Comment by colpabar
16 hours ago
This will sound crazy but this is why I still use 4chan. Everyone is anonymous, there is no voting, and the only moderation is to remove illegal things or flagrant rule breaking. It's 99% dogshit (and worse), but if you go into it knowing that, you can find some good stuff sometimes. Not good as in morally good, just sometimes someone will post a link to a video or an article that will actually make me think.
Here, and on reddit, and anywhere with voting or people caring about the number next to their username, it's the most popular opinions at the top and everything else at the bottom or flagged. I genuinely don't understand what people get out of that.
And I guess I should specify that this is also why political topics get flagged. Sure, it probably has a lot to do with people flagging stuff that goes against their beliefs. But I also think that political threads here offer absolutely nothing aside from reaffirming existing beliefs. No one is trying to change anyone's minds, everyone is just yelling at each other. Threads about actual tech stuff can be very interesting and I do learn things from them sometimes. But political threads here are worthless.
edit: I do not mean /pol/, no one should ever go there
> This will sound crazy but this is why I still use 4chan. Everyone is anonymous, there is no voting, and the only moderation is to remove illegal things or flagrant rule breaking.
What you see is a mirage.
The problem with 4chan is that the loudest voices are the ones that have no lives, and can flood the board with their bullshit. You could be having a conversation with someone in one thread, meanwhile they're busy posting about the same damn thing in 3-4 other threads at the same time.
And that's assuming the person on the other end is real. These days, there are bot armies of paid shills or AI to worry about, flooding the zone with their narrative to the point where your voice gets drowned out.
You cannot have a decent social space without some form of active moderation and some protection against sockpuppeting. Not every place with both of those gets it right, but without both you're guaranteed to fail, and 4chan has neither.