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Comment by chvid | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have an idea of how big 8chan and 4chan is in terms of users?

Just from the visible activity in there I can see they must be massive.

I think Slate is incorrect in describing them as expression of traditional neo-nazism. To me they are quite their own thing. Born out of Anime culture and gaming-culture becoming a playground for role playing, trash talking, trolling, real-life pranks degenerating into what it is now ...

To me they are very hard to understand. You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi. How does that work psychologically?

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You start out by making relatively innocent jokes about jews, and notice that certain portions of the anglosphere left and right really respond to this. Not only do they tell you that you can't say that, they also shower you with threats of violence. Successful troll is successful. So you go a bit further, start moving into actual anti-semitic jokes, conspiracies. Still just for the lulz, but it gets an even better reaction. Meanwhile, your image board/irc buddies, the only people in your life who treat you like a real human being, keep egging you, some of them pointing to the reactions you're getting as proof that there's some kind of underlying truth behind the jokes. "Yeah, sure, the protocols of the elders of zion isn't real, but look at the reactions you're getting for what amounts to lazy trolling! And from people with actual power - political power, media power, financial power..."

I think you can see where it goes from here - the road to hell isn't always paved with good intentions, but when turning around means accepting that the people who hate you are right, what are you going to do?

This wasn't really my experience. "Jokes" didn't lead people to becoming racist or white supremacist. What it did do though is make people who were actually white supremacist come in and try to spread their ideologies and win people over to their side, so they could convince a fraction, probably the minority of posters, to actually believing it, and eventually their numbers grew.

The idea that people turned into white supremacists because they made a few jokes is kind of a slipery slope argument.

I agree, I was responding to chvid's specific questions about how you go from jokes to becoming a true believer. I don't think that's something that happens to every joker, troll or shitposter - not even the majority.

Sorry, I should have read your comment more carefully. I do agree with you here.

I don't think this describes interactions of most people. Most people interactions are completely ignored.

Also, the story relies on somebody intentionally antagonizing people for reaction, but when antagonized people are hostile back the person doubles up because buddies on irc are more friendly. No shit, he is not purposefully antagonizing them. And hostilities or not, person spreads anti-semitic conspiracies making other people believe in anti-semitic conspiracies. But like, if Jews push back, it is their own fault, they should be more passive and let it be.

What you described by the begging is not someone clueless joking. It is literally someone cool with antagonizing Jews in the first place, but not antagonizing irc boys. So like, he gets to socialize with who he is not antagonizing.

I never claimed that this describes the interactions of most, or even many people. I never claimed that Jewish people should "be more passive and let it be". And "clueless joking" are your words, not mine.

I am not endorsing the behaviors of anyone involved, simply doing my best to answer a very specific question.

Yes, these are mine expressions for what I seen in that story. Clueless joking is how the initial situation comes across in that story to me. Someone who just makes a joke but that is not because of antisemitism, but to troll.

The "should be more passive" is how I would sum up the reaction of main character to the part where there is large pushback from initial targets. Each pushback legitimize escalations.

Specific question:

> You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi.

My point here is that the answer to that is more complex. The hardcore push-back to initial joke does not happen, but there is a lot of socialization involving Jew jokes or whatever with no push-back at all - or where push back against it makes you pussy. Initial targets of joking were not random in the first place either.

There also is process by which that person becomes extremist with zero to no interaction from target of hate.

If you think this is all just playing devil's advocate and trolling there is something deeply flawed about your assumptions about how these people(alienated young white men) experience modern culture and politics.

I think it there is a lot of things going on at the same time.

Mental health issues, loneliness, social issues such as homelessness (living with your parents) and unemployment (underemployment, declining living standards), teenagers seeking borders and deliberately going for things that their parents does not approve, people seeking political change by first destroying the existing world.

But still it is hard to understand how it has gotten to the state it is today. This attack, the Christchurch attack are directly related to the chans. If Breivik was 5 years later, he would probably be there as well.

Plus other things are coming out of these boards that seem to start as practical jokes but ends up having major impact: Hyping of various cryptocurrencies, QAnon ...

I was responding to a very specific by question by chvid and certainly don't think it's all about trolling.

(Oh, and as anyone who has seen a /pol/ meetup knows, they're not all young white men... alienated, though - yeah, I can see that...

I think you've stumbled upon one of the most important and difficult cultural questions of our generation. I don't claim to have a robust theory, but I'll throw out an idea:

4chan becomes a place to say edgy racist things in order to get a rise out of people because it's amusing. Most people don't actually believe the racist things they say, but now saying racist things is normalized on the site, and it becomes more attractive to people who want to say racist things because they believe them and not just to get a rise out of people. Now it becomes very hard to tell who's an edgelord and who's a skinhead. When people develop friendships within this community, they aren't able to filter out the skinheads because they are indistinguishable from the edgelords.

First, skinheads' arguments sound a lot more convincing when they're coming from your friend's mouth as genuine professions of belief. Second, no edgelord wants to admit that someone else is too edgy for them, so there's social pressure for everyone in the friend group to adopt the beliefs of the most politically extreme member.

