Jow Forums seems like a simple sequential imageboard where everybody seems the same posts as long as they visit around the same time, albeit with a high turnover.
But considering how extensively mapped user information is--massive databases exist (and are commercially available and the entire interweb is backdoored anyway) dedicated to deanonymizing the entire population of the planet on a per-user basis by cross-referencing all of our accounts, activity, IPs and presumably heuristic shit like our writing styles--how plausible is it that we could each be seeing a slightly different version of Jow Forums, but have no way of ever proving this because the system has the ability to ensure that all of our social contacts (specifically those who we might be inferred to ever ask for verification, which I doubt many of us ever do so it's a low risk anyway) also see more or less the same thing we do?
I've been wondering more and more lately whether Jow Forums is simply a platform facilitating discussion, or if it's actually a Japanese AI superweapon which is actively matching people and ideas in a sophisticated and meaningful way.
I'm a freeware/indie game developer and years ago I was active in a certain bubble of indie communities (mostly before we even called it "indie" stuff) with a bunch of very cool and talented people. Many of whom, like me, grew disillusioned or were chased out of the communities when the gamergate psyop hit.
A few months ago there was some obscure thread in one of the active boards which derailed into talking about oldschool indie shit and as the thread progressed a bunch of us realised we knew one another from back then. Like, it didn't develop in a way that enabled people to LARP, everyone was cagey about our identities and we kind of exchanged clues and counter-clues until we were sure.
There were at least four of us who were friends back in the day but hadn't spoken for like ten years and apparently we all just happened to be posting in the same thread by "coincidence".
For Jow Forums is trivial to prove what you're saying is bullshit. Just compare the gazillion archives run over the world by different individuals. Alternatively rent two different VPS and compare boards over time.
Sebastian Smith
It's like people with similar interests want to engage in discussions for said interests. And as such visit sites where they could discuss said interests. Truly makes you think.
Adam Taylor
>rent two different VPS and compare boards over time That's assuming that this tactic is sufficient to anonymise you from the perspective of a hypothetical system like that. Even TOR turned out to be compromised in ways nobody knew about for a long time, and if Jow Forums really is a cultural warfare mechanism then we're dealing with state-level data.
>Just compare the gazillion archives Putting everything into archives together doesn't mean they weren't served into different buckets originally.
>run ... by different individuals prove it
Juan Hall
>Jow Forums is simply a platform facilitating discussion, or if it's actually a Japanese AI superweapon which is actively matching people and ideas in a sophisticated and meaningful way. >shitposting Does not compute
Nathan Torres
If archives were really a vulnerability then the way you'd deal with that would be by pre-emptively satisfying that need with your own ostensibly independent archives.
Just saiyajin.
Samuel Ramirez
Your reading comprehension is just incredible.
Levi Brooks
No, it is just above your brainlet level. >I'm a freeware/indie game developer >was active in a certain bubble of indie communities >there was some obscure thread in one of the active boards >a bunch of us realised we knew one another from back then Let's simplify it a bit for you: >someone with interest/work >active in a community >now in a big community >happens to know others of previous community
Grayson King
Yeah let's just ignore the actual question in favour of devoting energy to dismissing anecdotes, that sounds like a great path to the truth.
The whole point is that a system like this would have maximum plausible deniability. The OP was describing something designed for that exact fucking purpose, genius.
It's a neat idea, but in practice it would be too easy to expose by caching the website from different locations. That said, we know from Snowden's leaks that GHCQ has developed "sophisticated tools" to "manipulate online discussion". So it's not inconceivable that we're being tracked by some alphabet agency program which is posting in the same threads as us, or even creating new threads designed to draw us in, which are carefully crafted to manipulate us in subtle ways. After all, Facebook is on record as having experimented with changing people's political views by choosing which news stories they see.
Because these posts are tailored to your individual psyche, another person could see the exact same thread, with the exact same words in the exact same order, but wouldn't be affected in the same way. Maybe you see posts which are designed to instil a sense of hopelessness and apathy, but somebody else just sees shitposting, because their mental triggers aren't being pulled.
Camden Gomez
>pre Jow Forums No one likes anime except the weird kids >post Jow Forums Anime is mainstream >pre 4ch Gay guys like being guys >post 4ch Gay guys like being girls >pre 4ch People weren't autists requiring everything to be brand new clean and "modern" >post 4ch Everything that is old is cancer and aids and poverty neck yourself if you can't afford what's new
Christian Cox
not the guy you responded to, but... how the fuck this delusional user has anything to do with OP's question? just because this post is in this thread doesn't make it truth.
Chase Morris
I wonder how many papers were written on Jow Forums.
>So it's not inconceivable that we're being tracked by some alphabet agency program which is posting in the same threads as us, or even creating new threads designed to draw us in, which are carefully crafted to manipulate us in subtle ways. I mean, that's the whole purpose of the "threat matrix" system, right? Only a couple of us are Al Qaeda commanders, yet the system was inverted a while back from the previous watchlist-based system (like Main Core, he FEMA-maintained list of everyone who was supposed to be rounded up and arrested during a national emergency under the REX84 executive order stuff) to one in which every citizen of the fucking planet is ranked according to some kinda dissidence algorithm. There must be some informational reason for doing that as opposed to just keeping track of people who have actually demonstrated some reason that ostensible public protection agencies should be watching them, and remember, it's all cross-referenced.
I think anyone who actually pays attention to Snowden type shit is aware of the potential at least, but that's only a question of what kind of nefarious shit the Americans are up to. I guess the question here is who else is in the game. Back when the Berlin Wall fell the Stasi's records were preserved and exposed to the public (you could access your own government surveillance file), and I often wonder how many nerds the five eyes motherfuckers pissed off by compromising all their internet nodes.
Reminder that m00t was never real and everybody knew this once.
Gavin Morris
yeah but oldschool anime is a Japanese meme warfare superweapon too
Judging by that CNN story, we're still outside mainstream awareness, so probably not many.
Christian Price
it is kinda weird how for the first few years after 2004 the boards steadily sped up, but even though traffic has increased immensely it doesn't feel like the boards are any faster than they were five years ago
i mean it kinda got to the maximum level that a human can keep up with and didn't get worse
>There must be some informational reason for doing that as opposed to just keeping track of people who have actually demonstrated some reason that ostensible public protection agencies should be watching them
Total information awareness. The idea is to monitor every second of every person's life, have machine learning algorithms pick over the data until they can identify what causes a person to become deviant (terrorist, criminal, political radical, winds up in unproductive job, et cetera). So even if you never do anything wrong, you're still a useful data source, as the algorithms need a baseline to compare the deviants against.
Proof that Google for one is seeking to control us:
Who would choose to write a paper on Jow Forums as opposed to Facebook or Twitter? Smaller userbase, can't link posts back to real-world identities and demographics, can't even track a given user's posts, site known to far less people in the first place, controversial content, culture of insincerity.
Luis Perez
The set of positive integers is infinite.
Adrian Cruz
Or.. literally do this with a different computer in a different location.
You have to be 18+ to post on Jow Forums.
Christopher Myers
superschizo
Parker Lewis
Sometimes when I'm listening to music on youtube there's like a diss track which I'm pretty sure isn't in the original song. It's in the voice of the original artist but it's softly saying things like "hmm" and basically tut-tutting disapprovingly.
Albums which I've been listening to for years and know by heart. It'll be like the 2009 upload of something from 1998 yet I know what I'm hearing isn't the original.
Anthony Myers
This
Charles Jackson
Is the question of determining whether we're all sharing a fairly disorganised or cryptically intelligently organised discussion matrix p or np
