In the wake of the news of Fredrick Brennan's (8chan creator) passing, I was reminded that I too had some dream of creating an imageboard, but I never got around to it and I'm glad I did.

Basically, much like how 8chan was basically a fusion of Reddit and 4chan, my idea was a fusion of Twitter and 4chan, as in instead of boards, threads would be grouped via tags that anyone can create on the fly. The only rules would be to keep everything legal and all spam threads would be deleted. I never got around to it because of my limited knowledge of programming and servers at the time and I felt like my more progressive family members would disown me for creating such a site.

I'm glad I never created that site because I feel like most people who run community sites for niche and dissident audiences tend to regret it later in life and go down dark paths. Though, I'm not against such sites in principle, I just hope that if you create such a community that you are prepared for what you are getting into. At least Hot Wheels seemed to have enjoyed the final years of his life.

It sucks because while Google is allowed to be the largest host of kiddy porn and all the other illegal bits and bytes, they get a pass because shucks they try their hardest to delete it whenever it is found. Meanwhile, if a regular person owns a message board that allows uploads, they'll get their door kicked in at 3:00am because some bored guy in Tel Aviv uploaded CP to a board nobody looks at

I know, at one point, Alex Gleason tried to get access to the list of CP hashes to facilitate auto-deletion of such content but the corporations who "owned" those hashes wanted tens of thousands of dollars for them. Why that isn't considered "profiting off child porn" by the law, I have no idea.

@caekislove Hashing seems like a terrible way to detect CP because all one needs to do in order to bypass it is to change one pixel value in a way that it isn't noticeable and then the resulting image would have a completely different hash.

I know it's more complicated than just hashing the whole file, but I don't know the specific details. Like subhashes maybe. The point is even a crude solution isn't even made available and instead an impossible standard (no hosting naughty bits, even for a second) is required for independent hosts where as Google, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, etc can host CP and warez for weeks or months and just shrug and delete it whenever someone points it out without getting so much as a fine.

I always thought they basically just down-sampled it to 100x100 16 colors and hashed that - so the hash survives most changes.

But they don't publish how they do this, because as soon as it's published, it can be trivially worked around.

The whole thing is so dumb, I imagine the owner of the company that does it is probably in the Epstein files. So basically he's making hashes of the files that he himself is creating.