“Go back to Plebbit”: Mapping the Platform Antagonism between 4chan and Reddit

Team Members

Shirley Chan, Claudia Maria Cutrupi, Eleanor Griffiths, Sal Hagen, Victor Loye, Isabella Possaghi, and Daniël de Zeeuw

Contents

Summary of Key Findings

Reddit and 4chan’s platform antagonism have been part and parcel of both platforms, but particularly so on 4chan. Here, a media ideology of the Web as radically free remained constant over time and across political and apolitical boards (/b/ and /pol/). This clashed with views of Reddit as controlled and restricted—on /pol/ often in an anti-Semitic manner. Imaginaries of 4chan on Reddit were more diverse, differing over time and across subreddits, with views ranging from affectionate ones of 4chan as a “hive mind” to further the agenda of redditors to more antagonistically as a malicious source of misinformation.

1. Introduction

With the digital permeating human life to such an extent it has become a “total social fact” (Mauss 1966; Marres 2017), the study of the online has moved beyond separating the “virtual” from the “real” (Rogers 2013). Yet to this day, shards of early cyberspace imaginaries remain present within certain forums and message boards. These pose the Internet as a realm where the norms of the offline do not apply, imagining online platforms as distinct territories or sovereign lands, each with their own cultural practices, platform vernaculars (Gibbs et al. 2015), and spatial metaphors. Countering the idea of the Web as placeless, such visions can encourage “territoriality”, i.e. the “symbolic process of magically appropriating, owning and controlling the material environment in which you live”, but where actual ownership resides elsewhere (Cohen [1972] 1997, 65). As has been observed in subculture studies, this sense of territoriality often hinges on antagonism towards the other, most typically as hostility towards a mainstream. In anonymous online spaces, we for instance see this manifested as an opposition between the “mask culture” of imageboards like 4chan versus the “face culture” of platforms like Facebook (De Zeeuw 2019).

Figure 1: Representing the Web as different geographical locations.

For this exploratory project, instead of oppositions between mainstream and subculture, we were interested in the antagonism between subcultural online groups. Following previous work on the relation between 4chan and Tumblr (Hagen forthcoming), we now considered the relation between 4chan and Reddit. 4chan is rife with antagonistic discourse towards Reddit, scorning those not transgressive enough to “go back to Reddit” or belonging on “plebbit” (Figure 2). Reddit is larger and therefore likely features a less homogenous hostility, even housing subreddits dedicated to commenting on 4chan’s culture (e.g. r/4chan and r/greentext). Like a battle between siblings, from the outset we can already hypothesise this antagonism might often arise because of their similarities: the sites share a culture of (pseudo-)anonymity (Van der Nagel and Frith 2015), play (Massanari 2015), trolling (Phillips 2015), and “toxic technocultures” (Massanari, 2017). When, how, and why did different hostilities between groups on these platforms arise? What can studying their relationship say about how these groups see themselves? Has the relationship between 4channers and Redditors changed over time?

Figure 2: A common meme used by 4chan anons to scorn what they perceive as “plebbitors”.

Theoretically, we worked with the notion of platform antagonism to denote the animus between groups on different Web platforms. Such platform antagonisms can be often politically driven, for instance with left-wing pockets of Twitter becoming eager targets for far-right users of 4chan’s /pol/ board. Beyond this political contestation, however, platform antagonism specifically addresses how this opposition can be entangled with the technicality and materiality of platforms and the Web at large. For instance, 4chan’s lax moderation and its users’ absolutist position on free speech (even when it silences others) might invite views of Reddit, where moderators play a key role, as “censored”. Vice versa, 4chan’s anonymity might invite oppositional views on the site as a singular entity or “disinformation machine” (Hagen and Tuters 2021). As such, platform antagonisms might not only consist of political-ideological rifts, but may also arise from materially contingent “media ideologies” (Gehrson 2010) on the Web—what the Web is, who it is for, and how it ought to be used.

2. Initial Datasets

For Reddit, we gathered all comments that mentioned “4chan” since the website’s start in 2005 using Pushshift (Baumgartner 2020). This resulted in 2,328,056 comments. We filtered comments by bots by listing the most common authors and excluding the comments by posters that made at least 100 posts and that we verified as being automated.

