A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and its Effect on the Web (opens in new tab)

There isn't any kind of long-term karma game like on other sites. 4chan is still content-heavy and shit posts are still looked down upon by the larger community. It may not seem that way, but the stupidest people are often the loudest.

"/pol/ is winning because it's funnier than the people that despise it, it's that simple. Being authoritarian isn't funny. Tumblr, leddit, they're funny like a commercial is funny, they can be clever, they can be witty, but they'll never be gut-laugh, -holy shit- funny, because they never confront anything they're not supposed to, they never color outside the lines. They talk like they're resisting something, but all they do is agree with each other. They slay the sacred cows they've been conditioned to hate, and they ignore the elephants in the room they're conditioned not to see, and they'll always be like that because they're clever, educated pussies.

/pol/ is full of angry racist conspiracy theorists, but it's fucking hilarious. /pol/ might not always tell you the truth, but it will tell you the closest thing to an honest truth it can see, and it will laugh at you for being offended by it. The fact that /pol/ is starting to influence 4chan in general means that the sacred cows we're slaying are actually sacred, and people are laughing in spite of themselves. It's stupid and weird and it's too simplistic and old-fashioned to be true, but you're laughing anyways.

That's how it begins."

I think what a lot of people don't get about /pol/'s influence in the last year is it's mechanism. It is easy to browse the site as an outsider and think it is just shitposting 9000, with no real influence outside. However /pol/ unconsciously and without formal direction has an extremely effective strategy for disseminating information.

Once the essence of some information has been distilled users start disseminating it to the 'normies' via Reddit and Twitter. Twitter is where the real influence comes as they inevitably target journalists in large numbers. As most know, journalists and politicians are extremely engaged in Twitter. Stories frequently then cross the barrier into the mainstream.

Targeting of journalists and politicians, largely but not always via Twitter, is where most of the huge power is derived. People targeted don't necessarily have the internet experience to realise when these things are directed. A lot of what most of them see is a flurry of regular public concern which needs to be addressed.

When a story from /pol/ reaches the mainstream, it goes into a glorious frenzy. It is a powerful feeling when something you have created/discovered and disseminated in a 4chan thread becomes international news because of the boards collective action.

Summarised: when a very large group of people with political leanings on a story/topic informally organise, the effort can take the view mainstream. important to note is the demographic includes a diverse group of users who are highly skilled in programming, social media and politics.

edit: If I was a highly placed politician and wanted to disseminate secret information without attribution, I would run it through the tumbler that is 4chan.

The higher ideal: the philosophical context of freedom through anonymity resulting in great creativity is completely drowned out by the petty stuff.

There's a reason it creates a major portion of culture,memes, and ideas on the internet. It's one of the few places unimpenged by materialism or status or th ability of your boss to find your account. This means every one is simply judged by what ideas they create and I think thats a beautiful thing.

If you are a researcher looking for a 4chan dataset for supervised learning, be aware that labeling the images is not a task for the faint of heart.

When you browse an image board, you will have an implicit image filter: you will probably only open threads that interest you and that have been alive for a while. That does not hold for an image dump of all threads.

For example, Zimbabwe is marked as very active and very hateful. But it's probably just people with a VPN: doing that to get a "controversial" or "funny" country flag is a thing.

The incentives for giving credit to everyone who participated even a bit are quite strong: in most academic disciplines you get more than an eighth of a paper's worth of 'credit' for an eight-author paper.

For example the "-fag" suffix is applied to everything and practically synonymous with "-person". A namefag is someone who uses a username instead of remaining anonymous. A drawfag is someone who creates original art, it has a positive connotation.

Even when discussing unfair monetary things the term kikes (jews) might be thrown around, just due to the historic association of jews with banking. Even users who present left-leaning positions (e.g. on renewable energy, healthcare or defense spending) use those terms because the associated concepts are ingrained in the conversation structure.

I don't know about /pol/, but other boards use "my nigger" or humorous variations thereof as an expression of endorsement

Use of the words might correlate with the sentiment of the user, but the correlation may be weaker than expected.

To change politics, it requires a cultural change. Tumblr is another place on the internet that is a space for cultural change, albeit the opposite kind.

A *chan site has many layers a user must go through to finally fing a decent discussion (or the epic lulz). You have an outdated confusing UI, the sheer amount of useless content, the lingo and the highly offensive content.

After you learn to process and filter all that, you start finding the really good stuff. Or, as I like to say, "Gold floats on shit. You just have to be brave and reach it"

Although maybe the people who don't know about this (thus couldn't have fun) shouldn't have paid for it :\