It's rather disappointing that the authors didn't talk about the biggest thing that has reshaped discussion in 4chan since years.<p>The reply indicator.<p>For people who don't go to 4chan, you can read it on <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-here-s-your-you" rel="nofollow">http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/you-here-s-your-you</a>. Basically, if someone else replied to your post, the post pointer will show a (You) word, showing that the poster replied to a post that you wrote.<p>Moreover, the post number of posts that replied/quoted you will be attached to your own posts. Much-replied post will have a lot of link to the posts that replied them, and very visible when you skip through the thread.<p>This one simple feature has changed 4chan. Before, posts are similar and anonymous since they don't have visual distinction between each other. You have to actually read their content to know what's inside. The reply indicator make controversial posts very visible and "famous" in the thread.<p>Much like Reddit's voting system and Facebook likes or Twitter's retweets/favorites, 4chan now has its own post rating system. The difference is that Facebook likes and Reddit's vote system rewards popular posts that people agree with and liked. 4chan's "rating system" rewards controversial posts that people rebuke or laugh at.<p>The presence of this reply indicator make people try to post controversial contents, and to be controversial by 4chan standards, your post have to be very, very controversial.
"9. RARE PEPES
In this Section we display some of our rare Pepe collection."<p>Things that you have never thought would appear on a bonafide research paper for 800$.<p>EDIT: 4Chan thread regarding this paper, this is worth the read on it's own.
<a href="http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/92612923/a-longitudinal-measurement-study-of-4chans" rel="nofollow">http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/92612923/a-longitudinal-m...</a>
I've been really surprised how influential /pol/ has been this election, which has been really weird and a little scary. It's not uncommon to post something on 4chan stating that you have inside information on events that are going to happen over the next few days (which is fiction 99.9% of the time). Posts like this in /pol/ have been getting screenshotted and spread elsewhere on the web, where alt-right conspiracy nuts are latching on to them.<p>I've tried explaining to a few people that it's 4chan and you can't take it seriously, but they're convinced that these posts are real.
Can someone explain to me why they keep focussing on 4chan and not 'chans' in general? AFAIK 8chan's /pol/ has had a bigger impact this time around because they censor less. (Not censoring doxx information and such)
If you are a researcher looking for a 4chan dataset spanning a much longer time period and many different boards, I would recommend looking into the archive.moe database dump[0] that was uploaded to the Internet Archive after the owner decided to stop his activities.<p>[0]: <a href="https://archive.org/download/archive-moe-database-201506" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/download/archive-moe-database-201506</a>
This paper was shared on /pol/, here's a link to the (archived) thread if you're interested in reading the responses.<p><a href="http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/92760043/" rel="nofollow">http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/92760043/</a>
These students are funded anyway and decided to add a publication on an area they love.<p>They included their funding bodies because it is required by their funding agreement.
Figure 15 with heat map of hate speech per post puts India, Pakistan, Thailand, Belarus, Zimbabwe, and South Korea as the leaders of the pack. In my limited experience on /pol, this paints a very misleading picture. I hardly ever see people from these countries posting there. (See Figure 4.) They can't just leave the figure as-is, without further explanation.<p>The posters on 4chan (see dogma1138's post) are as surprised as I am that India features at all. To the contrary, India is commonly the target of scatological jokes.<p>Although they acknowledge the use of VPN, they might be downplaying its usage. Without making an effort to disambiguate that (with assistance from 4chan admins) I don't see the point of making charts based on countries. If not disambiguate, discarding posts by Tor and VPN users is easy enough.<p>I can't help but agree with the poster who wrote:<p>>>Although it is a bit absurd, /pol/ has, some<p>>>how, managed to place itself at the center of >world politics.<p>> i can't continue reading this, this is insane.
I don't like to be mean but I honestly don't see /pol/ has a big influence in the election or politics like some commentors have stated. First, most of the action /pol/ does outside of their board is mostly on Twitter and various open polls. I've never seen /pol/ do anything close to real life action. Not a single event or protest IRL. Not even a letter writing campaign. Just posting image macros. It's all in good fun I'm sure, but they're not going to change the opinions of voter blocs with Rare Pepes that's for sure.
Not forgetting 4chan's evil twin brother 8chan:<p><a href="https://8ch.net/pol/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://8ch.net/pol/index.html</a><p>And for more chans, look no further than:<p><a href="https://encyclopediadramatica.se/List_of_chans" rel="nofollow">https://encyclopediadramatica.se/List_of_chans</a><p>Whilst I appreciate 4chan was the original chan that started all the other chans off, people often forget the alternatives. A common complaint of the alternative chans is that 4chan has become too conservative and is too heavily moderated. Does anyone agree?
To be fair, /pol/ is one of the best places to get happening news (Information about terror attacks that would otherwise be censored by mass media, information from the Syria conflict etc)<p>There is a lot of shilling and a lot of trolling... It seems to me that /pol/ posts has become >50% shitposting from trolls and shills and less political discussion.<p>The real influx of users into pol started with the european refugee crisis, not the presidential elections.
If you look at the remnants of the earlier chans (created between 1 and 3 years after 4chan) which never really gained much momentum, you'll see that they had a much different culture at the time. In a way I wish we could return to this idea of the "small chan", as a way of escaping the grinding politics and hate culture that's on some boards (like /pol/) which tends to leak over (jokingly or not) to the other boards.
Handing over ICANN control to the UN was a mistake.<p>I have very little faith that this won't be used to censor free speech in the not-so-distant future.