4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump

I was honestly debating with myself whether this merited a response; but seeing it rise in points, I'll voice some thoughts to try and offer some "context" to the story above: (I'll admit this is focused on the earlier bits of the article, as I'm not versed in more recent chan-lore)

From my memory, this is ~60% fact wrapped in quite a but of "literary privilege" and strangely pervasive insecure-seeming ad-hominems. Many statements are canonically untrue (citing hacker imitation of anon starting in 2011, I remember on "real radio news" entire discussions about anon hackers being imitations as early as 2006~; saying that mememing originated on 4chan without any mention of ytmnd or any of the other sites that made up the early core of the meme-world; and perhaps I burnt out too early at 2/3rds of the way through the article but it seemed that the author painted the entirety of all the chans as just being /b?) and many other statements assert some sort of clear motivation/monolithic mindset. e.g. "supporting ron paul"; that's true insofar as football players support oddly shaped balls, it's a means to an end. (the end being even mixtures of "lulz"/memeing-post-critical-mass/taking the opposition\underdog position/etc. etc.)

I'd also like to call out the constant assertions that the 4channers were all some sort of shut-in-social-reject; I realize citing chanology (anti scientology protests) is a bit of a self-selector by the populations who could go in person, but as a metric for crowd composition: the sort the author paints with a broad brush were a minority to socially active (if fringe/alternative) highschoolers and a significant number of college students. The backhanded comment that it was merely a way to fill time is one of the more accurate bits, but in a way counter to many of the author's other points and likely not how he intended it as a pejorative: It was not out of some lack of "better things to do" or social rejection, but out of it being an absolutely unique and "rebelliously fun" thing to do. To assign more complex motive than that I think misses the mark for many anon I knew way back when.

The history of 4chan is a fascinating one and I'd love to see an objective enumeration, but I don't think this hits the mark for me, it feels like it was written very much by someone "looking in" on something they weren't quite fond of enough to really contemplate with eyes open.

Nice writeup, but right about the time the essay starts hitting Gamergate the author's bias begins to show and they tip their hands.