The Design of 4chan

Designing for Engagement

We are currently seeing the results of social media’s algorithm and its overwhelming production of fascists. We can pretend that it’s not a suprise, but, with intellectual honesty, we never ask “Why not?” We all say we saw it coming and we all have something to say about human nature and The Algorithm^TM, but I intend to expand my scope to the design of these interactions themselves. For this, we have to look at the capitalists who run these organizations and what they decide their KPI (key performance indicator) usually is: Engagement

“Engagement” is a deliberately vague, nebulous word that can mean whatever the shareholders for that quarter want it to mean, but it consistently comes down to 4-5 metrics:

1. follows
   • for seeing posts from the author more often
2. shares
   • for spreading posts to more people
3. comment
   • audience interaction
4. likes
   • signifier of preference
5. views (for time based media platforms)
   • signifier of choice

This seems like it makes sense, right? This does, in fact, show descending levels of engagement, right? You may have noticed something. A like is the only thing that actually signifies preference for something you want to see more of. It is more than possible to view, comment on, and share a post you don’t like from an author you follow whom you loathe. Even in Facebook’s reactions, the simple like, carries the least weight, especially the sad and angry, two things we (hopefully) want less than things we like and love. So why do likes get the least weight?

Well liking something proves that the user engaged with the post, but not the social media platform itself. So the goal isn’t to provide you with things that you enjoy, it’s to get you be on the site as often as possible. That is why there is such a comical disproportionate weight of comments[^1].

The Comment Section

i come back sometimes weeks later to continue a debate with someone who doesn’t trust Wikipedia

original post melts away, loosly related until the topic couldn’t been on any other forgetable post that I ceased to care about seconds after my first comment to someone else’s comment.

we all move on as if it never happened and I never see them again unless they, for some reason, followed the author I did just to have the same three “debates” over again ad nauseum. I’d recognize their profile pic and roll my eyes, debating to myself if I am boared enough to debate them.

but most of these guys are from sockpuppet accounts with bullshit names and pics that are seemingly random, but have the same few trends as you see more and more.

In other words, most of these people are anonymous

UNFINISHED ARTICLE. COME BACK LATER

# Case Study

[^1]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/understanding-social-media-recommendation-algorithms

A lot has changed this year. I refuse to talk about the daily existential crisis that compounds in a recursive nightmare day by day. We all know. We don’t need more. We don’t need more black pill content. So I’ll focus on myself for now:

Since my last post I have gotten a CompTIA Data+ certification; updated my takes on Ai; continued a couple projects; and started a few more, including deeper analysis into media and design. I was writing a long paper, Fascist Rhetoric: When Feelings Don’t Care About Facts and Empathy is Controversial, but I am shelfing it until it is no longer a detriment to my mental health.

I look forward in sharing progress on my little projects in the near future. I have a bunch of drawings of little guy on sticky notes that I want to carve into stamps– a cute little escape. :)

With my website attached to my email, I need to take what I post here more seriously. Whether I like it or not this is being looked at by employers and the like so I need to take this more seriously, particularly my out of date writing.

In this case, AI and the culture around it has changed so completely that I fully disavow them my original writing. I still am proud of what I produced from it, but outside of the Ai community [and other intellectually honest artists] that understand and utilize the soulless element of the tool instead of denying it, the most vocal proponents of AI have evolved to be explicitly anti-art and even anti-artist. I was lied to by someone I trusted and we are on no speaking terms.

Unfortunately this is no longer a question of how to use it in a fine art scenario but rather a political issue about Ai being used as a “business solution.” This makes me sad. It makes me angry. Above all, it makes me disappointed. Anti-intellectualism is determined to kill the idea of art itself in favor of empty “content.”

I plan on going deeper into analyzing handcrafted media, from the sincere honesty of outsider art to the cynically demanded flatness of corporate art. The status of Ai just makes me too sad to deconstruct further. Hopefully I’ll never discuss it again outside of the limited series I produced.

