Pohon BBS

Does Anonymity really improve discourse?

2024-05-24T07:30:05+00:00

By anonymity, I really mean anonymity -- not pseudonymous communities

Anonymity lowers the barrier to entry... for people who prefer
anonymous communities. But a lot of people who want to invest a lot of
real energy into a community, people who want to put work into serious
projects, are not going to prioritize an imageboard over something
like Discord or Twitter.

The main purpose of imageboards is to give a toilet to the internet.
Need to blow off steam? Vent? Post a dick pic? Get involved in petty
debates? Or are you such a brain damaged person that you get banned
from "mainstream" internet constantly -- you're the target audience
for 4chan.

Textboards and Gikopoi seem to have less tendency to go to complete
ass than imageboards, so anonymity does not automatically imply shit.
But this may just be due to the fact that these communities are very
small -- and they have less bias against pseudonymity than imageboards
As a counter-example, look at Sageru IRC for something that's generally
lower quality than /b/, /soc/, /pol/ etc

On places like IRC, Gikopoi, Mastodon, and other low-barrier pseudonymous
communities, mentally ill people and naughty children are easily blocked,
which creates a negative feedback loop that incentivizes the posters to
either shape up or get out. On the other hand, with an imageboard, when
trolling, someone can flame himself in the comments to keep himself in the
spotlight -- an anti-feature.

So my basic opinion is that anonymous and pseudonymous communities are
essentially equally good when small, and that as communities scale,
anonymous communities fare worse. This makes me think that gatekeeping
is actually not a bad thing. I can't imagine that Something Awful would
have done well without the $10 account registration fee, and something
like Reddit wouldn't work without karma. Anonymous communities have no
means by which to gatekeep, which is ultimately to their detriment

What do you think?

Somali/Syria vs DPRK

2024-10-10T20:13:27+00:00

Somali/Syria/Mnyanmar vs DPRK
which have better Human Development Index?
which have higher minimum wage adjusted to PPP/bigmac/hamburger?
which have more M.Sc. graduates, scientific publications, and doctors per capita?
Which have better public transport transit infrastructure?

Gikopoi Election 2024

2024-05-23T03:24:05+00:00

The year is 2024 and the Gikopoi Election is underway again.

---------------------
Year-Month-Day scheduled events
---------------------
2024-07-06 -- First debate, speeches / presentations
2024-09-08 -- Second debate, speeches / presentations
2024-11-05 -- Final election day
---------------------

If you would like to run as candidate, post a reply to this thread
with your Gikopoi name, and write an essay of at least 100
words on what changes you would bring, values you embrace, etc.

Propaganda can be submitted to our image gallery:
https://booru.gikopoi.com/post/list/election

the question

2024-04-06T10:25:55+00:00

what good is culture if it's inorganic (e.g. marketing & propaganda)?
cultural transmission controlled for profit like with recommendations
content (i.e. not art) produced mechanically to optimize something
could it even be called culture? or maybe it's "adversarial culture."
or culture takes after the shape of power.

if one wants to reject it, they may alienate themself from others.
surely there are others condemned. where will they dwell?
maybe there can be a club with no invitations, just the natural end of
a thought, or maybe converging paths.