Hacker News Reader

Comment by beebmam | Hacker News Reader

I think the accusation that 4chan is a far-right message board is accurate, and I believe that accusation can be supported by showing that 4chan's explicitly stated rules can be used to plausibly deny this accusation, while demonstrating that they're are not enforced (or selectively enforced).

4chan's Rule 3: "You will not post any of the following outside of /b/: Troll posts, Racism, Anthropomorphic ("furry") pornography, Grotesque ("guro") images..."

These rules are constantly being violated across many of the boards, and moderators rarely take action on some of the boards when posts are reported unless they explicitly violate US law. I've seen so many threads get to 400+ replies and fall off the boards, threads that blatantly violate these rules. The period of time after the 2020 election was brutal, an enormous amount of violent and racist content was not removed.

Rules are often even selectively enforced, sculpting narratives that moderator cliques decide on (see /pol/ for example).

At some point, it's worthwhile to ask "who benefits?" from these rules not being enforced. The kind of content that doesn't get moderated is strictly far-right stuff.

View on HN

There are people of all political persuasions on 4chan. You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see. No one will ban you.

> You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see

Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.

You can also be a communist. You can also be an open source maximalist. You can also be a gay dog furry. You can also be trans. You can also be extremely autistic.

It is good to have a place where people can exist as themselves and be exposed to different ideas. I would wager that most people who go there are far more accepting than the general population.

What is it that you feel like you gain from being exposed to white nationalism?

Being unfazed by horrors isn't a virtue, having scarred your soul like this isn't something to be proud of. You should be uncomfortable talking to a nazi! You should be more than uncomfortable!

Someone might say the same thing about trans people. Should I be extremely uncomfortable talking to a trans person? Of course not. Many people think I should though.

As for white nationalists, when engaging in discussion with someone you disagree with you have the opportunity to change their mind.

We're all human. We won't always agree. I'm happy to meet everybody as human beings.

You don't have the opportunity to change their mind that's an illusion that works in their favor:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

When you do stuff like this all you are doing is giving them a platform, letting them do PR for their hideous causes. They can calmly discuss the very existence of a group of people and then exit when it suits them. A member of that group is, rightfully, unlikely to have that sort of calm intellectual distance from a conversation about their right to exist.

>But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly

You don't have to watch your words on 4chan though. You can literally just make fun of them.

You can larp as whoever you want to get a rise out of whoever you want. That is mostly what the site is. While you're larping as a nazi you're being exposed to every other political point of view, every gender, every race, and every sexuality.

How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?

Yeah, a bunch of them are. They’re lunatics

> How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?

a lot of them. Nazis in dog costumes are an actual population on the board and get into frequent conflicts with non nazi pornographic content consumers. You just need to check out the 18+ boards and you see it almost immediately.

For context, if I'm not mistaken you're quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew

Discarding people rather than their views and arguments is what creates extremists. When you see people as members of a group rather than individuals then you push them towards the extremists of that group.

Edgelords that argue for sport exist of course but they too are people - and might not even believe in whatever ideologies they are meming.

Being racist and being trans are not equivalent...

Who said they were?

The person I replied to did.

Negatory captain, I did not.

You were arguing against an argument by popularity or something like that, but giraffe lady didn't say that you should be uncomfortable talking to nazis because they're near universally reviled? But because they are reprehensible, not due to how they're considered.

I think isolating white nationalists just makes them congregate on echo chambers more. There should be a balance; you should not talk to racists/people with evil views if you can't maintain boundaries with them. So I don't disagree that you should be uncomfortable

Maybe you didn't mean to but your comment did indeed equate the two.

You didn't say it outright. But your words definitely contained a strong degree of innuendo that two groups were, in terms of potential for being intrinsically repulsive to others -- basically equivalent.

I disagree. The only equivalence drawn is that there are people who try to tell me how I should feel about each of those groups.

I do not feel that way though.

> Someone might say the same thing about trans people.

Sure, they might, but it'd be ridiculous.

Being a white nationalist is a choice someone makes (and continues to make every day) whereas being trans is not.

Further, white nationalism is associated with bigoted actions (including speech) whereas trans is just someone's personal identity that doesn't really affect anyone else. The two aren't remotely comparable.

I don't agree with white nationalism but I don't believe it is a choice someone makes. For the most part, you can't choose to believe something or not. Sure, you can choose to not engage in the actions and speech characteristic of white nationalists, but so can trans people stay closeted.

> For the most part, you can't choose to believe something or not.

To what extent beliefs are voluntary or involuntary is a major topic of philosophical dispute: https://iep.utm.edu/doxastic-voluntarism/

I'm happy to meet everybody as human beings.

