This is true.

I use 4chan to train my brain's spam filter, so if you want to see the latest style of trolling or what the latest style of psychological attacks are, this is a great place to be.

I won't get into the speculation that the entire website is run by the government and that the most offensive content is from bots in a country bordering Palestine.

I personally don't get offended by words, but I guess if you are born after the 2000's perhaps you should avoid it.

Edit: I don't get offended by downvotes either, if anything it excites me. (Check my history if you don't believe me.)

https://youtu.be/ek9JAeM__Rg

> I personally don't get offended by words, but I guess if you are born after the 2000's perhaps you should avoid it.

Ouch

Gen Y hits back. I love it :-D

Which is just a way of saying he not part of any of the demographics where going to 4chan to see people froth at the mouth dehumanizing and belittling people like you is self-harm.

Wow an edgy white man not offended at seeing racism and transphobia, so brave.

No, not at all. I've received more slurs than you can imagine for being Spanish. I just don't care.

Sorry if it comes as blunt but I find no better way of saying it, you just don't understand the culture of the site, which is meant to filter people like you.

They are just words on a screen from an anonymous person somewhere. Easily thrown, easily dismissed. It makes no sense to be offended because some guy I don't know and who doesn't know me calls me something.

I’m actually unsure, hasn’t 4chan been involved in some seriously heinous shit, way more than words on a screen? I remember when “mods asleep post child porn” was a running joke. I feel that normalizing stuff like child porn as jokes is more than “words on a screen”; you have to re-learn how to engage with people outside of such a community because of its behavior.

Child pornography stopped happening once the FBI got involved with the site.

It also never was a normal or common thing and the administration of the site never set themselves to let it happen in any manner afaik. To a large degree it was a product of a different time on the internet.

But that's the thing, I do understand the culture. I spent the better part of my teens browsing and shitposting with the best of them. It just gets exhausting and stops being words on a screen when the hate you see there is reflected in the real world.

If you stop reading 4chan, the words posted there will magically stop offending you. Food for thought.

So let me see if I understand this thread.

- Haha look at all those Gen Z snowflakes getting offended at words.

- Okay sure, but the ability to not get offended is related to whether or not you're a target of their bullshit or not; 4chan trolls get extremely offended and unjerk the moment you turn the lens toward them. By 4chan's own standards it's actually pretty reasonable to be offended by their antics.

- But have you considered plugging your ears and not reading it?

So we've gone from 4chan isn't offensive it's just words to yes it is offensive and you shouldn't read it if they say things that target you which was my original point.

tl;dr if you're not offended by 4chan they're not actually saying anything offensive about you even though it might appear so superficially; 4chan just has a different list of things you can't say.

> So let me see if I understand this thread.

You realise you've been arguing with multiple people expressing multiple opinions, right? You appear to be prone to binary thinking, so it might not be clear to you that your opponents don't form a single monolith.

> tl;dr if you're not offended by 4chan they're not actually saying anything offensive about you even though it might appear so superficially; 4chan just has a different list of things you can't say.

I'm not offended by the things 4chan users say because I don't visit 4chan. You should try it yourself. Getting so upset by words you disagree with on one forum that you feel the need to froth at the mouth about it on another forum doesn't seem healthy.

Yes, and in threaded discussions if you jump in in the middle like this it's assumed you're continuing the downward trajectory of the discussion. Otherwise you would have replied to someone higher up the thread. I'm in no way assuming that you hold any opinion in particular just that the discussion has circled back.

I think you assume a tone that I absolutely do not have. I couldn't care less about 4chan drama and I don't go there anymore for the reasons you listed. I'm talking about my own experience and trying to make my case for the, apparently controversial, idea that words can and do affect people and that total emotional detachment is the exception rather than the rule. And of course that's the case, 4chan's whole thing is using offensive language to select specifically for the subset of people who can tolerate it.

shoutout mentaloutlaw, the best /g/ poster https://www.youtube.com/@MentalOutlaw/videos

Not him, but I browse it and I’m Jewish.

I’d rather have free speech and see constant posts about holocaust denial and oven jokes and just ignore them

It's a little telling that saying that a particular cesspool of the the internet is inhospitable to some people is responded to with talk about free speech. I didn't bring it up, just said it's not for me.

You can browse 4chan because you don't have a strong emotional reaction to the shit they say, but if you did that would be fine too.

