/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

Yes.

Certainly not. They fucked me up.
But my current level of exposure probably isn't detrimental, except through opportunity costs.

Being on an imageboard is essentially playing endless rounds of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fnEWQAYxcRnaYBqaZ/initiation-ceremony.

 >>/5098/
Except a large fraction of your opponents actually thinks it's one-sixth.

I changed so much I wouldn't even be able to communicate with my friends if I didn't present another narrative/persona to them.
It was hard at the beggining but now it's almost natural and it's how I got over my anxiety.
If not for imageboards which practically changed my sexuality I probably would have been married by now with kids and god I do not want that life.
I'm in a shitty place but it's the only road I can take that won't leave me hanging by the noose in a few years.
Getting a fucking small doggo really improved my life quallity.

Overall I think imageboards have a positive influence, the only problem I see is the isolation that comes with it.
Since this thread is about imageboards am I the only one that wishes 4chan would die ? I want to see it replaced by something better. Some boards have really stagnated.

 >>/5101/
> which practically changed my sexuality 
In which direction?

> did this thing that changes your utility function affect you positively?
Tough question. I think it did. Thanks to imageboards I learned to express myself honestly and without embarrassment when I choose to. This is not a skill that I had naturally. I used to censor myself and rely on a public persona too much. It was a big part of how I learned to recognize when I was acting against my values out of peer pressure. I think imageboards do help you with the things anons most often say they do: developing a thicker skin, honing your sense of humor, learning to ignore idiots.

On the other hand, imageboards are a massive time sink. They have diminishing returns on hours invested, but not until you reach several hours per day. The mainstream ones move too quickly to check and reply to every so often. Like most Internet communities, they deteriorate over time and 4chan is pretty far gone now. Imageboards are also bad at some topics. You seldom see the equivalent of a 300 title otaku on /sci/ or /g/. I guess high-level people with those interests don't have the time for it and would rather attach their knowledge to their brand for career's sake.

 >>/5101/
> I the only one that wishes 4chan would die ?
No. People talk about it on 4chan itself and places like >>>/irc/ here. If 4chan died, it would create an oldfag diaspora while dispersing the perma-newfags. I predict I will reduce my use of 4chan by at least 80% within two years. I am looking for good replacements to give part of that time to.

 >>/5102/
gayer

 >>/5094/
It hasn't had any effect.

Imageboards have had a pretty large effect on my life.

I've met the majority of my partners through imageboards, ended up falling into the ratsphere because of people I met on imageboards, I mean I could make a very extensive list of all the positive things that imageboards have exposed me to.

At the same time I've also spent a huge amount of my youth being exposed and desensitized to racism, extreme pornography, bigotry, all kinds of conspiracy theories, various time-wasting addictions, self-reinforcing negative feedback loops and poisonous ideaologies. I'd like to say that I came out of all this fairly well adjusted, but what the fuck does a well adjusted person look like in [current year] anyway?

Overall I feel like it's been positive, but I hear from enough people that they've found imageboards horrifying and useless that I consider my experience maybe not representative. I have no issue glossing over posts that don't interest me or seem obnoxious. I guess not everyone can do that effortlessly.

 >>/5123/
how the fuck do you meet partners on imageboards if you're not a britbong or a burger ?

 >>/5128/
I'm a burger, so I can't tell you. It's still a pain in the ass flying around the country meeting people though. Clapistan is a big place.

 >>/5128/
I've seen threads for inhabitants of my smallish western European country on political boards and on /cuteboys/. I don't really visit those boards though.

Let's have a /ratanon/ meetup in a few years.

What 8chan boards to you like? Recommending a small board in public can hurt it, but I think /ratanon/ is small enough and has a high enough quality of anons for the impact to be positive.

I've started to fantasise about nuclear annihilation.
Every night I dream of mushroom clouds blooming on the horizon, the blush of radiant heat lighting them like paper lanterns, like torchlight through the thin web of skin between thumb and forefinger. I want to taste cobalt ash on my tongue. The blastwave splits the world in two and cracks open my skull like a crystal eggshell. The noise is total, absolute, every part of me lost to a mountainside of white static. The breath of God. Shock grips my taut flesh like orgasm and I'm gone, transcendant, a spray of clean carbon in the gale.

 >>/5237/
>>>/randamu/

 >>/5237/
Not 8ch, but I like /zzz/.

Do you think imageboard posters, especially underage b&s, absorb and internalize bad thinking habits like jumping to conclusions and strawmanning? Are imageboards perhaps closer to how insane they seem than one would generously assume?

 >>/5630/
If anything, channer teens seem smarter and tougher at arguing to me.

 >>/5648/
Bad thinking habits don't necessarily make you worse at arguing.

In this post I will argue that "imageboard culture" is latent in the technology, such that a new chan populated entirely by imageboard virgins would quickly resemble 4chan.

