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Comment by DonHopkins | Hacker News Reader

I've lost good friends to 4chan/8chan. They were obsessed. At first it was cat pictures and memes, but it went way downhill from there. I've watched those sites cause the transition from normal, interesting, reasonable, open minded, intelligent, happy human beings, to horrible inexcusable pieces of shit who I never want to have anything to do with ever again.

It's not just that they inspire a few shooters and mass murders. They inspire a hell of a lot of other once-reasonable people to be deeply and irredeemably terrible in many other ways.

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I would not lump 4chan into this discussion. I'll concede that some boards on the site are more polemical than others and promote alt-right ideologies without a doubt, but there are many other interesting boards and people on 4chan that are not captured by the broad strokes you're outlining. I know people that browse /fit/, /lit/, /mu/ and /out/ just to name some boards that are perfectly reasonable individuals that don't lionize shooters or hold other alienated views.

I'm most familiar with /a/ and can tell you there's a broad distaste for /pol/ on /a/.

That's a concern leveled elsewhere in this thread: that you go to 4chan to discuss music or retro video games, and are one click away from an absolute hive of poisonous extremists.

On the other hand, the extremists are one click away from the people who will call them out on their bs. I'm not sure if that's worse or better than deplatforming them only to have they retreat to even more extremist echo-chambers.

It's good. Know thine enemy, and keep them close.

The "bad" boards frequently leak, and you do see highly political or racist posts from time-to-time on the regular boards. A sign that the community is functioning properly is regulars on /out/, /lit/, etc. calling out (read mocking) ethno-nationalist threads, or race-baiting for what they are.

> unfortunately no one has the answer.

The answer is structuring society, socialization, and culture in a way that doesn't disenfranchise people or leave them feeling helpless enough to turn to extremism, hate, and violence.

But that requires empathy and effort, things often in short supply.

People only go down the dark paths that lead to 8chan et al when the avenues to belonging they were presented with by their parents and by default failed them.

Just to add on my own experiences, Since starting to collect toys and also make my own, I've been entirely unable to find a better community for both of these than /toy/. Every other community is brimming with an endless barrage of superhero stuff and zero interest in niche/art toy lines. /pol/-esque posting is always mocked, reported, and subsequently purged by janitors there.

Can we please stop using the "alt-right" euphemism for racist, backwards, literal Nazis?

Edit: seems we have some Nazi-sympathizer downvoters on HN.

Go figure.

Literal Nazis are German White Nationalist Socialists. That's not what the alt-right is. The alt-right is a blanket term used to describe anyone right of Bill Clinton who is currently not a media darling.

Fascists or Ethno-Centrists are both better terms, and cover the ideologies that most people attribute to the alt right.

>promote alt-right ideologies

Why are invoking alt-right? One of the two shooters was radically left, and he posted his threats on Twitter.

Because that's the radicalized ideology that pops up most often on 4chan. If you know of a board with a contingent of alt-left/identity-politics I would be interested to know. As you said yourself, the case of the second shooter seems to be related to Twitter, not the chans.

> If you know of a board with a contingent of alt-left/identity-politics

This bubble is so large it no longer appears to be a bubble.

He had "leftist" in his bio so that makes him a "radical left".

Is that what passes as reasoned thinking these days?

No. Come on, are we gonna do it like this? Actually take a look at this guy.

I call him radical because he actually was. He posted overt, politically charged threats on Twitter, for example: "I want socialism, and i’ll not wait for the idiots to finally come round to understanding."

There are good boards on 8ch too. Probably more, considering anyone can make a board.

Just look at the absurdity of Qanon. This troll gone long [1] has affected real people and real relationships [2].

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-...

[2] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22664244/qanon-boyfri...

I recently passed several qanon billboards along major interstate freeway junctions while traveling in the southern USA.

Someone had scrawled QAnon garbage on a disused billboard in the back streets of Reading, UK last I saw it. This vomitous nonsense has global reach.

You could say the exact same thing about Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other form of social media. People get absorbed in ideas all the time, and those platforms just multiply the intensity.

Personally, Twitter has been a much bigger source of anger, shock and hate than 4chan ever was. Some of the shit I've seen on Twitter made it unbearable to go on my day and yet on 4chan, on boards like /vg/, /ck/, /g/, /wg/ it was mostly just shitposts and once in a while you would see a good post.

