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Cakebaker posted:What I reckon would be interesting is knowing sort of what the turnover is within these cultures. At a place like SA there are obviously a lot of long timers and it very much shows that the climate and culture of the site has grown with its members, especially somewhere like D&D. More adult and less nerdy, some parts excluded obviously. I think on /b/ there's probably high turnover because it's generally the first subforum you hear about or find, and it's still what a lot of people think of when they think of 4chan. Not sure about the other boards, but I'd imagine /v/ is probably closer to /b/ than it is to SA in terms of turnover.
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May 14, 2015 03:24
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Planarch posted:I think on /b/ there's probably high turnover because it's generally the first subforum you hear about or find, and it's still what a lot of people think of when they think of 4chan. Not sure about the other boards, but I'd imagine /v/ is probably closer to /b/ than it is to SA in terms of turnover. On that note, do you think the people that eventually left chan boards just moved on to Reddit?
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May 14, 2015 03:28
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4chan and its spin-off sites are a sort of imagined outcast paradise. People (mostly young boys/men) who feel different see it as an edgy "alternative" hangout, safe from their parents and the kids at school. The posts are usually short, easily digested. The images provide constant visual stimulation. These factors, combined with the fast rate of submitted posts, make it very easy to just keep hitting F5 and waste hours. You see an enormous amount of content just scrolling, viewing various threads and boards. Boards you're interested in never seem to run out of new discussion. And the darker stuff is either avoided, or might give you a risk-free voyeuristic buzz -- you're anonymous, who really knows the terrible stuff you're seeing here? Over time, the enormous mix of content you've seen makes you feel familiar with the site. Eventually, you start posting, confident that you know your way around. At this point, I think two major psychological factors come into play: mob-mentality, and the apparent disconnection between your internet culture and reality. The other interesting question about chan culture is how it came to be the playground of young boys/men (who are usually white). What about the idea of 4chan appealed to that demographic? Off the top of my head, I think that it's mostly because 4chan was intertwined with nerd culture, which was already heavily balanced towards young white guys.
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May 14, 2015 03:53
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Bullfrog posted:The other interesting question about chan culture is how it came to be the playground of young boys/men (who are usually white). There's a version of 4chan for lots of demographics. BBS boards in China, Autoadmit for law students, YikYak for college students, group chats on FB/Line, etc. Anonymity is a powerful force, and there's a major difference in what people feel sharing when they are anonymous.
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May 14, 2015 03:58
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Fried Chicken posted:Let's stop calling it "nerd culture"; defining your identity by what you consume is not culture. Everything they adhere was cooked up to fall within defined age/sex/disposable income/distribution region parameters assembled with ISO9000 compliance to Six Sigma standards 25 years ago by some snake in a suit so he could hit his quarterly bonus metrics. Any shared "language" is them referencing a consumed product because they have been marketed that referencing the familiar with a twist is the same as humor. Their "shared priorities" are consuming the products set to be rolled out next quarter. Their "common knowledge" is a series of iterative trivia about products they have consumed. This is not a culture, this is a market segment. This kinda amounts to saying there is no such thing as sports culture in the modern day, which is massively absurd. Of course any intimate enough connection between large groups of people and their shared interests turns into a culture, no matter whether someone calculatedly makes bank on them or not. Woolie Wool posted:Hipsters and nerds are two sides of the same coin. They're both driven by a peculiar mix of consumerism and insecurity.
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May 14, 2015 04:00
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Bullfrog posted:4chan and its spin-off sites are a sort of imagined outcast paradise. People (mostly young boys/men) who feel different see it as an edgy "alternative" hangout, safe from their parents and the kids at school. The unmoderated hivemind nature of *chan type sites causes the groups with the largest social capital to easily dominate the conversation due to their outsized influence and weight of social consensus, the real outcasts are forced out, the bros assume control of the hivemind, and the community becomes one with the Brog Collective. I know nothing of 4chan's Japanese ancestor 2ch but considering that it's more mainstream it's probably much the same set of privileged ethnic majority (in this case Japanese) males with high incomes, only this case with a softer, mass-society sort of oppression.
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May 14, 2015 04:00
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Bullfrog posted:The other interesting question about chan culture is how it came to be the playground of young boys/men (who are usually white). It started in what, 2003 or 2004? The internet was a lot more male then than it is now, at least in a lot of places.
