The User's Guide to the Comments Section

An English-language imageboard website. Users generally post anonymously, with the most recent posts appearing above the rest. 4chan is split into various boards with their own specific content and guidelines. Registration is not possible (except for staff). It was launched on October 1, 2003.

Age/sex/location (commonly referred to by the shorthand A/S/L, asl or ASL) is an article of Internet slang used in instant messaging programs and in Internet chatrooms. It is used as a question to find out the age, sex (or gender), and general location of the person one is talking to.

A YouTube trend in which adolescents upload videos of themselves asking for commenters to rate their physical attractiveness. In February of 2012, the phenomenon rose in visibility after news media began criticizing the trend as an unhealthy means of seeking approval.

Hand-drawn or computer animation associated with Japan. The word anime is the Japanese term for animation, which means all forms of animated media. Outside Japan, anime refers specifically to animation from Japan or as a Japanese-disseminated animation style often characterized by colorful graphics, vibrant characters and fantastical themes.

See "avatar"

A concept in Hinduism that means "descent", refers to the material appearance or incarnation of a deity on earth. The relative verb to "alight, to make one's appearance" is sometimes used to refer to any guru or revered human being.

4chan's random board. It follows the design of Futaba Channel's Nijiura board. It was the first board created, and is by far 4chan's most popular board, with 30% of site traffic.

See "troll"

A software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering (web crawler), in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. More than half of all web traffic is made up of bots.

See "twitter"

Baby boomers are the demographic cohort following the Silent Generation. There are no precise dates for when this cohort starts or ends; demographers and researchers typically use starting birth years ranging from the early-to-mid 1940s and ending birth years ranging from 1960 to 1964.

A user response to published content on the Internet, written in a designated “Comments” section, often below the published content.

You're in the woods, at midnight, walking past the pine trees with only the sound of the leaves beneath your shoes.

35:55 begins to play behind you.

In Karl Marx's critique of political economy, commodity fetishism is the perception of the social relationships involved in production, not as relationships among people, but as economic relationships among the money and commodities exchanged in market trade. As such, commodity fetishism transforms the subjective, abstract aspects of economic value into objective, real things that people believe have intrinsic value.

A worldwide blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that use a networked platform. The company's platform includes various features, such as social integration, social networking, user profiles, spam and moderation tools, analytics, email notifications, and mobile commenting. It was founded in 2007 by Daniel Ha and Jason Yan as a Y Combinator startup.

An egg is the organic vessel containing the zygote in which an animal embryo develops until it can survive on its own; at which point the animal hatches. An egg results from fertilization of an ovum. Most arthropods, vertebrates, and mollusks lay eggs, although some, such as scorpions and most mammals, do not.

Usenet slang for a period beginning in September 1993, the month that Internet service provider America Online began offering Usenet access to its many users, overwhelming the existing culture for online forums. The influx in Usenet users was also indirectly caused by the aggressive direct mailing campaign by AOL Chief Marketing Officer Jan Brandt in order to beat out CompuServe and Prodigy, which most notably involved distributing millions of floppy disks and CD-ROMs with free trials of AOL.

Before then, Usenet was largely restricted to colleges and universities. Every September, a large number of incoming freshmen would acquire access to Usenet for the first time, taking time to become accustomed to Usenet's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a month or so, these new users would either learn to comply with the networks' social norms or tire of using the service.

See "Usenet"

An online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.[1] They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes visible.

A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a thread, and can be replied to by as many people as so wish.

A philosophy of mind of the Berlin School of experimental psychology. Gestalt psychology is an attempt to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world. The central principle of gestalt psychology is that the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies. The assumed physiological mechanisms on which Gestalt theory rests are poorly defined and support for their existence is lacking.

The term "handle" dates back to the 1970s and comes from Citizens Band radio (CB radio), a short distance radio communications medium. CB radio users would identify themselves by unique nicknames, which became known as handles. When online chat became popular in the 1990s, the term "handle" transferred to the Internet and became a common way for users to identify themselves online.

