Now 10 Years Old - 4chan is the Most Important Site You Never Visit

Today 4chan is more popular than ever. Between 2009 and 2011, 4chan grew from 5 million monthly unique visitors to 10 million. It now collects 22.5 million each month, making it one of the top 400 sites in the U.S.

Those are the sort of stats that techies and investors salivate over. Yet to this day, Poole has shunned conventional business practices.

He is 4chan’s only official “employee.” If the site is down at 2am, Poole is the person to fix it (chances are, with a cup of tea nearby). If you want to buy ad space on its music imageboard, Poole will walk you through the process. And if you find yourself staring at a nude photo your ex put online or someone swiped from your private Photobucket, Poole is the one who'll handle your takedown request. Poole has worked for free and, on countless occasions, sunk the little money he has earned back into the site. In 2008, when the world’s economy collapsed and the little advertising the site had collected dried up, he asked his mother for $9,000 to keep 4chan afloat. (He paid back the loan just a few weeks ago.)

Why on Earth would someone punish himself like this? Why would he jeopardize himself financially and legally for a website that collects 10 negative headlines for each positive one?

It has to do with this idea of being a father, sure, but it’s also like being a priest. Leading a congregation isn’t about the money. It’s about giving people a place to worship freely. Under the confession booth’s guise of anonymity, they’ll share some deep, demented secrets, shit they’ve never told anyone—but they’ll tell an anonymous forum. Does that make Poole complicit in his community’s crimes and possibly guilty himself? Particularly when it comes to pornography, homophobic slurs, and pranks carried out at the expense of completely innocent people? Maybe. Certainly, it makes him similar to the likes of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tumblr cofounder David Karp, two fellow Internet entrepreneurs who faced the same challenge: When you’ve got millions of users, how do you rein them in? Do you even bother?

The golden age of memes

The tale of 4chan’s humble beginnings is one of the Internet's favorite fireside stories, and it has received its fair share of personal embellishments through the years. Many people still believe Christopher Poole isn’t even his real name (a theory given credence in July 2008 by Time magazine’s Lev Grossman). Using more than a half-dozen news stories from the past 10 years, and fresh information from Poole himself, I tried to get to the truth.

by Fernando Alfonso III, Daily Dot | Read more:
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Against Tipping

When you’re traveling, it’s easy to see the origins of modern tipping. A tipped service in a foreign land is typically performed by someone who is not an employee of an establishment but works either as an adjunct or as a free agent — a shoeshine boy, for instance. In a “third-world” city, a self-styled tour guide might be tipped in return for leading a group of sightseers. In Italy, a Neapolitan street urchin might offer to protect a parked car in return for a gratuity.

In both cases, the inference is clear: if you don’t employ me, I will hurt you. This thinly veiled extortion is the subtext to much tipping: if the propertied individual doesn’t comply with the demands of the semi-employed, something terrible might happen to them or their things. So tipping began essentially as a way to stave off violence by the indigent, forgotten people; it is a social contract adhered to by the privileged class who fear and disdain the less fortunate and are aware of the failure of their own class to create equity.

But tipping in the United States is something more nuanced. The people who are tipped in the US comprise an ever-expanding number of employed professions. Employers recognize the tipped individual as a great boon to the business: someone who needn’t be given benefits, a living wage, or employment security. They are essentially a guest at the company who must comport themselves appropriately for monetary reward, courtesy of the customer. And this reward can be large. The tip, though it is a ghost fee, is actually a fairly strict amount — 15 to 20 percent of a tab, $1 per drink — and is essentially mandatory; a failure to pay will result in public shaming or even fisticuffs. The tipping scale varies wildly and is determined by race and class factors. Cute young white people are often given the desirable, highly visible jobs that tip well at restaurants and bars, while Central American immigrants work for trickle-down tips in the back.

In the United States, one is required to tip one’s waiter, bartender, taxi driver, bellhop, barista, sandwich artist, valet parker, coat-check, hairdresser, barber, driver, masseuse, pedicurist, strip-tease artist, dogwalker, hotel maid, concierge, and so on. A tipped job is typically one that is tied to a very quantifiable service done for a particular person or group. It is often linked to the idea of a “luxury” service as well (an espresso could be made at home, so you must tip if you are buying it while out). In this sense, it is maintained by the consumer as a guilt fee.