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May 14, 2015 04:01
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Woolie Wool posted:The unmoderated hivemind nature of *chan type sites causes the groups with the largest social capital to easily dominate the conversation due to their outsized influence and weight of social consensus, the real outcasts are forced out, the bros assume control of the hivemind, and the community becomes one with the Brog Collective. I admittedly used to go there and it got so bad, it's an echo chamber of self-hatred and misanthropy. /v is especially bad.
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May 14, 2015 04:05
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If you'd like a slice of history (and have archives access), here's the original thread showing the formation of 4chan: http://archives.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=724028 It was a time of giants, where pedophiles darkened the skies with their numbers.
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May 14, 2015 04:06
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Woolie Wool posted:The unmoderated hivemind nature of *chan type sites causes the groups with the largest social capital to easily dominate the conversation due to their outsized influence and weight of social consensus Right. Plus the unmoderated nature of the site means you're going to be getting a lot of extreme rhetoric and gross-out stuff, which drive away "moderates" and people who aren't highly motivated to participate in it, which means even the most moderate statements (like, "women aren't inferior") face a huge uphill battle.
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May 14, 2015 04:10
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BigRed0427 posted:On that note, do you think the people that eventually left chan boards just moved on to Reddit? I'm not sure, and I think some may have left for Tumblr or stuck to real name social network stuff like Facebook and Twitter.
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May 14, 2015 04:12
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BigRed0427 posted:On that note, do you think the people that eventually left chan boards just moved on to Reddit? Reddit is a successor to Digg (more or less the exact same format) and that's about the same age as 4chan.
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May 14, 2015 04:12
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StandardVC10 posted:It started in what, 2003 or 2004? The internet was a lot more male then than it is now, at least in a lot of places. I think a lot of the growth of weird right wing insaneness among internet nerds has been a reaction to the growing inclusiveness of the internet, that it's no longer a club exclusively white male 15-25 year olds and they're lashing out.
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May 14, 2015 04:15
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IMO the chan sites are good.
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May 14, 2015 04:15
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Woolie Wool posted:The unmoderated hivemind nature of *chan type sites causes the groups with the largest social capital to easily dominate the conversation due to their outsized influence and weight of social consensus, the real outcasts are forced out, the bros assume control of the hivemind, and the community becomes one with the Brog Collective. Hmm, how awful. Good thing that would never happen here.
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May 14, 2015 04:24
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Wanamingo posted:4chan, reddit, and the like are all just festering shitpiles and their problems stem from the lack of moderation and the inability/unwillingness to hold individual people accountable for what they say and do. For better or worse I feel like this has always been SA's strong point and something that Lowtax spoke of in length when he did his presentation on community building.
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May 14, 2015 04:25
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Sheng-ji Yang posted:I think a lot of the growth of weird right wing insaneness among internet nerds has been a reaction to the growing inclusiveness of the internet, that it's no longer a club exclusively white male 15-25 year olds and they're lashing out. Being an adult and wanting to avoid the other sex has to be the ultimate in reactionaryness. Ah yes, aristocratic gentlemen's clubs and fundamentalist Islam... but with Bitcoin!
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May 14, 2015 04:25
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Every I see an attempted survey/tracking of 4chan's demographics the userbase is always reported as surprisingly female as compared to the internet at large.
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May 14, 2015 04:33
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Tell me more about how these other forums are so much shittier than this forum and literally responsible for the world's wrongs  You guys have your tongues so far up each others asses, I am amazed that you can hiccup without inhaling a length of colon.
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May 14, 2015 04:33
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Cakebaker posted:This kinda amounts to saying there is no such thing as sports culture in the modern day, which is massively absurd. Of course any intimate enough connection between large groups of people and their shared interests turns into a culture, no matter whether someone calculatedly makes bank on them or not.
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May 14, 2015 04:45
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Tim Raines IRL posted:Tell me more about how these other forums are so much shittier than this forum and literally responsible for the world's wrongs where did you go wrong in life to feel personally attacked when people talk about the negative aspects of a website
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May 14, 2015 04:46
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Tim Raines IRL posted:Tell me more about how these other forums are so much shittier than this forum and literally responsible for the world's wrongs On one hand you have kiddie porn and harassing trans game developers until they commit suicide, and then cheering. On the other hand you have goons saying mean things about their poor forum on the internet. Yes I see your point, those two things really are equally bad.
