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> using 4chan and ignore the crap you don't care about.

Can you even imagine using 4chan as a woman or a black man? Like not only in real life do you have to deal with people being racist as hell, but hey here's this forum that's entirely shameless about it too.

You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them.

The only people who can go to 4chan and just ignore the toxic stuff are the people who aren't affected by the toxic stuff.

On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog.

But you do.

Right.

But let's go /pol/ for a hot sec. Oh hey! Ctrl-F says there's 5 occurrences of the n-word (Hard -r too!).

I'm not black, but I imagine that just ignoring stuff like that really gets to you after awhile. Here is a forum where people actively demean others based on the color of their skin, and not only is it normal, but if you're going to visit you need to make sure no one knows that they're actually black. So should they just pretend to be white?

/pol/ is also filled with black nationalists, like NOI/Farrakhan supporters. That's the enigma of 4chan is literally everybody from every group is posting there instead of censorship that ensures only one ideology. By 'ignore what doesn't interest you', I assume that means don't visit the containment boards filled with rampant racism and trolling, you won't find holocaust denial or persistent racist threads on the other boards. It's the same how newsgroups work or discord chat channels work, some are moderated better than others.

And because there are black nationalists, the experience of white users of the site and black users of the site are exactly the same?

I am simply saying that if you're black, you're affected by the discourse on 4chan much differently than you would be if you are white. A few black nationalists is a lot different than the sea of n-word use, and it affects folks much, much differently.

Not every black user of 4chan is North American though, I assume it doesn't affect them because they post there regularily. Israelis also routinely post there despite it being a cesspool of anti-semitism. Again it's akin to discord chat groups. There's racist chat groups run by neo-nazis and there's moderated groups that ban for racism.

There was also that Shia LeBouf incident, where black and hispanic members of /pol/ from NYC showed up to disrupt his political performance art thing he was live streaming. These people exist, contrary to our political assumptions, the world is a stange place.

I also feel this is the reason that 8ch spinoff went down in quality so quickly. The infinite boards concept caused users to split off when their views were challenged instead of being forced to defend them on the common board

> You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them.

They can't? Almost no matter who you are, somebody somewhere is musing about your death, if you can't handle that in words, I doubt you could live much, regardless of your identifiable characteristics.

> if you can't handle that in words, I doubt you could live much, regardless of your identifiable characteristics.

I really cannot wrap my mind around the lack of empathy required to say "if you can't handle it" to people being called racist slurs. I presume you have never been called a racist slur. I presume you have never been demonized for your skin color - how can you even begin to know what that's like?

Ignoring the hatred that people on 4chan have for black people is not trivial - obviously this is more affecting for a person if they're black.

Have you read any testimonials about racism, or how it's made folks feel, or anything like that? There's many books out there, and I think your lack of empathy comes from ignorance. Reading some first-hand experience may make it more clear.

Not to defend racism, but you'll find that pretty much every race that's not 2D gets shit on when you're on 4chan. That's just part of being a moderator-lite website. The entire idea is you shouldn't bring your real life onto the site, you'll find people ready and able to tear down anything for incredibly inane reasons. Why is it that it's so prevalent is an excellent question; why do people resort to such strong racist/sexist/divisive opinions when they get to have a mask?

Most people are not racist/sexist when given a mask, the people who are go to /b/ or /pol/, and in the process get further radicalized.

Part of 4chan's whole game is claiming that "everyone is racist with a mask" in order to justify "I'm racist with a mask".

What's ironic here is how conservative your position is: defending the status quo that the n-word must reflexively provoke outrage. People are imploring you to accept that times are changing and the word is being disassociated from hate, yet you're sticking to the 40 year old definition because "that's just how it always was".

Doesn't that remind you of something?

???

I don't care how conservative my opinion is. I don't equate the quality of arguments and opinions with which adjectives can be used to describe them.

Also please point to which decade it was where the n-word was "disassociated from hate". When has the word not been used in a hateful way?

Calling people the n-word provokes outrage because it is an outrageous thing to do. The word has a history and we all know it.

