This was re-submitted here when I was sleeping, and I was the only admin. I went to bed thinking my submission had not been noticed, leaving my site misconfigured thinking it did not matter.
The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.
You're on a site where at least half the commenters are anonymous, and evidently the discussion level here is good enough for you to stay. Conversely, Facebook is not any less cancerous because they have a real name policy. So no, I'd say the least N years have not shown that.
I think the most important aspect of a community is its members. Reddit, Facebook, etc have all tried hard to grow their communities and have reduced the quality of them as they increased the headcount.
The best communities don’t strive for the hockey stick growth.
Reddit and Facebook are not a single community, they are many communities some of which have a very high bar for quality, and some of which are a free for all that tends toward low quality memes and trolling.
I found that removing any community of more than 100K subscribers from my reddit experience made it much more tolerable.
In the old design you could go to /r/subredditname/comments and see an ordered list of comments regardless of which post they were associated with. It really livened things up and let you track the conversations going on given that there wern't that many new posts in a given day. That's gone with the new design unfortunately.
People change these logins like gloves despite what the "spirit" of HN is supposed to be. In fact, an anonymous community that is strictly moderated for quality is better for being anonymous (or at least pseudonymous). If the average quality of contributions is reasonably high, you judge comments on their merit and aren't excessively reverent toward some and excessively skeptical toward others purely based on the contributor's history (and therefore set of beliefs). And people self-censor a lot less.
I haven't used Reddit in a very long time, but does it not allow anonymous posts and comments any more? My account, at least, isn't tied to my real name or identity in any way, IIRC.
Anyway, I'm not sure anonymity is a great feature. The lack of accountability is a good part of the reason why Reddit became such a cesspool.
This used to be a lot easier. Now reddit doesn't let you create an account without an email (and most burner email tools are blocked like https://www.mailinator.com/.
To me it seems like there are features of the site or certain subs that essentially shitlist you until your account is of a certain age or upvote quota. You're not wrong that posts by brand new accounts seem to be invisible sometimes.
They are employing a dark pattern to make it seem that way, but it isn't so. You can just click "next" without actually entering an email. But there is no indication that the field is optional.
This is how I still browse the site. You can also disable subreddit theming in your preferences and you’ve got a much more lite version of the site like the old days.
I think this "reddit-with-4chan-features" approach is more viable than 8chan's "4chan-with-reddit-features" approach, since I don't think the imageboard model is very compatible with the "community-run boards" feature. It's also a good thing that (it appears that) this website is "fresh" and apolitical rather than coming forth from a political rift in another community (e.g. 8chan, gab, voat).
I'll definitely be following this website with interest; I'm a huge fan of sites that allow anonymous posting as well as how Reddit can create active communities around very niche topics (which is a lot harder on e.g. 4chan).
EDIT: I do have some problems with this rule: "Nothing that violates US law, or anything that would be considered 'gray area'." What is a 'gray area' is, itself, a gray area. I don't think the rule itself needs changing, but it would be good if it was supported by some examples of things that people might want to do but you won't allow.
EDIT2: Another issue: in a lot of fonts, Ieddit (with capital i) looks very similar to leddit (with lowercase L), which is a derogatory term for Reddit on 4chan (and possibly elsewhere) (owing to the shitty rageface memes which use the word "le")
> It's also a good thing that (it appears that) this website is "fresh" and apolitical rather than coming forth from a political rift in another community (e.g. 8chan, gab, voat).
Only one group likes image boards anyway, this won't matter.
I think that the point of the gray area is to differentiate themselves from the kinds of things that went on at 8chan without getting banned. None of them were technically illegal but many were abhorrent regardless.
>EDIT: I do have some problems with this rule: "Nothing that violates US law, or anything that would be considered 'gray area'." What is a 'gray area' is, itself, a gray area. I don't think the rule itself needs changing, but it would be good if it was supported by some examples of things that people might want to do but you won't allow.
Loli/shota porn mainly. Other forms of borderline cp. The problem is, specifically stating 'hey don't upload THIS CONTENT', will result in people specifically uploading that content to buck the rules. I'll probably still add the clarification.
The gray area clause allows operational leeway.
