#8chan — Public Fediverse posts

Behind 8chan and 8kun: Fredrick Brennan
https://negativepid.blog/behind-8chan-and-8kun-fredrick-brennan/

#8chan #8kun #FredrickBrennan #anonymity #conspiracies #socialMedia #radicalization #politics #hoaxes #extremism #fringeTheories #misinformation #disinformation #onlineBehaviour #onlineForums #identity #negativepid

Behind 8chan and 8kun: Fredrick Brennan
https://negativepid.blog/behind-8chan-and-8kun-fredrick-brennan/

#8chan #8kun #FredrickBrennan #anonymity #conspiracies #socialMedia #radicalization #politics #hoaxes #extremism #fringeTheories #misinformation #disinformation #onlineBehaviour #onlineForums #identity #negativepid

Stepping Back From Social Media To Read a Book

I’m taking a break. After spending like two years in the worst parts of the Internet modeling the memetic spread of conspiracy-driven behavioral patterns and developing social media software as a side hustle, I think I’m going to take a step back and… I don’t know… maybe read a book? lol.

I’m a Computational Biologist who pretty much studies the memetics of conspiracy theories and how they act as another vector/epidemiological layer. I’ve also been working on various contracts for social media development stuff. Working on the shit I’ve been working on for years forces you to see the worst parts of people that they split off. It makes you hate everyone — and I mean everyone.

BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity

I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”

Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.

Bluesky mentions that here:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update

As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.

I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.

Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.

Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.

Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.

Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.

Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.

Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.

I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.

In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.

I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.

From Chan Spaces and Toxic Image Boards to BlueSky

After tracking the memetic analog of phylogenetic signatures using Cytoscape, I can pretty much confirm that the most active Bluesky users come from ontological spaces that are progeny of image boards, such as chan spaces, Tumblr, Rule 34, and similar communities. What a dumpster fire.

I used the ClusterMaker2 plugin within Cytoscape to generate clusters from a corpus of memetic data I dumped from a Bluesky importer that imported loci, cliques, and posts.

https://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/clustermaker2

I calculated Levenshtein distances, a way to quantify the difference between sequences based on edit operations, and also employed semantic similarity metrics grounded in corpora constructed from previous image board content. These corpora act as reference points to evaluate how closely the memetic patterns align.

The resulting evolutionary markers of meme propagation consistently matched across the datasets. This indicates that the most active users on Bluesky essentially belong to the same memeplex as toxic image boards, sharing similar memetic origins and evolution.

In contrast, the memetic signature of Mastodon aligns more closely with text based discussion platforms like IRC. This correlation makes sense because Mastodon operates on the ActivityPub protocol, which draws from old school messaging concepts like inbox and outbox structures, favoring threaded, text centric conversations rather than the chaotic image driven meme culture found on Bluesky’s progenitor spaces.

#4chan #8chan #algorithms #astroturf #astroturfing #bigTech #Bluesky #crypto #cryptocurrency #discourse #disinformation #fediverse #forums #IRC #manosphere #Mastodon #meme #memes #memetics #misinformation #misogyny #political #Politics #propaganda #radicalization #socialMedia #socialMediaAlgorithms #tech #techbro #techbros #Tumblr #uspol

@Lazarou @arzi @spacehobo now can anyone take down #8chan?

¿Han visto las peleas en redes por #ChatGPT y #StudioGhibli? ¿Saben de dónde vienen los argumentos más agresivos y tóxicos?
Lo pueden averiguar leyendo mi #artículo en #LiteralMagazine.
⬇️ https://literalmagazine.com/toma-esto/
#sociedad #artículos #CulturaDigital #internet #extremismo #trolls #Ghibli #OpenAI #8chan #DisonanciaCognitiva

X is now Temu 8Chan.

#Twitter #Temu #8Chan #lol

I just finished journalist Elle Reeve's new book "Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics"

The book is a highly readable 10-year history of the alt-right by Reeve, who interviewed many key figures within the alt-right and at times was given access to their confidential communications.

#books #bookstodon #altright #4chan #8chan #unitetheright #j6

It was to be expected, that people doing their civic duty are being harassed and targeted by criminals, who support an authoritarian state instead of a free country. https://www.salon.com/2023/08/26/hit-list-grand-jurors-face-violent-after-names-and-addresses-shared-on-qanon-forums/ #violence #4chan #8chan #Xchan

The worst places on the internet are getting into the AI game.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzjpn/ai-chatbot-white-supremacist-gab
#ArtificialIntelligence #qanon #GAB #AI #JimWatkins #AndrewTorba #8chan #4Chan #8kun #News #extremism

#Twitter hat eine der Schlüsselpersonen hinter #8Chan und #QAnon zurückgeholt. Er half beim Betrieb einer Website, die mit #Kinderpornos und weißen #Rassismus übersät war, & half bei der Radikalisierung mehrerer Massenmörder, darunter #Christchurch und #ElPaso.