Lately, I’ve begun revisiting my old music to see what holds up. Since around my mid-20s I have been disillusioned with the metal scene. There was an inescapable interconnection of the increasingly toxic culture, the genre being pushed to the fringes, and general stagnation. Also, I changed. I was tired of the machismo posturing and wanted to relax; so my tastes evolved into post-rock, chillout, and general down-tempo. Honestly what put the nail in the coffin was Vaporwave, a fresh [at the time] noise inspired genre that scratched many of my tastes simultaneously.

I could easily talk about the stuff that is very out of date and should remain in the past (RIP Children of Bodom), but I instead want to revisit something that became one of my top albums of all time: Catch 33 by Meshuggah.

When I was in secondary school I saw their music video for Shed on Fuse TV (RIP) and became enamored by it. But when I bought the album it’s from, I simply wasn’t ready for what it was due to me literal immature tastes. It was slow; it didn’t go “heavy”; there was barely any lyrics; I’d blink and would be at track 4 thinking it was still track 1. At first, I thought I got scammed, but I also knew I stumbled upon something… interesting? I simply had no idea what it even was. So I shelved it.

But it stuck in my brain like tar. I never heard anything like it before. Later I would discover Tool which was the closest thing I had to the familiar “interesting” feeling. Over the years, I would revisit the album and appreciate it more little by little. In college, I’d call it one of my favorite albums of all time, but I still didn’t get it.

Now I’m in my 30s and have matured as an artist, a writer, and as a person; now ready to take an honest look without judgement. Today I pulled up the playlist and for the first time listened while reading the lyrics. It finally clicked. I get it. I finally get it. It’s beautiful.

For the first time in eight (8) years, I made art I’m honestly proud of. I found a way to use the medium I’m most comfortable with in a creative process that happens to work for me so far. The hardest barrier to get over is the self-imposed stigma of short form.

The process is putting marks on the paper and not stop moving my hand until the drawing comes to me. The marks beget textures. Through the textures, the piece takes form. Now I just develop and finish it. It normally takes a few hours– no more than a day so far.

Yet I keep thinking of Another Man’s Treasure (retitled to Drink)– how I perceive it as my art’s highest point, despite having to cut half of it. I keep thinking, maybe one day I’ll finish it. Although I’m still open to the idea, realistically it’s just a romantic symbol of my past that exemplifies how much I struggle with creating long form content in general. After all, if a ream can’t crack two minutes, how could I expect myself to make fifteen, let alone thirty or ninety.

I’ve come to accept that this false dilemma that only exists within the framework of specific algorithmic rewards and/or monetary compensation. I don’t need to write the Great American Novel^TM when I often express myself in flash fiction; I don’t need to make a graphic novel when ‘zines have sufficed so far; I don’t need to develop an art style that isn’t mine to spend 40+ hours on a drawing I’ll never find good enough.

I am beginning to trust who I am and to do art for myself, no one else. Let’s see how far it goes…

Welcome to 2024. Been a while, friend. So here’s an update on some changes:

• New About edit dropped. Basically saying I’m burned out on sad stuff and the art I used to make. Trying to be more lighthearted with my art
• Theater fixed
  • Finally uploaded to Youtube. I don’t really know why it took this long to be honest. But I just looked at Vimeo today and thought, why the fuck am I still here? So there we go.
  • Aspect ratio fixed on Another Man’s Treasure. For some reason it was in 16:9 instead of 4:3 with black bars on the side. It’s embarrassing how lazy I am was.

So you might be asking what I’ve been up to. And if not, I’ll tell you anyway. I’m taking a break from more serious unpublished projects such as The Hive’s Labyrinth and Tower of Flesh and Bone in favor of more structured writing and lighthearted comics. Here’s what’s currently in the works:

• Structured writing
  • A Love Letter to Riichi: Chess, Poker, Gambling, and the Power of Media
  • On Ai Art 2: Embracing Sludge and Revisiting Dada
• Comic
  • Tunnels of Moonkrall