Here's a tentative paper regarding your point

https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10108/...

Seems pretty robust to me. The "edginess" thing makes sense when you realize 4chan is made up of 13 year old boys.

You've got it understandably wrong as it's actually made up of grown adults but acting as if they were 13 year olds. It's an important difference if you think about it.

I wasn’t kidding, it’s truly full of 13 year olds. There are certainly grown adults, but I don’t think people don’t realize how many kids use 4chan. Back when I was a teenager, I thought I was cool as fuck for knowing about 4chan and all my e-friends were just as deluded and 14 as I was.

It's always worked that way. That's why fascistoid ideologies are so dangerous. It gives you a 'humorous' out of a dire situation where the 'humor' is dehumanizing to whoever the ideology deems 'other'.

Very well encapsulated by this Sartre quote:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

Could be wrong, but edgy jokes + Poe's Law (sarcasm is uncertain online) would be a strong attractant for actual * ists. They may use it all for plausible deniability cover, but I bet many don't even realize most posts are just joking and think they've discovered an underground movement of people like them. Either way, your outlook changes when you go from the only one with unpopular thoughts that you have to hide to one of an untold multitude in which you can freely express those thoughts and have them validated and reinforced.

An HN post 3mo back was insightful in this regard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19847437

What I don't know (and am interested to) is this: do * ists on such sites gain members mostly by other * ists finding the community or by converting trolls? Because those two pathways have very different antidotes.

I suspect it's simply that most jew-hating etc. jokes are unmotivated unless you hate jews. If you don't hate jews you find the jokes unfunny and tedious and stop browsing, and if you do you join in. The origins of 8/4chan barely matter.

There is a certain amount of humor that can be derived from being as offensive as possible, without caring about who you’re offending or why.

It doesn’t require hate, just not giving a shit about people’s feelings.

What happens in an environment like that is that people that _do_ hate start to feel welcome, and eventually drive out the people who were just in it for the lulz. Or radicalizing them as well.

Exactly this.

And if you want someone to care about your feelings, the first step is never to tell them they are garbage.

Loving your enemy is a worthwhile strategy.

This isn't true, mocking other cultures is very common and accepted in many parts of the world. In Sweden we have entire books full of jokes on how stupid Norwegians are and they have their own about stupid Swedes. And no, we don't hate each other. Anyhow, we stopped joking about Jews because it attracts racists and extremists, not because joking about groups isn't funny.

Rivalry between neighboring countries sounds like diffuse and mild version of anti Semitism. It can easily baloon into a war, in the hands of the "right" agitators.

> You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi. How does that work psychologically?

I think that's just a reaction of the mind to repeated exposure. There was an article on the work of Facebook contractors who are responsible for moderating content: one of the interviewees confessed that they ended up unintentionally internalizing/accepting the tin-foil conspiracies they repeatedly saw in the line of duty (it was 9/11 trutherism, IIRC).

My theory is you don't even have to say it jokingly, you just have to see it over and over again, and the mind will learn by rote - using the same underlying hardware as spaced repetition.

> My theory is you don't even have to say it jokingly, you just have to see it over and over again, and the mind will learn by rote - using the same underlying hardware as spaced repetition.

If that were true, all of HN would be Rust evangelists and/or users of pure functional programming languages.

I'd say HN's language on Rust and functional uses far less radical language - no one here call PHP developers sub-human. Nevertheless, my attitude towards both Rust and Haskell has softened over time.

4chan has been mainstream for very long now. Just check Alexa and similar sites for stats. But boards are on subdomain and and also nsfw boards are separated.

I've seen young people so much browsing 4chan in public, also discussing it. I'm talking about school or university environment.

When I was young and actually had time or will to take part if imageboards, I did it at home and secret. No one wanted to admit or mention it in public. Everything has changed now.

>When I was young and actually had time or will to take part if imageboards, I did it at home and secret. No one wanted to admit or mention it in public. Everything has changed now.

Because newfags ruined everything. 4chan used to be amazing, especially /b/ and their memes (I'm talking 2008is)

They were saying that same thing in 2008, that it had been ruined by newcomers.

eternal september forever my dude

This graph is usually used to complain about the quality of mobile posts but also gives a good idea of 4chan's growth and size

https://img.fireden.net/v/image/1475/72/1475724694736.png

>Does anyone have an idea of how big 8chan and 4chan is in terms of users?

SimilarWeb (Alexa competitor) estimates that 4chan has 73M monthly visits (not visitors!), and 8chan has 16M monthly visits:

> You start by joking that you are a jew-hating nazi and then after a while you become an actual jew-hating nazi. How does that work psychologically?

Confirmation bias.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Also, the tendency of emotional events to imprint more strongly on ones memory than less emotional events.

If I'm with my friends, having a good time and joking about being a Nazi, maybe I remember that more strongly when I think "Nazi." Vs the horrific historical details I only read in a book.

Couple that with escalation of commitment, and you essentially have 8chan in a nutshell.

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