That's a bold statement and clearly untrue. A boatload of people gets their kicks out of pretending to hold any number of offensive views just to get a rise out of people online.
When I was a dumb 16 year old that was one of my favorite past times. Only works on people who don't believe anyone would do such a thing...
It speaks to your character that you wouldn't even immediately consider it.
Ask yourself what the point of your comment is. Are you really in a position to comment on another's character?
Don't do that.
> Don't do that.
You literally just fucking did that.
Such cheap attacks don't have to be tolerated and it's perfectly fair to point them out for what they are.
I didn't seek out a random comment to take a potshot at - you directly replied to me with a comment that contains nothing but a mean-spirited dig.
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.
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.
What's some belief you pretended to have, but you really didn't?
Whatever I knew would get a rise out of my audience.
The "head in the sand" approach doesn't work here.
The idea that all of these people are “just harmless trolls” is unsupportable nonsense. It’s wild how many people want to jump to the defense of these morally repugnant people, though.
But I refer you to "Popehat's law of goats". He who spams racist garbage...
Sure they do: they're called "trolls". That's not to imply that no 4chan users are racist, but the claim that "no one" would do it without being racist is absurd.
Counter Arguments has a fantastic video about this.
No one spams racist garbage despite not being racists because they want to create chaos and are fishing for a reaction.
Now, its true, that people who are racist and also attention seekers might be motivated more by the latter than the former in doing that, but that’s a different issue.
And the source article from 404 Media is very much about how this is happening despite the Bing tool that they conclude is being used for much of it itself being largely crippled to prevent “harmful” images, and explicitly calls out the point that the result is that non-harmful use is being sacrificed, with no meaningful impact on harmful use. Which, I would think, would be a message that someone who sees the 4chan use as of no more negative significance than “toilet graffiti” would fully back, since crippling tools to ineffectively prevent “toilet graffiti” is even more problematic than doing though in a (failed) attempt to prevent something that might be more important to prevent.