4chan is like the social equivalent of fuzz testing. If you want to see how your app holds up against weird unexpected input, you feed it /dev/urandom. If you want to see how it holds up against weird unexpected people, you feed it /b/.
Nothing against... no wait, I do have something against all of 4chan. It's f'ing pointless at best.
So why is this 4chan rulez time.com thing so often so high on HN?
Within hours today there's several stories about it and that's in addition to all the stories we had here when it started. We're as bad about his as the mass media is about swine flu.
Please, if you're one of the people submitting and/or voting this up, tell me what makes you so interested in 4chan and their Colbert style mockery of online polling?
Yes...
I think it's a statement about Time's approach to IT:
Willing to use data from online surveys it develops, but not to keep results up to date.
Maybe not funding/mandating IT to use sufficient resources to prevent result-spamming.
I don't think people are upvoting for the sake of 4chan rather they are upvoting for the subject, that a news or current issue magazine is so proud that they won't admit that the results are not real.
It's certainly rare among /b/tards. On most of 4chan, /b/ is considered a bit like a cesspit of potty humor and dumb discussion.
You'll find a lot more hackers (certainly more than 0.001%) on /jp/ (which has many game translators, ressource hackers and even visual novel programmers) and the textboard /prog/, among others. And I'm talking about hackers in the HN meaning of the word, not activists or website defacers.
Insiders of 4chan and/or the other social-engineering prankster groups will either be the Yippies of their time (flashy but ultimately irrelevant) or they will become a new "in" network that will leverage their ability to manipulate media to turn financial and political resources to their advantage, co-opting societal resources and, based on their ideology, further eviscerating our society's ability to maintain itself in the process.
It's not that they would be the only ones. They would be just the latest in a long series of societal exploiters. The Internet has merely provided them a virtual gathering place where the minions of chaos can organize just enough to propagate their ideology, but not enough to provide a useful target.
In other words, I wonder if they going to become a new establishment, or are they merely going to parasitize it?
I wonder if they going to become a new establishment
What? 4chan? No way. Some guys were bored, the poll wasn't really hard to hack, so they had some fun patching some tools together and playing with it. What they did doesn't require any kind of social influence or networking... it's just a bunch of bored people on an IRC channel somewhere. Most of which can't program.
4chan has no ideology, or if you prefer, thousands of conflicting ideologies. The visual novel fans (/jp/) despise most anime fans (/a/), the anime fans have no respect for the fitness and fashion fans (/fit/,/fa/), etc. /b/ is bigger but still a huge mess.
I'd be more inclined to call Time pointless than 4chan, and I think the poll supports that. Like it or not, 4chan has a strong influence on pop culture.
That said, I'm flagging this story for lack of intellectual content. IMO this is the kind of story that should be on reddit.
> So why is this 4chan rulez time.com thing so often so high on HN?
Really? I presume it has something to do with the 4Chan guys breaking the poll beyond all recognition. It's a very interesting little story that makes anti-establishment people like me smile.
For me this is a sad milestone. Internet polls were always suspect, but 4chan so easily hijacking a prominent poll makes any future argument based on an opinion gathered on the internet easily dismissed.
You: "Just as I suspected the poll from our website reinforces that we need to go in a different direction."
Boss: "Pfft. Remember moot winning that Time poll."
So people on the internet can manipulate a poll that was taken on the internet. Is this a big shock? No. Still makes me smile at the thought of it happening, even if 4chan and time are both hardly "the little guys" in any sense of the phrase.
