Can you even imagine using 4chan as a woman or a black man? Like not only in real life do you have to deal with people being racist as hell, but hey here's this forum that's entirely shameless about it too.

You seem to believe that folks can just ignore being called the n-word day-in and day-out as if it doesn't really affect them.

The only people who can go to 4chan and just ignore the toxic stuff are the people who aren't affected by the toxic stuff.

I used 4chan heavily when I was in college and early 20s. Back then most of the hate in /pol/ was directed at religion in general and scientology in particular and /r9k/ hadn't quite became a cesspool of incels. But as I got older I started to see the change. It became too "safe" (for lack of a better word) for people with social stigma to express their frustrations as anger and eventually misogyny and racism. I mostly stick to /tg/ and a few of the porn boards now but I'm hyper aware of who my peers might be. I know the simple answer is to "ignore the stuff you don't like" but that shit leaks everywhere and I still run across the occasional racist comment when I visit, even when I try to stick to the places that aren't literal cancer.

On 4chan though, I myself really don't get offended in any way. Someone explained it this way: you're only supposed to be offended if someone calls you a n* f* in a setting that not everyone is. On 4chan, everyone is already a n* f* so it kinda levels the playing field.

I get it that others minority people might not share the same view.

Folks have the right to be offended whenever they want to be.

If you aren't offended, then that's your decision and you're free to make it. But ultimately I still believe you should respect the opinions of those who are offended. If they hate 4chan, I'm not going to argue with them about it.

There's a lot of folks in this thread claiming that if you're offended by speech on 4chan, then it's really you who has the problem and that's mainly who I'm trying to address.

I am saying that 4chan is not a safe place if you are black or most minorities. Period. I don't care what 4chan's culture is because it doesn't matter for the sake of this point.

The part that affects me isn’t the word itself, and I don’t personally feel offended by a stranger using it. It’s just over time when you see so much vitriol directed towards your race even in places where it should be irrelevant (like gaming), I noticed I began to think that pretty much all white people were consumed by a hatred of blacks (why else would I see the n word being used so often?). It's hard to remind yourself about how big the internet is, maybe it's just the particular communities you visit, etc.

Edit: since this a throwaway anyway, I did develop a distaste for associating with white people for a period of time. In my mind, they were two faced and probably wouldn't hesitate to call people like me n*gger online.

> The part that affects me isn’t the word itself, and I don’t personally feel offended by a stranger using it. ...

This is kind of the point I'm trying to make further down the thread. There's a lot of folks saying that 4chan's use of this language is a form of community and culture, rather than meant as actual offense. But I don't think that makes it okay for exactly the point you make here.

Do not think that whites are all like those people.

Some of the best memes come from India and they get plenty of abuse on the site...

[0]: https://youtu.be/qCj6YNIpqmA?t=123

All people should be handled with care. It's basic empathy. History gives you context that can assist in empathizing with black people and women.

> plenty of people around the world have been killed, enslaved, displaced, humiliated and any number of things

Part of the reason slavery matters so much in the United States is because there are still vestiges of it in all of our political / social / and cultural lives. It's been a part of the U.S. from the beginning and the country has done a piss-poor job of rectifying the situation.

Your comment lacks any perspective on history which in turn affects how we treat fellow people.

It affects folks in the same way learning that a lot of folks on Reddit/HN like to Haskell. "Oh hey I didn't know Haskell was so popular"

I post on HN with my real name, but you use a pseudonym. Nevertheless, your pseudonym has a posting history and karma number attached to it, so anything you post will "stick with you" in a persistent manner. Discussions somewhat resemble real-life discussion because one can track who's saying what, what everyone's said in the past, and so forth. If I flame you, my post probably gets deleted and I might even get banned, because that's how this community has decided to moderate itself.

Anonymous imageboards like 4chan are wholly different beasts altogether. If I post something foolish here on HN, perhaps talking out of my ass, saying something incorrect, I'd get downvotes and comments telling me why I'm wrong. You might even remember my handle as "that one guy who said the dumb incorrect thing one time" next time you see it. on 4chan, when you make a dumb post and everyone dogpiles on you, calling you out for your idiocy and calling you bad names, you can just close the tab and move on in your life. People aren't attacking YOU, they're attacking Post #418317258, and its author has closed the tab and permanently disassociated himself from it.

Everyone has to go to school, the park, etc, and I pay the same tax so having an environment that is pleasant for everyone is a required property. I can't ignore someone shouting to me insulting slurs for who I am. But no one has to go to 4chan, if someone feels offended they can just not visit it.

I would quote "Shit my dad says" on this: "Don't focus on the one guy who hates you. You don't go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog shit."

But let's go /pol/ for a hot sec. Oh hey! Ctrl-F says there's 5 occurrences of the n-word (Hard -r too!).

I'm not black, but I imagine that just ignoring stuff like that really gets to you after awhile. Here is a forum where people actively demean others based on the color of their skin, and not only is it normal, but if you're going to visit you need to make sure no one knows that they're actually black. So should they just pretend to be white?

I am simply saying that if you're black, you're affected by the discourse on 4chan much differently than you would be if you are white. A few black nationalists is a lot different than the sea of n-word use, and it affects folks much, much differently.

There was also that Shia LeBouf incident, where black and hispanic members of /pol/ from NYC showed up to disrupt his political performance art thing he was live streaming. These people exist, contrary to our political assumptions, the world is a stange place.