No fucking way I am. Reading the above, it seems you lack awareness of how messed up and dangerous certain people out there are.

This feels all fine and good until those humans advocate for your extermination to other humans who are more prone to violence than them

And you should be uncomfortable talking to someone who is indifferent about supporting industrialized animal torture that is also destroying the climate, just because animals are "lesser" or "created by God for us to eat". But that's like, whatever, not the reprehensible evil in fashion.

Unrelated to this topic, but I don't see a logical way around this.

I guess I shouldn't talk to anyone. Almost unironically. Or should disengage from people who push into my boundaries, who would turn me into a worse person. So any white supremacist who keeps trying to "convince" me would be substantially worse than a meat eater who respects my views and doesn't push.

It's ok to be a communist, it's ok to use open source software, it's ok to be gay, a furry, trans, or autistic.

It's not ok to be a white nationalist. /b/ and other 4chan boards do not ban white nationalists.

>It's ok to be a communist

Only if you ignore the mountain of skulls

No, it is NOT ok to be a communist. Communists and white nationalists are morally equivalent, though communism to date has a much higher body count than white nationalism and their methods of execution and torture have on balance been more savage and more brutal.

We stopped white Nationalisms. If not, Communism's death toll would be a joke in comparison.

This post really illustrates the expansion of terms into meaninglessness. One presumes they're referring to the Allies (who themselves would now be considered extremely racist) stopping the Nazis, who allied with the Japanese and were targeting/killing mostly Jewish and Slavic peoples. The Nazis were specifically pro-German/Aryan and whatever they thought that meant ethnically. They did not see things in today's racial terms. It's absurd to describe them as "white nationalists" because they didn't think that being "white" was good. There were a lot of "bad" "white" people in their worldview.

It also seems unlikely that the Nazis would have succeeded in killing many more millions of people than they did without Allied intervention, but at least this requires some unprovable speculation about alternative histories. Either way, can we stop fighting battles almost a century old? Today's bad guys are not yesterday's and yesterday's good guys are not today's good guys.

Unprobable speculation? Ever heard of the final solution? FFS...

I would strongly recommend reading The Third Reich trilogy by Richard J. Evans. Most people have a rather propagandistic view of the war and this series is easily accessible for the layman and does a really good job at laying out what happened and when and why.

Can you provide a summary for people who don't want to read 3 books?

this is a baffling comment! white nationalists still very often hate jewish people! they are not dramatically different and still have a tendency to idolize nazis!

The communist body count is largely based on incapacity that led to famine.

The white nationalist made genocide an efficient industrial process. Just look how little time they needed to nearly eradicate the Jews.

Holodomor wasn't an accident, neither where the killing fields. Please stop spreading communist propaganda.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Holodomor

Well, by this logic it's way less ok to be capitalist and imperialist

on that grounds it’s also not ok to be a capitalist… maybe I’m not familiar enough with communism but I didn’t think it inherently included genocide like white nationalism tends to?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge

A money quote for those who can't be bothered to read: Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia's population.

And people still want to be communists. Ideology is strange.

Is that not due to the specific regime regardless of the political ideology? Communism doesn't inherently include brutal totalitarian autocrats? we've certainly seen them under other systems as well.

> Communism doesn't inherently include brutal totalitarian autocrats?

It's a "smoking causes cancer" situation. Just because other things also cause cancer doesn't mean that smoking doesn't. Read up on the history, look at each communist country, see what they become. Smoking causes cancer.

There's just still a bunch of communists who deny it because it's uncomfortable. Just like Neo-Nazis are denying the holocaust. If they were proud of it, they wouldn't deny it. They're not, but they'd like to keep the rest of their worldview intact and pretend that it didn't happen. Don't be like that, look at the history.

Fair enough, I can agree that communism has a bad track record. Though if I were to go back to my original point there's certainly an inherent violence in white nationalism that is unacceptable and being tolerant of this is paradoxical.

There are countries that while not communist, successfully enact a blend of socialism and capitalism without any significant violence. I don't think white nationalism has any sort of validly applicable aspects that can be stretched to that effect.

> Though if I were to go back to my original point there's certainly an inherent violence in white nationalism that is unacceptable and being tolerant of this is paradoxical.

I don't think it does any more than any other form of nationalism does. Are the Baltic countries violent in your eyes? Their nationalism necessarily is hard to distinguish from ethnic nationalism, because they're very homogeneous. All they'd need to do to be white nationalists is to declare so openly. They're a pretty peaceful bunch, unless you invade them (like the Soviets found out in the Winter War).

