hey dude you're 30 so we're around the same age, i'm 32. so were you on or aware of 4chan back in like 2006 during the habbo hotel pool's closed super anti black racist nazi shit that was going on over there all the time. do you only have rose tinted glasses for 4chan because you're white and would've been in middle school at the time just like i was so you would've been one of those "everyone had a racist phase" teen boys or what. did you just not pick up on how horrifyingly misogynistic 4chan was way before any Gamergate trump era shit. speak up lmfao
See again here's somebody acting like they're making some huge dunk by sort of just proving my point for me and not even reading what I'm saying. That whole habbo hotel thing was notoriously organized through /b/. /b/ was a board that had so much traffic that the site struggled to moderate it, to my knowledge, and this was because of the reputation it had from off-site. That was by far the worst board-culture, and the one that straight up had separate rules from the rest of the site. It was essentially a place for people to wear a digital mask and misbehave, mostly children, even. The rest of the user base was outright hostile to it and its users, again, because this was a complex online ecosystem.
For years, /k/ had a word filter that wouldn't let you post the n-word. I believe it would autoban you for 24 hours if you did. How does one reconcile that with the idea that it was always just some patently evil Nazi website? Well, you can't. The same way you can't reconcile that with the fact that it was a website with a lot of gay and trans people on it, or even a site with enough anarchists and communists for the site itself to acknowledge that fact with the usage of flags on certain boards, and for the creation of splinter sites to cater to that user base.
What I'm talking about is people constantly invoking 4chan as a uniquely evil, satanic website that poisoned the world, rather than actually being familiar with it and coming to a realistic understanding of why it functioned the way it did. There is a lot to learn from that, a lot of things that people are completely refusing to learn because they're plugging their ears and just repeating stuff they heard about /b/ ten years ago. Which is fucking dogshit stupid when we know, for an undeniable fact, that it was used as a testing range for numerous campaigns of manipulation. We know neo-nazis did it. We know the fucking FBI did it. We have reason to believe Epstein may have done it. There is so much invaluable information to be recovered from having conversations about this web of communication that acknowledges this for what it is rather than just going "that's the degenerate Evil Person website."
But you're very clearly not interested in having any kind of actual conversation. You're just trying to find some kind of sick dunk to justify your feelings of anger and repulsion that came from barely skimming a couple posts I made about this and not actually reading anything I've been saying.
Again; people are more concerned with moralization and narrativizing things in the most satisfying ways rather than doing the actual work of examining things with nuance and trying to extract facts from contradictions. You know. Like pigshit-basic dialectics. We could learn a lot about the psychology of social media and how these ideas propagate if we had conversations about like we weren't all twelve fucking years old. We might even have actual strategies to fight back against the deepening hole of reactionary propagation. But no. Let's just jack off about how upright we are, because we're not like what we imagine "4chan people" were/are. You're really saving us all, dude.
