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Friday, June 27, 2014

/v/ Vs. NeoGAF: Chaos Vs. Order

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - We're siding with 4chan, of course.

I haven't talked about the famous image board 4chan at all on KoopaTV, besides when I said the inspiration for Trayvon Tyson's Punch-Out!! came from there. I have talked about NeoGAF a lot, though. (Apparently not enough to fill that whole sentence with links, though.)

So /v/, one of the sections of 4chan and one of a few dedicated to videogames (parts of 4chan are safe for work, including /v/ which is linked, and parts of it are not, such as the infamous /b/), has been doing some admirable things lately. These include two cards to Nintendo, pictured below. Meanwhile, NeoGAF continues to be the self-important cesspool of non-compassionate "tolerant" fascism.

When news broke out that Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's president, could not personally attend to E3 due to his physician advising against flying (he recently underwent surgery to remove a growth in his bile duct), /v/ created a card for him.

/v/ Satoru Iwata get well card 4chan
/v/ hoping Iwata gets well.

Meanwhile, upon hearing the news about Iwata, NeoGAF had a disgusting discussion thread with all sorts of mean-spirited comments about Nintendo's doom. (Mean-spirited comments that would not even come to fruition, since Nintendo easily won E3 2014.)

After E3 ended, /v/ once again made another card. This one was sent to Nintendo's Treehouse.


/v/ directly Nintendo of America E3 Treehouse card
See? It's even a tree.

The Treehouse guys really did a good job. They were a huge part in how Nintendo won. And how did GAF react? They made an entire argumentative thread cursing /v/ for their thank you gift and being completely creepy, locating and posting private vacation pictures of Nintendo Treehouse members.

It should be no wonder why KoopaTV would rate Microsoft above Sony when making that E3 winners/losers article: Sony actually reached out and name-dropped NeoGAF. No one else did that. Perhaps NeoGAF was so beholden to Sony that they felt the need to trash Nintendo in any way possible? NeoGAF does have a known pro-Sony bias, so it's a mutual alliance between GAF and Sony. Remember, NeoGAF was one of the driving forces behind the anti-Nintendo "Miiquality" movement!

Let's compare the moderation styles of NeoGAF and 4chan. NeoGAF is a heavy-handed fascist nanny-state: There is zero sense of humour on there, and they even describe themselves as a place with "careful moderation." Moderators will delete and ban you for any dissent from the hivemind. The NeoGAF hivemind exists to stifle discussion and the truth. After all, if what you say is offensive to any group of people out there besides Nintendo or conservatives (as true things generally are, along with good jokes), it "disrupts" the community. That's bad. You are to be eliminated. Deleted from existence. And NeoGAF never forgives or forgets dissent. Other forums, like NSider2 (which KoopaTV “contributor” YoshiRider123 is a moderator of) are taking after NeoGAF's example and are all the worse for it. I'll go into more detail about that in a later article.


Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn Ashera description Order Stability Past Certainty Restraint restriction
Replace “Ashera” with “NeoGAF.”

Meanwhile, 4chan is an experiment in the wonders of minarchy. There is some form of moderation: It's very passive, and responsive to things that are illegal (like child porn) or against other very reasonable rules. A majority of the Internet's memes and wonderful creative things originate or are inspired from 4chan, including many of NeoGAF's oft-spammed reaction pictures (without credit to 4chan, so they're plagiarizers too) and even avatars of 4chan haters. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, that even includes the inspiration for Trayvon Tyson's Punch-Out!!, arguably KoopaTV's greatest accomplishment so far. There are many naysayers out there who say that we need a strong, intrusive central government to “run” things. I say, look at 4chan. The free market works without government intervention, and we're all the worse because there is that intervention. If we believe that the best government is very small government, then that applies to website moderation, too.

When people are free to express themselves, yes, you get a home of dudes who express hate. But you also get wonderful things to happen in this land of anti-censorship. You get maximum creativity. Sometimes good entertainment does need to push boundaries. You get people posting without fear that the nanny-state might disapprove of something. You get a much more relaxed and happy culture than a rigid, bureaucratic, uptight order. Happiness results in more productivity, and that increases the value of a community. You also can challenge the orthodoxy. If there is no prevailing "correct" view (which is the nanny's opinion in the nanny-state), then all sides have to substantiate themselves. Nothing is "assumed" to be true. It's through that honest discourse we can get the truth, or at least the best points from all.


Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn Yune description freedom chaos transformation future mystery
Replace “Yune” with “4chan.”

At NeoGAF, people have this pent-up "outrage" inside since they're so subjugated, censored, and conditioned to obey their fascist overlords. This makes them lash out at the slightest "injustice" around. What it does is scare average people off, and make it a hotbed bubble of extremism. This would be fine and comparable to some less-than-desirable websites out there (like Stormfront) if they were not acknowledged by major videogame industry players like Sony. NeoGAF prides itself on being a great source for videogame news and "leaks" from various videogame developers. This gives it credibility in the industry. I'm not really sure how credible that credibility is or why it's there, but any developer who comes around there is either frightened off, using NeoGAF for the money its members have to support their products, or is as fascist as NeoGAF.

During the writing of this article (this week), NeoGAF decided to create their own card for Iwata. This is, of course, after trashing /v/ for making a card and after trashing Nintendo and Iwata. NeoGAF will include every submission into the card, while 4chan was selective. 4chan competed for the card's real-estate: This means people tried hard to make quality submissions to please Nintendo. It's a demonstration of market forces at work. Meanwhile, NeoGAF's submission quality is very low, because everyone gets in. As you may recall, Nintendo itself excluded entries when making their own card. Nintendo sides with 4chan's market practices!

KoopaTV sides with freedom. /v/ is obviously in the right, and that's why you see nice things come from there instead of the pettiness from NeoGAF. We want nice things to come from here, too! You can help!


KoopaTV's own moderation style is modeled after /v/. You can comment anonymously, and you won't be censored. We ask that both dispute and agreement be made intelligently and constructively, and perhaps we will create something new and amazing with you, the reader. Thanks for reading!



The pictures that aren't /v/'s cards in this article are from Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, which Ludwig discusses extensively here.
The article with more detail on YoshiRider123 and NSider2 is this!
For another moderation style, see this analysis on Miiverse's.
It turns out that you cannot talk about EVERYTHING on 4chan, such as #GamerGate!
Naughtiness is allied with chaos, while niceness is allied with order.
Chrom is no longer a moderator of NSider2, and the whole website pretty much collapsed.
When the orderly moderators of NeoGAF all quit the site, it devolves into the natural state of things: CHAOS.
Chaos vs. Order was announced as the final theme in Splatoon 2's Splatfests.
Read about the Chaos vs. Order in its dedicated article here, which makes repeated reference to this article.

2 comments :

  1. I frequently visit /v/, basically on a daily basis, but I've got to admit that this whole article is sort of biased... Don't get me wrong, I really, really dislike NeoGAF (especially for being a boring, no-fun-allowed hugbox), but I think you should express the reasons regarding your dislike for NeoGAF in a more... objective manner, I guess.

    Other than that, great article! I love and prefer /v/ myself, as it is the epitome of free-speech online, and as a whole I think that /v/ is more unique and charming than most gaming forums.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ...Yeah, I know it's biased. It's hard to be un-biased when this site has been directly attacked by NeoGAF on multiple occasions, so rather than try to pretend to be objective (which I never claimed to be) I might as well let out how I really feel!

      Thanks for enjoying the article, sir!

      Delete

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