>EDIT2: Another issue: in a lot of fonts, Ieddit (with capital i) looks very similar to leddit (with lowercase L), which is a derogatory term for Reddit on 4chan (and possibly elsewhere) (owing to the shitty rageface memes which use the word "le")
I see a lot of people suggesting this. tbh I kind of like teh association with the "leddit" term, I find it amusing. From a ui perspective, the /i/ might make more sense though.
Personally I think you should skip the /r/ or /i/ part of the paths. Always bothered me that reddit has it - communities are central to these sites so IMO they should be the first part of the path
Almost every single action signs me out. Creating a sub gives back an 'invalid' error message', which then signs me out.
Have clicked on less than 10 links and have already been exposed to bestiality images. This post in question has been up for half an hour, where is the moderation?
This was re-submitted here when I was sleeping, and I was the only admin. I went to bed thinking my submission had not been noticed, leaving my site misconfigured thinking it did not matter.
The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.
> John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory was proposed in the Penny Arcade (web comic) on March 19, 2004 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. It says that when a normal person is allowed anonymity and an audience, they lose social inhibitions and act inappropriately.
If anything, the last decade has taught us the immutability of this law. Usernames and comment history seem to help somewhat with people acting accountable for their actions. Total anonymity seems to always lead to a cesspool like 4chan.
I think people are more toxic in private even if they're now willing to be semi-toxic in public.
I say this as someone who was very good at research back when people didn't understand stuff like not using the same handle across sites, not using same email across sites, not giving out so much info the property of intersection narrows them down... it's amazing to see someone's public and what they think are private thoughts and how they contrast.
I've kind of given up on total anonymity when saying anything of substance given advances in stylometry - anonymous receiving is solved, but speaking seems the real challenge.
This is limited: what about all the people who like the unique community that formed on anonymous imageboards? There's no posturing or attempts to build a reputation. You just throw out your piece and it stands alone.
Be careful if you're at work. There's already porn on this thing in some of the Imgur links.
I miss the late 90s when you had a lot of small, independent websites. Sure there was always a war against spammers and scripts, but I feel like you could find more independent content from individuals instead of these big link aggregation platforms (remember web-rings?)
There is more to think about today when making something that hosts other's content (or links to that content). I'm surprised ActivityPub networks (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) haven't had more issues with spam and bad actors.
When starting a project like this, I think a few small things authors should consider right off the bat: implement some Captcha (preferably an open source implementation that's not Google mandated tracking, if you can find something decent), for at least account creation .. maybe posts too. I'm not sure what Lobsters uses for spam testing/filtering, but it'd be worth looking at that and other projects for any quick solutions. Prismo (https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo) also comes to mind.
Hosts of ActivityPub based platforms have all kinds of troubles with users and instances that are abusive and/or datamining.
Thing is, the instances are generally small and good admins communicate, dropping known abusive IPs and reaching out to server hosts when abusive instances violate local laws like the CFAA.
Most Masto/Pleroma instances are too small to be worth the trouble. I get about 1-2 spam bots signing up per week, usually deleted automatically or within 1 hour of signing up (longer if all the admins are sleeping).
Small instances that don't do anything about spam usually get defederated fairly quickly.
With the way federation works, your reach is very unpredictable and you need to attach to very large instances if you want to have any effect. And large instances have more moderators to more quickly handle them.
Per-user mastodon probably has more moderators/administrators than comparable services (twitter), so it's a bit more clean.
> Be careful if you're at work. There's already porn on this thing in some of the Imgur links.
Not that I need further proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and still am attracted to "anonymous" "free" "speech", I'm using TOR at work to avoid being flagged for such accidental visits.
Internet fuckwads are fine as long as they stay limited to their own communities.
What you and I deem a 'fuckwad' will vary greatly. While somebody spamming 'hitler did nothing wrong' is certainly a fuckwad, it is only an issue which this fuckwadry is exposed to those who were not expressively looking for it.
I see zero issues in fuckwads congregating if they stick to themselves.
It doesn't matter if some of them keep to themselves. What matters is that those communities continuously spill out and if that has detrimental effects. I contend that they do and they have.
In addition to that, allowing those communities to exist legitimizes them and allows them to recruit impressionable people.
The combination of these two things lead to things like gamergate and "doing it for the lulz" and ends with things like the march in Charlottesville and the El Paso shooting.