All I can do is shrug.. People with no clue will always just yell.

>You could say the exact same thing about Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other form of social media. People get absorbed in ideas all the time, and those platforms just multiply the intensity. Personally, Twitter has been a much bigger source of anger, shock and hate than 4chan ever was.

Do you ever see people openly hoping for shootings, cheering them on, and then posting manifestos there (referencing not only the ideology they learned from the site, but even the in-jokes of the people cheering for it on the site) before doing their own shootings? And then after that, do those sites regularly completely refuse the concept of doing anything to try to prevent repeats?

I'm sure that other sites have been guilty of bits and pieces of that, but the combination makes 8chan on another level than any of those.

I'm in the same boat as DonHopkins. I've seen people who used to be friends get sucked into far alt-right stuff through 8chan specifically. Maybe it happens with Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, but I haven't seen it and haven't seen many people here bring up any experiences like that.

> Do you ever see people openly hoping for shootings, cheering them on, and then posting manifestos on Twitter?

Yes I have many times. Just this weekend alone, the Ohio shooter tweeted "Kill every fascist", retweeted several violent Antifa posts. His Twitter profile read “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” His top pinned tweet said “Millennials have a message for the Joe Biden generation: hurry up and die.” In May, he tweeted, “You’ll never be rid of me. I’ll haunt your life like a fucking vengeful spirit.” He added, “My Horoscope Just Reads ‘Doom.'” He shared posts about “concentration camps” at the border and wrote, “Cut the fences down. Slice ICE tires. Throw bolt cutters over the fences.” He retweeted a post from another person about stealing from “right wingers” at a Trump rally. One of his tweets referred to white people. “Imagine if we did the thing you liked, but in a way that totally ruins what you liked about it! Wouldn’t that be fun? Ha ha Also, of course they’re all white people, of course they are,” he wrote.

From another comment:

> "Dayton shooter Was The Lead Singer Of A "Pornogrind" Metal Band - The gunman, identified as 24 year-old (wont be named), was a member of Menstrual Munchies, a three-man band that performed regularly on the Midwest death metal scene. All the Dark Metal Bands that were friends with the shooter are distancing themselves extremely fast. All their music supports antifascists (aka antifa) and their genre of music is defined by its explicit subject matter and themes of gore and violence, specifically sexual violence and necrophilia."

> "Betts was also in a “Pornogrind” Band that, according to Vice News, “released songs about raping and killing women.” Vice called it the “extreme metal music scene.” The bands he performed in sometimes were called Menstrual Munchies and Putrid Liquid, and the songs contained vile names like “6 Ways of Female Butchery” and “Preeteen Daughter Pu$$y Slaughter,” Vice reported."

> Betts’ Twitter profile read, “he/him / anime fan / metalhead / leftist / i’m going to hell and i’m not coming back.” One tweet on his page read, “Off to Midnight Mass. At least the songs are good. #athiestsonchristmas.” The page handle? I am the spookster. On one selfie, he included the hashtags, “#selfie4satan #HailSatan @SatanTweeting.” On the date of Republican Sen. John McCain’s death, he wrote, “F*ck John McCain.” He also liked tweets referencing the El Paso mass shooting in the hours before Dayton. The Twitter page contains multiple selfies of Betts.

Archive of the tweets:

http://archive.is/https://twitter.com/iamthespookster https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/connor-betts/ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBKBsgSUIAALHBg?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBKBsgsU0AAiB4O?format=jpg&name=... http://archive.is/7niS2

>All the Dark Metal Bands that were friends with the shooter are distancing themselves extremely fast.

If the groups of these other shooters had instead responded by distributing propaganda that literally canonized the shooters like saints and praised future shooters in order to encourage more, then it might be comparable. (You don't have to look far at all on 8chan for this type of thing.) I'm probably only in the tamest of lefty circles, but I've never seen anything remotely like that. I don't see these shootings celebrated; it seems like a much harder argument to make that they're encouraged in lefty places than the argument that 8chan encourages violence.

Sorry that's not the argument I was trying to make. The argument I was trying to make is that Twitter, FB groups etc all have these type of violent posts but they are not being held liable (most likely because they are way too big and maybe also because they are US based companies). Reddit has subreddits which actively call for assassination of political figures. I have reported them a few times but the posts stay on because maybe the mods aren't getting paid to do their jobs on reddit unlike the other big companies.