Having free speech is allowing Birth of a Nation to exist, not making popcorn and watching it every night.

Belittling the youth is one way that insecure people make themselves feel better about getting old.

>> Belittling the youth is one way that insecure people make themselves feel better about getting old.

That seems like one possible explanation for the comment. ;-)

And dismissing the old is one way that youth make themselves feel they know better.

Surely you can see the irony in your comment

Yeah « outch this is cringe »

Picked up some bad habits from 4chan?

Like having emotions?

Despite the current culture war meme thing, the kids today in general surely have much thicker skin than other adults did at their age.

LOL

Kids are constantly bombarded by bullying and abuse online. It's seriously unhealthy. The fact that kids are growing up more in touch with themselves and able to process their feelings in a healthy way is amazing compared to how their parents dealt with emotions.

I don't get it. Isn't the whole critique from you guys that their snowflake-sensitivity is performative and in bad faith, thus harming the more normal people with wokeness or whatever?

Is this just a new evolution in the discourse now where the kids are actually more sensitive? But that this fact is still condemnable or something?

Like I get it, kids are bad, but you guys have to narrow down your narrative here, you are all over the place.

Well, you certainly have the personality type I’d expect from someone who frequents 4chan

Edit:oof, checked his profile like he suggested and in just two pages of history he’s engaged in climate change denial and covid vaccine conspiracies. Buddy, I don’t think using 4chan to “train my brain’s spam filter” is working too well for you. You’ve got a mind so open your brain fell out.

Going through someone's comment history to find reason to engage in ad hominem attacks is exactly the type of personality of someone who I expect to frequent Reddit and reason why I switched to HN. Sadly, it appears that this malaise reached here as well.

This is not an honest or fair assessment, and adds nothing to the discussion. The person they are responding to invited exactly that to happen:

> (Check my history if you don't believe me.)

He literally said to check his history...

I mean, he's literally saying the jews are responsible for bot farms and "offensive content".

That's not the stance of someone rational.

Yea, good point. I had missed his line about “country bordering Palestine”. The quip about downvotes exciting him is telling as well.

Going against the common consensus can make you feel like you have hidden knowledge and you even could, but a certain type of personality gets addicted to that feeling and reflexively seeks to always go against any consensus, regardless of the facts

Oh I completely agree with your assessment. I was one of those people through my late teens and early 20s.

Luckily I grew out of it and learned empathy. But not everyone is as lucky as I was.

Isn't it tremendously exciting believing that you can see the pendulum's next reversal?

At some point in life I hope that you find yourself on the precipice of life and death. Not as a threat or because I wish harm upon anyone. It is only when you are faced with that choice for real that you decide whether you want to be that sad person that allows others to dictate their emotional state.

Nevertheless, you are right. And so I have burned my fingers plenty.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I learned at a young age that I am to be the universal asshole, and for a very long time I was not okay. It took a substantial part of my life to get to a point where I am able to be okay with that.

As for others, they rarely understand why I am the way I am, and that too is okay.

We are all here to grow and eventually realise that we all need each other to survive, so we compromise, we adapt, and we ignore the ugly parts of others so they will tolerate the ugly parts of ourselves.

I feel like a guru now, anyways I'm going to bed.

Enjoy

Bruh I have been in multiple life and death situations, I didn’t come out of them thinking I was amazing for not being considerate of others.

> Due to circumstances beyond my control, I learned at a young age that I am to be the universal asshole, and for a very long time I was not okay.

No you’re not required to be the “universal asshole”. That’s a choice you are making everytime you have the chance to be better and decide to go with the easy path of being a dick. You have the agency to do otherwise and you don’t get to absolve yourself of those choices.

You’re not a guru, you’re just anti social

There's a slight difference between "the jews" and "Israel". Obviously Israel would have some bot farms, though I don't think it's reasonable that they'd form the supermajority of bots on 4chan/etc.

Also I think it's extremely generous to give this fellow the benefit of the doubt on "the jews" vs. "Israel", but that is what HN guidelines generally suggest.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

This is why I'm aware of /lmg/.

HN is a kind of small miracle in that it's the sort of place where I'm inclined to read the comments first, and seems to be populated with fairly clever people who contribute usefully but not also, at the same time, extreme bigot edgelords and/or groupthinking soy enthusiasts. (Sometimes clever folks who are still wrong, of course, but undeniably an overwhelmingly intelligent bunch.)