"Anonymity" is the trivial feature that everyone brings up, but I think even more relevant is the lack of quantitative feedback on posts, except for (You)s. Most sites have explicitly positive feedback options and sometimes negative ones. Thus, the primal instinct to "make number go up" can be satisfied through like or upvote optimization. And a downvote optimizer has a rough time since their posts are likely to be algorithmically obscured. The infamous Reddit circlejerk culture appears. But on imageboards, all optimizers are (You) optimizers. And the ordering of comments never changes, so the sentiment of the (You)s is irrelevant.

A "fit" channer is one who can acquire the most (You)s with the least effort: easy dopamine encourages these posters to stick around. I'd argue that the most cost-effective way to gather (You)s is to identify new threads with high potential for replies, and leave an irresistible bait as one of the first replies. (The last replies are ephemeral, but anyone who opens the thread will always see your bait.) This strategy is now explicitly recognized in the form of the "second post best post" meme. To be able to utilize this strategy, you need to be quick-witted and you need a honed meta-contrarian mindset. A good bait is funny and appears to be sincere opposition to the OP or to the predicted views of later repliers. Posters with these traits are selected for, by their own biological reward system interfacing with (You) count, and the infamous "smart people pretending to be idiots while defiling sacred values" culture emerges.

There are other strategies for (You) optimization, such as GETs. GETs are unique to imageboards and therefore create another unique aspect of imageboard culture.

Another strategy is creating good content like funny memes or effortposts. But this strategy works even better on modern dopamine-efficient social networks like Twitter, which additionally tend to give popular content more exposure for a snowball effect. 4chan has no comparative advantage here, so it's no longer the meme center of the Internet, as much as it likes to pretend otherwise.

If you liked this post, don't forget to (You) and subscribe.

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 >>/5659/
That's a long post but check on these dubs

 >>/5659/
Now that the dust has settled, when did you outgrow this post?

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 >>/5661/
Pic related really makes you want to do something more productive with your life.

 >>/5662/
Based and redpilled

 >>/5659/
The (You) theory is a recurring one and has merit, and this is the most in-depth articulation of it I've read. Have a (You).

Could a message board thrive without 
encouraging either reply-optimized bait or vote-optimized circlejerking? There would have to be some other kind of incentive for the posters. Retweets are one, but they are incompatible with anonymity and require users to have their own feeds.
> it's no longer the meme center of the Internet
Is this true? The most successful memes (like the recent NPC meme) still seem to originate on 4chan. Social networks make replication too easy, which weakens selection.

 >>/5665/
My political web consumption doesn't intersect with my imageboard web consumption. I have barely seen the NPC meme outside the context of controversy about it.
4chan is the meme center of the imageboard-using internet, probably, but not of the internet at large I would guess.

 >>/5666/
Normie, incel, cuck, redpilled (and/or based), soy, brainlet, chad/stacy, boomer/doomer/zoomer, 56%, amerimutt. All terms popularised or birthed on 4chan and now in semi-regular use on Discord channels and subreddits the world over.

More tenuously, one could draw a connection between the archaic -chan tfw  (from the english "that feel when" and the world-conquering normiefied when… (you drop your phone on your face, when your side-piece starts acting uppity, when your professor leaves the cursor in the middle of the screen et al.)

 >>/5659/
Actually based. I've had similar ideas about boilerplate thread titles (such as those found in  >>/5662/)
originating due to selection pressures, but your more general thesis resonated with me. 

A thought: trite, (you)-provoking titles only seem to exist in fast boards - /a/, /tv/ and /v/ especially. Only in these hotbeds of activity is the selective pressure great enough for these memes to form. Think hydrothermal vents, or stagnant pools seething with amino acids and boiling in unfiltered sunlight.

And for any lurkers reading this who find the idea of a noticeablr dopamine hit from (You)s unbelievable: it's real. The desire for acknowledgement, validation, recognition - all powerful motivators, especially to those starving for attention. Knowing that someone cares about what you think - that it hurt them, helped them, made them think or laugh or masturbate or rage - is a rush, even filtered through anomymity and a million miles of fibre optic.

 >>/5666/
The NPC meme has already passed its peak popularity, but it was pretty big on some blue boards.

 >>/5668/
> it's real
It is.

 >>/5660/
Checked

 >>/5668/
Yeah, I was thinking about fast vs slow boards a little. For example, why was I writing an effortpost when part of its thesis is "effortposts are a weak strategy"? One answer is that I'm an adaptation executer and not a fitness maximizer, but I can also tell you I wouldn't have bothered if I didn't expect this thread to be near the top of the catalog for weeks: impossible on a fast board.

I also kind of ignored thread-opening strategy. For me it's high effort with uncertain reward, but as you and other anons have identified there are plenty of efficient openers. I think that fits with my general hypothesis.

(You)-efficiency = (You)s/effort
(You)-efficient posting strategy -> becomes part of imageboard culture
Not (You)-efficient -> doesn't
(You)-efficient, but also like/upvote/retweet efficient -> disappearing from imageboard culture in 2018

 >>/5673/
Oh, I also hand-waved anonymity earlier, but I think it fits neatly into the (You)-efficiency model if we replace "effort" with the more general "cost". Some strategies have a real-life social cost without anonymity, and some even have a within-the-community cost under pseudonymity.

Why is /a/ so shit?

 >>/5684/
normies, ree.