Communism on the other hand, is necessarily violent, it cannot function without violently suppressing those who do not believe in it, and it will, always and without fail, go on an eradication trip to do so.

I think there's a notable difference though, the baltic states may be ethnic nationalists... but they're established nations. And sure, while they could claim to be white nationalists... they do not seem to want to make that association.

White nationalism universally seeks to carve out its own space at the expense of others. It's impossible to engage with the ideology without associating with violence.

It's definitely not OK to a be communist. One of the most hurtful ideologies out there. Proven again and again. It's definitely not OK to be a fascist or an islamist either.

For what it's worth, you can openly be a white nationalist (or black nationalist, or any other kind of racial nationalist) on most social media, even here on Hacker News.

However, you will be moderated if you say anything extremely violent/racist on most social media sites. That's a good thing, in my opinion. I can understand if someone doesn't think it's a good thing that that content is moderated.

I'd take the argument that 4chan isn't a site for the far-right more seriously if 4chan didn't have these explicit rules which they don't enforce (or selectively enforce). But it's pretty clear what kind of rules are allowed to be broken on that site and what kind of rules aren't allowed to be broken. Take one glance at /pol/ for an example.

That's a weird way to frame a truly free speech environment. Yes, speech is more limited to left-leaning speech on most accepted parts of the internet. That doesn't make a board that allows both to be right-leaning. It means that most of the internet is left-leaning.

Ofc, im simplifying to left vs right here, but that's only in response to calling it a right leaning board.

Many people confuse "free speech is a good" with "free speech is the highest good".

> truly free speech environment

Sounds awful.

You should rest easy tonight, knowing that nobody has any plans to make you go there.

If only its toxic effects didn't spill over into the real world, corroding hard-won civilized society.

Right without 4chan “spilling over into the “”real”” world” we’d have a utopia with zero hate.

If your civilization can be toppled by some weeaboos on a Mongolian basket weaving forum, maybe it wasn't that great to begin with.

Truly free speech has a vibe of calling Vogelfrei truly freedom.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelfrei

Are doxing, slander, defamation free speech?

Truly free, as in no limitation. I would include doxing, slander, and defamation to fall under "truly free speech", yes. That it not me advocating for these things, it is me calling limiting them what it is: limiting speech. We limit them because they can be very dangerous or destructive, not because they aren't speech.

> It means that most of the internet is left-leaning.

At the risk of sounding like I wear a tin foil hat... that's what they want you to think!

> Yes but you can do this anywhere

I disagree. Most websites don't allow white nationalism, so there aren't any white nationalists to bully. On websites like Facebook or reddit, you're either screaming into the void or preaching to the choir.

Yeah you can argue that /pol/ sways far right and you'd be correct, and I don't personally condone most of the opinions that are represented there, but take a look at the general threads, you have a pro-ukraine one and an anti-ukraine one, both with equal representation. I can't think of any other site that has this. Any other website following the classical formula of pseudonyms and upvotes/downvotes, like Reddit, hackernews, and so on, are destined to be an echo chamber. You can feel it here too, even though HN is heavily moderated.

And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse.

If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.

Surely at this point half the content on /pol/ is from professional propagandists and LLM-powered bots, trying to create the impression of a "4chan consensus" to sway anyone stupid enough to be taken in by that.

Why would professional propagandists care to influence a mongolian basket weaving forum? Even if they do succeed, their audience is going to be largely social outcasts with very little power or influence in society.

Respectfully, meme magic says otherwise

Laughing to myself imagining the people believing you, thinking “hmm methinks I could use a little intellectual diversity in my bubble”, they click over to 4chan, take a big sip of coffee, and… actually look at it. lol

e: I’ll concede you can find different opinions there. Just, I wanna see a video feed of an unsuspecting person actually trying to go there to, like, learn.

>e: I’ll concede you can find different opinions there. Just, I wanna see a video feed of an unsuspecting person actually trying to go there to, like, learn.

Learning about opposing viewpoints doesn't count as learning?

Imagine I said whatever you wanted me to say to that and have fun with it, man. You deserve it.

There's an adjustment period to understand each boards specific signal:noise. You can't just walk in and find Aristotle and Kant figuring shit out.

Each board has its ridiculous bullshit, groupthink, absurd extremists, edgelords, etc. once you know how to parse that you can quickly navigate to quality posts.

Each board of course has different signal:noise though, somewhere like /lit/ is probably 1:20 whereas /pol/ is probably 1:500-1/1000. But the quality posts are totally different from what you'll find anywhere else. Different users and audience.

