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Comment by csin | Hacker News Reader

"In 4chan a literal nazi, a drag queen, a bona-fide pedophile and a luddite can exchange opinions..."

This is overly romantic. I just visited /g/. Less than 1 min in, I see "nigger" and "faggot".

I'm sure there are blacks, gays and drag queens that see value in 4chan and are desensitized to those words. But, I'd estimate 99% of the population is white men/boys with antisocial tendencies.

Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with like minded people building a village. But let's not pretend the culture of the site, doesn't instantly weed out a huge chunk of multiple demographics.

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>This is overly romantic. I just visited /g/. Less than 1 min in, I see "nigger" and "faggot".

Yes, and if you spend an hour in it, you'll see them dozens of times more. Words hold the meaning we give them, by constantly seeing words like these you stop caring about them. This is part of what makes 4chan so inclusive.

Because rather than having a social agreement not to call someone this or that, everyone calls everyone this or that so, so often that it bears no meaning anymore.

A nice exercise in you thinking the whole world is only what you see for yourself. Here are the actual demographics:

Demographic

    Age: 18-34
    Gender: ~70% male, ~30% female
    Location: United States (47%), United Kingdom (7%), Canada (6%), Australia (4%), Germany (4%)
    Interests: Japanese culture, anime, manga, video games, comics, technology, music, movies
    Education: Majority attended or currently enrolled in college

How did they measure this? Except for Location (and maybe Interests) it seems like an anonymous image board would not have this information.

I mean it's pretty telling of which demographics gets weeded out... when rebuttal stats, casually leave out race and sexuality %'s.

>But, I'd estimate 99% of the population is white men/boys with antisocial tendencies.

You'd be wrong https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1220127-pol

one photo isn't data

It directly refutes OP's "estimation".

Not really

How? If I said that I think >99% of people have 2 arms, a photo of a one armed man doesn't refute it.

Do you have competing evidence besides your prejudices?

What prejudices would these be?

> desensitized to those words

"Desensitized to words" is normal mental development; infants may be excited by sheer words - not beyond.

Beyond infancy you (should) have gained filtering and control;

before that and after social experience, you should be able to understand actions as part of "playing" ("non-seriousness", transversality of intention).

This will only happen if you aren't directly exposed to trauma associated with homophobic or racist aggression etc.

No. Even those formerly traumatized can later become resilient to words.

This seems exceedingly generous to 4chan. Where else is this standard applied?

Unfortunately in less and less places due to outrage culture becoming commonplace.

I disagree, people care less about vulgar words than they used to.

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