All too often, I feel as though there's too much mod/janitor presence on 4chan to truly make it fun and sporadic. There should just be a small set of global rules to follow:
...and that's it! Everything else is fair game for Anonymous. Users should be left to moderate and evolve the site on their own, without forced interference from The Powers That Be.
Now, I understand some people want to think that certain 4chan boards are safe to browse at work, but the truth is that a site of that nature and with that level of activity is bound to have several rule-breaking posts on any given day, and the mods simply cannot act fast enough to catch them in time. Excessive swearing and racist posts are almost never deleted anymore. What's the point of continuing this myth?
Damnit, I hate Apple keyboards. Why do they have an Enter key right next to the arrow pad?
Disagree, I'd give 4chan /a/ all of 10 minutes to become flooded with nothing but guro and scat hentai.
>>3
If that's what the collective user base wants, then let it be. If not, it will sort itself out in due time.
>>3
DO NOT WANT guro and scat.
>>4 The problem with this sort of thing is that, with spambots, the xChan flooder, etc, the will of a few can subvert the wants of the rest of the users.
It's a great ideal, sure, and it'd be wonderful if all mods had to do was sweep up bits of spam every once in a while, but it's just not practical most of the time.
>>6
there are ways to prevent spambots and flooders from posting.
>>7
Exactly, and by "flooding," I mean posting the same text or image repeatedly. The xChan dumping tool is fine in most cases, when you want to mass-upload an entire manga or any other series of images.
I think moderation isn't bad if it's not too nazimode. I mean if people post a whole bunch of scat and guro on /a/ over a long period of time, that means that the site admin(s) should make a board for scat and guro hentai. If such a board where that content is appropriate already exists, then I see no reason to allow users to unnecessarily post it on other boards, just like I feel like /a/ shouldn't come and post unrelated content. It's not fair.
>>10
Obviously you miss entirely the fine point of trolling at leisure. Dedicating a board to scat and guro would have no effect on spamming. At present, /h/ is spammed with /d/ material and /s/ with basically everything.
Well, I've been visting a fairly large russian imageboard (it has around 500000 posts per month) which is barely moderated. Board rules are minimalistic, and almost never enforced. Image flood is only banned/rolledback when it is too long (like days). The only things being deleted are CP and other illegal content.
As a result, it is overflowing with flood, offtopic, copypasta, mindless trolling (like posting scat to 'girls' or 'cooking' boards) and plain insults. In fact, insults constitute a large part of the board's local memes. Dunno if it is any better or funnier than 4chan.
Even in these harsh environments original content is created somehow, memes spread and lulz are received. But every now and then I am amazed at the lengths a person can go just to be a dick.
>>13
Sounds somewhat like Futaba Channel, apart from deleting CP.
>>14
Being compared to Futaba is the best compliment an imageboard can ever get. ;)
Doesn't Japan have/enforce laws against CP?
Plus the age of consent is really low there (I want to say 12 but I'm not exactly sure and don't care enough to look it up) so some "CP" might be perfectly legal there.
looking at the state of 4chan now, it's a necessity to have mods enforcing rules, to keep the quality of the boards. let's look at the most unmoderated board on all of the imageboards:
4chan's /b/.
current threads as of 2008-5-1 4:20PM
-post ending in x tells me what to do
-I am feeling emo
-europe vs USA
-reposted image asking for "MOAR"
-Personal Army Request
-post ending in xx gets y
in other words, stupid crap that has been done several times before.
moderation is needed (in moderation) if you don't want your board to become a stupid piece of shit.
>>19
If you think /b/ is unmoderated, try posting CP.
On one hand, endlessly recycling the same ten threads makes a board suck, but on the other hand, banning people for posting stupid threads will turn a board into Something Awful.
I think much of the reason /b/ sucks now is not because of the existence or lack of moderation, but rather the fact that it's just way too fast to keep up with. People don't bother looking around to see if something's been posted because it's impossible to do so, and they don't bother coming up with something original because it's less likely to get a response within about two seconds. The latter point is a matter of thread survival: for a thread to live, it needs to have a population. Front-page visibility by someone who is likely to respond increases this population; each post in the thread brings it back to the top of the front page, thus providing another chance to increase the thread's population. The chain goes, roughly, interesting content -> posts -> thread visibility -> greater thread population -> continued participation -> vitality.
The other factor in play is that any site containing x type of content is most likely to appeal to people who have an interest in that type of content. For sites featuring primarily or exclusively user-generated content, this results in a feedback loop because the people interested in this content continue to post the same sort of content, and those not interested in it typically leave. (For the purposes of simplicity I will casually ignore trolling and crapflooding here; however in actuality, these play a fairly important role in defining what sort of content is most readily available.)
Now, as I said earlier, the speed of posting on the board is a large deciding factor in the range and quality of content the board has to offer. Thread discoverability -- that is, the likelihood that someone interested in the thread is going to see it -- plays a crucial role in the existence of "minority" threads, and is inversely proportional to the speed of the board: faster boards decrease discoverability, and exponentially so. All of this adds up to an environment that rewards crap and discourages thought, because the ultimate goal becomes not "post something interesting" but "post something that will get replies".
I could probably derive a mathematical formula for determining how likely a thread is to survive based on this, but I think I've overanalyzed enough for today.
>>19
"Mods enforcing quality" is the straight road to stagnation, most of the funny or amusing threads i've seen were not that funny/amusing from the beginning. And "keeping quality" just restricts the creativeness/randomness of the board, it is what collective blogs with rating system are plaqued with -- people do not express themselves or write on the topics that they are interested in, but try to please the community, which leaves otherwise interesting, but possibly unpopular topics without coverage.
In fact, 4chan's way or futaba way are both legitimate, albeit very different approaches to building of online communities.
>>20
You maybe right. As far as I can understand, Futaba copes with this problem by having several random boards. Maybe this is the way 4chan should take too?
>>21
I've been saying that since 2006.
/r9k/ essentially is another /b/, and in general it's much better quality. I don't know how much to attribute to it being a slower board vs. the duplicate post checking that weeds out a lot of the repetitive crud.
>>22
/r9k/ is one of my favourite boards. Although it does go quite a bit slower then /b/ I find it's good for more thought out threads and interesting replies. There is a lot of stuff on there that doesn't interest me though, mainly political, religion, baww, nigger/race threads ( which seem to come up every day and get 100s of replies). But after all that theres usally something to interest me there.
It seems to be a more discussion based board, where as /b/ seems a lot more media driven, with little discussion taking place.
But I still enjoy /b/ for what it is, even with all the reposts and trolls and all that, it's still one of a kind and theres always something new to look at.
>But I still enjoy /b/ for what it is, even with all the reposts and trolls and all that, it's still one of a kind and theres always something new to look at.
You could say that /b/ is attractive not for the quality, but the quantity of posts. On a good day you're almost guaranteed to find all new threads on the first page with every refresh.
But the thing is, there has to be a fine line between moderation and just not giving a fuck. /b/ moderation is the latter.
I think it would be an interesting experiment if there was a content drive as the board approached 90 million posts. http://www.big-boards.com/
It's totally hilarious that they are STILL not listing 2ch, when it would easily be #1 on the list.