compared to having to register to a site, but 4chan gets shit done compared to Reddit MRAs or white supremacist sites or whatever.
I think moot ultimately saw gamergate coming years ago and tried to reign in the use of the board to impact “real” life, but ultimately failed and it makes a natural jumping off point.
Oy, poor Adam Frankenstein, I was at his bar mitzvah. You know he grew up without a mother? And when they called him up to the Torah all anyone could hear was groans and grumbles, how embarrassing. It’s like he didn’t even bother to learn his parsha. But the father, a nice doctor, a scientist too, I hear he is still single…
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It’s actually about ethics in caste determination.
Oooh! Entomology humor.
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GG: society looking at itself in the mirror: some are horrified, others double down.
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Huh. If the founder of the system was unable to turn a profit with it, it’s hard to imagine any sort of buyer gEttinger anything out of it either. The only way that sale might benefit Moot, isaybe selling it to the FBI, and they could use it as a honeypot.
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You can be good with servers and communities and still have zero (or at least grossly insufficient) business sense.
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Don’t you find that natural constraints tend to present themselves? Even wanting everyone to participate, not everyone will. And odds are against them all discussing “everything”. Just the inbuilt limitations of people impose constraints of cognition and expression as things are normally.
I see this trend as something of a contemporary recoiling from the notion of “public space”, and as it being quite reactionary. It occurs to me as being not so much a matter of freedom but of participation. Are all parties equally able to participate in a given process, or is it one group defining the terms of participation of another group? I do indeed find most human relationships to be simple, because most people hardly define them. They seem to implicitly assume that the structures of their relationships are defined and evaluated by others, rather than knowing how or being willing to negotiate them themselves.
The word “insufficient” implies that “business sense” is desirable, or useful. Sounds dubious to me. Science is about understanding of the real world. so if science exists only in service of business, people’s understanding of the world will be skewed. When science serves business, anything approaching objectivity becomes impossible.
It’s nice that he’s trying to distance himself from the trainwreck, but actually it’s all about ethics in the management of dodgy websites.
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It’s useful for trading what you have for what you want. Often via money, which are a fairly useful proxy for trading for actually useful things.
As such, it is fairly useful and very desirable. Without it you’re doomed to be mostly broke all the time, unless you’re extra-lucky.
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4chan being a “dodgy website” seems to be, I think, more a matter of popular perception by outsiders. I have spent some time there, and there really have been topics about just about anything and everything. This has included topics which border upon unsavory, but to suggest that they then “characterize” the much larger site as a whole is unfair. Topics are not generally overrun by racist, homophobic, antisemetic, reactionary people. But it stands to reason, that if you seek out topics about hot issues such as these, that such responses are represented as part of the mix. The reality as I encountered it there was one of true diversity, but not an overly manicured variety of diversity.
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Just move on and it’ll all go away FFS.
And yet half of what you comment on here is about gamergate. Lack of self-awareness, much?
You’re projecting so hard right now.
Maybe you should take your own advice and move on.
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Just so. And Penthouse has some really fascinating articles by great writers, so to categorise the whole magazine as porn would be equally unfair.
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It would be unfair to both the magazine, and to porn. Since, so far as I am aware, Penthouse doesn’t actually depict any sex acts. So it fails to even meet some definitions of porn on this basis. When I was a child, Penthouse was run by the same company which published the science magazine Omni, and they often did have some of the same writers and topics between them.
But a crucial distinction is that the content of a magazine tends to be curated by its staff. And as a publication on paper always subject to practical limitations as to what can be included, and distribution factors which necessitate choosing an audience, and tailoring content for them. A completely open bulletin board works in a different way. It exists as a forum, rather than a publication. (unlike BB for instance, which is a sort of hybrid). The content is all provided by the users, for the users. The distribution is done “automatically” by keeping the servers running. And since it is free for the users, there is no need for them to subscribe to it, either in terms of delivery, or content.
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