The 'chans seem almost like a leaderless cult. I've also seen people get completely sucked into them in this really honestly creepy way. I suppose it's like a subculture but minus virtually everything positive like socializing with real human beings and having real experiences.

What's tragic is that they convince cat lovers to post cat pictures on "Caturday", when they should be posting them every day! That needlessly reduces their positive contribution to society to just 14.28% efficiency.

It's the same phenomenon as mold. Everything that doesn't like toxicity flees, leaving only those who get trapped and turn into the toxic mold.

You are arguing that we should shut the internet down.

To paraphrase GP: everything on the web is one click away.

You can say the same thing about video games. We had a moral panic over those, too.

What video games can you name that promote White Supremacy like 8chan does?

GTA would fall into the league. Just a different team.

Of course no sane person takes it literally.

Sadly that leaves quite some, who do take it literally.

Maybe those games where you control a Western European country in the middle ages and have to defend your civilization against religious, cultural and ethnic rivals?

Well there's always the 1971 HP 2100 minicomputer version of Oregon Trail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(1971_video_g...

>Prior to the start of Rawitsch's history unit, Heinemann and Dillenberger let some students at their school play it to test; the students were enthusiastic about the game, staying late at school to play. The other teachers were not as interested, but did recommend changes to the game, particularly removing negative depictions of Native Americans as they were based more on Western movies and television than history, and could be problematic towards the several students with Native American ancestry at the schools.

But they partially addressed that in the 1974 MECC version:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(1971_video_g...

>He also added in more positive depictions of Native Americans, as his research indicated that many settlers received assistance from them along the trail. He placed The Oregon Trail into the organization's time-sharing network in 1975, where it could be accessed by schools across Minnesota.

Now the developer, Don Rawitsch, would like to create a version of the game from the Native American perspective.

https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/archive/it-s-a-white...

>But developers still field questions about the game’s stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans. During a recent gaming conference, Don Rawitsch, one of three aspiring teachers who developed The Oregon Trail, said he has dreams of reimagining the game with a Native American perspective.

>“If I were to create something like Oregon Trail today, I would create the Native American version,” he said during a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference in March. “What would it be like on the other side of the wall, so to speak?”

But even the cowboys-and-indians-movie 1971 version of Oregon Trail was a far cry from 8chan.

Speaking of cowboys-and-indians, Custer's Revenge is a videogame that is closer to the way 8chan views the world.

There are definitely leaders on the chans. The site operators know who log in the most, post the most, and what they post. This sort of info is inherent to running a message board. Moot was upfront about this when he ran 4chan, and he cooperated with law enforcement when they came looking for specific people.

The idea that these movements are leaderless collectives is part of their propaganda and should not be passed on without skepticism.

As someone who unashamedly frequents 4chan it saddens me to see this sort of view. I'm neither for or against 8chan's banning but I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of the *chan cultures.

The problem with most of the internet is that there are so many psychological incentives to repress unpopular opinions and to fit in with the hive mind. Reddit is the pinnacle of that where your opinion is literally shown or hidden based on its popularity. Now this is good for lazy content consumption since most of the time the popular content is what you want to see. But it's also very dangerous. Very very dangerous. Not only because it discourages changes in thinking but also because malicious entities can literally manipulate what you're thinking.

So yes, I may not always like what I read on 4chan. It may act as a platform for mentally ill people. But a lot of greatness also comes from it too. I mean it's no coincidence that a disproportionate amount of internet memes originate there. But a lot of thoughtful discourse also occurs there, often inciting interesting arguments where elsewhere on the internet it'd be buried by downvotes or deleted by moderators.

The antidote to social media ad populum isn't social media anarchy. They're both bad, but they're not equally bad.

It's like asking if you'd rather eat your own poop or a handful of one inch nails. As unpalatable as the former certainly is, the latter is unambiguously worse.

I never claimed it was a solution. I just said it helps you to avoid it. If it were the solution I wouldn't be on Hacker News right now.

Although I strongly disagree regarding 4chan being unambiguously worse. Maybe if you're talking about just /b/ and /pol/ I'd agree but the site is so much more than that.