Also elevenlabs ai started as an offshoot of the MLP voice generation threads.

Take a look at the general threads, you have a pro-ukraine one and an anti-ukraine one, both with equal representation.

And this is ... a good thing?

yes

What, you prefer a bubble? Things were far better before the opposing viewpoints walled themselves off and refused to communicate with the people who disagreed with them. Isn't the political divide one of the big problems in (US) society these days?

What, you prefer a bubble?

False dichotomy.

Just because I don't like the same radio station you like - doesn't mean I want to live in a bubble, and only listen to my own music.

When 50% of the population likes that radio station, then yeah it means you want to live in a bubble.

So if 50 percent of the town I live in watches Fox News, and I don't -- I'm living in a bubble?

If Fox News is different enough from the news you watch, then yes, obviously.

My take is a source is "bubbly" or not on the basis of its content.

Not the portion of people in your immediate vicinity who happen to read/listen to it.

This doesn't make a site right-wing.

I don't think it's good, that's why I don't go there. But the discussion was never whether it was good.

> Yeah you can argue that /pol/ sways far right and you'd be correct, and I don't personally condone most of the opinions that are represented there, but take a look at the general threads, you have a pro-ukraine one and an anti-ukraine one, both with equal representation. I can't think of any other site that has this.

It's not so much the voting that makes things lopsided but when posts are ordered or deemphasized based on those votes or if the actual moderators are opposed to free speech ideals. I can think of at least two low-moderation forums that do manage to host people of opposing opinions for the Ukraine war and other topics so it's not like 4chan is particularly unnique, just bigger and better known.

It’s interesting that the website is considered far-right simply because it doesn’t ban far-right posters. The website isn’t explicitly for right-wingers, but by allowing them to post on the website that’s what it’s become.

More specifically, it allows far righters to post against its rules, but enforces them against other groups. It's hardly surprising then.

> More specifically, it allows far righters to post against its rules, but enforces them against other groups.

Source of this happening systemically? I ask systemically because for any forum there's accusations (and corresponding anecdotes) of censorship from both sides, so a few posts don't really prove anything. You see this on twitter for instance, with accusations that both the left and the right are being unfairly targeted.

1. Read the sitewide 4chan rules.

2. Look at /pol/.

3. Break another of the rules. (ie not the racism rule).

4. see your post get deleted.

How does this answer my original question? Are you just suggesting that because there is racism on /pol/, that it means that rules are being selectively enforced against non-"far righters"?

Yes. The far right is specifically being exempted from certain rules, while other rules are exempted. You can observe this because the far right is exempted from the rule that's meant to restrict them to /b/ and is instead allowed to roam free across the website (not just /pol/), while others aren't.

>Yes. The far right is specifically being exempted from certain rules, while other rules are exempted.

which specific rules are you talking about, aside from racism? Or is your claim simply that rules against racism isn't being enforced and therefore that constitutes "but enforces them against other groups"? Note that the latter is slightly different than the former. The former simply implies a rule that is written but not enforced, but the latter implies that certain rules (eg. "be polite") are being selectively used against a particular group (eg. impolite far-right posters are not punished, but impolite far-left posters are punished).

It's the Nazi Bar problem.

https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089253502461952...

You are linking to a website that now allows far-right posters, not sure if Nazis are included. Did it become a Nazi bar? I don't think so.

From the outside, it sure as shit looks like it. Great that you don't think so, good to know you're oblivious.

This is literally slippery slop fallacy? . Are we dropping that one from the rulebook?

Sometimes slopes are slippery.

I think it's far-right representation has certainly grown over time, probably largely as a function of right-wing speech being pushed out of other platforms.

However 4chan has always had, and continues to have quite broad demographics, it attracts extremes, by nature of it's low moderation and permissive content policies.

Some examples of left wing associated content could be it's very active LGBT user base.

It's involvement political movements like "anonymous", targeting groups like the Westboro baptist church, hacking the website of Uganda's anti-gay prime minister, occupy wall street, etc.

Grown or concentrated? I can assure you they've always been on Facebook and Twitter, if you didn't see them you were probably bubbled by the algorithm. After the 2016 election a lot of the more mainstream sites decided they didn't want to host them anymore, it's kinda a no-brainer that they'd go to places like 4chan that won't kick them off

LGBT is not inherently left wing. I’m not sure why you would think it is.

Anti-semitism also isn't inherently right wing. That doesn't mean the social phenomenon currently driving anti-semitism isn't right wing.