We all hope the troll spewing "Hitler did nothing wrong" learns better somehow, but there isn't a quick and effective "somehow". The Internet enables us to connect with people all over the world, or at least the English-speaking world, but all we've constructed is more echoey echo chambers. Fuckwads sticking together is how we got to the current state of politics. Someday, someone smart is going to figure out how to do better than deleting/hiding fuckwads' comments and giving them their own echo chamber.
It's the best solution we have now, but it's a pretty bad one.
> If anything, the last decade has taught us the immutability of this law.
Or equally likely-- there are a tiny fraction of bona fide users who act moderately anti-social on the net when granted anonymity, just as they would in real life.
It's just that forums with no little to no publishing friction allow those people to do 100x damage compared to what they could get away with in real life.
Add to that:
* corporate-sponsored trolls doing 1000x damage compared to real life
* nation-state trolls doing 10000x damage compared to real life
That's how you get that inimitable Reddit charm of watching an entire thread on geopolitics seem to change its hive mind as the mods manually strip out all the astroturf over the course of an hour.
I don’t know, there seem to be various levels of anonymity with different social implications. Let’s roughly differenciate between:
1. Full Anonymity (no way to differenciate between user A and B except by the content)
2. Anonymous Pseudonymity (Users can take usernames, but they don’t mean a lot because they can be changed fast and there is no per user post history)
3. Accountbuilding Pseudonymity (Users usually stick to their accounts, Per user post history or karma is visible and meaningful)
4. Mandatory Real Names (on top of the stuff in point 3 you also have to use your real name - but face no consequences if you make something up)
5. Enforced Real Names (same as point 4, but the service provider has to check your identity)
Positive effects of mandatory real name policies could never been proven — as far as I know they haven’t improved civility e.g. on facebook.
I believe the secret lies more in the feedback systems and how easy it is to flip or flop your position away from what you historically said. It helps if all community interactions or rules are clear and minimalistic instead of arbitrary and arcane.
All of this together weakens or strengthens the impact of the kind of user you mentioned. So in short: the emergent culture on really bad image boards is also part of their systemic design, just like it is with hn, facebook, instagram and any other online plattform. I think the type mentioned in point 3 (accountbuilding) paired with clever measures to keep the aims of the community aligned help a lot.
You're coupling registration process with posting process. What evidence is there that a fully anonymous image board writable by Debian maintainers would follow this so-called "law?"
Register user but don't show any identifiers when they post. They can speak freely as the user can be anonymous but their data is still stored somewhere so they can't act without any thoughts.
Haven't we by now found out that in reality, it's really only an audience that is needed? There are many inappropriate comments posted on Facebook, YouTube or Twitter posted using people's real names.
And also, of course, it just holds for some otherwise apparently normal persons.
Penny Arcade was complaining about people on Unreal Tournament 2004, which was pseudonymous. The real driver of toxicity was the hyper-competitive nature of the game he was playing.
You should see how some people act in real life playing hockey or soccer. Everybody knows their real names, but that doesn't stop them from being assholes.
> My next question though is what stops reddit from implementing them?
They're never going to implement the anonymous posting. They used to let users register without providing an email, since the new redesign it's required.
> They're never going to implement the anonymous posting. They used to let users register without providing an email, since the new redesign it's required.
As far as I know, it's still not required. When you're at the signup popup and it's asking for your email, just click next. It's not a required field.
...and there is no /r/bestiality. Come on, people...if you are going to make a forum for your interests, at least learn to spell the name of those interests. The word comes from the Latin word bestia.
I like the idea of anonymous posting and at the same time on Reddit I've found challenges with brand new accounts with agendas showing up en mass with little regard for the local community and just wanting to push their agenda.
It's a rough thing to allow anonymous comments and also foster a community online.
This was re-submitted here when I was sleeping, and I was the only admin. I went to bed thinking my submission had not been noticed, leaving my site misconfigured thinking it did not matter.
The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.
How is this relevant? The project does not seem to be violating any guidelines. Are you suggesting an illegal and unethical reporting of a sites donated income because you don't agree with it on a publicly indexed forum? If so, thats really messed up.
170 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] thread> Too Many Requests: 60 per 1 minute
I visited the site twice...
It looks interesting, but I am curious what are the implications. I.e. how does everyone’s interactions change.
Also seems kinda weird I have to login to be honest...
The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.
The best communities don’t strive for the hockey stick growth.
