oldhatemachs write-up is inaccurate. 4chan isn't what it is because it's a magical place of anonymity where your opinions are considered in a vacuum. 4chan is what it is because, as time goes on, the website attracted the people that were getting banned from pseudonymous websites. As these kinds of people accumulated and accumulated, the website became progressively more toxic in every way, which drove out people who didn't enjoy that, which gave the most toxic members hegemony.
It's also not true that 4chan has stopped doxxes and raids. Just yesterday /pol/ was full of people that were scouring everything they could to doxx the security guard involved in the shooting. 4chan was also counterraiding the leftist bunkerchan to have revenge on them making a meme about the facial features of the kind of people that enjoy /pol/.
And it's also wrong that 4chan is a paragon of free speech. It used to be, but as the userbase started harboring more and more fascists, and as more and more of them became janitors, they started censoring leftist posters unless they refrained from, well, anything that makes a Chan a Chan.
4chan in general is also highly resistant to evidence that goes against their narrative, and won't shy away from accusing the authors of any study they disagree with of being part of a Jewish conspiracy.
Most of all, the biggest meme in that post was calling /pol/ "slightly grown up from their libertarian idealism, [...] now with a hint of conservatism". /pol/ is openly fascist. As in, Julius Evola, Swastika, Black Sun, genocide, kind of fascist.
People who spend their time talking about the day of the rope being censored isn't what drove them to violent tendencies, what drove them to violent tendencies is a mix of being socially recluse, racist, white males, egged on by literal Nazis who saw the opportunity to radicalized them, all of that in a community so repulsive to anyone else that few enjoy being there.
It's not even that creative either. The main mascot of /pol/ was stolen from some random webcomic, the wojak came from Krautchan, and so on. It's just slight memes from someone else's art and a few puns. It's not a main creative force of the internet, far from it.
Those are the dynamics behind 4chan becoming what it is. Purely anonymous websites in a pseudonymous majority will inevitably become a disaster. That poster is someone who was carried down the rabbit hole and can't realize just how extreme and wrong their opinions are, who can't realize what their values became, trying to convince themselves their worldview and website isn't as insane as it is.
>4chan exists outside of /pol/, and the rest of the site actively resents it. Doxxes and raids are bannable offenses, and people that openly call for those activities are banned. Yes. Banned. That wasn't the case years ago. /b/ was also neutered multiple times to curb the harassment it generated. If you want, you can easily go on /pol/ and make dipshit posts about chuds and cumtown, and they will deride you for it, but they can't ban you. The problem stems from moderation, and with /pol/ now being the most active board it's gotten increasingly harder to moderate. If you actually bothered to go beyond /pol/, you'd see the open hostility that their usebase generates. But you probably only follow /pol/ because it enrages whatever semi-isolated comfortable community you came from.
Have you been on 4chan outside of /pol/ since 2016? This isn't tha case, /pol/culture has infiltrated every single board by now. You don't notice it because it infiltrated you too.
Anyways, let's see how ridiculous this is. So, let's look at /x/ for 5 seconds - Oh. The coronavirus is a hebrew jewish plot to turn us into cattle and only Trump can save us. Nice.
Let's look at /lit/ now! I used to enjoy that place. First thread, someone asking about what they should learn. Oh, woudln't you guess, it devolved into an IQ thread. A few days ago I tried to give it a chance again, and there was a thread about Hegel were unironically 2/3 of the posts had a speech of Hitler as their source on how to interpret Hegel, with a conclusion that is evidently false to anyone
So let's look at /p/ now. Someone asks, how do I get better skintones in pictures? Half of the replies are insults because they associated with non-whites or calls to genocide.
Okay, then let's look at /sci/? Second thread : Quantum Mechanics is untestable somehow and also don't believe it because it's jewish science.
Argh. Maybe /mu/? Okay then, let's see. Out of the first five posts : Two are people trying to debate the impact of african americans in music (with predictable contents), the rest is an unironic moonman thread.
As for /b/ and /r9k/, I don't even have to say anything.
No, the entirety of 4chan is culturally infested by /pol/. And so are you. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact that /b/ and /pol/ together are almost 30% of the entire site, and everything else is culutrally neutral or superfocused.
You can claim whatever you want about raids and doxxes being banned from 4chan, but they evidently aren't banned from /pol/ as long as they are politically motivated. There's still a thread on /pol/ right now trying to doxx Doloff.. As for the efforts to get /pol/tards to >go back, they are useless. It's a battle that has long since been lost. /b/ has been neutered, yes, and it doesn't matter. It's 4 years too late. 2016 was the point of no return.
>Hardly. You are more than welcome to chat with the janitors and moderators on IRC, except they will probably ban you for trying to remove /pol/ because they get complaints like yours every single day, and most often than not its people triggered by fucking australians and canadians roleplaying as nazis interspaced between a few genuine fascists. Once again, having a thin skin on 4chan will give you a bad time, and it sounds like you had a bad time.
>roleplaying as nazis
When you roleplay for enough years, you start losing "play" part.
