Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway0129 | Hacker News Reader

My friends and I used to visit the *chan sites when we were younger. Sometimes the discussions there were good e.g. if you browse the exercise forums.

But then one of my closest friends killed himself silently. That was when I realized that these sites are no jokes. Some of the people there have fallen so deep into the pit of hate and depression. Nowadays I don't even link nor share the name of the sites to my younger friends where I see the early signs of hate growing. My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up, making them socially illfit, making them outcasts and making them blame everything on immigrants and so on when they can't find a girlfriend or friends.

View on HN

I think this is mistaking the symptom for the cause. I'll admit this is largely my ideology, but large civic disengagement along with dire economic issues are the reasons for festering chan culture, not the other way around. It makes people ripe for accepting narratives that blame immigrants, women, muslims, etc.

It's easy to blame "economic issues" for all sorts of social problems, but I doubt that has much to do with this one. The 4channer-types I've known were mainly from rather well-off families and with tons of means and opportunity. Perhaps even so much that it'd be easier to correlate the other way.

It’s not about the narrative I don’t think - it’s about people trying to find communities that accept people as they are, and then what starts out as a joke starts to go too far. The commonality between every right wing mass shooter is that there was an online community - I dont think anyone goes straight to a hate community, they go to the first place they feel like they themselves aren’t treated awfully, and then latch onto whatever the culture is there. So it’s not so much the blaming their lives on others, as it is doing a win for their “team”.

I think fundamentally it’s due to the ostracization and lack of any real social support for outcasts in our open society that creates the monsters. We offer nothing and nowhere to go for those who don’t get along, so they end up in the back corners of the internet at the very bottom of the social barrel with nothing to do but fuck with the society that spurned them (or they themselves spurned).

There's a feedback loop, regardless of whether we find the communities virtuous or not. It's not difficult to see how, for instance, the boardgamegeek forums helped turn a very niche strategy hobby into something that has a nice sized shelf at Target, with a market over a hundred times larger than 20 years ago. You still needed people that could enjoy such social pastimes, and different societal changes will have an effect of how many people are even interested in such things, but the meeting ground sure makes a difference, as it reinforces the interest, and makes it easier for people to dive deeper on it. It just happens to be something that we consider harmless, or even positive.

o while there sure are more desperate people that have antisocial tendencies, just for economic issues, whether they consider those tendencies to be socially acceptable, and whether delving more on them is something that they will do, depends on finding social validation, and nowadays, we do that on the internet pretty easily. This kind of thing could still happen in the past: History tells us so, but the level of disengagement, and depth of the economic reasons required to trigger the radicalization of people, in one form or another, is far lower than before. It doesn't matter if it's people finding support and advice on how to kill themselves, bulimics seeing that their behavior is normal, or just a teenager that finds other people that likes music from the 50s, or goes very deep into pinball. Similar shapes, except some have deadly consequences.

I don't know about father figure specifically, but the dialogue you get from many on xChan sites really just makes me just want to talk to them. For every n playing it up, there must be a few who genuinely have these hateful views.

I've never been that far down the rabbit hole but I can imagine a lack of any human contact playing a role from my experience.

Oh damn, my condolences.

>My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up

Can't upvote this enough.

I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the forest from the trees.

But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here.

I think it's essentially draws back to the incel/hikkomori phenomenon. You never see young men in relationships doing these kinds of things...whether it's a white right wing mass shooter or an Islamic suicide bombing. People seem to want to pin these things on ideology, because that's the reason the perpetrators themselves give for what they do. But it seems more likely to me to be a reaction to a life they view as having no future, by which I mean no prospect of a successful romantic relationship with the opposite sex.

I don't think the Christchurch shooter was an incel, apparently he had pictures on social media partying with women. And he killed 50.

51 :-(

He didn't seem to have a successful social life.

I don't want to spread any more content about him by sharing links or quotes here, but I think it's important to dispel the suggestion that he had a well-functioning social or relationship life.

Media interviews with people who knew of him all indicate that suggestion is false.

>People seem to want to pin these things on ideology, because that's the reason the perpetrators themselves give for what they do. But it seems more likely to me to be a reaction to a life they view as having no future, by which I mean no prospect of a successful romantic relationship with the opposite sex.

It's both. A combination of hopelessness for their future and an ideology that can be seized upon to fill that same void.

50 virgins in the afterlife is the simplest example of this. Whom might such a future appeal to? Not so much the successful family man, I think. But it's not the only ideology that fits the bill. If you can promise any kind of wider purpose to someone's life (e.g. save your race!) that'll inherently appeal to a portion of the people that feel their life lacks meaning. If that group gets bigger AND an ideology gets increasing mind-share, you get the phenomenon we're now experiencing.

If you read about shooters, there are good reasons why girls don't date them. Mostly them being impossible to even speak with for anyone. Or maybe, girls are less likely to date increasingly violent dude. Or dude who refuses to speak to them.

And it has nothing to do with dude "having no prospects". That people in this state then fit greatly into ideological bubble that feeds their delusions is something we can criticize ideological bubble for.

Have you read those manifestos or about shooters themselves? Cause lack of opportunities ain't the issue in specific cases I read about.

Lack of opportunities is not case of Roger Elliot, Sandy Hook massacre nor columbine. Not in the mail bomb case either nor that one with skater brother (can't recall name now).

I heard it said that young people were "the canaries in the coalmine" for the larger problems of society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com