Meanwhile, a bus driver on a daily route will not be tipped, for example, though he or she is working hard to serve the public. Policemen are not tipped except in the form of donations by ass-kissers to the “fraternal order” in exchange for a sticker that is supposed to confer preferential treatment by officers. Public servants are not tipped. The tipped individual is providing a personal, private service.

Luxury service is therefore the crux. Tipping is the onus of the purchaser who pays the wage of the worker on top of the cost of whatever service provided, which goes to the business itself.

If one ever tries to discuss tipping in America, one is immediately met with a dismissive and lofty: “Well, I tip really well because I was/am part of the service industry.” Like veterans of the armed forces, the “service people” are bound together in a cult whose members have experienced the true nature of work servitude and the demeaning, harrowing experience it represents. The fellow warrior conspicuously tips well in a great display of homage and respect. Service implies a subservience but also a noble sacrifice. The service industry workers prepare our sandwiches nobly, submitt­ing to our personalized mayonnaise requests. Almost all Americans have worked in the service industry at some point and many will only ever work in it.

Tipping for these service-industry comrades is outside of money. It is an alm or genuflection; a gesture of humility to the tippee designed to recognize and rehabilitate the degrading nature of their work, and also to connect with them spiritually. The camaraderie and smile dispensed by the waitstaff on receiving a generous tip after a suspenseful meal service brings the light of spiritual nourishment to the tipper, who can rest well that night. The Neapolitan street urchin’s implied violence still hovers over the interaction, but now the justice and retribution feels more karmic.

by Ian Svenonius, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: Ben Sanders

Andreas Maria Jacobs, Macrograffiti
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Tim Walker, Lily Donaldson and Blue Spitfire, Glemham Hall, Suffolk, 2009
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Winslow Homer, The Water Fan (1899)
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Sardine Fishery Collapse

A $32-million commercial fishery has inexplicably and completely collapsed this year on the B.C. coast.

The sardine seine fleet has gone home after failing to catch a single fish. And the commercial disappearance of the small schooling fish is having repercussions all the way up the food chain to threatened humpback whales.

Jim Darling, a Tofino-based whale biologist with the Pacific Wildlife Foundation, said in an interview Monday that humpbacks typically number in the hundreds near the west coast of Vancouver Island in summer. They were observed only sporadically this year, including by the commercial whalewatching industry.

"Humpbacks are telling us that something has changed," he said. "Ocean systems are so complex, it's really hard to know what it means. For one year, I don't think there's any reason to be alarmed, but there is certainly reason to be curious."

by Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun | Read more:
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No Husband, No Friends

Thanks to Noah, the world is made up of people in twosomes. I never thought much about the ark until my husband died one bright, sunny November morning almost one year ago.

My friends headed for the hills. In the last years of my husband’s life, we had come to rely on two or three couples for entertainment, but they disappeared after he died. Were they afraid to face their own mortality, or was it that the dynamics we presented as a duo were lost with me as a widow? Widow. The word means empty. Another charming word I have come to embrace: bereave — to deprive or rob. Here I find myself a bereaved widow, relegated by my erstwhile friends to the occasional lunch or shopping spree. I didn’t have any single friends. (And if I had, I probably would have treated them the same.) I was struggling with the No.1 stressor on the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory — death of a spouse — sans friends.

Everywhere I go, everywhere I look, couples surround me in the supermarket, at the mall and in their S.U.V.’s awaiting a green light. I never noticed the twosomes before. Now they make me feel obsolete. Whether he knew it or not, Noah set the course for bias against singles. Singles can’t dine in the finest restaurants. Singles disrupt the seating in theater rows. And singles can’t be seen cavorting with couples. I understand Noah’s plan — the world needed two to tango in the face of an annihilating flood. But he should have designated a section on the ark for us.

I spend most of my days alone in the bereavement bunker. That’s what I call the place I rented. After my husband died, I navigated through the many stages of grief. The first one is the merciful one — numbness — the stage at which one makes idiotic decisions, like selling the place you live in without a well-thought-out plan of where you might go. I did a lot of wacky things during that stage, but moving eight months after my husband died to take up residence in a tiny rental a few miles away tops the list. I sent most of my furnishings to auction and discarded the majority of the rest. Two days after moving into the bunker, I was reading with a flashlight because I couldn’t count a lamp among my possessions. Everything I saved I didn’t need, and everything I threw away, I had to replace.

