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Comment by dfgasdgsd | Hacker News Reader

This was such a sad story - everything I read at the time said Dr Meza was a charitable, successful member of the community in LA (running coach, founded programs towards Latino students, etc.).

The LetsRun forum is such a wild place - it's a really strange mix of great running news discussion, 4-chan / bodybuilding.com conspiracy theories, and (IMO) a lot of teenage / college male runners who have a lot of angst, and something to prove because they are in an unpopular sport. Moderators/owners (rojo / pojo? or something) don't do anything / actively encourage this.

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Bodybuilding.com misc & 4chan are super toxic communities.

I look back at my teenage years and realised how hazardous they are to mental health. My curiousity & engagement on those communities was limited to infrequent lurking.

I now understand why alt-right/q anon movement popped up so quickly.

A big issue with these boards is that the ownership can't overmod because these communities are a big drawcard, even if they're financial negatives.

> Bodybuilding.com misc & 4chan are super toxic communities.

Yes, but so are Facebook and Twitter.

Not communities.

Communities there can and have been super toxic yes.

There is a difference though as those platforms have larger moderation resources though.

I dunno, I just had a weird incident happen last week where a family member of mine received a ton of cyber bullying on Twitter because she’s an actress and has an unusual surname. When I reported stuff Twitter said it wasn’t against their policies.

FB/Twitter are not one community, they are a million different communities that mostly don't see each other.

Oh but when they do!

> FB/Twitter are not one community, they are a million different communities

You can apply the same arbitrary granularity to bodybuilding.com (different subforums) and 4chan (different boards) too, and say 'such and such subforum isn't as toxic as these other ones...'.

The point is that all four platforms spread and foster toxicity. And given that Twitter and Facebook are magnitudes bigger, they also do so much more than 4chan or bodybuiding.com.

One person can click to see different subforums on those sites, and often does.

One FB/Twitter, you can only see stuff posted by your friends, friends of friends, specific people whose names/usernames you know and have searched for, groups you have chosen to join, and ads they show you. The other 99.99% of content is invisible to you.

> Bodybuilding.com misc & 4chan are super toxic communities.

There’s that word. The world is super “toxic”. The aforementioned sites allow people to speak freely, which can result in negativity, but they’re also bastions of freedom and creativity and everyone’s thoughts being equally visible.

One can easily argue that that’s far less toxic than Reddit’s style of everyone being the church mom that silences and admonishes everyone that says something “problematic” or what the congregation considers unacceptable. Where’s the fun in that?

There’s definitely a certain group of people who hate not being able to silence others, since if they can’t silence and censor their opponents, their arguments don’t really hold up.

You freedom ends where my nose begins, or something like that. The freedom to voice your opinions, even unpopular ones, is good. It stops being good once it turns to online harassment, IMHO even before that.

And by the way, just because there is no active moderation doesn't mean that every voice is equally heard. Or did any one on running.com listen what Dr. Meza had to say?

Man, Dr. Meza was an obvious chatear who refused to stop. He could have silenced it all by running with a GPS way before it snowballed to what you call harassment. He deserved to have his reputation ruined. You're just blaming victims (the ones cheated) for doing something about it. You can't have a world where the cheater keeps his profits from cheating and his victims are not hurt by it. It's not a positive sum game, something gotta give. Don't blame the victims.

You know what's an easy way? Just don't let him compete anymore. Like what grown ups do. Amateur sports turned into cesspool.

They did that! One marathon banned him, many ordered him to run with an observer, he was told to cut the shit over and over, and he violated those rules. He was banned, don't say he wasn't.

So, he wasn't competing anymore. What ever times he "ran" didn't matter anymore. People could have left it there, why didn't they? And why would any of that justify the online bullying campaign against him?

If he wasn't competing he could have just raced without a bib, or just run around town on his own at 5am, nobody would have cared about his teleporting. He called that attention to himself and kept cheating until the absolute second he got called out and demanded to run with an observer to put up or shut up.

>And why would any of that justify the online bullying campaign against him?

Pour encourager les autres.

Very well said.

4chan is a bastion of free speech in the same way that Somalia is a bastion of the free market. Being the only place in the world to do something "freely" means you mostly attract people that want to "freely" do all the things that other places have rules against.

Why the scare quotes? If you’re in favor of censorship why not own it?

By that logic are you also condoning revenge porn and other actions which violate another person's consent? If you're in favor of it, why not own it?