> People are imploring you to accept that times are changing and the word is being disassociated from hate

The only people imploring me of this are random folks on the Internet. I talk to black folks all the time in the real world, and you know what? It's still not ok.

Given the Alexa ranking of 4chan lots of women and non white people use the site so no need to imagine it because it's happening.

Yes I am aware. It's a rhetorical device. As in, "you're forgetting about all the women and black people who use 4chan" - because they do use the site, and their opinions about being called the n-word or "bitches" or being asked to show their breasts matter as well.

I don't think the overlap between 4chan users and people that install the Alexa toolbar is large enough for those statistics to be accurate

Although I am not black, I am Asian, and can be described by a word started with C (/csg/ if you lurk /g/), and more accurately G. I would be offended if someone calls me that in real life.

On 4chan though, I myself really don't get offended in any way. Someone explained it this way: you're only supposed to be offended if someone calls you a n* f* in a setting that not everyone is. On 4chan, everyone is already a n* f* so it kinda levels the playing field.

I get it that others minority people might not share the same view.

> you're only supposed to be offended

Folks have the right to be offended whenever they want to be.

If you aren't offended, then that's your decision and you're free to make it. But ultimately I still believe you should respect the opinions of those who are offended. If they hate 4chan, I'm not going to argue with them about it.

There's a lot of folks in this thread claiming that if you're offended by speech on 4chan, then it's really you who has the problem and that's mainly who I'm trying to address.

People have a right to be offended and the offender has a right not to care. I certainly don't endorse 4chan culture but it's different from what you think.

What is it that you think "I think" 4chan's culture is?

I am saying that 4chan is not a safe place if you are black or most minorities. Period. I don't care what 4chan's culture is because it doesn't matter for the sake of this point.

A safe place? It’s not like they can slap you over tcp/ip. I think you take the internet too seriously, and are disrespectful of other people’s opinions.

I know what you're saying, and I'm telling you that you're incorrect. 4chan is not a safe space for anyone, minorities are not special in this regard.

And what everyone else is saying is that you're wrong. Just like the article writer who thinks they know everything about 4chan without going on it, you presume a lot about the site that just isn't true. Calling names on 4chan isn't really an insult. It's just the way everyone talks to each other. And race or gender isn't really relevant, and you'll get called racial slurs no matter your background.

Black occasional user here who recently turned 30.

I used 4chan heavily when I was in college and early 20s. Back then most of the hate in /pol/ was directed at religion in general and scientology in particular and /r9k/ hadn't quite became a cesspool of incels. But as I got older I started to see the change. It became too "safe" (for lack of a better word) for people with social stigma to express their frustrations as anger and eventually misogyny and racism. I mostly stick to /tg/ and a few of the porn boards now but I'm hyper aware of who my peers might be. I know the simple answer is to "ignore the stuff you don't like" but that shit leaks everywhere and I still run across the occasional racist comment when I visit, even when I try to stick to the places that aren't literal cancer.

My perspective (21/M/Black Canadian): the people who say we can just ignore it are right. That’s because you pretty much have to learn to deal with it as an avid internet user (even on more ‘vanilla’ sites like YouTube).

The part that affects me isn’t the word itself, and I don’t personally feel offended by a stranger using it. It’s just over time when you see so much vitriol directed towards your race even in places where it should be irrelevant (like gaming), I noticed I began to think that pretty much all white people were consumed by a hatred of blacks (why else would I see the n word being used so often?). It's hard to remind yourself about how big the internet is, maybe it's just the particular communities you visit, etc.

Edit: since this a throwaway anyway, I did develop a distaste for associating with white people for a period of time. In my mind, they were two faced and probably wouldn't hesitate to call people like me n*gger online.

Thanks for offering your perspective on this. I obviously can't speak to what it's like personally - I'm only going off of others' experience and my own intuition for what it would feel like.

> The part that affects me isn’t the word itself, and I don’t personally feel offended by a stranger using it. ...

This is kind of the point I'm trying to make further down the thread. There's a lot of folks saying that 4chan's use of this language is a form of community and culture, rather than meant as actual offense. But I don't think that makes it okay for exactly the point you make here.

I don't know but people call each other worse things than that here, even if they are all white. I wont even repeat the things they say.

