Poll: Should 4chan be "hunted" down?

[SinisterGehe]

I been wondering lately should 4chan "hunted" down.
Always when I hear something bad about Internet, or what "bad" things are happening in Internet. It seems "almost always" to trace to 4chan. Either the info about the "bad" things or the reason for the "bad" things, or the cause of the "bad" thing is located at 4chan. (There has also been examples of good deeds going around in 4chan.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/104600-Minecraft-Multiplayer-Brought-Down-by-DDoS-Attack
For example. Yes I know the info about the "motive" of the attack (by the attacker, yes no?) was only posted there.
But we have have surplus of examples of people in 4chan starting "Internet terrorism".
And also those god awfull memes origin from there.

I do not 4chan myself, and I know there are "good" things in there. (Depending on your definition on "Good") and thus should not be "hunted" down. But due to my person black and white ideology of negative Utilitarianism. "The virtue of the "thing" is the sum of it' negative side effects."

So what I am asking, are the other people as worried about the balance between the "good" and "the bad" side-effects of 4chan.

Disclaimer:
All opinions marked inside " - " are subjective, to my view of good and bad. And you as a person who reads these opinion should reflect your own on to the, we are not here to discuss about my opinion, I am here to ask you a question.
Typos and grammar errors are because of me not being native to the english language, and there is no need to comment about it. If for some reason. You can not understand the question/point of this topic due to my language skill, please do not post a reply at all.

Thank you.

 

[Space Spoons]

Whether 4chan is ultimately a force of good or evil is really a non-issue, because it can't be stopped either way. Like many elements of the Internet, it's largely composed of anonymous members who could very easily pack up and move elsewhere, if the need arose. If the US government were to become involved, it's possible the website could be taken down, but at this point, the concept of 4chan has spread so far that any number of impersonator and/or replacement sites could spring up over night.

And that's assuming it's even possible for the government to intervene. I've never dug into 4chan's terms of service, but there's likely a clause protecting the proprietors of the site against the more morally questionable acts of the userbase. In the same way YouTube isn't responsible when someone occasionally uploads porn or something, 4chan likely isn't responsible when its users do something crazy.

In short, as long as the Internet remains largely unregulated (and it's in everyone's best interest that it does), sites like 4chan are going to continue to exist, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it.

 

[Squarez]

If you go to the /b/ thread it's not what the rest of the internet makes it out to be (that being a bunch of teenagers sat around scheming what to haxx next) it's generally just a bunch of guys (and the occasional femanon) posting image macros for laughs.

Sometimes you get the people who want to attack shit, but regardless of whether 4chan as a website is taken down, those troublemakers are just gonna congregate elsewhere.

If anything it's more porn and spam than attack threads.

 

[THE M3RCENARY]

You cannot destroy them. They are like cocaroaches. No matter how many times you flush them down the toilet, they always crawl back up again.

 

[Anarchemitis]

"How do you solve a problem like /b/tards?
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
How do you find a word that means 4chan?
A flibbertijibbet! A will-o'-the wisp! A clown!

Many a thing you know you'd like to tell it
Many a thing it ought to understand
But how do you make it stay
And listen to all you say
How do you keep a wave upon the sand?

How do you solve a problem like /b/tards?
How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?"

 

[Fraught]

If for some reason. You can not understand the question/point of this topic due to my language skill, please do not post a reply at all.

Thank you.

Heh, someone thinks a lot about themselves.

Whether 4chan is ultimately a force of good or evil is really a non-issue, because it can't be stopped either way. Like many elements of the Internet, it's largely composed of anonymous members who could very easily pack up and move elsewhere, if the need arose.

And the first reply already gave the best answer there is.

 

[Geekosaurus]

I imagine it's almost impossible to trace members of 4chan. As summed up by this pretty decent quote:

'There is no head to cut off. It's a conglomerate. If one of them betrays the principles of the accrual of money and power, the others betray him. What it is is human weakness. You can't kill that with a gun.'

Cookies for anyone that knows what this is a quote from. Without using Google.

 

[SinisterGehe]

If for some reason. You can not understand the question/point of this topic due to my language skill, please do not post a reply at all.

Thank you.

Heh, someone thinks a lot about themselves.

Nah, I am just sick of being tagged as mindless 10 years old brawling troll because I do grammar mistakes in my sentences. Or getting judged as an idiot or incompetent person without them having any clue what my mother-language is. I usually do respond to them: "You come here and try learning Finnish and our all of our Grammatical cases. Then we will see who's talking."

 

[Thedayrecker]

4chan is racist, sexist, and they enjoy the odd bit of child porn, but can you stay mad at this?

 

[dududf]

If for some reason. You can not understand the question/point of this topic due to my language skill, please do not post a reply at all.

Thank you.

Heh, someone thinks a lot about themselves.

Nah, I am just sick of being tagged as mindless 10 years old brawling troll because I do grammar mistakes in my sentences. Or getting judged as an idiot or incompetent person without them having any clue what my mother-language is. I usually do respond to them: "You come here and try learning Finnish and our all of our Grammatical cases. Then we will see who's talking."

You speak finnish?!

If I remember correctly Finnish has nothing to do with any other languages, no points of references, no shared patterns. The fact your speaking english at all is very impressive.

Anyways, Why take down 4chan as a whole? The rest of 4chan is pretty good, and most of the trouble makers in /b/, and I'm sure they are not the majority.

 

[Mr Montmorency]

If you say 4chan is sexist, racist or homophobic, you've missed the point, and I'm going to call the cyberpolice.