4chan’s ephemerality and time constraints meant we had limited options in terms of data archives. Ultimately we used two datasets: a full 4chan/pol/ dump from November 2013 onwards, partly derived from the archive 4plebs and partly from 4CAT (Peeters and Hagen 2018), and, to contrast Reddit’s early data, an old 4chan/b/ dataset of five million posts between 2006 and 2008 (the Jason Scott archive).

3. Research Questions

• When and how did platform antagonisms arise between users of 4chan and Reddit?

• When were 4chan users most concerned with Reddit? Do the considerations of Reddit differ over time?

• What subreddits actively engage with 4chan, when, does their consideration of 4chan differ across subreddit and over time?

4. Methodology and initial datasets

The primary goal was to use a digital methods approach to identify key moments in 4chan and Reddit’s platform antagonisms and extract how users on both platforms imagined the other. To do so, we first mapped quantitative trends. With the Reddit dataset, we created a streamgraph of mentions of 4chan separated per subreddit. For 4chan/pol/, we made a line graph with absolute and relative trends of Reddit-mentions per month. The 4chan/b/ archive unfortunately lacked time information, so a trend graph was impossible.

With these quantitative trends, we then selected key “snapshots” for qualitative coding. As the first snapshot we chose the earliest data (2005-2008) for historical comparison. We then took the Reddit streamgraph as a basis to identify three subsequent spikes, and extracted comments during roughly one month. For Reddit, we selected two different subreddits per spike. These were culturally divergent, which fitted our exploratory approach; the goal was to get a rough grasp on how 4chan was considered and antagonised over time and on different subreddits. For equal comparison, we mirrored this timeframe for the 4chan data. As snapshots we ultimately chose:

• The ‘early years’: The start of the Reddit dataset from 2005 through 2008 and the 4chan/b/ dataset from 2006 through 2008. Here we could take a larger timeframe because less data was available. The main interest was to have a historical reference point: did platform antagonisms between 4chan and Reddit slowly grow or was it already present from the outset? /b/ was selected instead of /pol/ because the latter did not exist yet and /b/ was 4chan’s most culturally influential board at the time.

• Subreddits: All subreddits but mostly the general “reddit.com”; subreddits were only introduced in 2007.

• August 2014: We chose the start of the Gamergate debacle considering it has been said to play a key role in the politicisation of online subcultures and push of young men towards the (alt-)right.

  • Subreddits: We chose r/KotakuInAction and r/TumblrinAction as subreddits, two spaces that were involved in the Gamergate controversy. These skewed more “pro-Gamergate”, so we hypothesised that redditors on these subreddits would be more affectionate of 4chan.

• January 2017: This month was chosen because it featured the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president.

  • Subreddits: We chose r/The_Donald and r/politics as subreddits. r/The_Donald was a well-known pro-Trump space whose culture shared many elements with /pol/, for instance with the use of the same vernacular (“based”, “redpilled”) and memes (Pepe the Frog, NPCs). r/politics contrasts this, being a large liberal-skewing subreddit. Views on 4chan were thus hypothesised to be more antagonistic on the latter than the former.

• January 2021: This month was chosen because of the The Capitol Hill breach. Various cultural elements that first emerged on /pol/ would appear during this attack, like QAnon. It would thus form an interesting case study on how 4chan(/pol/) could have been related to this event.

  • Subreddits: We chose r/news, Reddit’s general news subreddit, and r/PoliticalCompassMemes, a highly vernacular subreddit dedicated to the “Political Compass” meme and niche political tribes.

We assigned one member of the project for each of these snapshots. We read through and labelled the posts on the basis of two categories:

• Whether an imaginary of the other platform (4chan or Reddit) was expressed in the comment, and if so, what kind of imaginary. These emerged through grounded theory.

• Whether the comment spoke in an affectionate or antagonistic manner about the other platform.

A single post could be labelled with multiple imaginaries. Most posts were left unlabelled, being either neutral or ambiguous. We stopped labelling when we categorised at least 100 comments with a specific imaginary per platform, per case study. Ideally, we should have coded the posts with two or more researchers for intercoder reliability, but this was not possible considering our short research timespan of 3.4 days. To buttress and represent our qualitative findings, we made several word trees with words following subphrases like “4chan is” and “Reddit is” (Jason Davies n.d.).

Figure 3: A schematic overview of the method steps.

