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A comment on 8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service. Parent comment

Re:8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service by api on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @09:08AM (#20624778)
There are tons of non-gamified and non-surveillance-capitalist forums out there about all kinds of topics. I realize not everything and everyone on the chans is toxic, but there is quite a lot of toxic presence there.

I think the chans were cool and interesting back in the early-mid 2000s but since then they've been taken over by not-actually-ironic trolls, political propagandists and astroturfers, and other nasties. Since the forums are anonymous there's no real way to police it or even tell who you're talking to or whether they're a "real person" or a sock puppet of some kind.

I distinctly remember what to me felt like the chans' shark-jumping moment: Ebola Chan.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ebola-chan

When that appeared along with a thread full of seemingly not actually ironic comments like "maybe Ebola will de-populate Africa," I felt that the chans were done.

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Re:8chan goes dark after hardware provider discontinues service by ShinTakuya on Tuesday August 06, 2019 @09:21AM (#20624880)
There's plenty of actual racism around, which of course I don't like, but most of this is limited to /b/ and /pol/ which are not representative of the entire site. They just happen to get in the spotlight more because of how controversial they can be.

A lot of people on 4chan view these boards as a sort of filter to scare away outsiders. The majority of the site isn't nearly that edgy and largely discuss the various relevant topics for each respective board.

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