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May 14, 2015 04:48
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MaxxBot posted:On one hand you have kiddie porn and harassing trans game developers until they commit suicide, and then cheering. On the other hand you have goons saying mean things about their poor forum on the internet. Yes I see your point, those two things really are equally bad. On the other hand, pedophiles and harassing people to death are both something SA has in spades.
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May 14, 2015 05:49
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on the left posted:On the other hand, pedophiles and harassing people to death are both something SA has in spades. ty peppar....
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May 14, 2015 05:58
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Fried Chicken posted:No, it doesn't. Sports culture is organic, it grows, creates, and reshapes, and has evolved over thousands of years. It has laws and social structures. Changes to it come from the interactions of those within it. "Nerd culture" doesn't, the new things are handed to it from the outside, with the outside selling them on what their new direction will be. It isn't people developing a way it interact, it is their way of interacting being marketed to them. There is no law of social structure, a key part of this is that there is no method to clamp down on a misbehaving member - that's a result of the fact that the structure comes from the outside. It is a consumer demographic. More than that, "nerd culture" is aggressively, violently hostile to any attempt to do anything new coming from within it. The whole reason we are talking about it is because when some of the members of it started to interact in new ways, like acknowledging that they were anything but straight white males, they started getting rape threats, death threats, and attempts on their lives. Do you have any sources you could use to confirm this a little further? I've always wanted to make more specific correlations between consumerism and popular culture as it is expressed, but lacked a good basis. If you have anything, I would be interested in reading it. I am only asking because, while I feel inclined to agree with you, I also see that the distinction you are making between the two is actually quite sutble for all it affects. One could just as easily observe the involved timescales required for cultural evolution as an argument for "Well, they only seem resistant to change because it takes a long time for it to do so," which would completely ignore the from-within/from-without element you are referring to.
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May 14, 2015 06:44
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There is a bit of a political awakening going on in internet circles. A bunch of ignorant regressive jerks are realizing that they are a bloc. Its a brave new internet, something akin to the polar political opposite of 'SJWs' is congealing. I, for one, welcome the change. We now have 'internet conservatives' and 'internet liberals'.
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May 14, 2015 06:52
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Their structure is probably more a consequence of "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity", ie - In trying to create an environment without 'oppressive' centralization, they create an environment dominated by 'warlords'/cliques. Reddits democratic nature is undermined by its granting of more power to groups/individuals who are more involved and have their own agenda (subreddit/vote brigading being a good example here: most people dont' participate in it, but it has a big effect).
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May 14, 2015 08:11
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Fried Chicken posted:No, it doesn't. Sports culture is organic, it grows, creates, and reshapes, and has evolved over thousands of years. It has laws and social structures. Changes to it come from the interactions of those within it. "Nerd culture" doesn't, the new things are handed to it from the outside, with the outside selling them on what their new direction will be. It isn't people developing a way it interact, it is their way of interacting being marketed to them. There is no law of social structure, a key part of this is that there is no method to clamp down on a misbehaving member - that's a result of the fact that the structure comes from the outside. It is a consumer demographic. More than that, "nerd culture" is aggressively, violently hostile to any attempt to do anything new coming from within it. The whole reason we are talking about it is because when some of the members of it started to interact in new ways, like acknowledging that they were anything but straight white males, they started getting rape threats, death threats, and attempts on their lives. How do you explain fanfiction then? People back in the 1970s were rewriting Star Trek to be about a romance between Kirk and Spock. I don't think that was Paramount imposing its marketing plan from the outside. And fastforward to today, when fanfiction is actively driving corporate product - that seems like the opposite of what you're describing. If nerd culture is all just top-down marketing, then where did this come from? I also think that nerd culture's marginal status sometimes cuts in favor of its capacity for progress. Cultural gatekeepers can control the commanding heights of the media landscape, but they can't control (or don't bother to notice) the margins, so marginalized groups can use those spaces to push the broader culture in a progressive direction. The first interracial kiss on TV wasn't on The Tonight Show, or Mary Tyler Moore, or Gunsmoke, or Perry Mason. It was on the definitional "nerd culture" show. And there are other examples - Delany, le Guin, Iain Banks, Paul Verhoeven, Joss Whedon, Alan Moore, Octavia Butler... Progress is baked into nerd DNA just as surely as reaction is.
