Even if "lurk moar" wasn't always meant seriously, to the people that saw it as one of their first interactions on forums/boards it became a golden rule.
People on the internet today are generally more well-meaning than in the past. No one wants to get into a new place and cause disorder or be yelled at, and so they prefer to learn as much as possible before posting.
There's still a lot of new people posting. It's hard to get a picture of the ratio of lurkers to posters, but I strongly suspect it's more balanced nowadays.

Even on kissu, a site which has a strong need for more active posters that mostly attracts people already very familiar with imageboard and japanese cultures, people are regularly accosted for their posts being "too 4chan". You obviously aren't okay with people coming here and posting whatever they feel like. If people really did just take a day or two before testing whether they fit in, they'd all end up leaving for being too green.

There's nothing fun about your anime discussion being interrupted so a newfag can ask for sauce on a Cardcaptor Sakura screenshot. There's nothing spontaneous about people using youtube comments post styles or pictures of the funny facebook frog. There is no time to watch people become more seasoned when there's a constant deluge of people completely ignorant of the history and culture of the site replacing them. There has to be a baseline of knowledge to have conversations of any sort of depth. If you can't expect people to be familiar with certain things, you can't freely reference or build upon them, either for serious discussion or just dumb jokes.

I think newfags that come here should at least try to get with it, and try not to rock the fucking boat.
Lurking on kissu is retarded though, just fucking post, holy shit dude it ain't that hard, oh my god

Speaking as someone who started using 4chan with /b/ around mid to late 2007, "lurk moar" was absolutely used unironically sometimes. The meme itself is a silly intentional misspelling, so it doesn't sound very serious, but there was absolutely the mentality that you should "lurk at least a year/half a year before posting" in certain boards. It was for your own good because it does feel a bit overwhelming to take everything in at once and learn the culture and posting etiquette.

We don't really need to have this mentality on kissu however, because most users are already familiarized with imageboard culture. We also can't afford to since the activity is low and we need as many new users as we can for the site to not die out. It cannot be denied that there are a lot of "unspoken rules" as mentioned by: >>126386 though, and sometimes unnecessary overmoderation when it comes to getting rid of posts that are too "4chan-like".

>>126395
I guess I'm misinformed about the history of this attitude then, but I still feel opposed to it. The most effective way to transmit the unspoken rules should just be to start by being yourself, and then pay attention to the negative attention you receive when you do something out of step. That way the misstep will stay clear in your memory as something to avoid, much like how it works in real life. The really bothersome people are the ones who don't even care about respecting the culture, and they wont return to lurking no matter how much you tell them to. I think I can tell when a user is a former lurker, rather than someone who learned the culture by trial and error. Their posts tend to seem more mechanical and their outlook is more insecure.

>>126397
I've already said it's not very relevant here anyway. It's also easier to just say "lurk more" or "lurk for this certain amount of time before posting" instead of explaining it in depth like you did. Memes are an effective way of carrying simple information. DNA of the soul and stuff.

>>126397
Yeah, it's way better to have every single new user reply to every single copy pasted bait post to learn that it's a copy pasted bait post than to spend enough time lurking to recognize that it gets posted all the time and is always disingenuous. I, for one, would much rather spend my days repeatedly teaching new users the most basic facts of the site than talking to people who already know those facts.

>>126400
having the ability to bait new posters a little is fun. repetitive crap should just get moderated away.

>>126400
Notice that it only showed up in 2007, because that's when the newer users really started flooding in. I will always be an eternal newfag because of that even though it has been almost two decades since I started using imageboards.

"Lurk moar" predates 2007. At least the mentality of it did. The phrase is just a short way of referencing an attitude that had been prevalent on BBSs, usenet and forums going all the way back to the 80s. It's just a way of saying; "It's obvious you're new. You should probably read some more before posting again".

2007 was just the /b/ version of endless September. Which happened way back when AOL started letting idiots run around on places that used to feel more exclusive because they could only be accessed by people in college or working for tech companies. Every September back then was kind of annoying because when all the new freshman would get access for the first time they'd start posting stupid annoying stuff for the first month or two before they finally calmed down and settled into the culture.

Like everything there needs to be a balance. A community dies without fresh blood. But new people should respect those that came before them and the existing culture. If both sides aren't respected the community dies. It either dies a slow death due to lack of fresh blood or it dies a quick death because all the members leave as a mass group because things are no longer fun.

>>126372
>but as the “lurk moar” meme has been taken more and more seriously,
>>126395
>sometimes.
"more and more"? "sometimes"? Dude, it was always dead serious.

>>126412
I see stuff like this as more of a joke though. If people wanted to be taken seriously about it they would say something like "lurk at least a year/half a year before posting", not post a /b/ image macro.

>>126413
/b/ was about being an asshole in general. At least it was by 2007. People that wanted to be taken serious were posting on forums and other places where they had an identity. Or in more topical anonymous boards. Where /b/ was seen as a dumping ground for trash and a place to go be an asshole for any or even no reason.

All that aside this attitude wasn't ever unique to the internet. All the real life social circles practiced something similar. It is a shit test. Either you want to fit-in with the rest or you're better off going some place else that's more your speed. It's how culture works.