>A few genuine fascists
>A few
I don't want to remove /pol/, 4chan as a whole is already completely lost. I don't care about having a bad time, the cultural hegemony of 4chan has just become literal fascism. Either you became a fascist, or you left, there is no point to it anymore.
>And everything is part of the larger merchant driven jewish conspiracy, because once again, it is 4chan, and it's not 4chan's fault that almost every New York Times or Washington Post opinion editorial writer has a jewish sounding last name. :)
You're showing your true colors, aren't you :). Thank you for proving me right. The only people who didn't leave or at least come to loathe that website are literally fasiscts, and you're more than on your way there if you're not already there. You literally did buy fully into the JQ. I'm not >making you out to be some sort of far right fascist extremist, you are "protocols of the elders of zion"-level far gone, and that's when you're trying to hide your power level for the folks over at HN. Liberalism isn't even close to being the unopposed cultural hegemony in the anglosphere, and there is more to "opposing liberalism" than quoting Mein Kampf.
>Advice Animals, Rage Comics, Pedobear, Xzibit's Yo Dawg, Rickrolling, Rules of the Internet, Exploitables, Copypasta and Creepypasta, LOLcats, R9k and its euphoric inceldom, Literally ANY reaction face, Redpill ideology, An Hero, TrollGuy.
Yup, and every single one of those is, in the year of our lord 2020 irrelevant, except with for maybe the Rules of the Internet in some circles, which itself was pumped at repurposed from Encyclopedia Dramatica, and rickrolling. Crucially, none of those are from ~2013 before 4chan started seriously going to shit.
>which you refuse to acknowledge got popular on the internet because of 4chan
Exactly what you were ree-ing about reddit doing, right?
>arious creators were also regular 4chan posters, including Rebecca Sugar, Dan Harmon, Deadmau5, Markus Presson (who released alpha and beta versions of Minecraft on /v/ before the rest of the world even knew what Minecraft was)...and probably a lot of more who wish to remain anonymous.
All of that, years ago. 4chan is a shithole now.
>4chan pokes fun at you, and it pokes fun at itself, because people are far more complex than the consumerist labelism of targeted advertising which strives to extract wealth from them, and that's at the apex of our current cultural revolution.
It isn't, it's in a cycle we've been in since the 1800s and now 4chan is emblematic of the "1939" stage, except with more incels and NEETs. 4chan was good back in the day, it was interesting, but now it's just a place for people that can't survive in any pseudonymous community. That's why it's stagnant at ~22M active monthly users for the last 8 years, and why it's #1 referal is now jeuxvideo.com (lmao!)
4chan is dead, and /pol/ killed it. You're just now in so deep that you can't see it, and see any assesment of it as an assesment of yourself.
It seems to me that 4chan has evolved, and the nature of shitposting perturbed you too much to enjoy the site. I can go to /x/'s catalog page and see maybe 1-2 posts about le jewish nazi conspiracy theory, with less than 10 posts. Because it's fucking bait and most the lurkers aren't taking it. There's a thread on /lit/ right now about African writers with a lot of recommendations. It's 4chan. As always, you wade through the shit to find the interesting stuff. It never existed to service you or your sensibilities.
Sorry not sorry that your point of view is so narrow that literally any mention of Nazis triggers you. That's the nature of 2020 shitposting. You got filtered.
>That's why it's stagnant at ~22M active monthly users for the last 8 years, and why it's #1 referal is now jeuxvideo.com (lmao!)
Hiroshima Nagasaki's incompetence is the one genuine cause of the downfall of the site. He wants money, and he's severed ties with 4chan's other referrals and sponsors for better deals. Not even J-List was willing to stick around. The site is more or less managed by a dedicated team of mods and janitors, with Hiroshi occasionally changing a few lines of code on the backend and fucking things up. He hasn't even figured out how to take down /qa/ yet, which was a board moot temporarily created to answer questions when he left. I don't (fully) fault 4chan's community for this. I fault the owner.
>You're showing your true colors, aren't you :). Thank you for proving me right. The only people who didn't leave or at least come to loathe that website are literally fasiscts, and you're more than on your way there if you're not already there.
Thank you for taking the most obvious of obvious baits, and proving once again that you got filtered.
I think it's best to just stop here. You clearly have a chip on your shoulder and any mention of 4chan's impact on the greater cultural sphere of society will be met with scrutiny unless it conforms with your world view in that it is a horrible, terrible, no good website full of bad people. (It IS that, but it is also MUCH more.) You can move your goalposts all you want until nobody is left playing with you.
>and the nature of shitposting perturbed you too much to enjoy the site
It's not shitposting. It's the actual cultural hegemony of the website. You can only be le ebin ironic nazi for so long before you're actually a nazi.
>I can go to /x/'s catalog page and see maybe 1-2 posts about le jewish nazi conspiracy theory, with less than 10 posts
50% of threads in /x/ devolve into jewish conspiracy theories, or otherwise fascist-inspired rabbit holes.
