> them and their close ones are certainly going to be exposed to a whole lot of viciousness soon

Isn't viciousness the notorious bread and butter of 4chan?

Live by the sword, die by the sword I would say. You don't get to enjoy raising leopards and also get to be surprised when you become lunch one day

They certainly don’t get to claim any kind of moral high ground, but as a bystander I can feel empathy for someone hit by a drunk driver, even if the victim had driven drunk before in the past.

Any increase in human suffering is unfortunate, regardless of one’s take on just desserts or karma or whatever.

I’d say it’s more like a high-profile NRA member getting shot. Unfortunate but it’s hard to miss the irony.

That’s fair, similar point. Reasonable people can both appreciate the irony and feel bad for the victim. Few people IRL have the sociopathic “they had it coming so I just want to watch them bleed out” attitude that we see so much of online.

Most boards on 4chan, like the origami board, food and cooking, pets and animals, retro gaming, toys, etc are relatively harmless and are just a different way to participate in discussions than using discord or reddit.

The staff has cut down a lot on organized harassment that 4chan was notorious for in recent years. Those people migrated to private discords, telegrams, and other forums (like kiwi farms, soy party, etc). Ex, #gamergate was mostly an 8chan, Twitter, reddit, and IRC phenomenon - #gg people would get banned if they tried posting about it on 4chan

Damn, the culture they have bred and actively maintained is now going to be turned against them?

It might end up making them more sympathetic people on the long term. They might realise the seriousness of what they have done to others.

You don't like to lump people into groups by race/country of origin but find no cognitive dissonance in lumping people together by platform choice.

Yes.

People can leave the platform. They can't leave their race.

That's just the view of bureaucratic machines which prefer to have some stable identifier in the relevant field on paper form (it doesn't matter if it's for ethnic cleansing or “celebrating diversity”), and then shape the reality until it fits.

Even though it might be hard to ignore the well-budgeted choir of well-intentioned promoters of status quo, you still don't have to believe in this concept.

One of those is something people are born into without choice. The other is chosen because of their tastes.

"Wow, you'd group people by their actions and beliefs but not by immutable characteristics they were born with?!" /s

"The culture" of 4chan varies from board to board and even thread to thread.

the serious crime of... deleting egregious posts from a website

While a precise estimate is difficult to gauge it is supposed by professional analysts that a majority of hacks are state sponsored.

If the hacker is a state actor then I don't think anyone has learned anything about Free Speech.