For the admins, its a problem. Besides 8kun, they are pretty much the only major image board with anything really going for it, especially now that 420chan has bit the dust. However, if they enforce the rules, its very likely that people will either stop using it entirely or move on to 8kun instead. For the janitor problem, 4chan relies almost entirely on them to report posts that break the rules to the admins, but since its on a volunteer basis, janitors have no reason to take the role seriously which has led the site to be the gutter it is now.

Basically, the whole 4chan system is screwed. I used to go to 420chan as an alternative because it was way more "chill" and there was way less racism and trolling due to it having actual moderation. Now that its gone though my only choice for imageboards are 4chan and its much worse brother, 8kun so I have decided to stop using imageboards entirely until something decent gets started.

... now? It's felt like a cesspool for decades.

4chan hasn't...

Oh god, 4chan has been around for almost 20 years. I'm getting old...

The more things change, I suppose.

Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.

It is good to have a place where people can exist as themselves and be exposed to different ideas. I would wager that most people who go there are far more accepting than the general population.

Being unfazed by horrors isn't a virtue, having scarred your soul like this isn't something to be proud of. You should be uncomfortable talking to a nazi! You should be more than uncomfortable!

As for white nationalists, when engaging in discussion with someone you disagree with you have the opportunity to change their mind.

We're all human. We won't always agree. I'm happy to meet everybody as human beings.

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

When you do stuff like this all you are doing is giving them a platform, letting them do PR for their hideous causes. They can calmly discuss the very existence of a group of people and then exit when it suits them. A member of that group is, rightfully, unlikely to have that sort of calm intellectual distance from a conversation about their right to exist.

You don't have to watch your words on 4chan though. You can literally just make fun of them.

You can larp as whoever you want to get a rise out of whoever you want. That is mostly what the site is. While you're larping as a nazi you're being exposed to every other political point of view, every gender, every race, and every sexuality.

How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?

a lot of them. Nazis in dog costumes are an actual population on the board and get into frequent conflicts with non nazi pornographic content consumers. You just need to check out the 18+ boards and you see it almost immediately.

Similarly I do dispute the characterisation made by Sartre that we are irrational, doing it for fun, etc.

Many people have similar beliefs about other groups (Christians, Muslims, etc.). In America you can openly dunk on Christians or Muslims for example. You can agree or not with those beliefs, but I don't think the people doing that are completely irrational or doing it just as a provocation.

Edgelords that argue for sport exist of course but they too are poeple - and might not even believe in whatever ideologies they are meming.

I think isolating white nationalists just makes them congregate on echo chambers more. There should be a balance; you should not talk to racists/people with evil views if you can't maintain boundaries with them. So I don't disagree that you should be uncomfortable

I do not feel that way though.

Sure, they might, but it'd be ridiculous.

Being a white nationalist is a choice someone makes (and continues to make every day) whereas being trans is not.

Further, white nationalism is associated with bigoted actions (including speech) whereas trans is just someone's personal identity that doesn't really affect anyone else. The two aren't remotely comparable.

To what extent beliefs are voluntary or involuntary is a major topic of philosophical dispute: https://iep.utm.edu/doxastic-voluntarism/

> Someone: @dang

> dang: That doesn't work. The only things that work are to email [email protected] or rely on randomness. The former works most of the time and the latter works some of the time.

(I'd have said the same thing if you said you were developing a hatred for right-leaning people or anyone else.)

No fucking way I am. Reading the above, it seems you lack awareness of how messed up and dangerous certain people out there are.

Imagine that saying that being whatever race or skin color is acceptable terrifies some people, people who literally would like you to be unable to state that. Of course, this isn't evenly distributed. Substitute any other color for "WHITE" and everything is hunky-dory. This is also very illuminating.

More over, one discovers that merely being in the proximity of someone who might agree with the idea that it is okay to be white makes you, in full guilt-by-association mode, also a "Nazi." From this we learn that "Nazi" is a term which no longer means anything, like how Orwell complained about the term "fascist." People who disagree are now "Nazis." This is amazing if you stop and consider it. It is as if someone who fails to engage in a ton of logical fallacies has become The Enemy, "the worst" or a "garbage person." This, from people who preach against dehumanization.

