A Man Who Helped Turn 4chan into the Internet's Racist Engine | Hacker News Reader

A Man Who Helped Turn 4chan into the Internet's Racist Engine

vice.com

29 pointssyck38 comments

4chan as a whole isn't racist. 4chan is just honest and unfiltered. Honest discussion is pretty much impossible on any other mainstream web platform. Websites like hacker news are heavily moderated to "stay clean" and then we got reddit, a dystopian wholesome echo chamber.

By the way: Pretty much every other 4chan user is looking down on /pol users. They don't trust /pol, because they realized it's indeed inhabited by the bad kind of racists and generally heavily biased people.

I've poked my head in from time to time and definitely have noticed the patterns in TFA. weather this is the result of a shift in English speaking culture or the acts of malicious moderators though I can't say.

Then again, maybe it was always like this and the older nasty ideas get ignored because "that's just 4chan." I think their data on that is pretty interesting.

/pol/ and /b/ are now a majority of 4chan. It's going to take a few more months/years but 4chan is well on the way to become /pol/: the website.

Yeah but pol swings between being full if edgy leftists and edgy rightists

Yeah I haven't seen a leftist in /pol/ since the bunkerchan raids. At most, you have people that are barely liberals.

Unpopular opinion: I hold /pol/ and rest of 4chan in higher regard than most of the internet precisely because the lack of filtering allows a lot of quality content to come through that would otherwise be silenced, and it's on you, the reader, to make up your mind and do your own research, rather than be told what to think and read through downvote/thoughtpurging mechanisms that websites, such as HN, embrace.

4chan has a handful of good boards on there that are not filled with racist diatribe. You're going to find content on there long before it hits anywhere else - if it hits anywhere else to begin with. Even /pol/ itself, prior to the 2016 election, had plenty of interesting discussion. Hopefully once this drama blows over it will return to a more nuanced place. As for Vice trying to paint /pol/ as this ultra-edgy super radical place, I can't help but laugh at how hard they're trying. It's a board full of early 20-something year old shitposters. Give up the nonsense RWDS-tier fearmongering please.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373, which is as valid today as it was back then. Replace whatever tech with "Rust", and read through the last three days worth of self-aggrandizing submissions.

This is a pretty absurd take. /pol/ has it's own upvote mechanism, commenting, and the sage mechanism.

There is essentially nothing of value in /pol/. Serious commentary is swallowed by the endless sea of nazism and nazi-adjacent rhetoric.

There is no going back to pre-2016 times, it's seriously over. It's not even full of 20-somethings anymore, it has aged significantly.

As for a lack of filtering, that's not a thing, either. Janitors will remove your posts if they are left leaning and make too much sense. There is a serious manipulation effort.

Just as an aside, there is no need for them to lie about /pol/ is. /pol/ is less outrageous today because of the election, but here are some gems from /pol/ a week ago:

>A post about running over protesters and how hilarious that is >Abrahamic religion is a jewish plot to destroy the white race by turning them away from paganism >The FBI is a tool of the radical left in order to destroy America, you should get ready to kill protesters >People that are making fun of the hunter biden tapes are "tranny shills" trying to make us queer to destroy our masculinity

There is hardly any need to lie. The portrayal of /pol/ is accurate.

I'm not going to bother refuting this. Like I said, it's an unpopular opinion. You're welcome to think whatever you like, including that I said anyone lied.

>As for Vice trying to paint /pol/ as this ultra-edgy super radical place, I can't help but laugh at how hard they're trying. It's a board full of early 20-something year old shitposters. Give up the nonsense RWDS-tier fearmongering please.

You're saying that Vice lied by contradiction or omission here.

The "upvote" mechanism is more based on attention grabbing than popularity though, which definitely leads to a different sort of dynamic due to the different incentives.

While this is kinda true, this is kind of negated by the ability to sage.

> Replace whatever tech with "Rust", and read through the last three days worth of self-aggrandizing submissions.

Hardly. The rust evangelism strike force (and similar hype movements) we're obnoxious, but these days I'm more annoyed by comments whining and derailing threads because they don't like the language someone chose for their project.

