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Comment by mishmash

15 years ago

Nice, and now the HN home page is likely three clicks away from child pornography.

Wow 14 downvotes and counting (it's already greyed out, but thx guys! ;) for making an inconvenient but almost certainly true statement.

So here's the thing: the chan culture in general can be refreshingly great and diverse in many ways. It has cool, talented, and funny people, including fellow HN members (check out the society meta-boards sometime). I've been there for years, and am even friends with someone who admins a relatively popular subchan.

This is not some ignorant hate-based butthurt religious rant here - and I will gladly eat the signed integers to prove it... my problem with this submission is that part of the chan-sub-culture that 4chan represents and helped popularize, the part that resides at 4chan.org is a culture of desensitivity and inaction with regards to the posting of child porn. It's continually posted and often stays up for hours. It's been this way for years. I go back every once in a while hoping it's changed, but as of last week, it hasn't.

We can argue all day about about moot's level of involvement (maybe pg has a comment regarding founders setting the expectations and social norms of a community?), moderation strategy, it's associated seemingly "positive" effects on society at large (memes, hacktivism, etc.), but those are not the issue. The issue is that by posting this to HN, we are both indirectly via the network effect, and directly via advertising revenue, supporting a community with less than ideal standards relating to the sharing of pictures of sexually abused children. And yes, ad-free text boards count too due to spillover.

Next time just post the story/example or something in a Tell thread, and have the discussion here.

my 0.02$

also, here's an archive img of the linked discussion for those still at work:

http://i.imgur.com/LdgLc.jpg

  • I upvoted your original post because it is a good point (4chan is dodgy ... or so I hear...).

    I downvoted your whinge about getting downvoted for the following reasons:

    (1) meta discussions must die

    (2) pretending that upvotes/karma matter is just deluding yourself. Go watch the Southpark episode about internet dollars until you get it

    • The second comment was 300 words long with about 20 of them used for the setup and mention of karma. It was an attempt to explain the first, which is something I care about, and should be obvious considering it was so clearly not going to be popular with HNchan. So that doesn't seem like a meta discussion to me - although your comment and this reply most definitely are now.

      Both mentions were probably more part social commentary than complaint. I mean it was already completely grey, and isn't the whole point of fading out comments so that other people aren't bothered by them? If so then fading out does not work because that comment was downvoted 20+ times. So after the first -4, we had 16 other people highlight the comment, read it, and downvote it. That's a broken system.

      And notice I derisively referred to it as a signed integer - that was deliberate because in the great wide universe that is my life, an integer stored in database somewhere is something I care eternally less about than the content of my comments and the realization I hoped to spur...

  • You could of at least used gif, that image is barely readable (at least to me)

    • Those source cap was a PNG, however imgur scales and compresses large images to 1MB JPEGs.

      From http://imgur.com/faq

      Is there a maximum file size I can upload?

      The maximum non-animated file size you can upload is 10MB. However, if the image is over 1MB then it will automatically be compressed or resized to 1MB, for better viewing on the net. The maximum animated file size (both GIF and PNG) is 2MB.

      edit: formatting

      2 replies →

  • 4chan is a massive massive message forum akin to a common carrier or Google Groups. You are suggesting censoring one of the most active and interesting websites on the internet. Should we avoid linking to Craigslist because human trafficking takes place on it? Or ebay because piracy takes place on it? Or usenet because - well - pretty much everything happens on it? Or Google, or maybe just the internet as a whole?

    The link is on HN because of the interesting thread and has nothing to do with what you are talking about.

    • You didn't address the central point of my comment or offer any reasons as to why the proposed solution would not work.

      And it's interesting you asked if we should censor Craigslist, Ebay, and Usenet because NONE of those sites/networks receive any meaningful traffic here.

      It would even be easy to imagine ebay and craigslist being blacklisted.

      4 replies →