I have to trawl what are apparently the disturbing depths of the internet, venturing into a website originally used to post memes about how liking Bridget isn't gay, to discover these things.

One can hardly habeeb it.

It's not a privilege Black people get; it's perfectly linguistically coherent.

It's not ok to be a white nationalist. /b/ and other 4chan boards do not ban white nationalists.

It also seems unlikely that the Nazis would have succeeded in killing many more millions of people than they did without Allied intervention, but at least this requires some unprovable speculation about alternative histories. Either way, can we stop fighting battles almost a century old? Today's bad guys are not yesterday's and yesterday's good guys are not today's good guys.

The white nationalist made genocide an efficient industrial process. Just look how little time they needed to nearly eradicate the Jews.

A money quote for those who can't be bothered to read: Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia's population.

And people still want to be communists. Ideology is strange.

It's a "smoking causes cancer" situation. Just because other things also cause cancer doesn't mean that smoking doesn't. Read up on the history, look at each communist country, see what they become. Smoking causes cancer.

There's just still a bunch of communists who deny it because it's uncomfortable. Just like Neo-Nazis are denying the holocaust. If they were proud of it, they wouldn't deny it. They're not, but they'd like to keep the rest of their worldview intact and pretend that it didn't happen. Don't be like that, look at the history.

There are countries that while not communist, successfully enact a blend of socialism and capitalism without any significant violence. I don't think white nationalism has any sort of validly applicable aspects.

I don't think it does any more than any other form of nationalism does. Are the Baltic countries violent in your eyes? Their nationalism necessarily is hard to distinguish from ethnic nationalism, because they're very homogeneous. All they'd need to do to be white nationalists is to declare so openly. They're a pretty peaceful bunch, unless you invade them (like the Soviets found out in the Winter War).

Communism on the other hand, is necessarily violent, it cannot function without violently suppressing those who do not believe in it, and it will, always and without fail, go on an eradication trip to do so.

White nationalism universally seeks to carve out its own space at the expense of others. It's impossible to engage with the ideology without associating with violence.

Only if you ignore the mountain of skulls

I was with you right up until you started talking…

However, you will be moderated if you say anything extremely violent/racist on most social media sites. That's a good thing, in my opinion. I can understand if someone doesn't think it's a good thing that that content is moderated.

I'd take the argument that 4chan isn't a site for the far-right more seriously if 4chan didn't have these explicit rules which they don't enforce (or selectively enforce). But it's pretty clear what kind of rules are allowed to be broken on that site and what kind of rules aren't allowed to be broken. Take one glance at /pol/ for an example.

Ofc, im simplifying to left vs right here, but that's only in response to calling it a right leaning board.

> truly free speech environment

Sounds awful.

/s

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelfrei

Are doxing, slander, defamation free speech?

At the risk of sounding like I wear a tin foil hat... that's what they want you to think!

I disagree. Most websites don't allow white nationalism, so there aren't any white nationalists to bully. On places like Facebook you're just screaming into the void.

And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse.

If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.

e: I’ll concede you can find different opinions there. Just, I wanna see a video feed of an unsuspecting person actually trying to go there to, like, learn.

Learning about opposing viewpoints doesn't count as learning?

Each board has its ridiculous bullshit, groupthink, absurd extremists, edgelords, etc. once you know how to parse that you can quickly navigate to quality posts.

Each board of course has different signal:noise though, somewhere like /lit/ is probably 1:20 whereas /pol/ is probably 1:500-1/1000. But the quality posts are totally different from what you'll find anywhere else. Different users and audience.

And this is ... a good thing?

False dichotomy.

Just because I don't like the same radio station you like - doesn't mean I want to live in a bubble, and only listen to my own music.

Not the portion of people in your immediate vicinity who happen to read/listen to it.

I don't think it's good, that's why I don't go there. But the discussion was never whether it was good.

It's not so much the voting that makes things lopsided but when posts are ordered or deemphasized based on those votes or if the actual moderators are opposed to free speech ideals. I can think of at least two low-moderation forums that do manage to host people of opposing opinions for the Ukraine war and other topics so it's not like 4chan is particularly unnique, just bigger and better known.