But I do agree in the respect that there are a lot of very annoying people now that do nothing but enforce "board culture". They're so bad that they do not even participate in the "culture" outside of posting in meta discussion and being backseat moderation. Such people kill the fun and the very communities they pretend so much to care about. It's actually a very effective method to kill off a community. I see bad actors in the wild doing it all of the time these days. Just look at any small imageboard where there are barely any posts per-day. 9 times out of 10 the majority of the posts that are happening will be in some meta board/thread. There will be a handful of people in them posting 10-20 pph crying about the state of the rest of the board. While the rest of the board sits dead and unused.

One afternoon, a stranger comes up to you and your friend as you're having a coffee together. You ask the stranger what he wants. He says hi, then all of a sudden, with no laughter and with no feeling in his eyes, he starts speaking in the language of you and your friend's in-jokes. You turn to your friend, as if to ask him if he knows the stranger. He shakes his head. You turn to the stranger. He grins and says, "oh, I'm just a long-time lurker."

>>126414
>/b/ was about being an asshole in general. At least it was by 2007
And it was hard to tell when people were being genuine assholes or just joking, so the lines between "lurk moar" being a joke or not often got blurred there.

>>126418
That was the point. It was the place where you went when you didn't want to be serious. Most every other forum on the internet had this overly serious vibe to it and was filled with people flexing their post counts, join date, custom title (or mod title) like it was something to be proud of. When you went to /b/ or 4chan in general you didn't have to worry about people like that. You could be an asshole without any repercussion and you could joke without worrying about one of the people I mentioned getting their pantsu in a twist and crying to the mods. At least you could in the early years.

Hence why the community policed itself and was so hostile to outsiders. If you were there attempting to kill the fun or acting like you were posting on some serious forum where status mattered you were going to get a flood of replies basically telling you to fuck off every time. Which was a pretty effective way of keeping such people out before other people figured out they could easily use it as bait.

It's also why most of the raids focused on forums. Everyone had experienced unfair moderation on forums before and such places were easy to troll (and fun to troll). People would help raid forums they'd never used before just because they had an axe to grind with people that used other forums. I don't think I could ever put into words just how annoying some forum regulars were back then. As annoying as social media is now at least their real name/dox is attached to what they post. Which keeps sort of civil. Back then when everyone used pseudonyms you had tons of annoying people that took themselves way too seriously who would waste their lives sitting on some message board all day and night pretending to be a demi-God. You couldn't have a conversation with other people because they'd come into every thread and try to make it about themselves. Even threads where they openly admitted to having no interest or knowledge to share. Such people also had a lot of pull with the mods and admins. So even when they were in the wrong they never got punished for it.

>>126419
"lurk moar" seems such a different message from "fuck off".

>>126417
And that's why you don't apply lurk more to forums

>>126421
and why it's nothing like an attitude that occurs in real life!

...well, except maybe in academic and other serious contexts like seminars, where you're meant to listen in to learn how to contribute to the discussion, but even there you'd be encouraged to reveal what you have to offer and take the risk of opening your mouth early on.

>>126417
Itan desu ka?

>>126417
But I actually do this....

>>126418
It was always genuine and also a joke. I hate you and want you to suffer, but I also want to enjoy myself. Stewing in vitriol isn't fun, so I find ways to insult you that are humorous. This is true everywhere, every joke you've ever heard has sprouted from a kernel of truth.

>>126417
Not exacly the same but back in school a complete stranger came up to me all of the sudden asking me to write down my top 10 anime.

>>126423
In real life people tend to group up by invitation, or at least acknowledgement. If you're sitting in on a group of friends chatting, you probably have tacit approval to join in. And if you're in a larger group with designated roles and try to interject out of turn, you'll probably be asked to either sit quietly or leave.

>>126428
i'm all for putting people in their place, but that doesn't necessarily mean the place they should be bullied into is lurking.

lurk more on the small penis forums

>>126434
are you a regular

>>126435
no i just got here

>>126436
aaaa damn

A couple interesting things that pop up when comparing sage's records of /b/ vs desu's /a/ are that, first, /b/ used the imperative an absolutely ludicrous amount of times compared to what /a/ would later (although it looks like it peaked in '09 that may be due to the two other years being incomplete), and that while moar was first vastly more popular (save for '07, apparently more srs) later the non-goofy more would take a bigger lead that'd only get bigger as time went by.
Glean from this what you will, it does seem to fit into an idea of it getting more serious over time and of /b/ being blatantly more of a board for screweing with each other.

>>126441
Guess it's time for you to stop watching anime and start spamming soijacks, then. We should also start making more twitter screencap threads to really show how superior we are to /a/utists.