> It’s, you know, that kind of black person. :)

Oh yes, smiley because this is just so funny and amusing :) Hundreds of years or racism using EXACTLY that excuse - "It's only supposed to describe the bad ones" - and hey let's just smile about it :)

I'm done with this discussion. It's pretty clear that you've never actually thought about how this affects other people. There are many books on the subject of the n-word written by black men and women, I suggest you read a few.

They can't? Almost no matter who you are, somebody somewhere is musing about your death, if you can't handle that in words, I doubt you could live much, regardless of your identifiable characteristics.

I really cannot wrap my mind around the lack of empathy required to say "if you can't handle it" to people being called racist slurs. I presume you have never been called a racist slur. I presume you have never been demonized for your skin color - how can you even begin to know what that's like?

Ignoring the hatred that people on 4chan have for black people is not trivial - obviously this is more affecting for a person if they're black.

Have you read any testimonials about racism, or how it's made folks feel, or anything like that? There's many books out there, and I think your lack of empathy comes from ignorance. Reading some first-hand experience may make it more clear.

Doesn't that remind you of something?

I don't care how conservative my opinion is. I don't equate the quality of arguments and opinions with which adjectives can be used to describe them.

Also please point to which decade it was where the n-word was "disassociated from hate". When has the word not been used in a hateful way?

Calling people the n-word provokes outrage because it is an outrageous thing to do. The word has a history and we all know it.

> People are imploring you to accept that times are changing and the word is being disassociated from hate

The only people imploring me of this are random folks on the Internet. I talk to black folks all the time in the real world, and you know what? It's still not ok.

It is my understanding that it was created as a containment board, but it's popularity and relative power has soured me on the whole site.

Here's the problem: /pol/ gets so much traffic that I can't imagine that its visitors do not cover a fairly broad subset of 4chan's entire user base. This means that if I contribute to any of the other boards I am contributing in some way to the intellectual capital pool drawn upon by the sorts of people who hang out in /pol/.

No thanks.

I'm not the only person who feels this way. I've heard others say this kind of thing too. There's a lot of people who once visited the site who no longer do so. Boards like /pol/ seem to be killing 4chan as anything other than a more Internet-cool satellite of Stormfront.

I don't think there actually are, in practice.

How do you have any sort of "containment" on an anonymous forum? There's nothing at all stopping /b/ and /pol/ from stepping into any other board and either playing along or not. The only containment there is a state of mind.

> ignore the crap you don't care about

The problem is that plenty of people seem to use it for recruiting to make the world worse for non-users, whether by campaigns of organised harassment or disinformation, or other means.

For your second point, how is that unique to 4chan? Every message board I've ever used does stuff like that.

I just went to /pol/. No -- every message board I've ever used does not do stuff like that. And how the hell are you okay with using one that does?

not a message board though, but a forum.

So you keep repeating that and raising the censorship bar until nobody is offended anymore. And what you have is a whitewashed, sanitized forum with less creativity, originality, and free association. That's not what everyone wants. Some people want the uncensored version.

How do you call for that on an unmoderated platform? Or do you think they should have a mod sit there and curate it for your tastes? Or automated software that keeps everything PC? I'm curious how "calling for " is in any way different than praying?

It's like that because people with your outlook have deplatformed so much discourse that 4chan is the last bastion of a truly free exchange of ideas. Voat comes in a close second.

Calling something bigoted and racist is just an attempt to deflect and ignore the conversation. Offending people is generally the backbone of controversial discussion.

Everyone "signals." Signaling is a fundamental aspect of social behavior. I don't care much about signaling and tend to ignore it as background noise. It's the real ideas that matter. The dominant ideas on Voat and /pol/ are political totalitarianism, dogmatic biological determinism, hatred for huge groups of people, and even advocacy of slavery and genocide.

There are toxic "left" communities that advocate totalitarianism and are full of hate as well, but they don't seem quite as common or as popular.

Best memes. /b/ has gone to shit in the last few years, /r9k/ can be hilarious although disturbing.

RIP

Several reasons I don't use /g/:

* I don't want to look at images.

* I don't want to search for the threads I want, they should all be in one board, that's the whole point.

* The fact that /prog/ was killed in the first place when a textboard like it couldn't POSSIBLY be accounting for much bandwidth anyways is proof enough that 4chan wanted to appeal to a wider range of users. I took the hint.

* Finally, the type of users that use /g/ are not the people I want to have discussions with anyways, even if it's programming-related. Lots of /prog/ users only used /prog/, back before it was killed.

/prog/ was sometimes fun, but I could never really spend much time there before getting bored. There's only so many times you can see SICP snake and fizzbuzz haskell before getting tired of it.

I'm sad the text boards are gone, but looking back after they went read-only I couldn't find much I actually wanted to read again, and I can't really blame moot for not wanting to deal with a slow spam-filled relic any longer.

I find some interesting stuff in the readonly. Fibonacci buttsort is always good, sicp stuff is nice to remember. Idk, it's a nice nostalgia for me.

That said given moot's nonexistent proficiency in PHP, he probably had enough things on his plate just keeping the site running, I can't imagine integrating recaptcha in the world4ch codebase would have been very fun..

I don't envy the challenges of non-technical founders/ceos/managers, but I also don't sympathize with them very much. The Internet is an amazing resource for learning things.