Ich habe Fragen…

In sworn testimony before the January 6th committee, Jim Watkins claimed QAnon was invented by George Soros and Media Matters.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93a7j3/jim-watkins-george-soros-qanon
#qanon #JimWatkins #GeorgeSoros #MediaMatters #january6committee #8kun #8chan #News #CapitolRiot #RonWatkins

[ #note ]

FINAL REPORT:
Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
(Dec 22, 2022 ※US time)

📄 https://january6th.house.gov/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/Report_FinalReport_Jan6SelectCommittee.pdf

#J6 #January6 #Trump
#QAnon #CapitolAttack
#4chan #8chan #8kun

@drewharwell @taylorlorenz #QElon is a lying liar that lies.

Perhaps he should have looked at the financials of #8chan to see if creating a safe space for #fascists and conspiracy theorists is turning a profit before radically changing the Twitter brand.

[ #note ]

NYT: "In the U.S., His Site Has Been Linked to Massacres. In Japan, He’s a Star."
(December 18, 2022)

📰 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/business/4chan-hiroyuki-nishimura.html

https://archive.is/FkbEK
(no paywall)

"Hiroyuki Nishimura (※) has become a famous voice for disenchanted young Japanese. What he talks much less about is his ownership of the notorious website 4chan."

※"ひろゆき" こと "西村博之"(@[email protected])

#QAnon #4chan #8chan #8kun #ChanCulture #J6

@taylorlorenz

#QElon is such a lying snowflake. I don’t know who is signing up to advertise on that #8chan clone of a platform.

#QElon wants Twitter to have exactly the same moderation rules as #8chan. Anything goes as long as he can avoid “being arrested.”
#EvacuateTwitter
https://jimstewartson.substack.com/p/qelon-is-rebuilding-8chan-because

Jim Watkins was a server supplier and business partner of Japanese bulletin board "2channel", but after a dispute with Hiroyuki Nishimura over money, he effectively took over and gained the right to run Japan's largest anonymous board, which still exists today under the name 5channel.

Researchers are considered to "QAnon phenomenon" was inspired the methods of spreading disinformation in Japanese largest anounymous board.

#QAnon #ChanCulture #J6
#4chan #8chan #8kun
#JimWatkins #RonWatkins

Speaking of which, the men behind "Q", "Ron Watkins" and his dad ex. 8chan and 8kun owner "Jim Watkins" have been in Sapporo, Japan, for several days.

https://nitter.unixfox.eu/2022_Karma/status/1602033485765816320

Probably they need to meet Japanese partners in connection with a court case against "Hiroyuki Nishimura" (ひろゆき (@[email protected]) founder of 2channel, currently owner of #4chan) over his share of money on the Japanese anonymous board 2ch, which is a major roots of #ChanCulture.

#QAnon #J6
#8chan #8kun
#JimWatkins #RonWatkins

#QElon is Rebuilding #8chan Because He Wants a New Alt-Right - by @jimstewartson https://open.substack.com/pub/jimstewartson/p/qelon-is-rebuilding-8chan-because

@dangillmor @dalias #8chan delenda est

OK, I spent four hours writing this out. This piece ended up much longer than I intended but I wanted to be thorough. What #QElon is doing on Twitter is a national emergency. #Twitter is just #8chan now, but a thousand times larger.

This has to be stopped. Here’s a Telegram search for “Roth” after he was targeted with #Pizzagate-type smears and #GamerGated.
#EvacuateTwitter
https://jimstewartson.substack.com/p/qelon-is-rebuilding-8chan-because

I find myself in the strange position of defending someone who allowed a lot of harm, including to me personally, but what #Elmo is doing to Yoel Roth is sickening and unconscionable.

Elmo is trading on queerphobic lies to completely mischaracterize what Yoel Roth says in his thesis to smear Roth as a “pedophile.” Elmo’s lawyer probably made him include “looks like.”

This is exactly what they do on #8chan and now #Telegram. This is suicide trolling based on bigotry.
#EvacuateTwitter

He doesn’t understand how $#8chan blue check works. His intentions are fan fiction.