An Analytical critique of Attention Whores on 4chan and why they're

>>37802452
But wheres the harm you may ask? What harm is there in letting people shitpost a bunch of memes? I'll tell you. The reason is because deep underneath all the memes and attention grabbing nonsense is a deeper issue. The issue of attention grabbing, the issue of putting your voice out there and wanting to be heard no matter what bullshit you might be talking about.

It encourages people to behave in awful ways and do whatever is necessary in order to rake in the responses. Few and far between are the well thought out posts which evoke true sentiment, or attempt to tackle a deeper issue. And the ones that do barely get 10 replies if they're lucky.

So where is the incentive for well thought out posts to be made? There is none. No one wants to take time to write an intelligible thought when you can get 10 times the amount of responses by posting a cartoon frog and an inflammatory statement.

2/10

>>37802469
You might say, "Well, some of those shitty threads which go over 200 actually have some well thought out arguments." And while this may be the case for a small minority. It certainly isn't the norm.

Usually the aim of these "arguments" is to smugly imply that the person above you has a line of reasoning which is faulty. The use of greentext. And the greentext is usually just one line of dialogue such as:
>"Implying your argument isn't bullshit"

And this itself is the devolving of arguments into low effort "debates" which the other person may have to type out several paragraphs just to prove the other person wrong based on a single line of text.

3/10

>>37802489
So why is this happening? Who's to blame? I can't honestly say, but if you think about branding, and how they have a logo and a catchphrase to market and advertise their product to a mass audience. Perhaps the general 4chan public has picked up on the effectiveness of corporate marketing.

Or perhaps it's the laziness of the people posting. Why put in effort at all when you can just shitpost and garner a ton of attention?

Now don't misunderstand, I'm not against shitposting in small quantities. The amount of levity they bring may be beneficial for those who don't like to involve themselves in super serious discussion.

4/10

>>37802507
But I'm talking about a lower level of public dialogue. I have some friends who post on 4chan, and they use 4chan memes in real life. Generally I find this behavior to be cringy. But why is it cringy? They're just acting the same in real life as they do on the board.

Most of the things I find cringy are when they bring up memes. So why are memes cringy? I think memes are cringy because its socially awkward to use them in real life unless you're among friends who also use those memes (in which case it's only slightly less cringy)

Memes themselves which are either a phrase, image reaction or both convey concepts and ideas generally for humorous purposes.

5/10

>>37802530
It's easy to convey these more complex concepts with a single image which sums the entire thing up. A meme is worth a thousand words in this case.

So you could say speed plays a role as well. For those who want to simply put their ideas out there in an instant and have other people get the general concept of what they're trying to say, memes could be useful to convey that information.

Image reactions themselves generally serve this purpose. Supplementing their view with perhaps a facial expression which the person may or may not be making in reaction to their post. (Often times people will just post funny faces because it gets responses.)

6/10

>>37802559
Avatarfagging is another way in which people manipulate others into responding to a post. Avatarfagging for those who don't know, is posting an image of a character, (usually the same character every post) next to a large block of text in order to insure that it's responded to.

Avatarfagging gives that person an identity which stands out from other Anons, and therefore is more likely to be responded to. The problem is that giving that person attention means other less flamboyant posts are lost in the mire. It becomes a fight for attention, who can say the craziest thing, or post the best image alongside it to have the greatest chance at getting a response.

Some people as a rule, will ignore these people. But they tend to be few and far between.

7/10

>>37802452
The idea of language historically and as it is observed in linguistics is that it gets simpler. As time goes on, though, one language can dilute and split into multiple new ones.

Humans can observe imagery and are good at understanding with minimal context. Memes are the perfect optimization of this, where all one needs is some understanding of the origin of the image or if it's ironic understanding *why* (this is why sometimes you see artifacted jpeg indian memes used as irony).

4chan is simply the flagship of this movement. Who doesn't want simplification of languages and unique contextual jokes for cliques who get it?

>>37802583
Namefagging or Tripfagging (yes I know I have one, how nice of you to notice) is a way for someone to establish their identity with a name.

However over the years it's garnered a negative stigma, (and rightly so for the most part) of being just a way to whore for attention and stand out among a sea of Anons.

Being an Anon for an attention whore is alienating. How can you garner attention if people don't know that it's you making the posts?

8/10

>>37802614
The human side to it all is that humans crave attention. It's not a weird thing to do. We all tend to do it to some extent. But whether or not we're heard all comes down to chance.

Did the Anon who read your post feel it was worthy enough to respond to? Would making a proper well thought out response take too much time?

If your post doesn't get responded to, it can feel like maybe what you had to say wasn't important. Or that it was a waste of time to even try. Again, it all cycles back to that low effort high reward system.

9/10

>>37802644
What can we do to stop it? Well the answer is, probably nothing. The system is already too ingrained. It's too easy to make low effort high reward posts and gather all the attention you want without any effort at all.

Unless we all stopped responding to obvious bait posts, we'll never establish a more utopian 4chan which prides itself on quality posts and well thought out ideas and concepts.

See? Even the idea of that is laughable isn't it? We'll never get there because people are too lazy, stubborn, and unwilling to change. And that's why I believe attention whores are destroying the site, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

10/10

>>37802452
>>37802592
I posted a response, but since I've seen the whole thing now, I'll add one thing:

Be better. Of course there's bait and such, but you have to make the step and be better before anyone else. Your statement can apply to society as a whole. If people wanted to have thoughtful discussion rather than respond to a bait meme, we'd have had the industrial revolution by he 1500s.

To end this, you either have to separate yourself from it and advance, or make a damn good argument towards why we should stop.

it's disheartening that the state of affairs and status quo is such that sincerity is nearly impossible.
long live the meme.

>>37802452
I didn't read your gay ass thread, you aren't a good writer

>>37803350
But how did you know if you didn't read the gay ass thread

>>37802452
This is so long I am going to need to grab a snack first hold up anon.

>>37803433
Can you summarize it for me please? To be fair, few people are going to take the time to read that

Thanks for posting this OP. Thanks other anons for providing illustrations.

>>37802452
I too dislike the use of memes and reaction images but their is nothing you can do its mostly underage people that read about "le epic 4chan meem xDDD" its what they expect the user base to be

>dat affirmation via archival

File: the fuck.png (219KB, 561x561px) Image search: [Google]

219KB, 561x561px

You're pretty shit at writing, you're trying so hard to seem quirky and smart with all your questions and whatnot that it makes the entire piece hard to read. If you understood your audience and your own writing better you'd understand that your entire style of presenting this came off as very "Reddit"-esque, something that fucks with your overall credibility and lowers the chances of anyone caring to actually read your whole post significantly. You hit the right points but it's such a shitty read that there's almost nobody that will actually care enough to go through it all or take anything away from it.

6/10 (stay after class so we can discuss your willy scores as well)

-Prof. Sage

>>37804132
Thanks for the critique. I'm sorry that the format or form bothered you. Any comments on the content itself though?

>>37802452
Yo OP,
[email protected]

>>37804169
There's not much to say about it, you stated the obvious about a well-known issue with a site that's been complete shit for a full decade now. Overall it was a lot of nothing with no real purpose besides getting 3 or 4 (you)s, although I suppose you're already well aware of that given the subject of your work. I might be willing to give you a half-point extra for shitposting differently than I'm used to seeing, if you give me a succ after hours

>>37804307
Thank you for your thoughts anon.

>>37802452
t.14yearOldIntellectual
Fuck off to Tumblr