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May 14, 2015 09:17
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Fried Chicken posted:No, it doesn't. Sports culture is organic, it grows, creates, and reshapes, and has evolved over thousands of years. It has laws and social structures. Changes to it come from the interactions of those within it. "Nerd culture" doesn't, the new things are handed to it from the outside, with the outside selling them on what their new direction will be. It isn't people developing a way it interact, it is their way of interacting being marketed to them. I'm going to leave aside your rather ahistorical and ignorant claim that sports culture is the product of "thousands of years" of "evolution", because it's irrelevant to this thread. (Didn't D&D have a sports thread at one point?) You sound exactly like Adorno complaining in the 1950s that all culture has become a product. I'm not sure what precisely your reference point is, but I'll supply one. In the city I was living in until last month, all of my old high school friends definitely had their nerd culture handed to them as a commercial production. The entire scope of their ordinary conversation runs from Mario Party, to Minecraft, to Adventure Time, to anime, to memes. I had dinner and beers with them many times after graduating college and the conversation always went around like this in circles. It was like listening to and participating in a live 4chan thread, minus the bigotry. But yet, they're still functioning adults; two have highly paid jobs. What they have is still a culture, because it's a common knowledge of (mass-produced, mediocre) arts and a common (ever so autistic and dispassionate) emotional vocabulary. You don't have to be creating the culture yourself to participate in it. Most likely you have a legitimate point to make, just as Adorno definitely had one. But that doesn't mean you can deny that nerd culture is a culture. Nagato fucked around with this message at 11:18 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 11:15
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Ponsonby Britt posted:How do you explain fanfiction then? People back in the 1970s were rewriting Star Trek to be about a romance between Kirk and Spock. I don't think that was Paramount imposing its marketing plan from the outside. And fastforward to today, when fanfiction is actively driving corporate product - that seems like the opposite of what you're describing. If nerd culture is all just top-down marketing, then where did this come from? Was I Love Lucy really the definitional "nerd culture" show? Because I'm pretty sure that it was popular with everyone.
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May 14, 2015 11:43
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This is going to turn into a thread about gamergate and goons screaming at each other that SA is just as bad.
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May 14, 2015 13:40
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Lotsa pretentious posts itt when the truth is that "chan culture" is inherently crass and stupidly contrarian against what is perceived as "the normies". Before 2008, the "normies" were the neocons, and chan culture was definitely more leftist (albeit in a retarded and extremist way). Just wait for 2016 and the inevitable triumph of the GOP to see some change in how chan culture swings politically.
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May 14, 2015 13:43
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WitchFetish posted:2016 and the inevitable triumph of the GOP Hillary Clinton has already won the 2016 election.
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May 14, 2015 14:16
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I don't think Hillary is quite a lock as some but how do you look at the joke that is the Republican presidential primary and think that will lead to an inevitable victory?
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May 14, 2015 14:18
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You guys are not really good with irony, are you?
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May 14, 2015 14:26
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WitchFetish posted:Lotsa pretentious posts itt when the truth is that "chan culture" is inherently crass and stupidly contrarian against what is perceived as "the normies". Before 2008, the "normies" were the neocons, and chan culture was definitely more leftist (albeit in a retarded and extremist way). I don't think appending "fag" to the end of each noun was really more leftist than the status quo.
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May 14, 2015 14:43
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ehh
Eggplant Squire fucked around with this message at 14:57 on May 14, 2015 |
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May 14, 2015 14:54
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What we're seeing is the Millennial generation's incarnation of the sixties culture war, the terrain of which has been formed by the outcomes of that last epochal shift. Reactionary and masculinist impulses are expressed not as a Nixonian belief in patriotism and family but in allegiances to all-consuming hobbies and the right to infinite pornography. Likewise, the progressive and feminist impulse that once agitated for freedom of expression and collective liberation now sounds censorious, joyless and addicted to the narcissism of small difference. Ultimately though it's not so much about politics as it is about millions of people; atomized, hyper-stimulated and severed from history like never before, detaching their ego from the physical world and crafting it around electronic space.
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May 14, 2015 15:49
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computer parts posted:I don't think appending "fag" to the end of each noun was really more leftist than the status quo. "tits or gtfo" - definitely a reaction to the Obama presidency.
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May 14, 2015 16:26
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We are the uploaded generation. I personally think I'm already pretty 'uploaded'.
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