Comment by vzidex | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vzidex | Hacker News Reader

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Anecdotally, I see it in lots of places - I was a part of those types of communities when I was younger (I'm better now, and I _think_ I'm reasonably well-adjusted), but I still keep tabs on those corners of the internet so I know what's going on, and can be prepared if/when they bubble over in a meaningful way.

I see lots of hateful activity, from "boogaloo" groups that hide their violence fetish behind euphemisms and jokes about revolution, to "satirical" posts about the value of white identity and culture over other cultures and races.

The other day I came across a website whose purpose was to collect the full names and photographs of (white) women who date outside their race - specifically, women who date black men - and the (white) men who date women like that. Said site has a section dedicated to women who were hurt or killed by their partners, and labels those women those who "paid their toll" for dating outside their race.

I haven't seen any meaningful action by any of these groups except that website I mentioned, but the activity is there if you care to find it. It's something that worries me, specifically for my partner - who is a woman of colour.

If you spend enough time searching for the darkest corners of the deep web, you can find powerless, sad people saying bad things about women and people of color.

You can find roughly the same things being said about white men on the front pages of NY Times, CNN, Huffington Post, Twitter, HN and Reddit and being celebrated as progressive, socially acceptable views to be shared non-anonymously by people in positions of power.

If we’re thinking of the same thing (related to ‘coal’) thats looking like it’s a 4chan troll site.

Yes, we're thinking of the same website.

I've been around on 4chan long enough to know that "troll" most often is equivalent to what the site really feels, or at least some of the people on there. The "troll" or "satire" label is only there to try to evoke plausible deniability - as in the case of "for legal purposes my call for violence against this person is a joke".

i.e. the sorts of people - in general - who browse the more unsavory parts of 4chan/8chan/etc are very fond of their dogwhistles.

The way I read it, 4chan is like a concentrated version of what it was like to be a teenager at the edge of society. You stir the pot and feed off the energy that people respond with.

If you live in a Christian conservative community, you leave pamphlets full of gay porn outside church. In a progressive community, you make racist websites about interracial dating.

They aren’t pro gay porn or pro racism, they’re pro getting a reaction out of people, that they find hilarious. We encourage them with our outrage.

5 males aged 13-15 with basic self-taught networking skillz could wreak a huge amount of havoc such that it would throw off observations that are based on web activity. It is one of the reasons that anecdotal observations of online behaviors I consider to approach zero value, with some exceptions.

And, obviously, a lot of those kids are older and still engaging the same juvenile behaviors.

"4chan is like a concentrated version of what it was like to be a teenager at the edge of society"

Which teenagers and which edge of society, I'm fairly certain they're not all the same. Also your post is what every reader of 4chan says when the discussion comes up.

I'm not a reader of 4chan. I just know people that are, and I try to have empathy for other people's situations.

There's definitely radicalization and rising militancy in boogaloo groups, and I'm fairly confident that this is where alienated young men are increasingly headed.

But their composite ideology seems closer to a more nihilistic, violent, class-conscious form of libertarianism than the ethnonationalism-tinged militia movements in the past. Groups seem to go through semiregular cycles of periodic anti-racist meme posting in order to keep their communities relatively clean of white supremacists.

It's fascinating, because historically (since the oughties at least) reactionary movements have emerged as deliberate constructs from the racist fringes of the right-wing, growing to attract dispossessed libertarians/Republicans, only to collapse in relevance as their origins and convictions are laid bare. Conversely, even moreso than the kekistan phenomenon, boogaloo seems to be an emergent initiative manifested through, rather than engineered to take advantage of collective discontent shared by young men ranging from disillusioned Trump voters, to anarchists, to libertarian progressives that feel betrayed by the corrupt appearance of the DNC. Some actors have emerged to take stewardship of segments of the movement's broader community, but none that I've been able to identify can claim ownership of it.

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