Do not think that whites are all like those people.

If you look at my comment history I've made this exact point about politics. I agree with you. 4chan as a whole isn't any more racist than any other forum. The boards are separated by topics just like reddit for example. My purpose behind my comment was simply saying if you avoid the parts you don't like (exactly how you do on the internet in general, stormfront is a thing), you don't experience that toxicity. I rarely see racism on the boards I browse. And I'd say I see a lot more racism on average on reddit.

I see what you mean. But minorities always just "ignore it" - but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect them. It's how folks are frequently taught to cope. Even if you're staying in more of the "safe" boards, I imagine you're always worried that someone you're interacting with doesn't.

Why would anyone posting on an anonymous imageboard be worried about people making negative comments towards them, anonymously? Your fellow anonymous users only know about you what you choose to share in your posts, and unlike reddit or HN, you don't have a persistent identity.

Because it tells you that's what "society" thinks of you. And that will affect your day-to-day life.

It affects folks in the same way learning that a lot of folks on Reddit/HN like to Haskell. "Oh hey I didn't know Haskell was so popular"

But "you" are not "you" when you post on an anonymous imageboard. Most boards don't even have poster IDs, so you can't even distinguish individuals with multiple posts in the same thread. You're just seeing a bunch of posts from random people who could even be replying to themselves, and you have no way of knowing, unless you obsessively check the "unique IPs in this thread" number as new posts flow in.

I post on HN with my real name, but you use a pseudonym. Nevertheless, your pseudonym has a posting history and karma number attached to it, so anything you post will "stick with you" in a persistent manner. Discussions somewhat resemble real-life discussion because one can track who's saying what, what everyone's said in the past, and so forth. If I flame you, my post probably gets deleted and I might even get banned, because that's how this community has decided to moderate itself.

Anonymous imageboards like 4chan are wholly different beasts altogether. If I post something foolish here on HN, perhaps talking out of my ass, saying something incorrect, I'd get downvotes and comments telling me why I'm wrong. You might even remember my handle as "that one guy who said the dumb incorrect thing one time" next time you see it. on 4chan, when you make a dumb post and everyone dogpiles on you, calling you out for your idiocy and calling you bad names, you can just close the tab and move on in your life. People aren't attacking YOU, they're attacking Post #418317258, and its author has closed the tab and permanently disassociated himself from it.

>But minorities always just "ignore it" - but that doesn't mean it doesn't affect them.

Everyone has to go to school, the park, etc, and I pay the same tax so having an environment that is pleasant for everyone is a required property. I can't ignore someone shouting to me insulting slurs for who I am. But no one has to go to 4chan, if someone feels offended they can just not visit it.

I would quote "Shit my dad says" on this: "Don't focus on the one guy who hates you. You don't go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog shit."

Where is this idea coming from that black or women are somehow special cases that need to be handled with care [0]? I know the answer is "America", but plenty of people around the world have been killed, enslaved, displaced, humiliated and any number of things. And every one of them, whether they are from Scandinavia or Africa, will get insulted and ignore it or leave.

Some of the best memes come from India and they get plenty of abuse on the site...

[0]: https://youtu.be/qCj6YNIpqmA?t=123

> Where is this idea coming from that black or women are somehow special cases that need to be handled with care

All people should be handled with care. It's basic empathy. History gives you context that can assist in empathizing with black people and women.

> plenty of people around the world have been killed, enslaved, displaced, humiliated and any number of things

Part of the reason slavery matters so much in the United States is because there are still vestiges of it in all of our political / social / and cultural lives. It's been a part of the U.S. from the beginning and the country has done a piss-poor job of rectifying the situation.

Your comment lacks any perspective on history which in turn affects how we treat fellow people.

There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason. Seems that they also contain any outside perspective on the site as well. /b/ and /pol/ are particularly egregious, but they're worth suffering to live if it means I can keep /g/ and /tg/. The open format of the site also, while it does contain a lot of posting, does have a curious cross contamination effect. You may learn about an entirely unrelated thing on accident, for good or ill.