 

[TheRundownRabbit]

NO! Sure 4chan is the asshole of the internet, but the internet needs an asshole goddammit. Plus they bring some good, i mean, their probably the ones who are gonna stop the Justin Bieber crusader kid.......they are our only hope!

 

[Eternal_Lament]

Frankly, I don't think they should be hunted down for 2 reasons.

1) trying to hunt down members of 4chan (or hell, even just rying to one-up them) is a futile effort. It's the people that do that we end up getting cases like Jessi Slaughter (I don't care if she's an 11 year old girl, she started it, she continued it, anything that is said to her is fair game), or even just this week that stupid ericDouglace kid (who truly deserves what he's about to get considering how he's acted and with what he's threatened to do). So you may believe 4chan needs to be brought down, and that's fine, but actually doing so is going to be impossible. Also, even IF you somehow manage to bring 4chan down, the members can just go somewhere else. That's the thing about anon, they are both everywhere and nowhere.

2) they're antics are certainly disturbing, but really at this point it's nothing new. Also, it's important to note that it isn't actually the site 4chan that incures wrath, but rather /b/. Considering how long it's been around to, I guess people have just gotten used to it, because as I said before, brin down 4chan (or in this case /b/) and they'll just move somewhere else, but will we be disgusted? No, surprised maybe depending on where they end up, but not disgusted, we've gotten used to their antics that it doesn't really matter

 

[hawkeye52]

4chan is the symbol of internet freedom so no

 

[Dr. Whiggs]

Yes. They are not funny, they are not the almighty brigade of internet tough guys everyone thinks they are, they are a bunch of insecure, mindless, argle bargle why am I even bothering.

 

[SinisterGehe]

If for some reason. You can not understand the question/point of this topic due to my language skill, please do not post a reply at all.

Thank you.

Heh, someone thinks a lot about themselves.

Nah, I am just sick of being tagged as mindless 10 years old brawling troll because I do grammar mistakes in my sentences. Or getting judged as an idiot or incompetent person without them having any clue what my mother-language is. I usually do respond to them: "You come here and try learning Finnish and our all of our Grammatical cases. Then we will see who's talking."

You speak finnish?!

If I remember correctly Finnish has nothing to do with any other languages, no points of references, no shared patterns. The fact your speaking english at all is very impressive.

Anyways, Why take down 4chan as a whole? The rest of 4chan is pretty good, and most of the trouble makers in /b/, and I'm sure they are not the majority.

Yes, finnish is my mother language and I speak the most tranditional accent of it called "turun murre".
Finnish language got connections to some languages but they are mainly almost dead minority languages, or different accents. And the finnish language was invented in 15ths by Mikael Agricola. And I spoke english before it was taught in school to me (In Finnish schools english is started on 3rd grade, and swedish that is our 2nd languge is started to teach on 7 grade, try making sense out of that)
Majority of finns that have born after 80's understand english extremely well, and almost all (80%) of current generations understand and many of them (35%) speak english fluently. Thanks to our amazingly efficient school system (Finland has always been in top3 of PISA exams). But one crippling flaw that our school system possess (In languages at least) is that, it is taught purely in academic fashion. Example, in my Gymnasium (School) there is only one course of "Everyday english" and "Spoken english" per year and only 28 students can attend to one of the courses and rarely we even get more than 10 in to them.
But finnish is the hardest language next Mandarin-Chinese and Japanese.

And what I mean about hunting down 4chan was mostly the trouble makers. People who share child porn, or other Illegal material in there. The 4chan system and Idea is good (as ideas often are good) but the implementation is flawed (mostly)

 

[procyonlotor]

I do not 4chan myself, and I know there are "good" things in there. (Depending on your definition on "Good") and thus should not be "hunted" down. But due to my person black and white ideology of negative Utilitarianism. "The virtue of the "thing" is the sum of it' negative side effects."

I'm sorry to quote you in your own thread, OP. I just wanted to underline this.

You are pretty much acting the part of the ignorant parent trying to get video games banned because they have never truly endeavored to understand what they were dealing with. From reading your post, your information is almost exclusively hearsay and entirely indirect.

To answer your question, no, I don't believe 4chan should be "hunted down". As a matter of fact I believe it should be protected. It is one of the places where freedom of speech can occur on the most pristine level available. (Mind you, the place is still moderated and is subject to rules.) The fact that people can use it as a platform for many kinds of discussions, or indeed, to plan an attack, virtual or otherwise, is irrelevant. You can do all those things in your own home, on the street, anywhere.

Then there is the matter that 4chan is a popular internet trope. It is to some extent a scapegoat. People love to point fingers, and they will do that against anything they can so long as they have the tiniest bit of justification.

So, please, Escapist, get your head out of your ass.

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

I tend to side on the '4chan needs to be stopped' but I don't really think that exactly. I think the internet vigilantism of 'Anonymous', which often crosses over into real life assaults, needs to be stopped or seriously curtailed.

Take the Gene Simmons website crash, if a bunch of people stormed into a record store in real life and took everything, or stormed into a record company headquarters and smashed everything with baseball bats, we'd condemn them, and the police would hunt them down and arrest them, but suddenly because it's on the internet and it's anonymous we're all cheering for the glorious attack on a filthy capitalist society?

Wake the fuck up, you wouldn't stand for it in real life, so why do people cower in fear when Anonymous are mentioned on the internet? They are bullies, tyrants and dictators who feel obliged to stamp on whatever they don't like out of some hyper-inflated sense of entitlement.