Yet when people mention that they visit 4chan, they talk about the 'very clever people posting there'. It's like mentioning that you regularly go paddling in your local river in order to collect tiny nuggets of gold, without mentioning that your local river is a flow of excrement, nuclear waste, and malignant psychopaths.
Post #1: Comment using the N word
Post #2: Someone using "fag" to insult people who, presumably, use Arch linux. (The term was Archfags)
Post #3: In response to something about headphones: "that deaf faggot [n-word]"
So it's funny. I've been browsing 4chan for 5 minutes and couldn't avoid racism & homophobia in the very first things I saw. Maybe you should actually visit the site instead of just spreading misinformation.
If you find that hard to understand, maybe stay away from HN where we try to have at least some minimum of reason in our discussions: you either lack that by minimizing racism and hatred to "bad words" or you are a troll arguing in bad faith.
There's no other way to use these words. They're always racist and homophobic. That's the point, /pol is a cesspool of racism and homophobia.
If you wish to still call that “racism and homophobia”, then neither of which necessarily has anything to do with race or sexual orientations, or even disdain. — you should also know that your usage of these words is then quite nonstandard, and does not align with what most mean with them.
The word “nigger”, in particular, has been of particular interest of study in how depending on context the word can very much be about race, and negatively so, to a simple form of address that has no implications of race.
The way this thread progressed was very fascinating to read.
First, an absurd baseless generalization was made. Then, when challenged, the generalization was narrowed down a bit. Then it was narrowed down again and again until we got this comment which asserts an outright lie.
These words aren't always used in a racist and homophobic way. 4chan is proof of this.
Try to step back and move into another level.
What are words?
What is this "vibration of air molecules" hitting my ear?
What is the meaning behind them?
Why so?
Do these certain "frequencies" always mean a certain meaning? Always?
Nope, it's still me, I'm right: I just saw a whole new group of content on the first page of /g/, still lots of racism & homophobic slurs. A an even mix of f- & n- words, though it also included these two gems: "tranny fa--ot shitskin" followed by "Holocaust never happened"
So nope, nothing is conflated for me and I haven't jumped anywhere. My feet are firmly planted in the land of "4Chan has lots of racism & hate speech". I don't know what land you're in if it's a place where calling someone a "fa--ot [n-word]" doesn't get categorized into some sort of hate speech.
This is the main point of contention. No one denies that such words are a common occurrence on 4chan, but you believe these words are automatically indicative of racism.
Are you open to the idea that someone who refers to himself as “an Archfag” is simply communicating on his being an Arch Linux user, and not otherwise intending to communicate his sexual orientation, and certainly not to proffer a negative view of his own sexual orientation?
it's offensive to outsiders....to keep them out lol
A thought provoking message. Just quoting it for posterity. Carry on.
You mentioned /g/ -- there is a daily programming thread on that board with a very long history. I've seen some really interesting projects posted there. Some even made their way here eventually. SerenityOS for example.
If you can't, or rather won't, see beyond that. Then it's just not for you. And that's fine.
But what people have "kindly" explained have merely been justifications for racism and other hate speech that all seem to ultimately boil down to it being normal for 4chan. That, and the excuse of "oh but they don't really mean it" is pretty thin justification.
A very simple pattern of 4chan posting culture is to offend others in order to provoke a debate about what you actually want to discuss. It's the 4chan version of clickbait. The /g/ catalog is absolutely filled with people doing this. Want to talk about Linux? Pretend you're a superior Windows user and mock Linux for not having some feature. File picker thumbnails are a common example. This happens all the time and can generate some rather unique discussions.
Because it's anonymous, you'll see a lot of frowned-upon behavior which can nevertheless be interesting. Everytime some drama happens on GitHub or LKML there might be a random 4chan thread discussing it in the usual offensive tone. It's interesting to read about what people think, especially opinions they wouldn't express if they had to sign the post with their real names.
I do this with investment ideas on /biz/ regularly, particularly in the stock market general thread and have had some very enlightening debates as a result.
It's definitely there. Not in /pol/, but /pol/ is a subset of 4chan.
very clever people posting there
Nobody denies the extreme cesspool-like aspects of some corners of 4chan.
The one thing you can uncontroversially say is that 4chan is diverse. It's almost like reddit, where each subreddit has its own distinct culture, mods, etc.
I would say that overall, 4ch does attract... a pretty clever crowd. Almost everything there is layer upon layer upon layer of self-reference and iteration. Meta on top of meta on top of meta. Not saying you have to be a genius to "get it" but I don't see a dummy enjoying it.
I'm also saying this as somebody who doesn't particularly like the place. I grew out of that shock humor stuff about two decades ago.
Although I'm also not sure how clever a person really needs to be to understand multiple layers of meta: "Meta" is so ingrained in cultural DNA at this point that anyone born in the last 25 years will understand all of it on nearly an intuitive level, and anyone over that age will still have been bombarded by it for decades-- long enough to mostly still get it.
This is very strictly enforced in practice, one doesn't see any nudity or gore remain up on those boards for more than ten minutes before a janitor catches it.
Pornography is allowed on all boards that aren't designated “safe for work”, but gore is only allowed on a very select few.
In general I have much less of a problem with porn or gore than I do with raging hatred.