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I want to talk about the breaking up of our online communities. Over the years we've observed many communities disintegrate. The story is familiar at this point. It starts small and tight-knit. Centered around high quality content, civil discussion, DIY ethic, an activist mindset, and accepting different modes of thought. Gradually over time, though, the community grows and starts to attract a new type of member. Trollish, close-minded, often racist/misogynist/anti-semitic, infatuated with soykaf-posting and surface aesthetics instead of substantive thought. One hypothesis might be that when communities start out, they are self-selected and therefore defined by a common set of values and mutual respect. The more they grow, the less self-selection occurs and the dynamic becomes more dominated by populist values and groupthink. In other words, as the size of a community grows, the more it comes to resemble the population at large. I don't believe this is actually the case. While I believe intolerance and small-mindedness are widespread, I don't believe if you took a random sample of the population you would see represented the kind of reactionary, conspiracy-theoretic politics espoused by the community members I refer to. Rather, I believe it is an intentional disinformation campaign, designed to break up select communities that would otherwise be capable of organizing a resistance against centralized power. We saw this when 4chan and Anonymous were infiltrated by Stormfront and /pol/ became a breeding ground for disinformation. We saw this with the degradation in quality of 8chan and Lainchan. Our community is increasingly fractured and spread across multiple imageboards, effectively preventing the organization and scaling up of our creative projects. We need to reverse the tides. The first step is recognizing when a legitimate conversation or project is being disrupted by disinformation. Don't feed the trolls, ignore incendiary comments of no content. Reject all arguments founded purely on grounds of race, sex, religion, or identity politics. The only comments that deserve the reward of acknowledgement are those based on fact, backed up by data, and that contribute constructively to some creative endeavor. Let's stop bickering about ideology and start organizing. Let's produce work that helps to disrupt and dismantle all forms of centralized power. I know these words have been said in different forms by different people in the past. I don't make a claim to originality, only to the desire to continue discussing and organizing and fighting back against the ugliness that has made the web a shadow of what it once was.

>Reject all arguments founded purely on grounds of race, sex, religion, or identity politics. >Let's produce work that helps to disrupt and dismantle all forms of centralized power. You're probably going to find it difficult to reconcile these two things since there are large subgroups that see everything as a race or sex issue and want to dismantle things into a state that prioritizes their particular group over others, legitimately thinking that the subjugation of sexes or races they perceive to be 'problematic' as dismantling centralized power.

>>3717 Love your post. Though I must mention that there was some research on group IQ. As far as I remember it is said that group IQ usually peaks at around 15 members. At around 30 members group IQ is back to the level of an individual member and at 100 members emotional thinking starts taking precedence. Basically if you have two people of: 100IQ + 100IQ=/=200IQ 100IQ + 100IQ~= 130IQ And if you add more: 100IQ + 100IQ~= 130IQ + 100IQ= 140IQ+ 100IQ= 145IQ...etc... This largely happens because of imperfections in how we communicate. I might remember it all wrong though.

>Rather, I believe it is an intentional disinformation campaign, designed to break up select communities that would otherwise be capable of organizing a resistance against centralized power. I doubt it's intentional (though frankly I wouldn't be surprised, I imagine we're all aware of forum sliding). It's just the way communities work (in meatspace as well). There's that quote that goes something like a group of people pretending to be idiots attracts idiots something something. In a more general form, a group of people trying to be or do something will attract people who will eventually corrupt it. I don't see what it's possible to do to stop it.

Isn't this level of organization impossible for an anonymous community? You'd need accountability for the members of that group if you want to keep people from trolling or being trolled. What would stop someone from coming here to wage slave for example? The nature of anonymity has it's downsides, this is one of them and i think it's inevitable. You cannot enforce post quality, specially as the place grows. I had some ideas about how to make an anonymous, self sufficient community and i came up with an anonymous forum (with registration) and a hidden system of bans and deletion controlled by the community (and i plan to create this forum engine one day, if only for the fun of it). But even this system could be broken with enough people and effort. Having anonymous posts but requiring an account adds a new layer of accountability but it's still a community effort, and these disinformation campaigns really hurt any community. /q/ last week was filled with .jp posters and posts, it's impossible to deal with that, it requires a lot more effort to refute a stupid post than to post a stupid post (for example: https://lainchan.org/q/res/1866.html#3703 ), and when most posts are stupid it's really difficult to inspire people to post high quality content. I understand your idea but i don't really agree that it's a conscious effort of disinformation. You have to remember that anyone can use the internet, there's a lot of really young people who think trolling is fun, making people genuinely upset is fun, that are genuinely racists and misogynists, who genuinely think george soros is some kind of antichrist ready and willing to take over the planet, there's even a trend of people who believe in flat earth. These people are sadly everywhere and it's inevitable to attract them as a community grows. Even in programming communities you can find these stereotypes. An example of a self-regulated community was Evilzone (rest in piece). The member quality was enforced by soykafting on the heads of new members until they knew what was expected of them. Could you make a post asking about how to hack your school's computer? Sure, but you would get 10 answers telling you to go fuarrrk yourself, your family, your children and your children's children, it worked for that specific scenario and community, there were other problems like ego from old members upon new members and some elitism, but this "young, dumb user" mentality was completely eliminated by simply having enough wise members available to soykaf on the heads of these young, dumb users. It's a solution that has to come from the community naturally, though. Here on lainchan we have the mentality of accepting new members with open arms, which is sometimes used against us. But it cannot be helped, every community has it's downsides and weaknesses and this is ours.

