anon6778

For me it's not so much the day to day interactions, which are largely apolitical[1], but the culture we consume. For example the latest E3 showcases had quite an emphasis on "diversity". On most days there will be some story about wage gap, harassment or other sexual missteps on the HN front page and various online newspapers. Now that's the daily surface stuff. This is not bad in itself most of the time. I do not deny that some of those social issues are real. But occasionally they go into the other extreme where they start to seem threatening or grossly stereotyping.

And then there is that background noise with shitstorms trying to get people fired over things they said (remember the nasa T-shirt guy? or brendan eich?), products boycotted over guilt by association and so on. But they make you ask yourself "could this happen to me?". Say the wrong thing and get fired because someone is OFFENDED about a joke or affiliating with the wrong people?

I have also seen github projects that I use suffer just because someone didn't like some language. This concerns me because when people push their preferences on the entire platform instead of subcommunities it becomes a cultural monoculture instead of a more compartmentalized system.

[1] The only exception I recall is the discussion about which gender inputs we should support in software forms where some suggested we should support the whole facebook madness.

> There was also always an undercurrent of racism (spamming the n word goes back to the early days of /b/)

You are conflating message with actual sentiment. Using racist language is simply a subset of inflammatory language and trolling. Calling people a retard or a faggot fulfills similar goals. It does not really tell you much whether the anonymous poster actually discriminates based on those attributes or just uses the language to maintain a vulgar atmosphere. Slur words will always exist, attempting to ban them will just make the political correctness treadmill spin faster.

> which was the first time a lot of 4chan users experienced politics having an effect on something central to their culture.

Not quite. cartoon child porn has always been seen as a canary in the coalmine. If they go after that, which other deviant thing will next be branded as a thought crime?

4chan is radically free speech. Any political movement that restricts free speech in any way at all will have that as a black mark on them. The philosophy is that only deeds matter, words are free. If you post on /b/ that you'll shoot up a school tomorrow nobody will give a fuck. If you then continue to actually shoot up a school tomorrow then a) that's the actual crime b) great lulz will be had.

I think the thing is that 4chan is mostly anti-establishment. Obama promised CHANGE (anti-lobbying, supporting lower classes) and at the same time bringing troops home, something that would also appeal to conservatives. Plus he was fairly open and media-savy which provided a lot of material for memes, e.g. the situation room photo when they got osama.

When he failed to achieve his promises - certainly due to republican blockades to some extent - he was seen as a disappointment and trump became THE spanner in the works of washington.

Another important polarizing issue is the vocal social justice movement in colleges, on tumblr, in the media etc. Since it is seen as infringing on free speech where it matters to 4chan (games, porn, unfiltered non-PC conversation, trolling) they are seen as a threat. If the left does not radically defend free speech, even when it is unpleasant or could be considered as hateful while the right promises small government and has crazy libertarian subcurrents then this is actually more value-aligned, at least on the surface, with 4chan interests.

I don't think a timeline where bernie had been the 4chan favorite would be inconceivable.

Racist language and some forms of culture war, e.g. against censorship of extreme porn, has always been present.

> Sometimes you just want to meme about the latest bad anime episode

That's what happens 99% of the time. If you get baited by the 1% of the time that pol leaks then maybe you need a thicker skin. And people DO respond with "go back to /pol/" half the time anyway. At the same time /a/ has threads about traps (crossdressing), yuri and other things that would ostensibly be considered degeneracy by /pol/.

While some things may have changed it's not that they are omnipresent.

Previously on HN (2016): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705851

Original version of the paper with "rare pepes": https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.03452.pdf