Some time later I briefly touched on the anger stage of grief. I held the doctors, the nurses, the drug companies and the old slash, burn and poison protocol of cancer treatment in this country responsible for my husband’s death. Now I just blame Noah.

Frankly, I’m sick and tired of the stages. I went from depression to panic attacks back to depression to migraines, to abdominal migraines, to not sleeping, to sleeping too much, to never leaving the bunker, to not wanting to go back to the bunker. To deal with my mood swings, I have seen a grief counselor and a psychiatrist and attend a support group. My counselor advised me I wasn’t acting irrationally — it was all just coping mechanisms. She suggested I make friends. My psychiatrist prescribed anti-depressants so I would stop acting irrationally. How can I go wrong?

by Charlotte Brozek, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jillian Tamaki

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To Paul, With Lox and Squalor

I’m leaving New York this week. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I do know that there is no Russ & Daughters where I’m going, and there is no Paul.

Since moving to New York City twelve years ago, I have lived in nine apartments. The first was university housing on the Upper West Side. The next six formed a Brooklyn daisy chain, fragrant with interpersonal drama. The eighth, which brought me back across the East River, was chosen more or less because of a sandwich.

I discovered this sandwich during my ten-month tenure at the seventh apartment, a place I landed by necessity after a breakup. The apartment had a sloping floor, a ceiling pregnant with water damage, and a space heater that emitted the smell of burning hair, but not much in the way of heat. But it also had a panoramic view of Manhattan, and it was this view that pulled me from my slowly decomposing residence to the Lower East Side, where I found Russ & Daughters, a nearly century-old smoked-fish emporium. Between its neon sign, glorious aroma, and sense of history so palpable it could almost be sliced as surely as a side of lox, it was, in my eyes, a halfway house between a grandmother’s embrace and a place of worship. I ordered a sandwich involving whitefish salad, horseradish cream cheese, and an everything bagel, took a bite, and knew I was home. A few months later, I moved into my eighth apartment, four blocks away from the shop.

I can’t remember exactly when I met Paul, though I do remember being moderately afraid of him. Among the chorus of white-coated Russ & Daughters countermen, he stood out as a crank par excellence, a silver-haired middle finger pointed in the direction of the city’s capitulation to customer service with a smile. He could smite indecisive tourists with a single sneer, and dispatch more high-maintenance specimens with an eye-roll so world-weary it almost required its own cane. He was a throwback to a New York that predated frozen-yogurt chains and nail salons, a New York of daylight muggings and nighttime shooting galleries. He was old-school, full stop.

Over time, we developed what one might call a rapport. I’d ask him about his day. He’d ask me about my boyfriend. We’d bump fists over the counter. One afternoon, I brought in an old Polaroid land camera, prompting Paul to reminisce about photos he took of various lady friends in, shall we say, compromising positions. “What do you want?” he asked, noting the look I had failed to suppress. “I was a red-blooded young man.”

I came to think of Paul as the dirty uncle I never had. He could work blue, but the only time he made me blush was when he told me, with a disarming degree of sincerity, that I was his “precious little angel.”

by Rebecca Flint Marx, Medium |  Read more:

Houses in Greenland
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Fred Herzog
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Cass McCombs

The Decline of Wikipedia

[ed. See also: The battle to destroy Wikipedia's sock puppet army.]

The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.

Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-­ranking quality scores.

The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.

In response, the Wikimedia Foundation, the 187-person nonprofit that pays for the legal and technical infrastructure supporting Wikipedia, is staging a kind of rescue mission. The foundation can’t order the volunteer community to change the way it operates. But by tweaking Wikipedia’s website and software, it hopes to steer the encyclopedia onto a more sustainable path.

The foundation’s campaign will bring the first major changes in years to a site that is a time capsule from the Web’s earlier, clunkier days, far removed from the easy-to-use social and commercial sites that dominate today. “Everything that Wikipedia is was utterly appropriate in 2001 and it’s become increasingly out of date since,” says Sue Gardner, executive director of the foundation, which is housed on two drab floors of a downtown San Francisco building with a faulty elevator. “This is very much our attempt to get caught up.” She and Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, say the project needs to attract a new crowd to make progress. “The biggest issue is editor diversity,” says Wales. He hopes to “grow the number of editors in topics that need work.”