I’m pretty excited! Although I’m spending way too much time with Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m pretty confident I’ll crack at it sooner than later ;)

the motherfucking 100% eclipse baybeeeeee. Granted, it was cloudy but seeing the people at the park was a treat. A deeply human event that I’m thankful to have experienced. our monkey brains came together to appreciate an observable cosmic event. I felt connected to everyone for just that moment. Then they all drove home. However, the most underrated part was it getting light out after it got dark. No one really talks about that. Maybe I’m the weird one…

Medications for ADHD and bipolar was the best thing to ever happen to me. Often I would lose things: they’re not in their logical places; they’re not in their illogical places; they’re not even visible. It’s like I’m being gaslit. Once I’d finally find them, they were either in plain sight the whole time, or they were under a pile of papers in the furthest corner of the house. To describe this, I started saying, “The mean ghosts are playing tricks on me again.” This happens a lot less and at a much lower intensity. It’s easier to make a conscious effort to place things in easy to see places and actually form systems of organization to iterate upon.

I’m better able to be patient and slow down. My outlook is now less like construction, a task that I build once and don’t think about it again until something needs repair; and more like gardening, a slow, persistent task that results in a little improvement every day. Developing gardener-brain was always a disproportionate struggle to the point of inability; but now that I get it, I finally have the patience to reapproach almost everything I gave up on with a new, deliberate focus.

It’s almost 4AM on a Sunday morning. The hospital has me on-call and monitoring the monthly maintenance– a task which consists of periodically refreshing the SQL query I wrote after each dozen minutes to see if their servers have rebooted so I can tic a box. If they’re stalled out for whatever reason, I tic a different box or reboot it myself. Normally, I’d be complaining– pissing, whining, and moaning; in fact, I’ll probably be in that state after I the inevitable failed attempt at sleep tonight; but for now, I’m actually pretty happy. It gave me the chance to finally finish overhauling my website for the nth time. But I’m even more proud of my progress than usual.

My computer science journey has taken me to a lot of places I’d never thought I’d see. Most of what I do all day now is develop and refine the solutions to logic puzzles. It’s honestly refreshing that I’m never truly done: new tools come, old ones disappear forever, and existing tools get updates that inevitably break something. I’m glad I’m a gardener.

This website used to mean very little to me. It was nothing more than a way to show my work to employers who would never hire me. But… why does every social media account I have include this site in my bio? Why did I do that?

The site began to mean something once I took it out of Adobe Muse and hard-coded the it myself. I barely knew programming outside of basic UX training. I had the audacity to think I could use PHP, a new language to me at the time, to keep my format “simple.” I thought I could easily replace large sections of frequently repeated code (such as the header and footer) by using separate files of code chunks and referencing them. I thought it would be easy. Silly me. After many hours upon days of spinning my wheels and banging my head against a wall, I just hard-coded every page in HTML. I didn’t have many pages to write, so it wasn’t too much of a problem. The simplest solution was the best solution in this case. But now I’m actually producing content at a persistent pace. It’s impractical to continue hardcoding like I have been.

For the past few months, I have been trying to figure out how to put my curated Ai artwork on the site. There are a lot of images and I knew there had to be a better way: a way with less potential mistakes; a way that I didn’t have to keep fucking repeating myself– copying and pasting the same code chunks 100+ times. And what about my writing? And what about my zines? And what about And what about And what

I asked ChatGPT. It suggested a few things, including PHP. Nope. Next please. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what I wanted, but ChatGPT helped me deuce that I wanted a “static site generator (SSG).” I don’t remember the suggestions other than the one I decided to use: Jekyll– a formatting setup based in Ruby (my favorite language) and is specialized for content sites like mine. “Content is King.” It was a way to create templates, reusable code chunks to include, and … wait… this is exactly what I was trying to do way back before the pandemic. Have I really improved this much in just a few years? This total site conversion became my obsession for the month.