>>3721 >Here on lainchan we have the mentality of accepting new members with open arms Members of what? You are not a community, not even close.

>>3722 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/community

>>3721 I lurk some of the places this stuff is launched from. It is absolutely deliberate and more than that they count on people assuming it's just trolling. Any decently sized or effective activist group is getting hit at this point along with their assorted hangouts.

>>3724 I curious about what some of these are, do you have links, or names of the forums?

I saw OP's pic and could only think of the irony. >We know our disinformation program is complete when everything the american public believes is false With all the made-up quotes on the internet, this phrase alone may just be disinfo, oh the irony. I ran a quick search to see if the source was verifiable and I found a Quora thread where someone claims to be the source of that quote... and for some reason everyone believes it. This is all just hilarious. Back on topic, I don't really think it's a directed effort in the sense that OP is thinking. My theory is this: It starts with 4shat, where a bunch of misfit, impressionable kids (at this time 4chan was already getting the flood of 12~13 year olds thanks to: Fox news, maymays, and Amongalouse h6x0rz), and a particular group sees the potential of this group. Many people fail to see how propaganda makes such a big impact on their lives and perception of the world, as well as of others'. It's literally everywhere, master propagandists are able to manipulate masses into a particular direction, and big communities necessarily attract such people. 4shat is especially apt for this because of image macros. So it started as a joke, I'm guessing most of us were there, but was it as inoccuous as we thought, ever since the beginning? Some of the key points are those catchy and concise phrases which are initially just funny as: Hitler Did Nothing Wrong. I can't remember just this moment what are the other clues (similar memetic techniques) that show that it was probably a propagandistic effort. The charts and all the wealth of conservative/right-wing/whatever resources to back up the ideas supported, combined with the general lack of anything to counter-weight all this, all constantly fed to internet addicted socially disadapted pubescents and other impressionable young adults lacking an identity... well, you know the result. The point is that I believe it was all the work of a propagandistic effort by a tight yet organized group of conservatives who saw a golden opportunity (even more so since you could actually see the leverage that these kids have had in their number for influencing real-world events). In the end these people had an agenda, and at the current point of this spiral we had this demographic which further provided which free propaganda which helped to get Trump elected. I thing that the whole Trump thing is more of a consequence than the endgame, what I am trying to say is that these people wanted to spread their ideas. Now, I don't have anything against conservatives even though I don't agree with them, but I guess we can all agree that a vast majority of the people at 4soykaf which flood out into smaller communities are fuarrrking braindead who just post soykafty provocative phrases just for the brief adrenaline rush of getting some response to their rock-bottom hanging fruit of a comment. This just represents the fact that the modern internet communities provide a nice platform for the hordes of these people who have this toddler mental maturity or motherfucking something that leads them to actually spend their time calling "cuc|<s" just for kicks.

>>3717 >conspiracy theories >no facts >anti-semitic >OY VEYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

i think part of the solution, if there is one, is to embrace the decline and fall of single communities, and accept that after a community grows to a certain size, it's time to leave and start over

>>3717 >Rather, I believe it is an intentional disinformation campaign, designed to break up select communities that would otherwise be capable of organizing a resistance against centralized power. Are you saying the founders of lainchan.jp are in on some global conspiracy against lainchan.org?

>>4268 > think part of the solution, if there is one, is to embrace the decline and fall of single communities, and accept that after a community grows to a certain size, it's time to leave and start over You go first then.

>>4248 I bet they made you post that graphic here, so now you're on their list too, better flee to north korea before they'll get you.