In the old design you could go to /r/subredditname/comments and see an ordered list of comments regardless of which post they were associated with. It really livened things up and let you track the conversations going on given that there wern't that many new posts in a given day. That's gone with the new design unfortunately.
Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/
I have disabled the new design entirely in my user preferences, so I get the old design even if I don't put "old" in the URL.
Anyway, I'm not sure anonymity is a great feature. The lack of accountability is a good part of the reason why Reddit became such a cesspool.
The new reddit design is horrible.
The design on the site could be a little closer to this site perhaps.
This is how I still browse the site. You can also disable subreddit theming in your preferences and you’ve got a much more lite version of the site like the old days.
https://memberapp.github.io/
It's got Reddit style functionality (HN style theme at present) with all content on the Bitcoin (BCH) blockchain.
I'll definitely be following this website with interest; I'm a huge fan of sites that allow anonymous posting as well as how Reddit can create active communities around very niche topics (which is a lot harder on e.g. 4chan).
EDIT: I do have some problems with this rule: "Nothing that violates US law, or anything that would be considered 'gray area'." What is a 'gray area' is, itself, a gray area. I don't think the rule itself needs changing, but it would be good if it was supported by some examples of things that people might want to do but you won't allow.
EDIT2: Another issue: in a lot of fonts, Ieddit (with capital i) looks very similar to leddit (with lowercase L), which is a derogatory term for Reddit on 4chan (and possibly elsewhere) (owing to the shitty rageface memes which use the word "le")
Only one group likes image boards anyway, this won't matter.
Loli/shota porn mainly. Other forms of borderline cp. The problem is, specifically stating 'hey don't upload THIS CONTENT', will result in people specifically uploading that content to buck the rules. I'll probably still add the clarification.
The gray area clause allows operational leeway.
>EDIT2: Another issue: in a lot of fonts, Ieddit (with capital i) looks very similar to leddit (with lowercase L), which is a derogatory term for Reddit on 4chan (and possibly elsewhere) (owing to the shitty rageface memes which use the word "le")
I see a lot of people suggesting this. tbh I kind of like teh association with the "leddit" term, I find it amusing. From a ui perspective, the /i/ might make more sense though.
Have clicked on less than 10 links and have already been exposed to bestiality images. This post in question has been up for half an hour, where is the moderation?
The technical errors are fixed now. I went to bed with the site reconfigured, not worrying too much because I thought this post was a dud.
the only issue will be losing familiarity for reddit users.
The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.
> John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory was proposed in the Penny Arcade (web comic) on March 19, 2004 by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. It says that when a normal person is allowed anonymity and an audience, they lose social inhibitions and act inappropriately.
If anything, the last decade has taught us the immutability of this law. Usernames and comment history seem to help somewhat with people acting accountable for their actions. Total anonymity seems to always lead to a cesspool like 4chan.
I say this as someone who was very good at research back when people didn't understand stuff like not using the same handle across sites, not using same email across sites, not giving out so much info the property of intersection narrows them down... it's amazing to see someone's public and what they think are private thoughts and how they contrast.
I've kind of given up on total anonymity when saying anything of substance given advances in stylometry - anonymous receiving is solved, but speaking seems the real challenge.
With psuedoanonymous sites like reddit it's trivial to be anonymous anyway by rotating alt-accounts. This just streamlines the process.
I miss the late 90s when you had a lot of small, independent websites. Sure there was always a war against spammers and scripts, but I feel like you could find more independent content from individuals instead of these big link aggregation platforms (remember web-rings?)
There is more to think about today when making something that hosts other's content (or links to that content). I'm surprised ActivityPub networks (Mastodon, Pleroma, etc.) haven't had more issues with spam and bad actors.
When starting a project like this, I think a few small things authors should consider right off the bat: implement some Captcha (preferably an open source implementation that's not Google mandated tracking, if you can find something decent), for at least account creation .. maybe posts too. I'm not sure what Lobsters uses for spam testing/filtering, but it'd be worth looking at that and other projects for any quick solutions. Prismo (https://gitlab.com/prismosuite/prismo) also comes to mind.
Thing is, the instances are generally small and good admins communicate, dropping known abusive IPs and reaching out to server hosts when abusive instances violate local laws like the CFAA.
Content marked as "nsfw" will not show up in the default index page, and nsfw posts in sfw subs will have the thumbnail hidden.
