Here is the comment I submitted to the article on Danah Boyd's blog:<p><i>I disagree that 4chan is a community of hackers for one simple reason: to me a hacker is someone who gets things done. 4chan and other sites that focus on memes are attention diverters, full of people who jump from one lol to the next.<p>In contrast a hacker is someone who is willing to focus time and attention on one thing until he excels in it. The 4chan mindset is not a long term, viable one, because the lulz distract from any real good that can be done. Sure you can pick through the porn, rubbish, and hate in 4chan and come up with examples of great things being done, but if you look at real hackers, such as the internet entrepreneurs that are creating web startups at <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com</a> you see many great things being created with little rubbish, not a few great things mixed into volumes of lulz.<p>I don't look to 4chan to create long term internet change. They are great for creating laughs, but the next Facebook, the next Twitter, the next great internet technology will not arise from them. It will arise from true hackers who still hack in the traditional sense, by writing code and coming up with innovative technological ideas.</i>
Social Engineering has a long history in 80s and 90s hacker culture. Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulson utilized some sort of social disruption in nearly all of their hacks, skills cultivated from when they were younger and more abrasive.<p>To further back up the thesis, Kevin Mitnick, grew up as a Ham in the midst of the amateur radio boom. Before the big days of phreaking kids would do the exact 'for the lulz' routine, disrupting and confusing a system full of weaknesses to probe and abuse.
Once you understand 4chan, you don't want to analyze it. I'm convinced that anyone who posts an analysis regarding 4chan does not have enough experience to accurately analyze 4chan.<p>The author makes a couple good points, but I think her writing would be better served by not tying in 4chan as some sort of example.
A quick correction: all articles that I've seen mentioning "4chan" actually mean "/b/."<p>Sure, the board is huge and by far the most famous, but it's not even responsible for the majority of the site traffic. There are dozens of different boards and, with very few exceptions, they are mostly sane.<p>I bet the people who write those articles don't even know about the literature and science boards that are just like any other forum, but without the user names. But I guess that cooking, animals and fitness don't bring enough pageviews to be mentioned.
<i>I would argue that 4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers – those who are bent on hacking the attention economy.</i><p>The very term "attention economy" is a key bit of awareness. There has always been an Attention Economy or Attention Ecosystem. It's central to culture and politics. It's central to media. It's especially important to the web. It's fundamental to human dominance mechanisms and decision making.<p>I think there's more than just marketing here. I think this is more like a cultural movement, with a network of personal relationships, an ideology, and differing levels of involvement.
Oh for goodness' sake <i>move on</i>!<p>I'm struggling to think of <i>any</i> capitalist adventure that won't go against the ire of 4chan. Which is great 'n' all, but one should know one's target audience.<p>Target appropriately and you will succeed. Fix someone's problem, and you'll get money for it. Even 4chan users' money... I hope.
Media is already late to the game. Guaranteed there is already a replacement for 4chan of which we've never heard but is spewing memetic galaxies like a dorky black hole.
I probably biased against 'MS researcher', and phrases like 'I grew up in a community of hackers', but... =)<p>4chan is, in the first place, the strong illusion of a crowd of young, non-serious people. It is totally different from any other community, where mostly mediocre and quite selfish people are trying to show up, praise themselves and impress others (read: facebook), where social exhibitionism and friend-counting flourishes.<p>4chan, with its anonymity, is definitely a time-wasting, the main activity of any young generation. =) And of course, it is also a slot machine, with several positive feedback loops, especially if you're admire and love 'freshness' and youth.<p>btw, its sub-culture and slang are self-evident, not a rocket science. It is just a cyber community of nonconformist youths, along with a bunch of various freaks. You may find something like that in any city's outskirts. =)
I liked the quote on the lower left-hand side of her post the best. Since still relevant to web culture, reprinting here:<p>"Facebook is so endlessly social and inclusive it sometimes reminds me of one of those mega-nightclubs from the late ’80s (Palladium, the Limelight, etc.), only without the music, the alcohol, the drugs, the lights, the sweat, or — it must be said — the people."<p>-- Lucinda Rosenfeld