The Toxic Online World Where Mass Shooters Thrive | Hacker News Reader

The Toxic Online World Where Mass Shooters Thrive

wsj.com

11 pointslxm22 comments

I don't get the point in the article. It just covers all of the information that the world-at-large is already cognoscente of.

It also seems amiss in it's tangential change in direction, from the "toxic online world where mass shooters thrive" to - pretty much - focusing on the latest cluster of shooters.

They also continually substitute /pol/ for all of 8chan. It would be akin to saying that The Donald is representative of all of /r/ or that The People of Wal-Mart is representative of America (at-large), when we all know that this isn't the case. Yet, this over-generalisation is continually being made. Why? Is it because 8chan is more readily recognisable and easier to write than /pol/? (I ask because I thought the "fake news" crowd used to have no believable foundation but upon seeing this I can now understand/empathise with how that seed manifests/grows.)

Most of the 8chan demographic comes from two waves:

-Gamergaters who left 4chan after moot banned it on his site

-/pol/ users who left 4chan after moot messed around with it and encouraged /mlp/ to post on it

So yeah, 8chan users are by and large the kind of people who always go on about evil essjaydoubleus destroying Western civilization by posting mean things on Twitter.

You could make the argument that /pol/ doesn't generalize well to 4chan but that's again not really true; the /pol/ ooze is more contained but it's there, seeping through the cracks whenever something related to social justice blows up.

Did 8chan compromise of only /pol/? I think you're demonstrating the problem I'm pointing out perfectly well: 8chan != /pol/ && /pol/ != 8chan

Your argument could've been that 8chan, as a whole, is a cesspool and that would have been a far less disingenuous argument than equating /pol/ to being the entirety of 8chan.

Note that I'm not arguing over the merits of 8chan or /pol/ or anything of the like, I'm merely pointing out that conflating the two precepts is entirely disingenuous and is probably demonstrative of how this whole "fake news" issue started - only it would've started with much earlier news bites containing much of the same conflation problems.

Whether or not /pol/ was indeed "bad" or "good" holds no bearing over the initial point that I made (read: you're moving goal posts).

Finally, the news article covers the violence connected to extremism and/or racism that has surfaced on these boards. This precept is leagues beyond the "Left versus Right" banter (that seems to permeate in the states) and is - clearly - far more damaging.

most people dont know too much about imageboards or how they work so I guess its just like you said, its easier to write the imageboards name and demonize that then to confuse readers. Either way its pretty disconcerting. I hate /pol/ too but generalization is a great way to distort the facts

This is a natural outgrowth of 4chan culture for anyone who browsed it years ago. Journalists who haven’t been down those roads will always miss the point. 8chan and sites like it are a symptom, not a cause. The cause is rooted in the isolation and disenfranchisement of men in modern society. Jordan Peterson is one of the only individuals I’ve heard describing the root of this problem in a professional, statistical, research based manner. As long as we continue to destroy everything that has traditionally given men meaning, this will get worse. 20% of men enjoy 80% of female attention in a dating app world. Churches, bowling leagues, etc. are dead and gone, community has collapsed. Patriotism is dead, the government is seen as corrupt and full of fools. Corporations are decried as soul sucking bastions of greed. On the one hand, these are good things. Truths laid bare. We no longer look up at our flags and company brands in reverence. But without mating, community, honor (serving your nation), or mastery (serving your work), what are they going to do? Lash out. They literally just don’t care about society anymore. Why should they? Where’s the buy in? At least that’s the logic as I understand it. It’s not correct. Ethics, morals, and honest self assessment are completely lacking in these people. But it’s a real thing that’s happening.

> 20% of men enjoy 80% of female attention in a dating app world.

This is a statistic would cause massive amounts of screaming in various internet echo chambers. Some saying it's conservative, and some saying it's an exaggeration. I'm not going to argue either way because I don't know. It did make me think about something I find pretty horrible about reddit/twitter..

"Callout culture" has morphed into some kind of bizarre bullying cult that feeds off the radicalization it causes. /r/inceltears is a great example.

/r/enlightenedcentrism and /r/politics are just advanced sentence vector generators tasked with every possible way to communicate the following axioms:

- Support for any tenet of my opposition proves you directly support the opposition's atrocities.

- Moderate, centrist or apolitical people are responsible for ALL atrocities.

Get mad, we can't be any more partizan than we are so you have to be radicalized! Shit on this group of people this week! Next week it might be someone different!

I hate it, and I don't see good outcomes arising from it.

> Some saying it's conservative, and some saying it's an exaggeration.

Screaming and shouting never changes facts: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

Interesting, I never saw the Tinder experiments. I know the same numbers came up long before when OKCupid was the giant in the field and temporarily released some of their stats (which they then retracted).

They showed pretty much the exact same 78/22% skew.