From what I can see /pol/ in particular is extremely popular and massively influential in the promotion of shockingly vile politics of a sort that until recently I've never encountered anywhere even close to the mainstream.

It is my understanding that it was created as a containment board, but it's popularity and relative power has soured me on the whole site.

Here's the problem: /pol/ gets so much traffic that I can't imagine that its visitors do not cover a fairly broad subset of 4chan's entire user base. This means that if I contribute to any of the other boards I am contributing in some way to the intellectual capital pool drawn upon by the sorts of people who hang out in /pol/.

No thanks.

I'm not the only person who feels this way. I've heard others say this kind of thing too. There's a lot of people who once visited the site who no longer do so. Boards like /pol/ seem to be killing 4chan as anything other than a more Internet-cool satellite of Stormfront.

No more so than you are contributing to the incredibly toxic subreddits like Redpill or the like by posting on any other reddit.

4chan is smaller and tighter. It's a different beast. Reddit is massive and those boards account for a small percentage of its activity.

2ch is similar, they have a very large Japanese nationalist/far right board that is popular. Doesn't stop people from using the rest of the site which is nothing like the racist political board.

I used to visit /lit/ and /ck/ until a bit more than a year ago. I don't anymore because the /pol/ scum made it their mission to pollute the other boards with their vitriol. I visited those boards a couple of weeks back and /pol/ has basically succeeded in killing those boards' culture. Lots of people have left and you are not one or two threads away from a vile racist comment. /pol/ has basically destroyed 4chan culture in all of the boards and all that's left there now are a bunch of disgusting racists.

That was what I observed too. Never been a big user of the site but I used to stop by from time to time. A year or two ago it was brigaded by fascists and now it's dead. Can't stand it for more than 10 seconds.

>There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason.

I don't think there actually are, in practice.

How do you have any sort of "containment" on an anonymous forum? There's nothing at all stopping /b/ and /pol/ from stepping into any other board and either playing along or not. The only containment there is a state of mind.

They do work though. Typically a board like /g/ is on topic and containment boards are used to shame offtopic users. That might sound unconvincing and "a state of mind" but social dynamics do work. If there is 1 /pol// shitposter in a thread they will be called out as bait or told to go back to their containment board. It's a useful rhetorical tool on 4chan and it works better than any literal rule because it comes organically from the board's culture.

Well, nobody's going to keep using a site they hate unless they have to.

> ignore the crap you don't care about

The problem is that plenty of people seem to use it for recruiting to make the world worse for non-users, whether by campaigns of organised harassment or disinformation, or other means.

First point: then why write an article about it? Get someone who knows what they're talking about.

For your second point, how is that unique to 4chan? Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that.

...what message boards are you using that every single one of them "does stuff like that"?

kiwifarms?

not a message board though, but a forum.

reddit, topic-specific boards I browsed years ago. You're just better at ignoring the bad parts of the sites you use. I see racism on here all the time, especially against asians for some reason.

> Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that

I just went to /pol/. No -- every message board I've ever used does not do stuff like that. And how the hell are you okay with using one that does?

.. then you might be part of the problem.

/pol/ has grown a lot louder and prominent in the past few years though, to the point where even many seasoned 4chan posters are annoyed by them. "go back to /pol/" is a complaint you can now see on almost every board.

Free speech is great and all, but I prefer to spend my time with people that have the wisdom to keep some thoughts to themselves, or maybe not have the thoughts in the first place. I'll probably never go on 4chan because I don't have the time or desire to have to sort through it all, not just because it is a cesspool of human indecency.

"Some thoughts" == the ones you (or most people) find offensive.

So you keep repeating that and raising the censorship bar until nobody is offended anymore. And what you have is a whitewashed, sanitized forum with less creativity, originality, and free association. That's not what everyone wants. Some people want the uncensored version.

Don't mistake my comment as a call for censorship. It's a call for civility and decency. we can have creativity, originality and free association without hate, bigotry, and racism. Your straw men have no power here.

"A call for"..

How do you call for that on an unmoderated platform? Or do you think they should have a mod sit there and curate it for your tastes? Or automated software that keeps everything PC? I'm curious how "calling for " is in any way different than praying?