That's been a staple of HN for the last decade as well.

>"Why C#, why not Go?" >Proceeds to write some half-assed impl. as an HN comment.

Hard disagree. Whatever magic they had back when I spent time on there is gone and it isn't coming back anytime soon. They've been overrun by neo-nazi circle jerking as nazi's have been excised from other platforms.

/pol/ is basically an agitprop prototyping board. Or at least it was circa 2016. Imo, the racism is incidental to a broad array of antisocial behaviors that are rewarded and reinforced by the culture of the board.

Spending too much time on there is not healthy. One of my buddies got sucked into it and started acting out in ways that had negatively impact on his life. Social contagion is real.

>negatively impact on his life. Social contagion is real.

Wait til you hear about what happened on the rest of the internet.

I had a colleague spend too much time there and start using degrading insults that were targeted against me in my presence around the height of /pol/s popularity in 2016. I caused a scene. I still think about it because of the way they embraced an exaggerated stereotype that didn't actually in any way reflect the people they actually knew with that identity for years. The stereotype was so different from the reality that I think at some point they stopped making the connection between the two.

I never heard anybody in my group of friends make a 4chan reference again, I can't help but think that incident served as an alarm bell that people were getting out of touch with reality, and people seemed to either stop using the site or started visiting it less. Human's historically have not existed in social environments like 4chan and I think the site, especially when indulged in frequently, can lead to a sort of psychosis.

This has to be a joke. Even the gaming boards are filled with transphobic remarks and literal targeted harassment. I was part of the community of a niche video game and experienced those things first hand, targeted at people I knew who did nothing but contribute to the game and the community.

Turns out if you fill your website with literal garbage, people will report on it.

Yes this is what 4chan is about since the early days. It’s an outlet for youth to explore edgy memes and dark humour in the confines of the internet.

You’d find transphobia and crude racist remarks all the way back on 90s Internet, and you wouldn’t have to go looking for it. Gamers were never the soft bunch and online communities of younger guys were known to be competitive and ruthless. I hope this is still the case.

I would rather have an Internet where a bit of thicker skin is required but freedom to say anything is maintained, than one where we are shielding and coddling people from uncomfortable thoughts - whether or not they are morally or factually right/wrong is an exercise left to the reader. You choose your own level of involvement.

Again, just my opinion.

PS. I’m not justifying the raiding they did on your community. Merely saying it’s par for the course of an unhinged internet. This stuff happened across the Internet. 4chan made it out alive for us to heckle and deride.

Many people have difficulty distinguishing between what they enjoy, and what benefits humanity.

For example, a group of children might derive pleasure from singling out and making fun of a classmate. That they enjoy behaving so doesn't mean it improves their school.

There are online communities that service humanity's worst instincts. It would be nice if people who get off on sites like that were able to recognize that their enjoyment doesn't make the sites a net benefit to everyone else.

> Many people have difficulty distinguishing between what they enjoy, and what benefits humanity.

The would get you many f-words on 4chan and they would be right. Might want to look up totalitarian dictatorships vs. authoritarian. Don't be shocked if you find yourself in there with your ambition to improve humanity.

No site needs to be a net benefit to "everyone else" (without evidence on your part).

This is getting ridiculous...

  No site needs to be a net benefit to "everyone else"

That isn't the point.

It's one thing for Jane to tell me smoking in bars should be legal. We can have a real debate over that. It's another for Jane to claim her cigar smoke is good for my health. That discussion, I would not entertain seriously.

Yet 4chans /lgbt/ board is filled with transgender people who don't seem to mind at all. On such a community they will bemoan things like a "Do I pass" thread on lets say, Reddit or Tumblr, because they will notice how the fact that the answer is invariably the same is an insult to their intelligence and self-insight as well as being painfully repetitive and pointless. I've observed that those from "Disadvantaged" groups are more drawn to 4chan rather than less and tend to see the negativity as a sort of filter to keep out users with an ego, who desire a community that gives it to them straight. 4chan for better or worse serves as an anti-thesis and refuge from the reputational internet and sticks around because nobody is offering what it's selling.

