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Re:The Web Runs on Tolerance by wredcoll on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @12:12AM (#46201480)
> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along

Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only.

It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those places, without exception, are better because they ban the hateful and intolerant.

> The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives

This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant and it really makes you wonder about the rest of it.

No one is required to tolerate assholes spewing hate no matter how liberal or tolerant you are supposed to be.

Re:The Web Runs on Tolerance by echelon on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @12:15AM (#46201490)
> This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant

Either I should have expanded on that or you're not recalling the same period of time I am.

The Obama years were when Millennials went to college. They're when broadband and smartphones proliferated.

This is when IRC and the indie web died. This is when platforms became predominant and when censorship became top-down mandated. This is when "app stores" over "unlimited web installs" won.

Everyone entering the internet during this period entered into a world where censorship was normalized. Where the algorithm started to take over.

Those of us who used the internet before the Obama years remember a vastly different internet.

It's not that it was Obama that did this. It's simply a marker in time to denote confluence of changes and generational coming of age that coincided with it.

Re:The Web Runs on Tolerance by karlitooo on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @01:03AM (#46201764)
Present day racism is carefully calibrated to cause hurt and outrage. That wasn't really a thing in the 2000s even on 4chan. 4chan was more freakshow culture than what Gaming The Algo for Clicks did to our media diet