I visited once out of curiosity, and was just shocked to see how overtly racist people were. It wasn't just "immigrants should stay in their countries" (which I was expecting), it was full on "I don't see why I shouldn't be able to kill me a n*gger if I feel like it" speech (censorship mine). Truly disgusting.

Same. It was so on-the-nose I wasn't entirely convinced that everything I was reading was authentic. Obviously that type of person exists but some of the conversations seemed performative.

A lot of it probably started out as performative, but later became sincere -- either as users on the site became further radicalized, or as the site became a magnet for users who actually believed the awful things they were saying.

When I first moved to my current home I installed a big wood stove in the basement to help keep the home warm. Over the next few years I learned a lot empirically about how fire works.

One of the more interesting lessons was how important it is to use the radiant heat from a burning piece of wood to build and sustain heat in other pieces of wood. It works a bit like fuel rods in a fission reaction. When you keep the logs separate they will burn, but not vigorously. But if you bring two glowing logs close together, you can see them mutually heat each other and drive up the rate of combustion.

I think something like that happens with these concentrated communities.

That's a really striking analogy.

It's hard to say, but it does seem like the pathway from edgelord to actual nazi is disturbingly short and straight. Even if a lot of that content wasn't authentic, there is a non-trivial chance that they'll come to believe it eventually.

“Ironic nazis” aren’t a thing, they’re just nazis. The original nazis used “irony” and “edgelord” recruiting tactics in the same way that the modern neo-nazi does, with the same intents and purposes. There’s no difference in the tactics, just like there’s no difference in the contingent of concerned free-speech absolutists convinced that we need to listen to their “jokes” and take them in stride as they advance their radicalization campaigns. The “irony” is important, because it allows their recruits to performatively voice their hatred in a safe manner, much like a child riding a bike with training wheels. The goal of radicalization is to move them away from the irony, but keep the hatred.

https://www.thewrap.com/daily-stormer-founder-ironic-nazis-a...

Edgelords get rejected by all the non-nazis.

This is when i tend to apply Popehat's law of goats.

The Rule of Goats: even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker

It's only an act for so long. If it ever was an act.

The default advice for Reddit is "just unsubscribe from all the defaults because they're full of toxic assholes" so I don't see why the same measure wouldn't apply to Voat or 4Chan.

There's the toxicity on Reddit on one hand, and then there's the "Hitler was right", casual usage of racial slurs, and insinuations that "jews are trying to stifle Voat" on the other hand.

In the linked post you'll see references to "Angel", an anonymous individual that was funding Voat up until - apparently - March of this year. The comments refer to this individual, in a negative light, surrounded by both three parenthesis and the star of David.

In other words, the level of toxicity is on a completely different level.

I don't see anyone referring to angel with the star of david in the comments. I think the author of the post was simply using angel to refer to their angel investor that kept the platform funded.

Reddit attacks people if they don't have just the right amount of left leaning beliefs for the occasion.

4Chan basically requires you to prefix and postfix all your nouns with certain slurs.

People are mostly the same all over so I assume like 90% of the stupid crap you see on Voat or anywhere else is just people trying to virtue signal to each other and they don't honestly believe that garbage (even HN has its own brand of this) and only a minority of users honestly believe what they type. People are very good at fitting in.

Sure, it looks bad if Reddit is your frame of reference but if 4Chan is your frame of reference then it's just the same old layer of garbage on top of whatever content you're actually there for.

I used to lurk 4chan regularly (granted, not /pol/), and the amount of viciousness and toxicity on voat.co still seems high in comparison IMO.

The way 4chan uses suffixes like "f*g" (which is mostly jocular/memey, even if in bad taste) is not the same as the kind of outright hate speech you'll find all over voat. Voat might be more comparable with /pol/ in particular.

What about 8chan? The culture of idolizing white mass murderers has produced several who have posted their manifestos shortly before going on killing sprees, and the 8chan culture is largely the same as voat and 4chan.

When the hardcore believers from /r/The_Donald moved to Voat, I was happy that it was still possible for anyone to read what they were saying. Similar to a honeypot or sting operation, we are probably worse off when they scatter back to the shadows.

> we are probably worse off when they scatter back to the shadows.

We aren't, because unlike a criminal conspiracy, political ideas are viral. They don't spread well in the shadows. Like with an epidemic, if you even slightly lower the r factor, those ideas lose much of their power.

If you keep them in the light, if you normalize them, they spread like wildfire - as we have seen over the past few years.

I’m fairly sure both honeypots and sting operations were carried out on voat.

The hardcore believers from /r/The_Donald are on thedonald.win now. The place is as full of anti-semitism, racism and misogyny as you'd expect. It's a good place for a laugh every now and then, if you can stomach the hate.

It'll get worse.

Being on reddit anchored them to a wider community and gave them rules to abide by. This meant the true nastiness wasn't on display only hinted at. People drawn in by the memes from wider reddit weren't immediately repelled by the kind of nastiness that's on display in thedonald.win.

Now they're on their own platform they have no anchor and no real rules, they'll "muh free speech" themselves to destruction.

How did they take the election loss?

They haven't.

Well seeing that even r/conservative still thinks Trump won and the democrats stole the election, I'm sure you can figure out the answer.

All in all, these people think as hard as us that they are right, that they are the better people, that they have the better ideologies. I just can't fathom it. I'm convinced at this point that the only way to think about it is to understand that the IQ average of that group must be pretty low.

I imagine that when you think yourself better than "them", you're thinking about mask-refusers, literal nazis, and (((dog whistlers))). And when they think of "you" they think of antifa druggies living in a park and burning down stores. We can't really demonize someone if they aren't a bit radical so we have to focus on the radicals.

What I'm trying to say is that the idiots you see probably are dumb enough to think they're geniuses, but there's a huge invisible support base (on all sides) of non-radicals who are fairly rational. And I think experience is the biggest difference between the groups. If you've seen a neighboring store burned you feel one way, if you've seen a neighbor threatened you feel another. The problem then is sharing experiences honestly so we can construct a mutual view of reality and then discuss the same issues.

EQ, not IQ. So much of right-wing politics is predicated in lacking empathy for others.

Or both in the case of places like The_Donald and voat, there's very little intelligent discussion going on and the enemy is always the "elites". The elites aren't the 1%, they're experts like doctors and people with enough education to move to big cities.

I think it's both, it's not just an empathy thing because they do have empathy: but only for their family, their neighbors of colors, etc. It's more selective sure, but it's still empathy.

I've seen conservatives say they feel (have empathy) for the women in Jacob Blake's life, and the children, but not for Jacob himself. Or at least not since he became an adult and chose to perpetuate the cycle.

I think it's more complex than that all (or even most) republicans are racist.

It sounds like you only started visiting voat pretty late. I mostly hung around from when it was still WhoaVerse till the big exodus from reddit when politics took over in 2015/16. That's the lifecycle of these things. They're great at the start then they either gentrify or are overloaded by unpleasant fellows escaping gentrification elsewhere.

Antiracism is not "gentrification".

But banning entire subreddits because they share links to good deals on firearms and accessories is. That's because it doesn't have to do with ethics, morality, or even politeness. It's how controversial it is and if it will hurt ad profits. Gentrification in this context is making a site palatable to brands and advertisers.

Once they take large amounts of investment money they have to begin producing a return on it. From that point on users are the product and the brands are the real users.

Neither is cleaning up graffiti or opening coffee shops. Gentrification is a second-order effect of 'cleaning up' a community.