5. Findings

Coding Scheme

For the coding scheme of imaginaries, we came up with the following categories:

4chan

• 4chan as the source of memes and Internet play

• 4chan as a boogeyman / hornet’s nest

• 4chan as countercultural / anti-hegemonic

• 4chan as a space for malicious (political) actors

• 4chan as a space for rejects / outcasts / the socially inept

• 4chan as a dissimulative environment / hall or mirrors

• 4chan as an “anonymity kingdom” (similar to the above but whereby anonymity was positively positioned as liberatory)

• 4chan as a space for leaks / conspiracies

• 4chan as a hive mind / collective intelligence

Reddit

• Reddit as the “normiefier” of memes / Internet culture

• Reddit as commodified / sellouts

• Reddit as a left-wing / liberal hub

• Reddit as a restricted / censored / controlled space

• Reddit as a source of (trivial) information

• Reddit as pretentious intellectuals

• Reddit as manipulable / a trolling target

• Reddit as neckbeards

Note that this coding scheme was preliminary and subjective—more intercoder discussion was needed to articulate themes that better represented the types of platform antagonisms. However, the above sufficed for this exploratory project.

Quantitative Trends

On Reddit (Figure 4; Figure 5), we saw that semi-frequent mentions of 4chan were already present at the inception of the platform. It later grew in specific subreddits like r/programming, r/AskReddit, r/funny, r/WTF, and r/gaming. r/4chan was also already present from 2010 onwards. In 2014, we see a first notable shift with Gamergate, where r/KotakuInAction and r/TumblrInAction appear frequently. From 2016 onwards, we see the emergence of politically oriented subreddits like r/politics, r/The_Donald, and r/conspiracy. This reflects how the far-right /pol/ increasingly came to be representative of 4chan in the public eye (Hagen and Tuters 2021). In the later years, we see an appearance of subreddits like r/PoliticalCompassMemes, r/CryptoCurrency, and r/wallstreetbets, the latter famously describing itself with the phrase “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”.

Figure 4: Streamgraph of comments on Reddit mentioning “4chan”, separated per subreddit (excluded subreddits with <100 mentions per month).

Figure 5: Streamgraph of comments on Reddit mentioning “4chan”, separated per subreddit (excluded subreddits with <100 mentions per month). Zoomed-in for our snapshots.

Figure 6: Absolute and relative volume of mentions of of Reddit on 4chan/pol/.

In the circle pack graphs below (Figure 7; Figure 8), we see the categories of imaginaries we assigned to the comments per snapshot, together with the volume of affectionate and antagonistic comments. Note that these are preliminary results: more intercoding is needed to solidify more reliable numbers.

Figure 7: Types of imaginaries we categorised per snapshot of mentions of 4chan on Reddit.

Figure 8: Types of imaginaries we categorised per snapshot of mentions of Reddit on 4chan (/b/ and /pol/).

Snapshots

Below we briefly summarise our qualitative findings per snapshot.

2006-2008: The ‘Early Days’

Reddit (reddit.com and other subreddits)

The three dominant 4chan imaginaries on Reddit in the early days are 4chan as a boogeyman, and a space for the socially inept, and as the source of memes. Somewhat expectedly, posts of the former two themes are mostly antagonistic, while the latter are largely affectionate. There is also meta-commentary on the identity and relationship between 4chan and Reddit, e.g. “Reddit not being 4chan”, “Reddit becoming 4chan”—a type of othering we might call “platform boundary work”.

Figure 9: Words preceding “turning into 4chan” and succeeding “reddit is” in comments mentioning “4chan” on Reddit between 2006 and 2008.

Figure 10: Example of a redditor expressing concern about reddit becoming like 4chan.

4chan/b/

From the earliest days of our 4chan /b/ archive, antagonism was already very much present towards Redditors, giving credit to the “old rivals” hypothesis. However, it is also quite clear that this is still emergent, with most users viewing Reddit as a “user-driven news website”, softening this blooming antagonistic relationship. Another striking point is how 4channers see Reddit as a resource, a pseudo-intellectual and manipulable community that anons can steer and exploit. Multiple key events (such as the raid on the Church of Scientology in January 2008) increased the visibility of /b/, pushing its users to ramp up the antagonism to drive newcomers “back 2 reddit” in a boundary effort. Finally, and interestingly, the idea that Reddit is a normifier of memes, far down its life-cycle, was already prevalent in those early days. Overall, it seems that there is quite the substantive overlap between the two communities, Reddit being present in multiple posts from users sharing their “daily diet” of websites they visit regularly. A few occurrences of Redditors discovering 4chan and 4channers discovering Reddit also reinforces this user base overlap impression, and with it, this aforementioned antagonistic boundary effort.

