I’m glad it’s dead.

I love the idea of imageboards. I love “anonymous” posting as a default. I love ephemeral threads.

I thought generals were pretty good. Board culture was real. People would make nontrivial 4chan optimized original content for what I assume was love of art.

There was something special about 4chan that I don’t think exists in forums, lemmy, tumblr, tiktok, or the other forms of social media we have now.

But the place was a shithole.

Split as it was by boards and threads, I could insulate myself from it to some extent but the culture on 4chan was getting worse year by year. The famous boards attracted the MAGA crowd and population had a large effect on what threads lived and died. I had so many threads hidden and yet I would still get a wave of revulsion looking at the catalog on my favorite board.

There are other imageboards. There are open source imageboard projects. Without 4chan’s shadow, I hope that imageboards and imageboard culture develop in different directions.

I’m not touching the first one

I see Big Pet has gotten to you 😔

There’s a danger of power accumulating in any system. But there are mitigations. The greatest threat to this fantasy system are barriers to entry. If everyone has their needs met, then there can be a minimum wage of 0. With the minimum wage at 0, I think barriers to entry will drop dramatically and it’ll be that much harder to protect “your” market share.

If we get rid of “intellectual property”, barriers to entry drop even further. Switching costs can be minimized by open standards. But then we run into the harder questions of the physical barriers to entry (rent, commodities, factories) and regulatory barriers to entry.

With a reasonably low barrier of entry, I hope that there will be enough centers of power that are intrinsically opposed to one another so that they cannot combine and oppress us all.

And for any government, what’s to stop them from oppressing us instead? The people always will have some mechanisms of control but every system will have its own difficulties and weaknesses. And the relationship isn’t just companies becoming governments, but there are also governments becoming companies. In fact, I’d argue it is more common for governments to become companies than vice versa. Cuba’s GAESA is in hotels, while Myanmar’s Junta and the IRGC are pretty well diversified.

One for the world:

I think dog / cat ownership makes you a bad person. There are huge energy and material costs to supporting those animals.

Cats when allowed outside will decimate ecosystems and are literal invasive species. As for dogs, I can’t help but feel that they’ve have been weaponized into a deniable tool for harassing other people.

One for Lemmy:

I think capitalism can be good. I think in an ideal world where everyone’s needs are met, there will still be a market and people getting ludicrously wealthy. And I think in that ideal world those ludicrously wealthy people can translate that wealth into political power.

This seems insane for those of us trapped in this present, but I think it is good for there to be a mechanism where understanding some reality that is tied to physical phenomena gives people power.

I think large organizations can get by for a very long time inculcating in their members strange philosophies. If the only path to power is by acquiescing to your superiors and parroting dogma, I think that would be bad.

Of course, conditions in the real world look nothing like those in that ideal world.