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Yotsuba Society

A website devoted to documenting and preserving the history of the imageboard/*chan culture/scene.

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4chan and by extent, the chanverse has been loathing the link-sharing social media site Reddit since 2011. Most of the loathing comes from Reddit picking up memes that 4chan decided to end and keep spreading them out across the internet. This limitation isn’t related to memes or catch phrases, but also other 4chan boards such /v/ and /a/ as those two boards also loathe reddit for their own community or culture related reasons.

What is Reddit? Reddit is a website about link-sharing content. Where it be articles, videos, or images. Users, known as redditors, vote for the best content. Things people like get upvoted, while other things they do not like get downvoted. The site is community run mostly, with a whole row of subreddits, some of them niche while plenty of them are long and effort.

Reddit never got big until Digg pulled a redesign change that made many diggers moved over to reddit. Since then the community has grown to its own culture, memes, and traditions. Even outside services related to reddit. But like 4chan, it has limited advertising, not because of the NSFW content.

The Origins of the Hatred This loathing of reddit seems to stem back from 2008 in this thread from the /prog/ textboards at world4ch.

FUCKING HATE REDDIT/ Anonymous : 2008-03-15 01:12/ http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1205555865

Okay, let me start with this: FUCK. REDDIT. I really hate that faggot site and its users. It’s really bad and we need to find a solution for it. There’s a steaming pile of shit coming from that webshite, and it certainly isn’t just trolls. It’s retards. Redditards, poluting our lovely /prog/. Through the text I’ll use “reddit” but I mean “programming.reddit.com” and not the whole reddit community, which while still full of BS not relevant to /prog/’s polution.

THE(IR) PROBLEM If you have an account at reddit or even browse it, and you’re not a redditard yourself you know what I’m talking about; Fucking idiots overusing internet memes, exactly like what the xkcd faggot does. Doing so, they believe they belong in some “elite” community of computer experts that like esoteric jokes. You should understand their mental state by now: “I can’t fucking program but I might make esoteric jokes that apparently computer experts like and maybe, just maybe others will think I’m an expert myself!”. Fucking morons. If one takes a moment from his day to browse reddit, might like the topics. Let’s see what we got: “How to * with Python ”, “A simple * with *”, “ in 10 steps”, “*: the revolutionary blog/software/other”, “Using * for fun & profit”. One might think, “ah, a nice community. I’ll stay a while with them”. The other day wakes up only to find the same topics with changed blog links and titles. If you don’t believe me try it yourself. (yeah, ofcourse there are the retarded “points too, how could a faggot community live without them? Look: wikipedia, digg, ..)

WHY /prog/ SUCKS It wasn’t long ago that reddit faggots weren’t aware of /prog/. I believe, 4-5 months ago /prog/ was clean of all the faggotry & spam. Back then a thread could make your day, and everyone was contributing content, which ofcourse lead to funny memes et al, unlike all these self-proclaimed “memes”. (notice any simile with the redditards? self proclaimed computer experts & funny or some shit) If you are not a /prog/ regular or oldie you might have not noticed, you might think that it’s been like that from the beginning. But it wasn’t. Even worse, you might think that these posts are from trolls, but they are not. Ok, maybe some are, but trolls are not retarded (as some may think). I’m a big time troll and I don’t think most of you understand trolling.

THE SOLUTION Okay, now that I bothered you with my text, I’m all ears to see what you got to say about this issue. I cannot think of a solution to get rid of faggots, but I don’t want to see /prog/ become a cesspool like reddit. I wish the old expert programmers would come back..

Excuse the lack of bbcode in my post but I have to haste.

For all intents and purposes it became a copypasta. But the resulting conversation brought two points. First, reddit represents the overuse of internet memes, believing they belong to a special community of computer experts. Second, it was use of topics title, but with different links, instead of original topics That rant was actually about the programming subreddit r/programming, known as informally as “proggit”. But this hatred can be for a good reason: this same criticism can apply to every other reddit. However, it’s not the first was valid. It was the first.

Another thread on the 4chan textboards is possibly more accurate about the loathing of Reddit than the first thread. The following from that thread is why 4chan actually hates reddit in the first place.

  1. Too much focus on “face” or reputation.
  2. Voting system makes normal comments more attention than good comments
  3. Threads lasts forever, but can’t be posted forever.