The 4chan moderators are rarely enforcing the rules against racism, like anti-semitism, on the extreme boards, and sometimes they don't enforce those rules on non-extreme boards too. The anti-semitism on the extreme boards is rampant. It's pretty clear that the far-right is the current social phenomenon that is driving modern racism and anti-semitism, at least in the West.

> That doesn't mean the social phenomenon currently driving anti-semitism isn't right wing.

> It's pretty clear that the far-right is the current social phenomenon that is driving modern racism and anti-semitism, at least in the West.

That really depends on who you ask. There are many Jews who insist that left-wing antisemitism is a big problem-some will even argue it is as big a problem as (or even a bigger problem than) right-wing antisemitism. And it isn’t just right-wing Jews who speak of left-wing antisemitism as a big and growing problem - the ADL, which is very much a respected part of the American Jewish establishment, is saying the same thing - https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/09/06/adl-ceo-left-wing-anti...

Not inherently, but close enough, mostly just because the right seems to hate it.

I’m well aware of the limitations with the left-right political abstraction. Every individual issue has varying levels of support among traditional political groupings, but I think it’s fair to say that issue of advancing the interests of LGBT people, is overwhelmingly an issue associated with a left wing political disposition.

> but I think it’s fair to say that issue of advancing the interests of LGBT people, is overwhelmingly an issue associated with a left wing political disposition.

Some truth in that, in Western countries right now, but less so historically or globally. Stalin re-criminalised homosexuality in 1934, and in Russia even today you can find far-left people whose views on LGBT issues are largely indistinguishable from those of the far-right. I’m sure some are going to argue those people “aren’t really left”-but unapologetic Stalinists really are far-left not far-right, and the anti-LGBT stuff is just their following in Stalin’s own footsteps. There are heaps of Western right-wingers who are far more LGBT-friendly than the average Russian Stalinist

Given the context, besides the other responses you've been given, I would add pink triangles.

>Rules are often even selectively enforced, sculpting narratives that moderator cliques decide on (see /pol/ for example).

I can tell you for a fact that the large majority of the mods despise /pol/. As for rules not being enforced, if a post is not reported it likely won't be acted upon.

I've reported 1000+ non-illegal posts for breaking the rules, at minimum, with very low (<5%) action/moderation rate on the extreme boards.

Anthropomorphic furry porn is right wing now? I think there are some people for whom "offensive to me," "offensive to others, and "right wing" are equivalent terms. All your post does is prove that you fall into that category. Live Leak death videos and racist jokes are no more "right wing" than pedophilia is "left wing" (which is to say that it isn't).

Now some people break down racism in some weird way where bigotry towards Africans or Hispanics is "right wing" and bigotry toward Caucasians and Asians is "left wing," but those people are laughable in their tribalistic thinking and weird politicization of everything.

Have you even been on 4chan before? This isn't some nuanced "what actually is systemic bigotry?" question. "Ni**s and tra**s should all be burned alive and there should be bounties that pay for it" is not a subtle message. Yet it is a sentiment that is visible (and often verbatim) in every thread, and which receives supportive replies.

always weird to read someones made up opinion of an online space. the documentary about pepe was the same

The rules not being enforced really is 4chan's worst problems, and where everything else terrible on that site stems. On /g/, the tech board, you will see nothing but flame wars and troll posts for/against various operating systems and programming languages. Its basically nonstop trolling DESPITE being one of the more serious boards. Worse, a lot of the "jannies"(unpaid tattletales) are in on the trolling and actively make posts to start flame wars.

For the admins, its a problem. Besides 8kun, they are pretty much the only major image board with anything really going for it, especially now that 420chan has bit the dust. However, if they enforce the rules, its very likely that people will either stop using it entirely or move on to 8kun instead. For the janitor problem, 4chan relies almost entirely on them to report posts that break the rules to the admins, but since its on a volunteer basis, janitors have no reason to take the role seriously which has led the site to be the gutter it is now.

Basically, the whole 4chan system is screwed. I used to go to 420chan as an alternative because it was way more "chill" and there was way less racism and trolling due to it having actual moderation. Now that its gone though my only choice for imageboards are 4chan and its much worse brother, 8kun so I have decided to stop using imageboards entirely until something decent gets started.

>... which has led the site to be the gutter it is now.

... now? It's felt like a cesspool for decades.

> decades

4chan hasn't...

Oh god, 4chan has been around for almost 20 years. I'm getting old...

Yeah, I even went and double checked just to make sure. "That feels right, but it can't be-... ah fuck."

Well, it was a cesspool back then, I guess it's good to hear it's still a cesspool now.

The more things change, I suppose.

20 years this October. Weird stuff

Reply on news.ycombinator.com