Now some people break down racism in some weird way where bigotry towards Africans or Hispanics is "right wing" and bigotry toward Caucasians and Asians is "left wing," but those people are laughable in their tribalistic thinking and weird politicization of everything.

and thinks it's completely serious, aren't you? Protip: much of what's posted on 4chan is ironic, deliberately inflammatory, and not meant to be taken seriously. Often the posters don't even believe what they're posting.

Also, if it bothers you so much, you should know that much of the growth in 4chan's userbase (as well as that of KiwiFarms) in the last decade is due to a continual influx of refugees from other platforms employing increasingly heavy-handed moderation, like HN. I've been flagged here in the past merely for correcting dangerous nutritional information, whereas on 4chan at worst someone would tell me "kys sugarshill." Not everyone likes constantly having to walk on eggshells in the name of "civility."

This hasn't been plausible, much less true, for 10 years. I don't know how anyone can look at, for example, Payton Gendron's manifesto and say it's ironic. Were the bullets he fired ironic as well?

There is an entire generation of users, who are probably the bulk of users now, who were never in on the "joke" (if there ever was one).

The NZ mosque shooter's manifesto was almost literally one long 4chan meme thread. There were pages and pages of images and charts and memes that were (and still are) posted to 4chan every day. He openly stated he wasn't always racist and that /pol/ significantly changed his mind on the matter.

We take it serious because innocent people being murdered is serious.

Look, if people posting charts and memes you find distasteful bothers you this much, you frankly don't belong on the internet. And you can post the opposite perspective on 4chan, without censorship: you can be pro-Communist, anti-Ukraine, pro-CCP, whatever.

And if I wanted to, I could probably play the same game as you and mine the Nashville shooter's manifesto for examples of influences to target for censorship, except strangely, for some reason, they won't release it.

You're missing the point.

It's not that it's merely "distasteful". I would put shock content like Goatse, 2girls1cup, Mr Hands, and Tubgirl into that bucket.

It's that racist content is actively harmful and encourages others to be actively harmful.

There's no victim when someone posts a video of two girls eating each other's shit, but spreading racist hatred encourages and emboldens racists which then results in hate crimes.

As for jokes, we quite insist on them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPXHRX8Q2hs

Edit: Downvotes for my own protection I assume? I feel so looked after. Such caring people.

People seek out ideological justifications for acting out their violent desires, which are inculcated by broken and atomized social environments. The ideology is the excuse, not the cause.

Ironic far right shitposts are just far right shitposts.

The usual problem I see is anti-"nazi" rhetoric quickly descends into dehumanization rhetoric about how such people don't deserve to live, should be ejected from all civil society, and must be relentlessly persecuted by every legal and social mechanism possible; in fact, all the suspension of every civil right is acceptable if it means stopping nazis. At the same time, it seems that almost everybody who lived in 1940 would be considered a Nazi by today's rather loose standards, and everybody tries to paint their opponents as nazis (even conservatives have the rather inept 'actually, Nazis were SOCIALISTS" retort) and apply this sort of rhetoric to what even 10 years ago was a completely mainstream liberal.

Certainly 4chan is full of reprobates of every flavor. But if you live in a society where the existence of Nazi rhetoric is actually dangerous, well, you've already lost your free society. People don't read deranged Internet rants and become mass murderers unless they were born in raised in an already broken, atomized society. The ideology is the excuse for the violence, not the cause. And unfortunately, this sort of rhetoric (we have to do whatever it takes to stop nazis) is also indicative of an worsening social environment.

And typically, in worsening social environments, where a variety of ideologies become excuses for broken and/or desperate people to become violent, the government will become more and more totalitarian in response. And we’ll cheer it along.

I know, I know for the sake of appearances we don't define everyone who disagrees with us as a nazi, that would be too obvious (although we still do alot).

We describe the broad spectrum of perfectly main-stream, otherwise unremarkable views (but that disagree with us) as "nazi supporters", dog-whistlers etc.

Too easy.

But doesn't it?

Usually it's the authoritarians, dictators and generally "bad guys" who need to limit speech, censor, burn books, etc.

Do you really need courts to settle a verbal (well.. written) argument online?

Yes, it's just one of many examples where cultural differences cause issues, and where two people consider themselves "good" and the other one "bad" and in turn, censor all speech, since both are racist in atleast some of the courts.

You imply (but I am not convinced) that there are serious consequences for having one opinion or the other on these "cross country" online communities. I suspect instead that for the more nuanced issues like affirmative action there will just be the usual arguing back and forth and little else.

