Doesn't seem worse than Reddit or Facebook to me. Heck, even though it isn't as obvious the amount of negativity on HN about everything Chinese is basically the same racism, just written in ways to avoid getting removed.

Did you visit the site? They have multiple boards on the sidebar that are explicitly dedicated to racism. One of them is just named “[Nig]s”. There’s a picture in the sean one with a 1488 behind pixel black people.

It's not real racism. In the chan culture it's a lampoon of real racism, and is meant to antagonize people that aren't in on it being a joke. While there may be people that are actually racist on chan boards especially on 4chan's /pol/ which has been more or less co-opted by alt right loonies, most people who use the boards aren't and they are just memeing for the sake of triggering folks.

What's the difference between being racist with the intent of offending ("triggering") people vs just being racist?

Isn't most racism done with the intent of making the target uncomfortable or offended? Like isn't that the entire point of racism? The KKK wasn't burning crosses to be friendly.

I'm sure most KKK chapters were actually satirical, totally-not-racist, KKK chapters. It was that oddball 1 in a hundred chapter that crossed the line that gave the rest a bad name

/s in case it's needed

Making people uncomfortable. That's a really mild take on the whole KKK thing. Feeling very charitable today, are we?

The difference being that I'm burning a cross in my front yard to keep my family warm because our heater is broken.

Speaking of chan culture, you must surely know that pretending to be racist is not really a great defense: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-was-only-pretending-to-be-r...

The guy created an antisemitic username just for that comment, he’s not arguing in good faith.

I cant be racist - some of my best friends are blacks.

It's not websites, it's people. Freedom of speech + anonymity just allow people showing who they really are.

I think it’s more like that these boards attract a specific type of person, not people in general. People generally don’t like racists because they’re also generally awful people as well. That’s why they’re banned off of most of the internet and the real world.

>People generally don’t like racists because they’re also generally awful people as well

Can't resonate. In my part of the world, people are generally racist.

The way online racists act is very different from general racism irl. It’s a much more hateful form and seems a bit more all over the place. They won’t just hate one ethnic group, they’ll hate everything and everyone that isn’t exactly like them.

> People generally don’t like racists because they’re also generally awful people as well

People are generally awful people as well.

Most people are either pleasant or neutral irl. There are no consequences for what you say online so people tend to be their worst on the internet. If people were generally awful, we wouldn't have any form of society anywhere in the world.

Anonymity also makes it really easy to simulate something if you want to imply something about human nature. Thats luckily something that is fixable client side. Just be less gullible.

Keep in mind that much of that is a constant struggle between moderation and Zersetzung. If somebody doesnt like free discourse, all they have to do is increase the moderation burden for such sites. Knowing full well, that the more rules you have and try to enforce, the more of an echochamber you become.

Still beats the toxic effects of curating identities in an echochamber. Dedicated boards also work as plumbing.

edit: Totalitarians are also not shy about employing Zersetzung. For example, the CREST Research ("Mining the Chans") people are very open about attacking chans through AI generated garbage to make them unusable.