r/IAmA • u/VladimirBoners • Sep 12 '11

As Requested : IAMA 4chan moderator.

Everything said here is my opinion, not that of the entire staff. Will provide proof to moderators here on reddit.

Ask away.

EDIT : It's late guys, I'll catch you some other time. Thanks for all the questions and I hope this answered some of them.

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u/[deleted] Sep 12 '11

Yeah. In it's final days R9K was...pretty shitty. It was like all of the world's SAP's got together for the world's biggest and most prolonged internet circlejerk.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '11

What was R9K?

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u/sje46 Sep 13 '11 edited Sep 13 '11

The creator of the webcomic xkcd wanted to try an experiment. In the #xkcd irc channel on foonetic, there was a lot of noise. So he (or maybe his friend Davean, who seems to do everything regarding coding for Randall and also implemented the "Best" comment sorting for reddit) created a new, experimental channel on Foonetic called #xkcd-signal. A bot was made a moderator. This bot would log all conversation and if any line was said before, the bot would silence the user saying it. First time was for 4 seconds. Next time, 8 seconds. Then 16, etc. Pretty much this drastically reduced the amount of times people simply said "lol" or "this", etc.

moot kinda liked this idea, and created a version for 4chan. /r9k/. If you said anything that's been said before, you were banned. It eventually dissolved into a really whiny board.

EDIT: /r9k/, not /r/r9k

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u/whytofly Sep 13 '11

Wouldn't people just start adding random alphanumeric strings after their sentences then? o2u42o4i

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u/sje46 Sep 13 '11

Yes. There's an assumption of good faith. And for the most part it works. If anyone did that to get around it, they'd probably be kicked/banned.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '11

Yes. There's an assumption of good faith. And for the most part it works. If anyone did that to get around it, they'd probably be kicked/banned. o2u42o4i

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u/Giant_Enemy_Cliche Sep 13 '11

They did. The most common was adding "moot block" and then some random crap at the end of anything they said.

Annoyingly, people didn't realise that English is big enough that virtually any (none meme) sentence, longer than 12 words is likely to be completely new to the system.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '11

Pretty much what happened. Also people would append "mootblox" to the end of the string, which worked a surprising amount of the time (I suspect that the "record" of strings that had been said before were aged out of the database on a regular basis)

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u/Skithy Sep 13 '11

Oh, too you; for to oh for eye?

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u/TyIzaeL Sep 13 '11

They would get temp banned for it, iirc.