The previous comment was using the word "free" as if it had a clear and self-evident meaning. But of course it does not - theres a huge grey area where individual liberty conflicts with the rights of others. Where is appropriate to draw the line in this area is culturally dependent. But most cultures agree that there is a line somewhere - for example even the US has certain laws regulating hate speech, and prevents individuals from having the "freedom" to enslave other humans. In this sense, everyone except an extreme few is in favour of censorship. It's just a matter of degree.

I'm reminded of the quote:

"The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do that which all will applaud. All the so-called liberties or rights are things which have to be asserted against others; who claim that if such things are to be allowed, their own rights are infringed or their own liberties threatened. This is always true, even when we speak of the freedom to worship, of the right of free speech or association, or of public assembly. If we are to allow freedoms at all there will constantly be complaints that either the liberty itself or the way in which it is exercised is being abused, and, if it is a genuine freedom, these complaints will often be justified. There is no way of having a free society in which there is not abuse. Abuse is the very hallmark of liberty."

>Bodybuilding.com misc & 4chan are super toxic communities.

They're places that provide access to actual human beings though. So many other online communities - especially ones with wide readership - are astroturfed into oblivion.

My take on it is that having to deal mentally with lunatics howling at the moon and screaming about the upcoming Great Replacement is the price you pay for access to actual opinions. That screaming horde is what keeps the astroturfers and consent manufacturers out.

> the price you pay for access to actual opinions

But you only see opinions of people who are willing to tolerate the torrent of abusive posts. You won't see the opinions of the silent majority who see the stupid flamewars and decide they'll spend their time elsewhere.

Some 4chan forums are completely hopeless (/pol for example) but on others you can find a lot of interesting stuff. As a general rule: as long as it's not politics the discussion is often interesting but then again, it's the case about everywhere.

>on others you can find a lot of interesting stuff

There's value to be gleaned from /pol/ if you can stand the lunatics. The skychan threads sometimes yield some interesting conjecture.

4chan is currently the best place for realtime ukraine war footage and analysis, in my opinion.

> There's value to be gleaned from /pol/ if you can stand the lunatics.

While I don’t particularly deny this

> 4chan is currently the best place for realtime ukraine war footage and analysis

Is most definitely a no.

Oddly enough, Reddit seems to be the best for footage, with Telegram likely coming second.

As for analysis, Twitter without a doubt. Is there a load of absolute horse shit? Of course. If you don’t know how to detour that, you shouldn’t care much in the first place.

The only good thing that has come out of 4chan regarding this war is the cope cage. That is indeed hilarious.

There's a certain amount of irony that leaks from a thread talking about how depraved 4chan is that devolves to someone rating the best place to find war footage. I served in a war and I don't think I've watched a minute of footage outside of two documentaries.

I'm not saying that I enjoy watching war footage, I'm saying that there's a severe dearth of it in conventional media, to the extent that for the first three days of the war I was saying to myself 'is this war really happening, apparently the tanks are rolling in, where's the footage?'

You're acting like the opinions on these forums are strongly held and like there aren't a significant minority of people 'trying on' personas or personality traits in order to see how others respond to them. I don't see how that's a meaningful distinction from people who have made the color beige their sole personality trait and strongly believe in manufacturing consent at the cost of all other goals.

>I don't see how that's a meaningful distinction from people who have made the color beige their sole personality trait

I'm not really sure how to respond to that. It's intrinsically different. It's getting responses from people who don't care what their neighbour thinks about them vs getting responses from people who care in the utmost what their neighbour thinks of them. One is intrinsically likely to be more unfiltered than the other.

If you want to know what sentiment a community actually holds you have to seek out all types of opinions.

It's always fun to see someone use the word "chit" for shit, and think "Oh hey that copypasta leaked out of bodybuilding".

These forums seem to collect the most problematic people from every political group and subculture, put them all together, and then teach them their own unique manosphere philosophy that is currently one of my least favorite things about all of mankind.

It's some kind of primitivist thought combined with a screenshot of a Nietzsche quote about strength and power, some pretentious militant atheism, a bit of eugenics, a lot of intelligence-worshipping, and a heavy dose of still believing in cringe culture.

Way bigger than just alt right, there seems to be a variant for every affiliation. It's almost mainstream.

Yeah Letsrun forum is really infamous in the running communities. The main reason for it that anonymous comments are allowed.

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