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.

@xianc78 @caekislove There's two ways to solve this: the first is that you manually approve attachments (the sharty does this), or you automatically scan images for NSFW content with AI. This actually does in fact cut down on shit.

And I mean NSFW because you're not only going to need to deal with some edgelord with illegal images, but also unfunny kids posting Nikocado's Coinslot or Ambatukum or gore.

@PurpCat @caekislove At this point, I think it would be better for these anonymous communities to just be textboards. It dodges the CP problem (minus the links) and (at least for now) also dodges the age-verification problem.

Jews fear the Commodore 64 BBS

@caekislove @xianc78 x68k bbs when

@caekislove @xianc78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5zzhDrG6gg this is what we had before imageboards: just nerds living in the moment

@PurpCat @caekislove What is this? A BBS meetup?

@xianc78 @caekislove yeah a pc98 bbs meetup in Japan from 1989

@PurpCat @caekislove I envy those who grew up during that time. Must be nice to be able to do this without fear of being doxed or having your life ruined later.

@xianc78 @caekislove I see it as different than just doxing.

I see it as, to the court of public opinion the dumbest thing you've ever done is going to be broadcast on repeat forever and some random guys from the peanut gallery will just bring it up over and over again.