Table 1: Examples of comments on 4chan/b/ (2006-2009) discussing Reddit.

August 2014: Gamergate

Reddit (r/TumblrInAction, r/KotakuInAction)

The comments observed on r/KotakuInAction and r/TumblrInAction—two fairly right-wing, pro-Gamergate subreddits—are almost perfectly balanced for “affectionate” and “antagonistic”. Many comments on these subreddits positioned 4chan as a powerful “hive mind” and showed affection with 4chan’s affordances of anonymity, imagined as allowing for anyone to “speak their mind”. At the same time, an equal amount of comments highlighted 4chan’s negative sides, noting the imageboard’s lack of empathy and tendency to form an “echo chamber”.

4chan/pol/

Considering “gamergaters” organised both on 4chan and Reddit, one would hypothesise a softening of antagonism. From the analysed threads, however, it seems that /pol/ antagonises Reddit even during the height of Gamergate. The ‘early days’ also showed ample antagonism, but now it distinctly manifests as criticisms on Reddit’s design, in the eyes of anons affording a restricted, censored, or controlled space. Notably, Reddit’s up- and downvote mechanism is criticised as creating “echo chambers” or “circlejerks”, i.e. spaces popularising ideas that were already popular. More maliciously, the active moderation on Reddit is seen as proof of a conspiracy of elites and Jews controlling its metrics. This contrasts how 4can anons consider their “own” platform, namely as a space for sacred or absolute truths where, because of a lack of ranking mechanisms, ideas are constantly contested and will only “stick” by virtue of truthfulness.

Figure 11: An example of a /pol/ anon antagonising Reddit as a restricted space.

A second dominant theme that arose was /pol/ users considering Reddit as manipulable, a space that could be gamed in order to spread far-right ideas and “redpill the normies”. Such viralistic themes of the Web as manipulable would only grow in the succeeding years with the rise of the alt-right and presidential candidacy of Trump.

January 2017: Trump’s Inauguration

Reddit (r/politics, r/The_Donald)

The subreddits r/politics and r/The_Donald featured contradictory views of 4chan at the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration. r/The_Donald had a largely celebratory perception of 4chan, whilst r/politics differed with a wary and antagonistic perspective.

r/politics is a “politically crosscutting” subreddit focused on the discussion of U.S political discourse with no explicit partisan affiliation (Jungherr et al. 2021, p. 7). r/The_Donald was a subreddit dedicated to the support of Donald Trump. The subreddit was active during January 2017 but was closed by Reddit in June 2020 for violating numerous community rules. The subreddit had 790,000 members who often referred to themselves as “Patriots” (Timberg and Dwoskin 2020, p. 1).

In our snapshot, r/The_Donald users often used affectionate language surrounding 4chan, such as “brothers in arms”, “wizards”, and circulated narratives of 4chan as anti-establishment heroes fighting against dominant power structures that they perceive as corrupt or usurped by left-wing liberals. r/The_Donald also seemed to view 4chan as ideologically like-minded in their right-wing political values and early internet tech utopianistic approaches, and admired their collective intelligence (“hivemind”).

r/politics focused discussion on frustration at 4chan’s attempts to spread disinformation and contribute to “information instability”. Many comments invalidated 4chan users as socially inept, isolated and juvenile. Many found their extreme views, collective actions, and willingness for others to believe them “worrying”.

4chan/pol/

In this snapshot, users of 4chan/pol/ had a very aggressive approach towards Reddit users, perceiving Reddit as a censored, controlled and sycophantic space dominated by left-wing SJW (Social Justice Warriors) and “authoritarian” moderators. Interestingly, 4chan/pol comments also looked down on r/The_Donald subreddit, describing it as a “normie” space that co-opted their “original” memes and attempted to replicate their idiosyncratic style. Many also perceived r/The_Donald as unintelligent and not very “online” such as “Reddit retards”, “plebbit”, “morons”, etc.

Figure 12: Word Tree of 4chan/pol/ commentary concerning Reddit admins in Jan 2017.