Whether that can happen depends on whether enough people still believe in the notion of online collaboration for the greater good—the ideal that propelled Wikipedia in the beginning. But the attempt is crucial; Wikipedia matters to many more people than its editors and students who didn’t make time to read their assigned books. More of us than ever use the information found there, both directly and via other services. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has either killed off the alternatives or pushed them down the Google search results.

by Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review | Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Edison’s Revenge

Fiddly cables, incompatible plugs and sockets, and the many adaptors needed to fit them all together used to be the travellers’ bane. But the USB (Universal Serial Bus) has simplified their life. Most phones and other small gadgets can charge from a simple USB cable plugged into a computer or an adaptor. Some 10 billion of them are already in use. Hotel rooms, aircraft seats, cars and new buildings increasingly come with USB sockets as a standard electrical fitting.

Now a much bigger change is looming. From 2014, a USB cable will be able to provide power to bigger electronic devices. In the long term this could change the way homes and offices use electricity, cutting costs and improving efficiency.

The man who invented the USB, Ajay Bhatt of Intel, a chipmaker, barely thought about power. His main aim was to cut the clutter and time-wasting involved in plugging things into a computer. The keyboard, mouse, speakers and so forth all required different cables, and often drivers (special bits of software) as well. The USB connection’s chief role was to help computers and devices negotiate and communicate.

Mr Bhatt did not think he was creating a new charging system. Indeed, the trickle of electricity (up to ten watts on the existing standard) is still barely enough for devices such as an iPad. Yet USB charging is now the default for phones, e-readers and other small gadgets. Some mobile-phone manufacturers are already shipping their products without a power adaptor. Ingenious inventors have eked out the slender USB power supply to run fans, tiny fridges and toy rocket-launchers.

The big change next year will be a new USB PD (Power Delivery) standard, which brings much more flexibility and ten times as much oomph: up to 100 watts. (...)

Current affairs

That could presage a much bigger shift, reviving the cause of direct current (DC) as the preferred way to power the growing number of low-voltage devices in homes and offices. DC has been something of a poor relation in the electrical world since it lost out to alternating current (AC) in a long-ago battle in which its champion Nikola Tesla (pictured, left) trounced Thomas Edison (right). Tesla won, among other reasons, because it was (in those days) easier to shift AC power between different voltages. It was therefore a better system for transmitting and distributing electricity.

But the tide may be turning. Turning AC into the direct current required to power transistors (the heart of all electronic equipment) is a nuisance. The usual way is through a mains adaptor. These ubiquitous little black boxes are now cheap and light. But they are often inefficient, turning power into heat. And they are dumb: they run night and day, regardless of whether the price of electricity is high or low. It would be better to have a DC network, of the kind Mr Daniel has rigged up, for all electronic devices in a home or office.

This is where USB cables come in. They carry direct current and also data. That means they can help set priorities between devices that are providing power and those that are consuming it: for example, a laptop that is charging a mobile phone. “The computer can say ‘I need to start the hard disk now, so no charging for the next ten seconds’,” says Mr Bhatt. The new standard, with variable voltage and greater power, enlarges the possibilities. So does another new feature: that power can flow in any direction.

This chimes with another advantage. A low-voltage DC network works well with solar panels. These produce DC power at variable times and in variable amounts. They are increasingly cheap, and can fit in windows or on roofs. Though solar power is tricky to feed into the AC mains grid, it is ideally suited to a low-voltage local DC network. When the sun is shining, it can help charge all your laptops, phones and other battery-powered devices.

by The Economist |  Read more:

Image: Matt Herring

$10 Smartphone to Digital Microscope Conversion

The world is an interesting place, but it's fascinating up close. Through the lens of a microscope you can find details that you would otherwise never notice. But now you can.

This instructable will show you how to build a stand for about $10 that will transform your smartphone into a powerful digital microscope. This DIY conversion stand is more than capable of functioning in an actual laboratory setting. With magnification levels as high as 175x, plant cells and their nuclei are easily observed! In addition to allowing the observation of cells, this setup also produces stunning macro photography.

The photos in this instructable were taken with an iPhone 4S.