Targeted harassment on 4chan like shunning and ostracism aren't even possible if you're truly anonymous, only impersonal and vague forms of harassment are possible. Intersite harassment is possible because your hackernews of the worlds enable targeted harassment through the use of persistent identities, some communities like FaceBook explicitly introduced such identities for the sake of retaliation against the undesirable. I don't think it's a good thing for 4chan to be drawing people into its culture who didn't consent, yet the people who enabled targeted harassment are the rest of the internet who gave up on anonymity, and 4chan is merely hacking the system to harass the wrong people.

Because the incredibly small part of the lgbt community that has internalized the transphobia they receive is fine with being called "trannies" or being judged on whether they pass or not by socially dysfunctional teenagers that makes it OK for every LGBT person to be called derogatory terms? Do you go around calling black people the n-word because your token black friend gave you the n-word pass?

I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say with the second paragraph. Other communities have identities, so it's their fault that 4chan, an outlier in the social platform space, enables and encourages their users to post derogatory and inflammatory garbage about people? Have you considered the fact that identity is part of why many communities exist in the first place?

The comment above you said the opposite of what you seem to think it said and your mischaracterization of denizens of /lgbt/ is absurd.

Just go away and have your own fantasies elsewhere. Goodbye.

Well said.

I have never met as many lgbt people than on 4chan and they don't complain. The other just don't need to visit and don't read opinions they have a problem with.

There are distinct groups and while mainstream lgbt isn't interesting for me, I would like to stay there, thank you very much.

4chan is an easy target for Russian agitprop to be sowed in the minds of the fringes of society and spread outward polluting the public discourse. Take one look at QAnon.

Why single out Russian? Are Americans incapable of agency or are they so ideologically pure that they're unable to come up with toxic ideas themselves?

It's easier to blame a foreign adversary than admit this was an american one.

It's easier to dismiss claims baselessly than to investigate deeply.

Russia's established methods of propaganda[0]

Intelligence Agencies indictment of Russia sowing discord online[1]

QAnon amplifying linked to Russia[2]

[0]https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

[1]https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/

[2]https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/salvadorhernandez/russi...

I posted pretty much every day on 4chan for like five years. While I very rarely visit the site now, I have a really hard time believing Vice is reporting this accurately.

Abusive, toxic, and vile content has been a staple running gag on 4chan for almost a decade. The site has always been populated with people who range between strange and mentally ill. While I realize there are clear and obvious links between 4chan and mass shooters, it's hard to believe that 4chan went like 8 years without "radicalizing" the "angry young men" who visit it and then suddenly they're all raving violent lunatics. I think it's much more likely that it started as a joke that went to far, and is now an extremely vile but small collection of people which can barely be called a 'movement'.

Speaking of visitors, the metrics are clearly bullshit. 4chan is anonymous and really nothing in terms of demographics polls can be trusted. I know as an absolute fact that women, trans people, and people of color post on 4chan regularly. People regularly post pretending to be other people, spam multiple threads, and false flag as people who they aren't. Infamous single trips like Accelspammer probably generated 100x the number of posts as the average user. It has been a long running conspiracy that the FBI or NSA scrapes 4chan. I also know for a fact that companies scrape 4chan: one time I posted a thread about a bad customer service experience I had and the company literally sent me an email saying "We saw your feedback on /g/..." So 22 million views a month means absolutely nothing, it doesn't tell us who is visiting 4chan or how often. 90% of it could be bot traffic.

Without naming the mods, we have absolutely no idea how credible they are or if Vice really did get leaked chats (spoiler alert, I don't trust them as far as I can throw them). There are also multiple mods, I don't think the article really explains or justifies how a single one got power over every janitor.

Really dubious reporting with a progressive slant as icing and some fearmongering as a cherry on top. Thanks again, Vice!

Why did you tell me 4chan's demographics, right after telling me that nothing about 4chan's demographics can be trusted?

I didn't tell you 4chan's demographics. I told you I personally know people who are not white men in their 20s who post on 4chan. And I told you that from personal experience, mental illness is a common topic.

Aside from that it's a free-for-all. Unlike Vice I'm not claiming to know everything so I can rag on a specific race and gender.

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