Of course you can. Especially if there's a fire.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

Do you not realize that "echo chamber" describes this place, and any place with groupthink enforcement mechanisms (voting, karma, flagging, and excessive moderation) much more accurately than 4chan? For example, HN groupthink has endorsed low-carb and ketogenic diets almost since its inception, and as a consequence, has also promoted the dissemination of dangerous health misinformation, like LDL cholesterol denialism and downplaying the risks of excessive sodium and satrated fat consumption.

Could you perhaps share some studies of effective ways to reduce radicalization? I highly doubt “not visiting or posting on 4chan” is one of them.

He constantly butts in where he doesn't belong, to claim that good discussion is "flame wars". HN truly is overly moderated and would benefit from less heavy handed moderation.

Internet antisemitism is of course not Rodgers and Hammerstein, but wide sweeping falsehoods don't prove anything about anyone.

Guess prince Harry didn't

When I used to visit 4chan for entertainment in 2009, I believed this too, but the veil came off a long time ago.

If you have a board where it's acceptable to pretend to be racist, antisemitic, etc, then eventually your board will fill with actual racists, antisemites, etc.

/r/The_Donald started as a subreddit where people thought the idea of Trump becoming POTUS was hilarious, stupid, could never happen, and people cheered him on for the lulz. Over time, it became a home base for his most rabid supporters.

Back on the original point, do you know what you call someone who pretends to be racist?

A racist.

That made me curious, so I went looking for the flagged comment. Upon reading it, I'd a hazard a guess that it's flagged not "merely for correcting dangerous nutritional information" but referring to the people who disagree with you as "HN brainlets".

Source of this happening systemically? I ask systemically because for any forum there's accusations (and corresponding anecdotes) of censorship from both sides, so a few posts don't really prove anything. You see this on twitter for instance, with accusations that both the left and the right are being unfairly targeted.

2. Look at /pol/.

3. Break another of the rules. (ie not the racism rule).

4. see your post get deleted.

which specific rules are you talking about, aside from racism? Or is your claim simply that rules against racism isn't being enforced and therefore that constitutes "but enforces them against other groups"? Note that the latter is slightly different than the former. The former simply implies a rule that is written but not enforced, but the latter implies that certain rules (eg. "be polite") are being selectively used against a particular group (eg. impolite far-right posters are not punished, but impolite far-left posters are punished).

https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089253502461952...

However 4chan has always had, and continues to have quite broad demographics, it attracts extremes, by nature of it's low moderation and permissive content policies.

Some examples of left wing associated content could be it's very active LGBT user base.

It's involvement political movements like "anonymous", targeting groups like the Westboro baptist church, hacking the website of Uganda's anti-gay prime minister, occupy wall street, etc.

The 4chan moderators are rarely enforcing the rules against racism, like anti-semitism, on the extreme boards, and sometimes they don't enforce those rules on non-extreme boards too. The anti-semitism on the extreme boards is rampant. It's pretty clear that the far-right is the current social phenomenon that is driving modern racism and anti-semitism, at least in the West.

> It's pretty clear that the far-right is the current social phenomenon that is driving modern racism and anti-semitism, at least in the West.

That really depends on who you ask. There are many Jews who insist that left-wing antisemitism is a big problem-some will even argue it is as big a problem as (or even a bigger problem than) right-wing antisemitism. And it isn’t just right-wing Jews who speak of left-wing antisemitism as a big and growing problem - the ADL, which is very much a respected part of the American Jewish establishment, is saying the same thing - https://www.algemeiner.com/2022/09/06/adl-ceo-left-wing-anti...

Some truth in that, in Western countries right now, but less so historically or globally. Stalin re-criminalised homosexuality in 1934, and in Russia even today you can find far-left people whose views on LGBT issues are largely indistinguishable from those of the far-right. I’m sure some are going to argue those people “aren’t really left”-but unapologetic Stalinists really are far-left not far-right, and the anti-LGBT stuff is just their following in Stalin’s own footsteps. There are heaps of Western right-wingers who are far more LGBT-friendly than the average Russian Stalinist

I can tell you for a fact that the large majority of the mods despise /pol/. As for rules not being enforced, if a post is not reported it likely won't be acted upon.