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Comment by Kaze404 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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