Once you get out of your teens, people pair off one to one. Even unattractive people. I think the issue is more that some guys have extremely unrealistic expectations of what kind of girl they should have. They're overweight, unemployed, and rude to others but think that supermodels should love them.

Also remember biologically men are programmed to seek many women whereas women are extremely choosy. This leads to lots of rejection for men. Men just need to accept that and keep trying with a good attitude to find love.

It’s a lot easier to get a humans together to hate something than to get them to agree to accomplish something as a team.

Exactly. I was just at a community dinner for survivors of the Paradise Camp Fire, and reflected on the greater numbers of single, older men sitting by themselves. It's as if a segment of society is deemed like Detroit: unnecessary and left to rust in solitude in the fields. Americans are being atomized, divided and distracted from one-another into quiet, lonely, purposeless, idleness# and desperation#. # These two states that are explosive on their own, brought together are incendiary. Add conspiracy theories, no hope for the future and prevalence of firearms, and it's a recipe for stochastic terrorism, omnicide, suicide and revolution.

Or, they could quietly die alone while occasionally complaining on the Internet about their lot in life. I think the only solution is to try to make a friend if you encounter someone like this.

I know its not hard for anyone to find flaws in the certain kind of people that become Internet trolls, but...

Sure, the church died. Car meets, bars, video game tournaments, rock concerts, so many events these men could fit into are happening every week in your city/near your campus. But because Timmy the Internet troll spends 16 hours on reddit a day he deserves some kind of sympathy for feeling disconnected and hating everyone? It sounds like in your comment that Jordan Peterson is explaining it like we're supposed to accept that it's so hard to leave mother's basement, I don't follow.

So tell me how people that do not own cars, do not drink alcohol, have no interest in video game tournaments or rock concerts should fit in. Asking for a friend.

> So tell me how people that do not own cars, do not drink alcohol, have no interest in video game tournaments or rock concerts should fit in. Asking for a friend.

The four possibilities mentioned by skim_milk do not define the entire combinatorial space of possible human cultural and societal interaction. The world has billions of people in it who don't fit those criteria, yet somehow they manage to socialize. Your friend needs to not be so pedantic. Surely they have common interests with someone.

What if common interests are shitposting on the Internet? Key questions from the original poster were..

> They literally just don’t care about society anymore. Why should they? Where’s the buy in?

Going out and socializing doesn't strike me as a purpose in life. Especially when you dislike socializing in the first place.

>What if common interests are shitposting on the Internet?

No one's only interest is shitposting on the internet. I can read your comment history and see you have an interest in anime, and being on HN implies you likely have some interest in programming of CS.

>Going out and socializing doesn't strike me as a purpose in life. Especially when you dislike socializing in the first place.

It's no more or less a purpose in life than staying in. But being asocial still isn't an excuse for being antisocial. You can go out in the real world and not be a toxic, hateful ass, just as you can online.

Well sure, but the places where shitposters can hang around are the only places you don't eventually get banned from for expressing wrongthink opinions and they also have people that are interested in anime and programming. It's hard to get a sense of belonging to communities that just ban you. Maybe you just see a place with toxic, hateful asses, but I see a place where everything can be discussed and some random comments won't get you kicked out of communities you were a part of for decades. There's a true sense of belonging. Even if everyone on there hates you personally, at least no one is going to just ban you.

I know how much you like Voat and the chans and how much you enjoy your freedom to engage in let's call it "wrongthink shenanigans." But you can't really "belong" there. You can't belong in a place where you have no identity. You're just words in a textbox attached to a nonentity no one knows or cares about.

If all you want from a community is amoral irony and a lack of social consequence, then fine. Perhaps if you have no faith in people or society, you have no expectations of others beyond immediate emotional gratification, and the world is nothing but an endorphin pump to you. But "belonging" is a social process. To belong is to adapt, and meaningful interaction requires both sincerity and empathy.

If you can't keep yourself from expressing... "wrongthink" opinions even when you know you're around people who won't tolerate them, then the problem isn't where you are, it's who you are. You aren't even trying to belong - you want to be tolerated but you're unwilling to tolerate.

The problem is that I'm unable to identify all wrongthink. What I'm looking for in a community is to not get banned for who I am. And I've found such a community. If I knew how to fix myself, I'd have done it a long, long time ago. Also, I think tolerance is the wrong way to frame this. What I want is to exchange ideas. I'm not interested in the identiy of whomever I'm exchanging ideas with. Likewise, my own identity doesn't matter. If an idea is bad, this can be identified through thinking, but you first need the abilitiy to discuss that idea.

Well yeah if you have no hobbies you'll find fewer avenues for meeting people. Taking an interest in people and things they do is a basic requirement if you want to bond with them.

You're kind of missing the point here. The original poster said:

> They literally just don’t care about society anymore. Why should they? Where’s the buy in?

That is the question. I've got no interest in bonding with people, actually. What I desire are intelligent entities to exchange ideas with. I'm an INTP, for what it's worth. Social situations are hard work for me.

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