And it’s finally done. This is actually my first post here using just the markdown front-end. It’s freeing that I can just copy and paste this post into an .md file and not really have to worry about anything. I have finally worked so hard, I can be lazy. Feels nice :)

I’m no longer using my site as a portfolio to be used for the sake of employment or commission work. The art industries have been nothing but huge letdowns (other than game design, interestingly enough). So now this site, the one that carries my name, will be treated as something just for me. Sometimes it feels as if I’m talking to myself on here, but that’s okay. I prefer it to the deafening silence from clients I would inevitably disappoint.

Anyway, I noticed I started writing more lately. Prose seem to flow more naturally to me than digital brush strokes. Probably because it’s the only art form I’ve done that hasn’t yet been commodified. As things come out, the library will expand further.

Which brings me to the obvious structure change: “Updates” became the “Library.” These may act like an update log or as structured writing, depending on how spicy I get. I just know that I am a lot more free to write whatever I want with these changes. Let’s see what happens next…

The website's mini-overhaul is finally done! Here's what I did:

• I replaced the difficult to use interface for multi-image pages. I was overthinking and over-designing a simple gallery. Sorry about that...
• I am constructing the pages for my Ai generated art. Admittedly, there are a lot of images I'm sorting through, so it'll take some time. If enough people like them, I'll post a large pile of extras including lots of novelty Shreks.
• The profile picture is finally updated. I haven't had short hair in years lol.
• Lots of little UI tweeks to make it better on phones (hopefully).

Thank you once again for your patience and support <3

The 2020s are turning out to be harder than I thought they ever could be. I needed a break for just moment. But then all at once I experienced an ego death. Soon after I came out to myself as a queer bisexual and began using entheogens.

It's now hip to say, "time isn't real," but lately it hit home. Over the past couple years, I was experiencing something resembling being a teenager all over again; but instead of learning to navigate the world of girls, it was navigating the world of boys. Even worse was the question, "bi man or bi woman?" I found that the question itself was a false dichotomy and unfair to even ask.

So now the question is, "How can I capture this through my art?" Well it's kind of weird isn't it; no longer recognizing myself in the mirror. For a while, it was like looking at a twin brother: a hairy, sloppy, masculine dwarf; handsome though. The medication made me very aware of my brain chemicals and the fact that they were being manipulated. The entheogens were making my aware of my skin, my muscles, and my electric flow. I could feel everything while understanding that I am, in some ways, a slave to the chemicals that allow me to be "me." I needed to express that. I needed it.

A Tower of Flesh and Bone began its outline process. The story of what it means to become meat was needling my brain. I needed to know what it looked like. I know it's a touchy subject for a lot of people, but I found that my favorite tool for the job has been AI generated rendering tools. Utilizing prose as the prompts have generated results that I literally could not imagine: the hive and its surreal complexity; the Blood Fields and its meaty masses spurting up from the soil's veins; and, of course, the Tower of Flesh and Bone with its mysterious presence amidst it all.

Now I do plan on inking over these images and treating them like references; but I do not want that to delegitimize how powerful this tool has been to help me visualize this world. Every generated batch teaches me about this place and I cannot wait to discover the stories that come from it during my writing process. In fact, I would argue that it is all inseparable as one influences the other in a self-feeding loop.

I'm very excited.

Yo it's been a hot minute, hasn't it. So obviously the website has been overhauled as I've been eluding to for the past couple years. It's been quite a journey to get to this point.

What's that? It looks almost exactly the same? Well that's where you're wrong kiddo:

• Total conversion- There is not a single line of code for this site that I have not personally written. Reconstructing the site from scratch has been quite a time consuming task but it was worth it. Adobe Muse is a thing of the past and I will never return to it again.
• Reactive design- The website is now usable on mobile devices

Jacob you handsome genius, you must be thinking, is your journey complete? You have a website with art on it! Surely you must be finished!

Pfft. I wish. Despite the site being live, there are still some problems–surprising, I know. I will fix them as they come up.

What about the art stuff? Are you still doing that? It's been years, my dude…

I'm working on a tabletop role playing game with my close friend, Mike. I will post updates as it progresses. Part of that process will be illustrations and creative writing. I am eager to post those as well.

I hope that was a sufficient update for what's going on! See ya next time.