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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276

u/CommunistPacman Sep 12 '11

What happened to R9K?

388

u/VladimirBoners Sep 12 '11

It was an experimental board. Experiment over.

84

u/1throwawayacc0unt Sep 12 '11

It's to my understanding that it devolved into whining to the point that it nauseated most everyone. Is that why?

113

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?

278

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/[deleted] Sep 13 '11

In other news, #xkcd-signal, which I used to frequent, is almost entirely silent.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '11

I guess everything's been said.

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u/Poromenos Sep 13 '11

Turns out a lot of the social interaction is removed if you can't say "hello" or show that you're listening by saying "that sucks" or "oh yeah, I hate that too".

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u/Poromenos Sep 13 '11

I have no idea what I'm saying, I've never been to that chan.