Last time I checked /b/ was nothing like it used to be, it's full of pornography these days, and /pol/ is a far right echo chamber (I swear I remember years and years ago it used to be more left leaning? Maybe I'm wrong though, never visited too often).
You do realize that 4chan memes were referenced at Christchurch? It's great to be an optimist and assume that everyone is secretly just kidding, but clearly not everyone got the memo. There are really crazy people there who take these calls to action deadly serious.
People commit atrocities in the name of religions and we don't seem to blame the entire organization for a single extremist.
Its great to be an optimist and think movies don't cause harm, clearly not everyone got the memo, there's some really crazy people out there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_Driver#John_Hinckley_Jr.
That's what you get with a heavily-centralized Internet: Everyone and their dog consumes all their media and spends most of their day on the same handful of platforms--not that spending it on 4chan, of all places, would be better, but you know what I mean.
/b/ is dead and /v/,/vg/,/pol/ are all faster now.
It still has an air of anarchy/anarcho-capitalism as it always had, the tone has just shifted more towards the anarchism element.
And as it stands now, 4chan is still the most popular imageboard, which is largely why /pol/ is a blob of opinions where the only thing anyone can agree on is that they hate each other.
Low impact?
What were they hoping for, global thermonuclear war? US Civil War 2?
If wayoutthere's post is to be taken as correct, and they actually are nihilistic and think this is all "a game" - then they should be considered a very dangerous "group" of people. Seemingly advocating for regional or planetary existential threats - and coming close to implementing such actions (and some could argue that to an extent they have been successful - just maybe not as successful as they wanted?) - well, that is insanity.
And it shouldn't be tolerated or encouraged.
The world isn't perfect. Our global and regional societies aren't perfect. We're human - nothing we do is perfect. All we can do is try to do better next time. The answer to this imperfection is not to destroy everything. I find it sickening that there are large groups of people who not only think this way, but have found each other, and have organized to try to make their sick dreams come true.
Basically, yes.
I noticed a lot of conspiracy or somewhat alternative sites went very right wing several years back. I used to love visiting sites like AboveTopSecret for entertainment value as it used to have a lot of in depth threads about ayys, for example. Nowadays it's a right wing political board.