The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long – image, timestamp, text.
I have nothing to say, really.
Fuck off.
Mainstreamification
danah boyd, saying intelligent things about 4chan:
Their antics force people to think about status and power and they encourage folks to laugh at anything that takes itself too seriously. The mindset is deeply familiar to me and it doesn’t surprise me when I learn that old hacker types get a warm fuzzy feeling thinking about 4chan even if trolls and griefers annoy the hell out of them. In a mediated environment where marketers are taking over, there’s something subversively entertaining about betting on the anarchist subculture. Cuz, really, at the end of the day, many old skool hackers weren’t entirely thrilled to realize that mainstreamification of net culture meant that mainstream culture would dominate net culture. For us geeks, freaks, and queers who embraced the internet as a savior, mainstreamification has meant a new form of disempowerment.
Yes, just a long quote. Don’t worry, her text is longer and well worth the read.
Bookmarks for December 9th through December 17th
These are my links for December 9th through December 17th:
- Semantic Versioning – Yes.
- The Sexy Side of PEZ! –
- Lost in the Filth Simulacrum –
- Is this Le Web or Le Clique? | HPC – But here at Le Web 09, I feel like I’m staring that ugliness right in the eye. The program is mostly made up of the members and sycophants of the cartel mentioned above.
I accidentally your Chaosradio
Grandioser Podcast über die ganzen tollen Dinge, die das Internet so aus sich heraus generiert: Chaosradio Express 121 – Internet-Meme. Mit den Experten @johl und @plomlompom.
Bookmarks for April 19th through April 21st
These are my links for April 19th through April 21st:
- Vettel: I Name Thee Kate’s Dirty Sister – I laughed.
- Inside the precision hack – So why do they do it? Why do they write code, build complex applications, publish graphs – why do they organize a team that is more effective than most startup companies? Says Zombocom: “For the lulz”.
- The Pirate Bay – The world’s largest BitTorrent tracker – "Continue to build the internets! Start more bittorrent sites, blog more, start your own lobby group, create, remix, mash up and continue to grow more heads on this amazing hydra that we know as the internets!"
- Google Torrent Search – Useful.
- Police delete London tourists’ photos ‘to prevent terrorism’ | UK news | guardian.co.uk – To prevent tourism?
A Virtual Unknown
A Virtual Unknown – washingtonpost.com – Meet 'Moot,' the Secretive Internet Celeb Who Still Lives With Mom.