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Comment by dieFledermaus | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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

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