>>126441
>>126446
I'm not a fan of cool guy's contrarian attitude towards everything /a/ either. Where do you think the distaste towards frogs and wojaks is from? Where do you think the /ai/ posters are from? Which board did your other mod primarily use before? Are you aware many /a/ memes got popular on [s4s] before? And so on. You're more similar to /a/ posters than what you realize. Kissu is also pretty 'elitist' as well with its unspoken rules that can get your post deleted and banned in a flash. A regular 4chan poster who comes here certainly has a bit of trouble fitting in. There's also the fact that it's impossible to get users from /jp/ and /jp/ adjacent sites anymore, so /a/ is your only option. And that is not to say that /jp/ wasn't elitist back then as well. I'd say the 2009-2012 /jp/ I'm acquainted with was way more elitist than /a/ and it was intimidating trying to post on it. The spinoffs are another history however.

i

saaaaaaaaaaaaw

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitt

>>126448
>You're more similar to /a/ posters than what you realize.
No point rehashing arguments. >>>/poll/3967
I certainly agree, but I doubt Anonymous does.

>>126448
>>126450
Anyway, let's get the thread back on track. /a/ is not very relevant to this. I felt like bringing up /a/'s culture and its users was unnecessary and it was just to bitch about it.

honestly
i never used /a/
ive been aware of 4chan ever since maybe 2006 and i went on /b/ and the textboards but i only got into anime a lot more recently than that and by that time i was almost exclusively using other imageboard sites

>>126452
Which imageboards out of curiosity?

Stop bringing up /a/ though. It's not very relevant to this. Yes, "lurk more" being used in a serious manner was quite prevalent there, but it wasn't the only board where this was the case.

>>126453
8chan /a/ and smug
sometimes visiting tohno, fufufu, uboachan, samachan, /tea/, and heyuri
now i main kissu.moe

>>126457
I see. So you're not a "4/a/" poster but you used /a/ spinoffs before. I did as well. I feel like this type of user is quite common on kissu indeed. It makes sense because 4/qa/'s culture was mostly a mix of /a/ and /jp/, similar to tohno and samachan.

>>126386
this tbh
I've been using 4chan since I was 12 (now 26)
I didn't really get the concept of lurk moar when I was a kid, but as I grew up on/with 4chan I started to realize it's basically equivalent of "read the room"
shitposting's all good and fun, but there's also times where earnest discourse is wanted, and having ignorant tards funnel in interrupting it with googleable questions and proud ignorance (eg. entering a well-established general with dozens of OP links only to immediately post "HEY I'VE NEVER PLAYED THIS GAME HOW DO I GET STARTED????") is unfun for everyone

Instead of lurking I shit on the floor and ask where my fellow homosexual aliens of african american complexion be at

>>126448
>There's also the fact that it's impossible to get users from /jp/ and /jp/ adjacent sites anymore
But /jp/ is where I first heard about Kissu, when people were discussing other IBs during the tuber boom. There were also imageboard meta threads on /jp/ recently that lasted for months before getting deleted.

>>126464
I did say "anymore" though. The potential to get users from 4/jp/ and /jp/ spinoffs is dried up at this point. Meanwhile 4/a/ and its adjacent sites are free game. And yes, modern 4/a/ is terrible, but we can discipline their users via verbal whip beatings. The site should aim to be akin to tohno and samachan if it wants to survive.

How serious the command to lurk more is, is of course limited by the fact that the poster has 0 power to enforce it personally.
So, on a board like /b/, where moderation is almost unheard of, it has traditionally had a self-ironic undertone.
On boards with actual moderation, the anons are encouraged in their positions that are supported by that moderation.
There is a parallel to traditional forums, where the most obnoxious posters usually enjoy the friendship and protection of the mods.

But regardless of whether the phrase is uttered with a good helping of irony or with palpable murderous intent, you cannot deny the underlying idea, which is the same either way.
If I may attempt to put it into words (though I am sure others will volunteer to correct the nuance):
"Your shit does not belong here. No, I'm not going to elaborate. Willingly putting in the effort to figure out what this place is about is the primary condition for belonging."

>>126470
Tohno is still alive, okay? The only problem with it is that it has too many boards for such a small amount of users. And I don't know why the admin of samachan took it down. It had a decent amount of activity. It was my favorite "/jp/ spinoff" (started as one and then also accommodated /a/ users later).

>>126448
>A regular 4chan poster who comes here certainly has a bit of trouble fitting in.

I am against elitism in general but this is not a bad thing.
Imageboards need to dissociate with 4chan as much as possible to find their own niche and thrive. The alts that just advertise as !Not4chan die fairly quick, meanwhile I was delighted to see Kissu go 5 years in a flash.

>>126372
To answer your question people simple say stupid shit these days. I lurk on one forum yet there still seems to be a lot of unfulfilled social interactions that stem from there. Compared to that, I guess imageboards are better if you lurk though. Not all of them but most. On the flip side, very young kids born after gen 4 pokemon will not lurk period. A lot of them are straight up illiterate, so the older bunch will most likely take their time to lurk even if its like useless too, seeing that older crowds are slowly posting less and less anyways. Didn’t really mean to turn the topic into IBs dying but….if you take out lurking they legitimately fucking die lmao. If i wanted to talk to literal children i’d hang out on youtube or something.

>>126472
I think the problem with Tohno is more the atmosphere on it than the number of boards. Everybody on the site seems miserable and depressed...
Well that's why I left it anyway.

>>126559
im miserable and depressed here too dont worry!!!!

>>126560
No, stop, you're going to scare them away!!