This was 'resubmitted' here when I was sleeping. I woke up to a site I left misconfigured being flooded with people lol.
Small instances that don't do anything about spam usually get defederated fairly quickly.
With the way federation works, your reach is very unpredictable and you need to attach to very large instances if you want to have any effect. And large instances have more moderators to more quickly handle them.
Per-user mastodon probably has more moderators/administrators than comparable services (twitter), so it's a bit more clean.
Not that I need further proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and still am attracted to "anonymous" "free" "speech", I'm using TOR at work to avoid being flagged for such accidental visits.
What you and I deem a 'fuckwad' will vary greatly. While somebody spamming 'hitler did nothing wrong' is certainly a fuckwad, it is only an issue which this fuckwadry is exposed to those who were not expressively looking for it.
I see zero issues in fuckwads congregating if they stick to themselves.
In addition to that, allowing those communities to exist legitimizes them and allows them to recruit impressionable people.
The combination of these two things lead to things like gamergate and "doing it for the lulz" and ends with things like the march in Charlottesville and the El Paso shooting.
We all hope the troll spewing "Hitler did nothing wrong" learns better somehow, but there isn't a quick and effective "somehow". The Internet enables us to connect with people all over the world, or at least the English-speaking world, but all we've constructed is more echoey echo chambers. Fuckwads sticking together is how we got to the current state of politics. Someday, someone smart is going to figure out how to do better than deleting/hiding fuckwads' comments and giving them their own echo chamber.
It's the best solution we have now, but it's a pretty bad one.
Or equally likely-- there are a tiny fraction of bona fide users who act moderately anti-social on the net when granted anonymity, just as they would in real life.
It's just that forums with no little to no publishing friction allow those people to do 100x damage compared to what they could get away with in real life.
Add to that:
* corporate-sponsored trolls doing 1000x damage compared to real life
* nation-state trolls doing 10000x damage compared to real life
That's how you get that inimitable Reddit charm of watching an entire thread on geopolitics seem to change its hive mind as the mods manually strip out all the astroturf over the course of an hour.
1. Full Anonymity (no way to differenciate between user A and B except by the content)
2. Anonymous Pseudonymity (Users can take usernames, but they don’t mean a lot because they can be changed fast and there is no per user post history)
3. Accountbuilding Pseudonymity (Users usually stick to their accounts, Per user post history or karma is visible and meaningful)
4. Mandatory Real Names (on top of the stuff in point 3 you also have to use your real name - but face no consequences if you make something up)
5. Enforced Real Names (same as point 4, but the service provider has to check your identity)
Positive effects of mandatory real name policies could never been proven — as far as I know they haven’t improved civility e.g. on facebook.
I believe the secret lies more in the feedback systems and how easy it is to flip or flop your position away from what you historically said. It helps if all community interactions or rules are clear and minimalistic instead of arbitrary and arcane.
All of this together weakens or strengthens the impact of the kind of user you mentioned. So in short: the emergent culture on really bad image boards is also part of their systemic design, just like it is with hn, facebook, instagram and any other online plattform. I think the type mentioned in point 3 (accountbuilding) paired with clever measures to keep the aims of the community aligned help a lot.
And also, of course, it just holds for some otherwise apparently normal persons.
4chan is a collection of boards, and not all of them are cesspools. The ones focused on niche hobbies tend to fare better.
Of course, abrasive discussion is still common. But one man's cesspool is another man's hot spring.
A cesspit is still a cesspit even if some people choose to call it a hot spring.
You should see how some people act in real life playing hockey or soccer. Everybody knows their real names, but that doesn't stop them from being assholes.
* Fully Transparent Mod/Admin Action Logs <- This is evidenced by the fact that on reddit mod drama sparks up every so often
* Anonymous Posting Option <- The fact that people make throwaways indicates that they desire anonymity sometimes
My next question though is what stops reddit from implementing them?
They're never going to implement the anonymous posting. They used to let users register without providing an email, since the new redesign it's required.
As far as I know, it's still not required. When you're at the signup popup and it's asking for your email, just click next. It's not a required field.
> Dogs knotting women (www.com)
Really, who expected anything else?
It's a rough thing to allow anonymous comments and also foster a community online.
The technical issues and most of the offensive content has been taken care of.
https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Those guidelines are here for anyone who is curious:
https://www.patreon.com/policy/guidelines