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Comment by Kaiyou | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting there's no mean behavior on 4chan?

I find 4 chan to be an interesting experiment. Yes it mostly is a cesspool. Yes folks there are pretty much awful.

But it's also extremely egalitarian. Everyone is on the same, whether you be an old* or a new*.

I don't partake but I like to dive in and observe them. Fascinating, because as much as we'd like to deny it, 4chan is the whole spectrum of humanity.

4chan is unfiltered and there are a bunch of people that aren't able to handle this, so it's a self-selected pool of people that are capable of participating in unfiltered discussion. In other communities heavy filtering is going on. Comments get removed and accounts banned, so that the people that cannot handle unfiltered content won't leave.

Personally I think all content should be unfiltered and the people who cannot handle this, should learn it. Open discussion is difficult when you have to self-censor all the time. We have it so bad, there's even a bunch of words we're forbidden from using in filtered communities and it's sold as a good thing. Lots of ideas and opinions are also banned, which is really unfortunate. We tend to criticize China for exactly the same things that are completely normal for most of us. It's just that China bans different ideas.

Governments and online communities are two very different things, and the key concern with government censorship is that there is no recourse or alternative.

4chan isn't unfiltered. Every community has its culture with its accepted norms and taboos, to say nothing of the requirement of any site on the open web to ban illegal content like child porn, and many like 4chan which also ban threats of violence and brigading. The boards on 4chan aren't immune to this simply because they don't use dedicated accounts. Not every board is /b/, and even they have their limits.

Having a high tolerance for vulgarity and dank Nazi memes is not the same as having open discussion or tolerance for opposing points of view. People who rally behind sites like 4chan, Voat and Gab in the name of "free speech" just want to be able to shitpost hate in comfort without consequence - they want their own filter, not freedom, certainly not for anyone who disagrees with them.

There's no need for tolerance for opposing views. What's important is communication. That means listening, not tolerating, and engaging. What you describe as hate are valid opinions based on rationality. It's possible to engage them in discussion. They're not ignoring facts and can be brought to change their mind. I've engaged them before, I know. Voat is a pretty good place for this. But you need to enter the conversation with the assumption that you could be wrong, otherwise your view gets clouded and all you see is hate. Instead of banning you for wrongthink, on Voat people actually respond to you with providing sources for their opinions, which you can then review and either debunk or validate. But you will be insulted a lot. People who can't handle this should stay away.

With all due respect, I'm looking at the front page of Voat right now, and articles like "Fucking jews want whites to eat this shit now 'for the environment'" and "Stop the Jewish war machine" don't appear to be presenting "valid opinions based on rationality", or a community which I should expect to be able to engage in honest, intellectual discourse.

I think it's a perfectly valid opinion on my part to consider this garbage and to not want its stench everywhere.

Not because I'm afraid to have my views challenged, or to be insulted, but because it shouldn't be my responsibility to have to turn every racist and bigot on the internet, particularly when opinions to the contrary abound and they could just as well educate themselves, and because it gets tiring to deal with this kind of nonsense all the time.

Like I said, if you can get over this and assume that you may be wrong it's a great place for discussions. If you engage them you will notice, that most of the stuff you see there is perfectly rational. You're just trapped in a filter bubble and possibly uncomfortable to find out your gay, to use a weird proverb.

>Yes it mostly is a cesspool. Yes folks there are pretty much awful.

This isn't even true in my experience. Frankly, it's a reputation that helps to keep the riff raff out of the space. Chan communities are the best kept secret on the internet, in my opinion.

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