Moot has always appeared to me to be a very talented and bright person. I think it's a mistake to judge him by what some people will say on an anonymous image board. The influence of 4chan on internet culture cannot be ignored: everything from LOLCats to advice animals and countless internet slang terms. He's also had a very unique and unusual experience being in charge of a group of people who believe the internet should be controlled chaos. In my opinion, Moot is a lot like Mike Judge after he did Beavis and Butthead: it's too easy to dismiss him because what he created is a bit crass. But he's a smart and talented person who will most likely go on to build a reputation beyond his first big thing.
>The influence of 4chan on internet culture cannot be ignored: everything from LOLCats to advice animals and countless internet slang terms.
Moot is not community. You cannot credit him with the inventions that his community came up with. His site was the catalyst, of course, but how much credit should he personally get for it?
Maybe you could judge him by the success (or the lack of it) of DrawQuest and Canv.as.. the two projects that he spearheaded and got VC funding for.
He backpeddaled from that position fairly quickly. Moot banned Tor use on 4chan, he banned VPN use, proxy use was banned, he added ban-tracking cookies, he added unique IDs, he aded country flags to many boards that didn't want them, etc.
He supported anonymity for publicity and did a lot on his site to dissuade its use. When he gave interviews on 4chan, he used to tell everyone that "4chan is not anonymous".
About the only thing that's left on 4chan that's "anonymous" is the default username: which is still "Anonymous".
You have more anonymity on HN with a throwaway account than you have on 4chan.
People also give him too much credit when it comes to community organizing as well. He got lucky with 4chan when he copied 2chan and catered it to english-speaking audience. When he tried to actually create something from scratch, both of his apps failed miserably.
There's a difference between anonymity of a user to other users, and tools being used by the administration to track and deny bad actors.
Besides, i'm pretty sure HN can track people across accounts as well, and if it hasn't banned proxies yet, then only because they haven't been abused enough.
How is using a default name like Anonymous or "Anonymous Coward" (or some other default name on other sites) different from making a throwaway? Making a throwaway might take you few seconds longer but to an admin, it's exactly the same thing. Your IP is tracked in both cases.
It's just that "Anonymous" username is EXTREMELY DECEPTIVE since you're NOT ANONYMOUS at all!
Again, you're misunderstanding who the target of the anonymity is. Users on 4chan are highly anonymous to other users. Anonymity to the operators exists practically nowhere due to simple abuse prevention considerations.
Also note that anonymity is a sliding scale, not a binary switch.
Yes, throwaway accounts offer some anonymity. But they are decidedly less so than posting on most 4chan boards in default operation mode, since the default way of posting on those leaves no way for one user to identify another user. Meanwhile throwaway accounts require a non-trivial amount of effort for every single post made; which is much more than the zero amount of effort required on 4chan to have the same benefit.
OK, here's a throwaway account, for which I had to pick a different user name a few times because of the name restrictions (not to mention a password).
You, on the other hand, are not using a throwaway account, so I can tell that you seem to have a rather violent dislike of moot. If this were 4chan, I would have no idea that you made 3 separate posts trying to tear him down.
The cost of registering – even if it's just 3-4 clicks away – is not negligible, and it gives a very different situation by default. I won't discuss the merits of a reputation & voting system, but when everyone has an account, the actual result is that few people are anonymous in practice. And maybe that's not so bad.
But on imageboards like 4chan, you will find very few people using names or even so-called "tripcodes" (the closest thing to an account), which means that by default to anyone that isn't a moderator, everyone is Anonymous in a sea of Anonymity.
Of course every Internet forum keeps logs of what IP posted what, but as long as it's kept private, that's entirely besides the point.
> You, on the other hand, are not using a throwaway account, so I can tell that you seem to have a rather violent dislike of moot. If this were 4chan, I would have no idea that you made 3 separate posts trying to tear him down.
It's been a while since I've visited 4chan, but didn't they add some sort of user ID to comments at some point? Like, they could still generically be 'Anonymous', but there was some sort of ID or hash you could ctrl+f to find other comments by that person within that thread.
You must be thinking of forced IDs, the feature itself is several years old but it's been turned on and off through the years.
Something that isn't very well known is that 4chan is actually a lot of smaller communities with only partial overlap, and the culture can differ a lot depending on what board you are.
A strangely effective rule of thumb is that the smaller the community is, the friendlier it acts.
IDs are only enabled in the bigger and most controversial boards of the site, where people otherwise don't hesitate to abuse their anonymity.
>He’s working on a new community site called Canv.as, which actually integrates with Facebook Connect, although users can still post anonymously. Poole said the fact that “you know that we know” the user’s real identity, even if other users can’t see it, discourages people from indulging in the most obnoxious behavior.
This is perfectly in-line with the banning of VPNs and Tor.
He tried the Japanese concept of anonymity from 2 channel ...