 

by Yoshinok, Instructables |  Read more:

Image: Yoshinok

Emil Nolde, Alps Mountain Landscape 1930.
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Are We Puppets in a Wired World?

Internet activities like online banking, social media, web browsing, shopping, e-mailing, and music and movie streaming generate tremendous amounts of data, while the Internet itself, through digitization and cloud computing, enables the storage and manipulation of complex and extensive data sets. Data—especially personal data of the kind shared on Facebook and the kind sold by the state of Florida, harvested from its Department of Motor Vehicles records, and the kind generated by online retailers and credit card companies—is sometimes referred to as “the new oil,” not because its value derives from extraction, which it does, but because it promises to be both lucrative and economically transformative.

In a report issued in 2011, the World Economic Forum called for personal data to be considered “a new asset class,” declaring that it is “a new type of raw material that’s on par with capital and labour.” Morozov quotes an executive from Bain and Company, which coauthored the Davos study, explaining that “we are trying to shift the focus from purely privacy to what we call property rights.” It’s not much of a stretch to imagine who stands to gain from such “rights.”

Individually, data points are typically small and inconsequential, which is why, day to day, most people are content to give them up without much thought. They only come alive in aggregate and in combination and in ways that might never occur to their “owner.” For instance, records of music downloads and magazine subscriptions might allow financial institutions to infer race and deny a mortgage. Or search terms plus book and pharmacy purchases can be used to infer a pregnancy, as the big-box store Target has done in the past. (...)

This brings us back to DARPA and its quest for an algorithm that will sift through all manner of seemingly disconnected Internet data to smoke out future political unrest and acts of terror. Diagnosis is one thing, correlation something else, prediction yet another order of magnitude, and for better and worse, this is where we are taking the Internet. Police departments around the United States are using Google maps, together with crime statistics and social media, to determine where to patrol, and half of all states use some kind of predictive data analysis when making parole decisions. More than that, gush the authors of Big Data:

In the future—and sooner than we may think—many aspects of our world will be augmented or replaced by computer systems that today are the sole purview of human judgment…perhaps even identifying “criminals” before one actually commits a crime.

The assumption that decisions made by machines that have assessed reams of real-world information are more accurate than those made by people, with their foibles and prejudices, may be correct generally and wrong in the particular; and for those unfortunate souls who might never commit another crime even if the algorithm says they will, there is little recourse. In any case, computers are not “neutral”; algorithms reflect the biases of their creators, which is to say that prediction cedes an awful lot of power to the algorithm creators, who are human after all. Some of the time, too, proprietary algorithms, like the ones used by Google and Twitter and Facebook, are intentionally biased to produce results that benefit the company, not the user, and some of the time algorithms can be gamed. (There is an entire industry devoted to “optimizing” Google searches, for example.)

But the real bias inherent in algorithms is that they are, by nature, reductive. They are intended to sift through complicated, seemingly discrete information and make some sort of sense of it, which is the definition of reductive. But it goes further: the infiltration of algorithms into everyday life has brought us to a place where metrics tend to rule. This is true for education, medicine, finance, retailing, employment, and the creative arts. There are websites that will analyze new songs to determine if they have the right stuff to be hits, the right stuff being the kinds of riffs and bridges found in previous hit songs.

Amazon, which collects information on what readers do with the electronic books they buy—what they highlight and bookmark, if they finish the book, and if not, where they bail out—not only knows what readers like, but what they don’t, at a nearly cellular level. This is likely to matter as the company expands its business as a publisher. (Amazon already found that its book recommendation algorithm was more likely than the company’s human editors to convert a suggestion into a sale, so it eliminated the humans.)

Meanwhile, a company called Narrative Science has an algorithm that produces articles for newspapers and websites by wrapping current events into established journalistic tropes—with no pesky unions, benefits, or sick days required. Call me old-fashioned, but in each case, idiosyncrasy, experimentation, innovation, and thoughtfulness—the very stuff that makes us human—is lost. A culture that values only what has succeeded before, where the first rule of success is that there must be something to be “measured” and counted, is not a culture that will sustain alternatives to market-driven “creativity.”

by Sue Halpern, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: Eric Edelman

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Katsushika Hokusai - Kanagawa oki nami ura (1830-31) (variation)

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David Konigsberg
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