>>3717 >We saw this when 4chan and Anonymous were infiltrated by Stormfront /b/ raided Stormfront. You have this entirely backwards. This is what happens when you tell everyone about your super secret club.

>>4272 or maybe they saw Lainchan gaining poor posts and went off to start again? Over time I do see more TOR is crap, don't use VPNs etc etc type posts as well as a less anarchic stand - with a more definite move to the right... Maybe its just the users changed or maybe layers of soykaf are spread over places of potential freedom? I dunno - but for sure this stuff goes on massively on the net - the name of the game is to control the narrative.

>>3717 >The story is familiar at this point It is, but it's a story older than history. IRL communities tend to split at about 150-200 people but the internet plays havoc with our usual social behaviour and anonymity even more so. I don't think anyone really knows how it'll work out quite yet. >In other words, as the size of a community grows, the more it comes to resemble the population at large. You don't need anything other than statistics to explain this. As sample size increases variance tends to decrease. >I believe it is an intentional disinformation campaign, designed to break up select communities that would otherwise be capable of organizing a resistance against centralized power. There are definitely disinfo campaigns going on and big ones too but, judging by their leaked training presentations, they usually don't focus on breaking up communities so much as controlling conversation and keeping people distracted from things that matter. They will invest fairly heavily and build identities and angle for mod positions and so on. >We saw this with the degradation in quality of 8chan and Lainchan. Nah, it doesn't make sense. 4chan sure, 8chan maybe, but lainchan is tiny. They don't have infinite resources and there are far bigger fish out there. More importantly we aren't up to anything. We'll discuss politics and stuff but there isn't any activity they'd be interested in and that's as it should be (take it away from the boards somewhere please). I'd rather they weren't here. >The first step is recognizing when a legitimate conversation or project is being disrupted by disinformation This isn't so easy. If it were they'd just be bad at their jobs. Generally it's best to just assume people are being honest, especially in anonymity. That's not to say you have to start feeding trolls but the places paid operatives go are those that are the most active and so your odds of interacting with them randomly are very slim. Most of the people you've seen were just being themselves. >I know these words have been said in different forms by different people in the past. A thousand times, but if it's ever going to be a reality you or me or someone is going to have to say them many thousands of times more. We genuinely aren't ideologically homogeneous on any sort of scale and while some of that is deliberate work it's mostly just people being people. I agree with the main brunt of what you've said. Most agree that the massive wealth and power gaps are a problem but we are nowhere near decided on what to do about it and maybe we never really will be. In light of that I think technological solutions, like TOR, are a good way to go. You don't need to unite the world or even a large portion of it. You can just get a few people who you can agree with and make a small difference. >>3721 >Isn't this level of organization impossible for an anonymous community? Not totally, though mostly because we can just start using a trip or go on IRC or whatever. >What would stop someone from coming here to wage slave for example? Nothing but that's true of anywhere. If you're doing something they're interested in they will go to the trouble of getting an invite and building a reputation or whatever. You have to accept that they may be there and get stuff done despite them. Especially in anonymity this means avoid wage slave hunts. Statistically it's very unlikely the majority are on target and they're rarely conclusive and what are you gonna actually do about it anyway? Ban them so they have to spend 2 seconds getting a new IP? Better to just deal with them at face value or ignore them. >lot more effort to refute a stupid post than to post a stupid post Yep, though for the most part we can just plain afford to do it and it does help. On that note... >>4248 Jesus spoke out against usury (i.e. loaning money at interest) and it was heavily frowned upon by Christians in Europe. Jews filled the gap and so now generations down the line there are a lot of rich Jewish families. It's not a conspiracy or even a secret and they aren't out to get you. >>3724 That depends on what stuff you mean. I doubt you're lurking the JTRIG meeting rooms. People on all sides do wage slave but that's somewhat genuine. They're doing it because they believe in it. That's not to say there won't be people among them who're real wage slaves. Activism of any sort is something they're interested in. >>4336 >with a more definite move to the right Nah. Anonymity plays havoc with biases. It's really difficult to evaluate numbers accurately. People tend to project their opinions onto anons who were talking about something else and assume that their opposition is smaller than they really are. I'd genuinely rather just count posts (skipping ones where they make it obvious it's them again) than try to guess myself. At the least I can assure you these people have always been here. There are mods on the right who've been there for years. Not the same people obnoxiously brewing soykaf of course but you can't let them get to you.

Maybe this site is just くそ

>>4305 And the moment m00t declawed /b/ StormFront really started to take over.