> > A: Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don't know each other. If there is a user ID attached to a user, a discussion tends to become a criticizing game. On the other hand, under the anonymous system, even though your opinion/information is criticized, you don't know with whom to be upset. Also with a user ID, those who participate in the site for a long time tend to have authority, and it becomes difficult for a user to disagree with them. Under a perfectly anonymous system, you can say, "it's boring," if it is actually boring. All information is treated equally; only an accurate argument will work.
You and I have every different definitions of 'disaster'. There's a load of shit and a few hazard zones, but a number of great discussion arise from people discussing the merit of an idea instead of the merit of an individual.
The most I've ever learned about reverse engineering software I learned from a guy on /g/ who's dayjob was reverse engineering malware. I even made a "callsign" (a Reversi game board). If he was around, he'd post in the thread and answer questions. This kept up for several months until public interest in a weekly RE thread died out.
It's very similar to Reddit in that regard - but without certain individuals becoming "popular/unpopular" based on their username and history.
The anonymity becomes more important when an individual holds a minority opinion. As continually evidenced by the increasing number of people losing their jobs for wrongthinking or making politically incorrect jokes like "dongle forking".
Everyone's gotta pay the bills. If you're thrifty, 4-5 years at a company like Google can get you .5-1 mil for your next venture (maybe more, maybe less, depending on your bonuses & promotions, how well the stock performs, etc.)
I wouldn't expect any meaningful new product or anything to come out of this - if I had to guess, he was probably hired as an IC. Don't expect him to become some sort of new figurehead at Google for anonymity or identity on the Internet.
I suspect very few people will ever admit they took a job for the money. Even though its usually true.
One of my favorite comments was actually by James Spader about Stargate. You can find the direct quote online, but he basically said it was an awful script but he took the job for the money, and doesn't think there's any shame in that.
I'm really not sure how I feel about this. Moot created the biggest, most toxic garbage fire of an internet community, refused to take management of it, and walked away when it became too toxic for anyone to deal with. In a way, he's a perfect new hire for Google, but Google usually doesn't leave quite so much devastation in its wake.
While it might be incredibly toxic at times, it's also the source of quite a lot of interesting Internet culture and movements, many positive works, and a ton of creativity. It's a microcosm of the worst and the best of what the Internet can pull off.
Don't dismiss it out of hand as exclusively negative.
Time and time again, the hands-off moderation of anything on 4chan beyond child pornography has had knock on effects in the real world. GamerGate began life on 4chan, and is still making women's lives miserable. All you have to do is ask Allison Rapp, their latest victim. <http://kotaku.com/the-ugly-new-front-in-the-neverending-vide...
While moot did, eventually, push GamerGate discussion off 4chan, he took forever to do so, and walked away from the site not long after. By not taking a stance on harassment and abuse earlier on, however, he created conditions for such a culture to flourish on 4chan.
Is there interesting and positive stuff on 4chan? Almost certainly. Would it still exist had moot taken a stronger stance on dealing with toxic posters? I'll go out on a limb and say yes.
Just FYI, reading the wikipedia article is a really bad idea. A variety of fanatics, political obsessives and involved administrators have been squatting on it for months; it's a dumpster fire.
How is this assessment any better than judging a physical community based on their loudest/most controversial members? The "4chan garbage fire" is a rude stereotype.
If I'm in a physical community where the loudest, and most controversial members are making it a terrible experience for people inside and outside that community, and the leaders refuse to deal with it, I think a fair assessment is that the community is toxic.
Your statement seems to imply that the loudest, and most controversial, members make it terrible for EVERYONE inside the community.
That is not the case in 4chan. There are a large number, if not a majority, of boards which have healthy, constructive cultures and are extremely helpful for hobbyists and enthusiasts.
So, if it's not terrible for everyone, then it's not a problem---as long as it's not terrible for you. Maybe, perhaps, this would work if the terrible people kept to themselves, but this is rarely the case. I was a regular poster on /mu/ for several years, but once the /pol/ users started trashing the board up, it's been a shell of its former self. And, again, that's just within 4chan. The worst things are what 4chan's community have done outside of the site. See also: GamerGate.
> If I'm in a physical community where the loudest, and most controversial members are making it a terrible experience for people inside and outside that community, and the leaders refuse to deal with it, I think a fair assessment is that the community is toxic.
While I disagree that 4chan is "toxic" in many ways it is representative of society in the way that twitter represents a fleeting incomplete thought.
What you have said maps near perfectly to the state of America. While politicians have totally fucked up the country, it is somewhat bleeakly obvious that these same dynamics are at play here.
So if you are American consider that you are in a physical community where the loudest, and most controversial members are making it a terrible experience for people and that they have chosen leaders that mirror their own desire to * refuse to deal with it, which unfortunately leaves us with the unpleasant assessment is that the community is toxic
What devastation? 4chan is absolutely not a "toxic garbage fire of an internet community", and it's not even his concept or idea. He didn't "create" anything in that sense.
He also didn't, "walk away when it became too toxic for anyone to deal with." That sentence is literally too hard to parse, given what's publicly available information about Moot and 4chan.
