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Comments
So, any ideas on how the 4chan culture will disperse once the place inevitably crumbles?
The way I see it, the cool boards, the /tg/, will go start new forums/imageboards somewhere, some riding on 4chan's former coattails, some trying to make their own identity.
The wannabe-edgy-hacker-Scientology types will crowd around Wikileaks, moreso than they already are.
The hentai enthusiasts will either crowd around the -boorus, or start their own imageboards dedicated to their specific series/fetish.
The perverts will just move back into Gaia Online.
The skilled, dedicated trolls will assimilate themselves into other communities and cause their ruckus as nature intended. The wannabe-trolls, on the other hand, will just stick around whatever remains of 4chan crop up around its smoldering corpse and stink the place up some more.
and the "lolololol rebecca black is cool now letz vote down our Justin Bieber comments and vote the friday ones up!" is not funny anymore either.
God damn I don't like a lot of things on the internet. If it wasn't for this place I don't even think I would like being anywhere here. (lies)
"It doesn't work because you are a faggot, go suck some cocks and get on IE instead luzr."
Not all sites should emulate the pointlessly offensive bullshit. Some places actually NEED to be professional lest the internet be useless. It would be no fun to try and search for a driver for your new laptop only to be redirected to pedoguro porn by some asshole dicking around at google for "lulz".
That said, I'm not happy about it, either.
>4chan is struggling. ED is destroyed. Across the internet, Hot Topic and the Cheezeburger Network co-opt memes and in-jokes - the product of an entirely different culture - and profit off of them, all the while diluting the culture among the masses.
By the time Hot Topic gets hold of them nobody on 4chan finds them funny anymore anyway.
>For every thousand instances of Anonymous hacking an epilepsy site, there's an instance where it also helped rescue an abused cat, or catching a child molester, or fighting a corrupt religious organization.
>For every thousand times someone got trolled, an idea was developed, and those ideas were exchanged without fear of external repercussions.
I'm sorry, but this is patently absurd. What are the names of these thousands of hacked epilepsy sites? I don't blame you for disliking Anonymous, but you're doing them a disservice here.
I realize the hipster-like implications of that last statement, but bear with me. What we're experiencing is a second Eternal September; when an influx of new users violently changes the type of discourse on the Internet. It isn't just happening on the imageboards and the wikis, though; it's Facebook and Twitter and Digg and Reddit, all made up of people who don't know how to behave online. These people want to be a part of cyberculture but lack the will to actually join it. Instead, they start a sort of ersatz, diluted culture that has none of the depth of the memes it mimics.
They are (were in ED's case) polluted by idiots who think they are funny, doing things to be cool. By it dying, the diseased sections will perish, and Anonymous will flower, growing back to what it was
In fact, after that it will eventually get diseased and die again, leaving only healthy sections. Think of 4chan and ED as supermemes. Anonymous is just tired of it and will establish new ones while vultures pick at the old scraps
Interesting choice of phrasing. I think you've hit the nail on the head. We've come full circle.
@ Cygan: Ah, then I retract my remark about it being absurd, but I still think you're exaggerating unfairly.
By it dying, the diseased sections will perish, and Anonymous will flower, growing back to what it was. In fact, after that it will eventually get diseased and die again, leaving only healthy sections.
I admit I had a love - hate relationship with ED. I honestly found ED to be funny. Their views were disgusting, but it was sort of like the critic who hates everything: If they REALLY hated it, you KNOW it's worth seeing. Lately, however, they had so many ads, popups, excessive hate, and completely inappropriate porn I started avoiding the site with a passion.
However, the culture ED represents still exists. We all still use memes, we all know what a "tropefag" is (despite the fact I made that up just now), etc. But it is dying.
The web is changing. In the good old days, the web was home to eccentric military researchers and professors, grey hat hackers whose hacks were often done purely out of curiousity and were sometimes an improvement to the site they hacked, and us - the nerds, geeks, etc. Anyone could start a website for free, and owning a website filled with random sillyness was something to be proud of.
Today, the bandwidth owners demand a profit from every site, and the global economy no longer is what it once was. Young children, parents, and corporations that cater to them spend far more on profitable web ventures than we, the "natives", do. Every cyberpedophile or cyberbullying case on TV, every troll post, every hack, every rude comment, every breast comparison chart and panty - shot wallpaper, and even every D&D site, makes the parents of young children, companies that pride themselves as responsible and mature, and governments that believe they know better than their people, question the value of the old web culture.
However, as much as I might not like it, a troll post doesn't cost human civilization all that much. A new idea can change the world. I would argue maybe it's worth the hordes of trolls to not restrain that one idea. But it's also worth the sacrifice of sites that generate much cost and little benefit to encourage new, healthier sites to find the light of day.
What I object to is the profiting off of a culture that was a
collaborative effort, without adding anything meaningful in return.
They do that to everyone. The 4chan/ED subculture was just inadequately equipped to handle it.
With all that in mind, a seven year Internet reign of terror really isn't bad going.
Man, the Internet generation is going to have the weirdest stories to tell their children...
He's not actually talking about cultural genocide, either, but still.
First of all, ED was backed up somewhere (encyclopediadramatica.ch), so its not really "lost."
That being said, it does sadden me to see such sites in trouble. As one person on OhI's BB said: "the homogenization of the internet has begun." To me, there is nothing worse than a setting where there is only one POV, and that is the value I found in ED--that they were an alternate POV. Wanting them silenced just because you didn't agree with them... well, give me a Godwin cookie, because that is pretty much the definition of being a Nazi.
To put it simply, E.D. becoming "Oh Internet" would be like if Penn and Teller: Bullshit became a fundie Christian program.