Donna J. Haraway is a Distinguished American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is the author of numerous books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985) and "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" (1988). Haraway's works have contributed to the study of both human-machine and human-animal relations. Her works have sparked debate in primatology, philosophy, and developmental biology.

Instant messaging is a type of online chat that offers real-time text transmission over the Internet. A LAN messenger operates in a similar way over a local area network. Short messages are typically transmitted between two parties, when each user chooses to complete a thought and select "send". Some IM applications can use push technology to provide real-time text, which transmits messages character by character, as they are composed. More advanced instant messaging can add file transfer, clickable hyperlinks, Voice over IP, or video chat.

a glossary and usage dictionary of computer programmer slang. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

In corpus linguistics a keyword is a word which occurs in a text more often than we would expect to occur by chance alone. Key words are calculated by carrying out a statistical test(e.g., loglinear or chi-squared) which compares the word frequencies in a text against their expected frequencies derived in a much larger corpus, which acts as a reference for general language use. Keyness is then the quality a word or phrase has of being "key" in its context.

Kilroy was here is an American popular culture expression that became popular during World War II; it is typically seen in graffiti. Its origins are debated, but the phrase and the distinctive accompanying doodle became associated with GIs in the 1940s – a bald-headed man (sometimes depicted as having a few hairs) with a prominent nose peeking over a wall with the fingers of each hand clutching the wall.

The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and weavers in the 19th century who destroyed weaving machinery as a form of protest. The group was protesting the use of machinery in a "fraudulent and deceitful manner" to get around standard labour practices. Luddites feared that the time spent learning the skills of their craft would go to waste as machines would replace their role in the industry.

The Luddite movement began in Nottingham and culminated in a region-wide rebellion that lasted from 1811 to 1816. Mill owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the movement was suppressed with military force.

I want to sitting on a chair next to this man and hear this music.

An image macro is digital media featuring a picture, or artwork, superimposed with some form of text. They are one of the most common forms of internet memes. The term "image macro" originated on the Something Awful forums. The name derived from the fact that the "macros" were a short bit of text a user could enter that the forum software would automatically parse and expand into the code for a pre-defined image. This in turn related to the computer science topic of a macro, defined as "a rule or pattern that specifies how a certain input sequence (often a sequence of characters) should be mapped to an output sequence (also often a sequence of characters) according to a defined procedure".

Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Critics regard memetics as a pseudoscience. Memetics involves sidestepping the traditional concern with the truth of ideas and beliefs and instead involving a focus on the success of ideas and beliefs.

The Usenet newsgroup alt.memetics started in 1993 with peak posting years in the mid to late 1990s. The Journal of Memetics was published electronically from 1997 to 2005.

See "Usenet"

A necropost is a message that revives (as in necromancy) an arbitrarily old thread, causing it to appear above newer and more active threads. This practice is generally seen as a breach of netiquette on most forums. Because old threads are not usually locked from further posting, necroposting is common for newer users and in cases where the date of previous posts is not apparent.

Sunset over old noir city.

An online research method originating in ethnography which is applied to understanding social interaction in contemporary digital communications contexts. It is defined as a specific set of research practices related to data collection, analysis, research ethics, and representation, rooted in participant observation. In netnography, a significant amount of the data originates in and manifests through the digital traces of naturally occurring public conversations recorded by contemporary communications networks. Netnography uses these conversations as data.

A judgment, viewpoint, or statement that is not conclusive. It may deal with subjective matters in which there is no conclusive finding, or it may deal with facts which are sought to be disputed by the logical fallacy that one is entitled to their opinions. What distinguishes fact from opinion is that facts are more likely to be verifiable, i.e. can be agreed to by the consensus of experts.

Whitney Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies and Writing, and holds a PhD in English with a folklore structured emphasis (digital culture focus). She is the author of This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, and the co-author of The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online with Ryan M. Milner of the College of Charleston. Across her books, numerous journal articles and book chapters, and popular press pieces in outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate, Dr. Phillips' work explores antagonism and identity-based harassment; the reciprocal relationship between public expression, corporate and state institutions, and technological affordances; political memes and other forms of ambivalent civic participation; and digital ethics, including journalistic ethics and the ethics of everyday social media use.

An adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers or viewers as a sincere expression of the parodied views.

For Michel Foucault, real power will always rely on the ignorance of its agents; with the discovery and emergence of Biopower, and Biopolitics a biological and political technology of its population, highlights this fact. No single human, group nor single actor runs the dispositif (machine or apparatus) but power is dispersed through the apparatus as efficiently and silently as possible, ensuring its agents do whatever is necessary. It is because of this action that power is unlikely to be detected, so remains elusive to 'rational' investigation according to Foucault.

A query is a form of questioning, in a line of inquiry.

A reactionary is a person who holds political views that favor a return to the status quo ante, the previous political state of society, which they believe possessed characteristics (discipline, respect for authority, etc.) that are negatively absent from the contemporary status quo of a society. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore the status quo ante.

Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. is an American academic and author focused on technology and Wikipedia. He is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, and a faculty associate at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He writes about online communication, particularly about reviews and commenting.

A shill, also called a plant or a stooge, is a person who publicly helps or gives credibility to a person or organization without disclosing that they have a close relationship with the person or organization. Shills can carry out their operations in the areas of media, journalism, marketing, confidence games, or other business areas. A shill may also act to discredit opponents or critics of the person or organization in which they have a vested interest through character assassination or other means.

In local government, a city hall, town hall, civic centre, (in the UK or Australia) a guildhall, a Rathaus (German), or (more rarely) a municipal building, is the chief administrative building of a city, town, or other municipality. It usually houses the city or town council, its associated departments, and their employees. It also usually functions as the base of the mayor of a city, town, borough, or county/shire.

all the comments are total nonsense, coming from people who pretend are in a relation with sound, so strong that they even know similar "music". humans are pathetic and deserve the fate they are experiencing.

A class of being in Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore. In Old Norse sources, beings described as trolls dwell in isolated rocks, mountains, or caves, live together in small family units, and are rarely helpful to human beings.

It's like an old memory, like when I was a kid and played metroid prime for the first time, so life changing.

Twitter is an online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, known as "tweets." These messages were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, the limit was doubled to 280 characters for all languages except Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July of that year.

Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially. The name comes from the term "users network".

Verisimilitude (or truthlikeness) is a philosophical concept that distinguishes between the relative and apparent (or seemingly so) truth and falsity of assertions and hypotheses. The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory.

A wiki is a website on which users collaboratively modify content and structure directly from the web browser. In a typical wiki, text is written using a simplified markup language and often edited with the help of a rich-text editor.

A wiki is run using wiki software, otherwise known as a wiki engine. A wiki engine is a type of content management system, but it differs from most other such systems, including blog software, in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader, and wikis have little implicit structure, allowing structure to emerge according to the needs of the users. There are dozens of different wiki engines in use, both standalone and part of other software, such as bug tracking systems. Some wiki engines are open source, whereas others are proprietary. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access); for example, editing rights may permit changing, adding or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Other rules may be imposed to organize content.

Xenophobia is the fear and distrust of that which is perceived to be foreign or strange. Xenophobia can manifest itself in many ways involving the relations and perceptions of an ingroup towards an outgroup, including a fear of losing identity, suspicion of its activities, aggression, and desire to eliminate its presence to secure a presumed purity. Xenophobia is a political term and not a recognized medical phobia.

YouTube allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to favorites, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users. It offers a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media videos. Available content includes video clips, TV show clips, music videos, short and documentary films, audio recordings, movie trailers, live streams, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos. Most of the content on YouTube is uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, and Hulu offer some of their material via YouTube as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can only watch videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos and add comments to videos. Videos deemed potentially inappropriate are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old.

Meaning the spirit of the age or time. It is the dominant set of ideals and beliefs that motivate the actions of the members of a society in a particular period in time.

American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Facebook, and currently operates as its chairman and chief executive officer.

Passing through the gate on the way to Europa, you look out the window, the steam from your coffee fogging the viewport. You think of Sasha, back in Dome 5. You wish you could go back and tell her how you felt, but it's too late. Life has a funny way of slipping through your fingers like sand.