Redditors like eating crap, they love crap. If you’re not like them, they will hate you. /prog/ is much better than reddit, it’s just Shiichan that sucks. (http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1298079773)

Other (modern) reasons why 4channers hate Reddit, from Reddit themselves.

There are other reasons why 4chan hates Reddit:

1) stupid and useless voting system, that basically propagates what the hivemind majority thinks, hides any controversial opinion even if it’s well written, analytical or thought out.

2) the rage comics, especially the use of “le” and the really stupid lol face

3) posting unfunny memes like “arrow to the knee”. generally a lot of /b/ shit, a lot of people on 4chan (especially /v/, /tv/, /x/ really hate /b/).

4) attention whoring and white knighting (just see what happens when a “gurl gamer” makes posts or female problems are discussed, or just go to r/gonewild)

5) reddit tries too hard to be politcally correct and inclusive, and downvotes anything that is even remotely offensive. It’s really hypocritical though, since there are some really shady and possibly illegal subreddits promoting some really weird and creepy stuff.

6) reddit seems to be more socially acceptable and makes appearances in shows like BBT, even after points (1)-(5). http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/rj5di/why_does_4chan_seem_to_hate_reddit_also_why_does/

The last reason and I think it’s more important is that you can be banned from a subreddit for without giving a reason. As a matter of fact, there is no option to give a ban reason when you want to ban someone.

Bridge Memes or Dead Memes? The most common reason is that they keep using memes that are considered dead to 4chan. A good example is the rage faces that are now mainstreamed across the internet. After /b/ got tired of them, Reddit adopted them and gave its own home: r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/ or known in short as F7U12

The most obvious hatred stems from the use of ‘le’ in the rage comics, in this comic. This comic is where the origin of ‘le reddit’ came from:

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/376/065/62f.png

While it was used to parody the way the French speak and laugh, and the source of the irrational hatred and paranoia of reddit comes from.

Most of the irrational Reddit paranoia is mostly on 4chan’s /v/ - The Vidya. /v/ blames Reddit for a variety of things, most notably for taking over the voting from 4channers during the 2012 Vidya Gaem Awards. It’s also blamed on shit posting on /a/, /g/, and /b/. So bad that if anyone use a reddit catchphrase, even a simple “le”, /v/irgins will scream “Go back to Reddit”. Sometimes, they use images using the prefix “le” as ironic shitposting.

The Sad truth of Reddit Paranoia

If I can sum up the actual reddit paranoia that is going on in 4chan, it’s artificial. The paranoia and the fear and loathing, it’s are all artificial. 75% of 4channers probably visits reddit and vice versa. Yet 4channers feel like they’re entitled to these memes they created because it was the site “it’s where all of the memes come from.” In reality 0.01% of 4channer’s “produce original content and the rest build their egos on it”.(http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/iq0xa/a_list_of_reasons_why_4chan_hates_reddit_nsfw/) You do not know this, they just don’t tell you that they visit both sites. The negative reaction and the shitposting when 4channers use reddit memes is more ironic than actual. Which leads me to the following story:

I recorded during a anime convention called Otakon 2008 a 4chan meetup. I’ve discovered the meetup via the cosplay.com forums and was interested in visiting out of curiosity. I was just me recording the meetup, nothing else. The video lasted on Youtube for four years until a redditor posted the link to /r/videos. Then my inbox showed up with ironic “le reddit” comments seemingly coming from 4chan. But most of the visitors came from reddit and ironically posted these comments. They posted these comments because the meetup that I recorded was embrassing to them as it showed /b/tards and by extent some 4channers as they are: Mostly socially awkward.

Yes, the reddit paranoia is a long line of tradition of false flagging. When 4channers commit a prank and then blame another rivial site for doing it. The same thing happened with Ebaums world, 9Gag, and now reddit.

But apparently someone got so butthurt about the reality of how awkward (and normal) some 4channers are that he/she filed a false privacy complaint with the intention of forcing me to remove the video. Since YouTube does not allow me to contest privacy complaints, I was forced to takedown the video. But it merely proves that the le reddit paranoia is mostly fake. And now soon it’s available to all to see, exclusively on Yotsuba Society along with all the comments I’ve saved before I took down the video. However, I actually still have the video not only in recovered .mp4 form, but the original MPEG-2 video I recorded in 2008. Sometime around mid-Feburary of this year I will reupload the video on this website, along with the recovered comments from the YouTube page before I took down the video. Let’s see if they can try to force me to take it down from my own website.

Ndee “Jkid” Okeh YSJkid@gmail.com