For instance, the game development community there much more human and helpful than most other communities I've participated in. But there's a hundreds of other micro communities that are really great if you know where to find them.

There are tons of non-gamified and non-surveillance-capitalist forums out there about all kinds of topics. I realize not everything and everyone on the chans is toxic, but there is quite a lot of toxic presence there.

I think the chans were cool and interesting back in the early-mid 2000s but since then they've been taken over by not-actually-ironic trolls, political propagandists and astroturfers, and other nasties. Since the forums are anonymous there's no real way to police it or even tell who you're talking to or whether they're a "real person" or a sock puppet of some kind.

I distinctly remember what to me felt like the chans' shark-jumping moment: Ebola Chan.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ebola-chan

When that appeared along with a thread full of seemingly not actually ironic comments like "maybe Ebola will de-populate Africa," I felt that the chans were done.

There's plenty of actual racism around, which of course I don't like, but most of this is limited to /b/ and /pol/ which are not representative of the entire site. They just happen to get in the spotlight more because of how controversial they can be.

A lot of people on 4chan view these boards as a sort of filter to scare away outsiders. The majority of the site isn't nearly that edgy and largely discuss the various relevant topics for each respective board.

> once-reasonable people to be deeply and irredeemably terrible in many other ways

Like otaku. Or furries. Can't imagine anything more terribly dangerous than furry otaku spreading GNU Manifesto and forcing you to install Gentoo. Awful place!

I used to go on 4chan as a teenager. It was always "edgy" but only recently (since roughly around gamergate and Elliot Rodger, which is also when 8chan started) has it begun to seriously drift to the far-right. White nationalists saw that as an opportunity to radicalize teenagers to their cause and it's still ongoing.

There is a whole cottage industry of people attempting to radicalize jaded white teens and "skeptics" to turn them from ideological libertarians or politically unaffiliated into hateful, "alt-right" fascists. One of them was Steve Bannon [0].

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/s...

Not just a cottage industry -- they actually have a big building and huge quantities of money and workers:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/02/putin-kremlin-...

>55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg, said to be the headquarters of Russia’s ‘troll army’.

It would be naive to assume that the only people who want to push America to fascism are from other countries. There are a lot of people in the US that support that too.

There's a good reason they call him Moscow Mitch.

I'm wondering since other commenters wrote that even twitter is filled with white nationalists. I don't think you can blame some random internet platform for the world's problems. It's just that they make the problems far more visible because they are echo chambers that focus around one particular ideology.

So what exactly causes white nationalism to be rising everywhere, not just on 8chan?

I can't find anything in your comment that alludes to what being a terrible horrible utter piece of shit consists of. Do you mind elaborating?

Note that this is a sincere question, since I haven't had exposure to 4chan since before the Internet went mainstream, and even then it was fairly limited. I've heard horrible things about what it's become since, but I don't know much about it.

That's the problem with leftists in censorship discussions - they fundamentally don't believe in free will. It's not the website that shot people. It wasn't Trump. It was the individual. Believing otherwise is highly problematic as it leads to authoritarianism.

You're just trading one absolutism for another. It's all societies fault! No, it's all on the individual!!

No nuance, no grey area. The leftists do have a point and reality is somewhere in the middle.

The shooter acted of his own free will. Yes, there were factors that contributed to his actions, but the responsibility is squarely on his shoulders. There's room for nuance, but unless he was forced to do something against his will, it's on him.

Culture matters. Environment matters. Yes he chose to commit the crime but if the environment promotes this kind of thinking/behavior then the environment needs change as well.

If he were Muslim or dark skinned we'd be losing our shit but because he's a white Christian male he's a lone wolf and it's solely his responsibility. Excuse me but I find that to be utter horsecrap.

Would you please stop taking HN threads further into ideological flamewar? That's not the intended use of this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm interested in how that can be the case. Do you mind sharing some more details of how normal people can go off the deep end through their experiences on the sites?

I posted this above, but it is a direct response to your question as well: Just look at the absurdity of Qanon. This troll gone long [1] has affected real people and real relationships [2].

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-...

[2] https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22664244/qanon-boyfri...

There's an extremely long tail of terribly damaged human beings and relationships, once you get past all the mass murderers and white supremacists that 8chan and 4chan have inspired.

I'm sure your former friends feel the exact same way about you.

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