January 2021

Reddit (r/PoliticalCompassMemes, r/news)

In light of the Capitol Hill attack in January 2021, the Reddit dataset featuring the subreddits r/news and r/PoliticalCompassMemes express divergent views on 4chan. The former subreddit focuses on news content, while the latter consists of memes with political themes. Mentions of 4chan in r/news center around the “OK”-hand gesture and encompass divergent viewpoints. On one side, several users argue that it started as a joke on 4chan. The comments are neutral in their tone as they neither condone nor praise it. Instead, criticism is directed towards those who take 4chan-content seriously. For example, users highlight that white supremacist groups have appropriated the “OK”-hand gesture and QAnon theories, which originated as memes on 4chan.

Figure 13: Word tree of words preceding “on 4chan” in r/news, January 2021.

Conversely, other users point out that 4chan is a white supremacist and racist space where users hide their opinions behind irony and offensive humour. Tension can be identified between users who still perceive 4chan as “a source of memes and internet play” and users, in the light of the Capitol Hill attack, arguing that the platform should be considered “a space for malicious political actors” and “dissimulative environment”.

Figure 14: Word tree of words succeeding “4chan is” in r/news, January 2021.

Posts from r/PoliticalCompassMemes also consist of various views on 4chan. One interesting aspect is that users in this subreddit display more affection towards 4chan than in r/news. Some highlight that they prefer 4chan’s platform design more than Reddit, connecting it to anonymity and free speech, while Reddit and other “mainstream” platforms are moderated and censored spaces. More specifically, they draw parallels between 4chan and “early” Reddit, emphasising that Reddit has become more censored along with its growth.

Figure 15: Example of Reddit user discussing 4chan’s platform design

In addition, several r/PoliticalCompassMemes users also defend 4chan, arguing that the platform is more diverse than it seems while also pointing out that the political composition of the platform is heterogeneous if one looks beyond /pol/.

4chan/pol/

The 4chan /pol/ dataset from the same period indicates a general antagonistic approach to Reddit similar to the previous years. /pol/ users perceive Reddit as a restricted, censored, controlled space. It is considered the “antithesis of 4chan” due to elements such as commercialisation, moderation and voting system, and individual user identities. In conjunction, Reddit as a hub for left-wing and liberal politics also emerges as a theme as /pol/ users claim that these forces hold control over the platform’s content, for instance, “Reddit is like a mind-training camp for SJWs”.

Figure 16: Example of 4chan user in /pol/ discussing Reddit as a controlled space.

6. Discussion and conclusion

The goal of this project was to untangle how anonymous online groups construct a group identity and sense of territory through antagonising other platforms. While in different manners, we observed that the relation between 4chan and Reddit has been consistent and noteworthy in the history of both platforms. However, the view of Reddit by 4channers has aligned more strictly with our concept of platform antagonism, since it featured more consistently hostile commentary that moreover was more often than not related to the materiality and functioning of Reddit. Notably, the up/downvoting mechanism and the role of moderators were prime targets in the anons’ argument . While this comments on the other, it inevitably also paints a picture of 4chan itself as liberated and rational, an oppositional space where only absolute truths survive. Through untangling such self-imaginaries, we can perhaps grasp how 4chan’s transient and anonymous environment has counterintuitively also managed to crystallise belief.

Through 4chan’s antagonism towards Reddit we also find clear “media ideologies” of what the Web is and how it ought to be used. Notably, Reddit has been criticised as complicit with the commercialisation of the Web, therefore straying from “authentic” forms of online sociality. To the anons, active moderation was not seen as compatible with this form of sociality. We also saw such platform antagonisms were appropriated by far-right /pol/ users over time, seeing Reddit as “controlled”, whether by “SJWs” or “the Jews”.

The fact that 4chan was mentioned semi-frequently during Reddit’s early days shows platform antagonism between Reddit and 4chan has been there from the start. In Reddit’s nascent years, 4chan was already posed as a terrible place, but the consideration was not exclusively antagonistic, also positioning the imageboard as “the source of memes”. Throughout the years, large subreddits have became increasingly concerned with 4chan as a tight-knit collective spreading disinformation and extreme political views. However, more affectionate views have also appeared on other subreddits (r/The_Donald, r/TumblrInAction, r/PoliticalCompassMemes).

We should reiterate the many limitations of this brief and exploratory project: we had a small sample size, the coding scheme was not optimal, and we lacked intercoder reliability. For future research, we also want to experiment more with quantitative and digital methods. For instance, text analysis methods using the corpora of entire subreddits could be useful in characterising different considerations of 4chan across Reddit’s many subfora.

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