Yeah I don't think disallowing neo nazi talking points to spread like wildfire is "PC." I think that's just being sane and practical.

Are we going to just ignore how bigoted and racist 4chan is in general?

Understanding why it is that way would probably be more useful than trying to get brownie points for your signaling.

It's like that because people with your outlook have deplatformed so much discourse that 4chan is the last bastion of a truly free exchange of ideas. Voat comes in a close second.

Calling something bigoted and racist is just an attempt to deflect and ignore the conversation. Offending people is generally the backbone of controversial discussion.

People (both individuals and as groups such as corporations) have freely decided that they do not want to donate their resources to providing a platform for people to advocate genocide or to systematically denigrate 50% or more of the population. What's wrong with that? If those are the ideas you wish to freely exchange you're welcome to set up your own site, but I am not going to pay for your bandwidth.

Everyone "signals." Signaling is a fundamental aspect of social behavior. I don't care much about signaling and tend to ignore it as background noise. It's the real ideas that matter. The dominant ideas on Voat and /pol/ are political totalitarianism, dogmatic biological determinism, hatred for huge groups of people, and even advocacy of slavery and genocide.

There are toxic "left" communities that advocate totalitarianism and are full of hate as well, but they don't seem quite as common or as popular.

You must really hate 4chan (or, at least, the racist boards there) if you expect this level of nuance and understanding in discussion. It's certainly not within a million miles of what /b/ or /pol/ extend to anyone else.

I spend most of my time on /pol/.

Best memes. /b/ has gone to shit in the last few years, /r9k/ can be hilarious although disturbing.

No. I'm not saying we should. I'm saying it's no different than other places, the racism on 4chan is on reddit. It's all over the internet. 4chan isn't especially bad in my experience. I don't go to the boards devoted to racism and I don't go to the subreddits and forums devoted to it either.

Reddit? Voat is completely unusable to me because every comment is tainted with a racist agenda. It is inescapable across their whole site.

/prog/ used to have an incredible amount of good discussion about programming. The perfect blend of memery to break the monotony with the perfect amount of puzzles and challenges and debate to keep it stimulating.

RIP

/g/ still has daily programming threads

I'm aware, thanks! :)

Several reasons I don't use /g/:

* I don't want to look at images.

* I don't want to search for the threads I want, they should all be in one board, that's the whole point.

* The fact that /prog/ was killed in the first place when a textboard like it couldn't POSSIBLY be accounting for much bandwidth anyways is proof enough that 4chan wanted to appeal to a wider range of users. I took the hint.

* Finally, the type of users that use /g/ are not the people I want to have discussions with anyways, even if it's programming-related. Lots of /prog/ users only used /prog/, back before it was killed.

world4ch had its own culture, but the lack of the Temporary Solution™ made it mostly noise and very very slow outside of spam.

/prog/ was sometimes fun, but I could never really spend much time there before getting bored. There's only so many times you can see SICP snake and fizzbuzz haskell before getting tired of it.

I'm sad the text boards are gone, but looking back after they went read-only I couldn't find much I actually wanted to read again, and I can't really blame moot for not wanting to deal with a slow spam-filled relic any longer.

I don't blame him for not dealing with it, I blame him for not fixing it with the https+captcha the rest of the site got.

I find some interesting stuff in the readonly. Fibonacci buttsort is always good, sicp stuff is nice to remember. Idk, it's a nice nostalgia for me.

Fair enough, I can't say I don't wish he kept it.

That said given moot's nonexistent proficiency in PHP, he probably had enough things on his plate just keeping the site running, I can't imagine integrating recaptcha in the world4ch codebase would have been very fun..

Sure, but it's also not like he didn't have any opportunity to better himself. Moot never wanted to be leet, but if you're running the world's most popular Internet cesspool, maybe you should push yourself here and there to at least be able to contribute to the code.

I don't envy the challenges of non-technical founders/ceos/managers, but I also don't sympathize with them very much. The Internet is an amazing resource for learning things.

Has tox matured into a usable system? I last tried it about two years ago and had too many problems with setting it up to suggest it to friends. Looking for a good non-centralized encrypted video chat.