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Comment by NaliSauce | Hacker News Reader

Wait - there are people who take stuff posted on tumblr and 4chan seriously?

I purely visit those two places for entertainment. Sure it's a bit repetitive, but the sheer absurdity makes me laugh and that's good enough for me.

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This was my reaction. It was like someone writing a 3000 word article on "Sociocultural analysis of Gender models relating to HOW the chicken ACTUALLY crossed the road."

If a chicken were to go on a murderous rampage (or even orchestrate a campaign that intimidates -- with threats of death, rape and mutilation -- women into withdrawing from online presence) I think such an article might be justified.

Hilarious that you blame 4chan. There's hundreds of millions of pageviews every month. Might as well blame AMERICA for school shooters or Islam for terrorists.

Your gut based fear response is uneducated. If you educate yourself your fear will diminish. I promise.

I don't blame 4chan at all, and neither does the author (who, BTW, doesn't talk about "4chan" but about one specific board). Hilarious that you read it this way. But when writing a piece of cultural criticism, it's important to categorize social groups based on cultural narratives (or currents), and the narratives on that 4chan board overlap with those found in the murderers' manifestos and intimidation campaigns. That within every narrative-group some people take things much, much further than others goes without saying. It also goes without saying that discussion groups -- online or off -- are better indicators of the "mainstream" of the groups they represent rather than the most extreme (people who end up behaving violently often eschew gatherings), and most certainly cannot be blamed for violent action. Nevertheless, all sorts of ideological violence are associated with some non-violent ideological groups in some way, and it is disingenuous to claim that there is no cultural association whatsoever between those anti-women rampages and certain online communities.

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