4chan has a handful of safe-for-work discussion forums that are pretty good. 4chan is not just (in)famous because of its raucous not-safe-for-work boards like /b/, but its imageboard format generally works pretty well for discussion, and the sheer volume of posts means it’s always an interesting firehose to sit by. Back in 2008 - 2010, I was on 4chan all the time, enjoying the breadth of discussion, irreverence, and volume that I now find on twitter. I liked a handful of sfw boards:
/mu/ for music
/tv/ for tv and film
/lit/ for books
/sci/ for science & math
/v/ for video games
But eventually I grew out of them: I got too busy to argue about nothing with strangers on the internet, had more real-life friends to discuss this stuff with, and found Reddit, Hacker News, etc. as other places for discussion.
But I would still go back to my old haunts on 4chan every now and again. And I noticed a curious pattern: some of these boards would advance with the times, being very much about contemporary discourse: /mu/, /tv/, and /v/ would all have a recency bias, as you might expect: when it comes to popular entertainment, people want to discuss what’s new! Whether it’s the new big show or the newest video game, folks are sharing opinions and trying to figure out whether it’s good or not.
But when it came to /lit/, the discourse never changed. Maybe that’s unsurprising, the study of literature is generally much more about the old than the new. But it’s not even that the topics stayed the same — so did the questions. I remember when /lit/ opened in early 2010, and immediately getting into all these deep debates about David Foster Wallace, Dostoevsky, Finnegans Wake, and all the other classic memes of literature — and years later, people are having the exact same debates. I mean that literally. This was a thread on the front page on February 6, 2023:
I have seen the exact same discussion question, possibly verbatim, countless times in 2010 alone. And it elicits the same responses today as it did back then. The people have turned over. The posters of 2010 are long gone, replaced by a new generation. But they post the exact same bullshit as back in the day. The discourse never advanced.
If you turn a critical eye, you might say that the discourse never really advanced in the other boards, either. Ranking threads of the top 100 albums or games or films or whatever, forever arguing over what’s best, changing the community’s position one atom at a time. Threads about why your favorite thing actually sucks. This stuff is boring. It’s structurally all the same, if not literally all the same, and I’m not getting anything out of seeing the same argument rehashed for the thousandth time.
This brings me to Twitter. I’m soon coming up on three years on Twitter. Christ, what a boring place. I say that, spending many hours a week on Twitter, and being immensely entertained. I don’t mean that the content is dull or uninteresting. There’s tons of great content on Twitter, and it’s very captivating. But it’s structurally boring, dull on some meta-level of abstraction, because my buttons are always being pushed in the same, intentional way: here’s a thread of outrage bait about your least favorite outgroup doing something terrible. Here’s a tweet about your favorite thing being very problematic. Here’s the latest instance of the culture war. Here’s a dumb thing that someone said to bait engagement and quote-tweet dunks. Here’s a thread about how hard people in their 20s should work. If you’ve been around the block long enough, you’ve seen the same few types of tweet, mechanically over and over and over again as the people of Twitter iteratively converge on what best gets engagement. And that’s boring.
I’m disappointed by 4chan and Reddit and Hacker News and Twitter in that the discourse never seems to advance. Maybe you win an argument in a thread today, putting hours of your time into it. And tomorrow the same people are having the same argument again in the same place. Why bother? It’s like the tidal waves inevitably sweep over your sandcastle, no matter how nicely you made it.
The belief that I’m led to is that a large community can never really advance its level of discourse. Perhaps there’s some mechanic where due to new members arriving and old members departing, the discussion always skews toward some immaturity, or past a certain number of members it’s impossible to propagate any kind of advancement in viewpoint or discussion topic. This would imply that a community’s level of discussion is actually fixed from the outset, determined basically by the makeup of its first few members, who define the topics and its accessibility.1
Reddit’s /r/books will forever be worse than 4chan’s /lit/. In the same way, /sci/ will always be worse than Hacker News. I choose these examples with purpose: I’ve been on all of these forums for over 13 years now, and I don’t think they have meaningfully changed. They seem to have each started on different levels of quality of discourse, and stayed there. None of these places have had an eternal September: The culture of these places, what counts as a good comment, what views and questions dominate, change only in few places and very slowly.
I’m interested in new ways of building communities that can actually advance their internal discourse.
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The only exception I can really think of is if you keep the group small enough such that you can actually build some consensus advancement in viewpoint or discussion topic.
You are wrong about this. /v/ for example has collectively changed their minds about many video games. Elden Ring was praised when it was first released, and reception is now mixed. I've seen the same happen to other games that were praised in the past. Criticisms of some games emerging that were never once brought up 10 years ago, like "backtracking" in Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door. And for the record, I did check old.sage.moe to make sure. It sounds like you didn't stick around enough to notice the changes.