>There's a thread on /lit/ right now about African writers with a lot of recommendations. It's 4chan,
Lmao nice, you found a 2 day old thread, after the jannies were able to clean the overwhelming amount of /pol/tards that infested it. And even after the obvious ones got filtered out, there still remains the unspoken weight of genetic essentialism
>It's 4chan. As always, you wade through the shit to find the interesting stuff. It never existed to service you or your sensibilities.
>your sensibilities
When 75% of the sensibilities of a website are in one way or another related to National Socialism, you cannot have a normal discussion anymore.
>Sorry not sorry that your point of view is so narrow that literally any mention of Nazis triggers you. That's the nature of 2020 shitposting. You got filtered
Yeah there's a small difference between "a mention of Nazis" and literally every discussion that tengentially mentions someone who isn't white being approached with the entire cultural baggage of a Nazi, complete with phrenology and all.
There was a time where this was just shitposting, then the shit-posting got more and more intense, and then people started reading Evola "for the meme", and then people started quoting Hitler speeches to justify why this or that is wrong, and then the (((jew))) started being jokingly referred to as the cause of all society's ills, and then someone went into a mosque right next to my friend's house and killed 6 people, right as it was getting irony-posidoned into the zeitgeist, half of them earnestly accepting it, and another quarter """jokingly""" absorbing it. It's not a new concept, you know, this is a well-studied phenomenon.
>Hiroshima Nagasaki's incompetence is the one genuine cause of the downfall of the site. He wants money, and he's severed ties with 4chan's other referrals and sponsors for better deals. Not even J-List was willing to stick around. The site is more or less managed by a dedicated team of mods and janitors, with Hiroshi occasionally changing a few lines of code on the backend and fucking things up. He hasn't even figured out how to take down /qa/ yet, which was a board moot temporarily created to answer questions when he left. I don't (fully) fault 4chan's community for this. I fault the owner.
Hiro being the only person stupid enough to take on 4chan is a direct symptom of what I call the "sprit of /pol" and later also /pol/ itself and by extension a good half of the website became, certainly now that /b/ got cleaned up and they are all intensifying there. It's exactly why m00t sold 4chan, and exactly why only a complete idiot would buy it, and also what it made it completely radioactive. It's a consequence of the social process and the exponential increase in anti-social behaviour, toxicity and general puke that led to hiro coming to own 4chan, it's nothing but a symptom.
>Thank you for taking the most obvious of obvious baits, and proving once again that you got filtered.
A bait too obvious, too often for too long isn't bait, its a real belief in the process of being irony-poisoned onto the dominant worldview.
>I think it's best to just stop here. You clearly have a chip on your shoulder and any mention of 4chan's impact on the greater cultural sphere of society will be met with scrutiny
I don't have an issue admitting 4chan had a huge impact on the earlier internet culture, and as a result some extant impact on the greater culture in the anglosphere. It did. Just not anymore. That era is over. 4chan as a cultural powerhouse is very much dead. There is nothing of value coming from that website anymore. You can't notice it yet, but it's just stuck in a downwards spiral which was predictable since 7 years ago and it gives nothing but predictable results. You just lack the détachement to see what it is, what it was and where it's going. You've also been talking about how it is somehow creating new insight in going beyond liberalism. It isn't, it's literally going through the exact same process the Fascists did after WW1, producing the same bankrupt and useless conclusions as a result, in the exact same quest. It's not avant-garde, it's simply pure decay of people that can't survive anywhere else and cannot produce any sort of cogent result because they lack of awareness of the process they are participating in. It's now nothing but a dead end, and has been since ~2013.
Talk about changing the goalposts. Your original argument is that 4chan's general culture is apart from /pol/, and hasn't been consumed, and that 4chan is somehow a driving force for creative content on the internet, and that it was some kind of nice, prison-banter like place where no one really cares what you are if you can make a good point. You've failed to make any kind of proper case on that, and pivoted to absurd claims of being a "tourist", "filtered", or whatever. The only thing you've been able to state that did anything except fall a kilometer flat on it's back was claims that it did a lot of things for internet culture over five years ago, and some nebulous claim that it's at the forefront at some kind of cultural revolution against liberalism that you will not be able to substantiate because all it's been able to do so far is to repeat the shit points of bankrupt between-WW1-and-WW2 philossophers but with slightly more modern slurs. It's a dead end, you know it, I know it, you just can't bring yourself to admit it because you're in so deep you can't even recognize the classic process of ironic disconnection into the loss of your worldview and then a reconstruction based on what you previously thought of as a just a joke.
It's odd, you kind of remind me of another German I used to chat with on IRC, in a channel somehow related to crypto, in your writing style, but somehow not in intellect. Good luck.
It's also not true that 4chan has stopped doxxes and raids. Just yesterday /pol/ was full of people that were scouring everything they could to doxx the security guard involved in the shooting. 4chan was also counterraiding the leftist bunkerchan to have revenge on them making a meme about the facial features of the kind of people that enjoy /pol/.
And it's also wrong that 4chan is a paragon of free speech. It used to be, but as the userbase started harboring more and more fascists, and as more and more of them became janitors, they started censoring leftist posters unless they refrained from, well, anything that makes a Chan a Chan.
4chan in general is also highly resistant to evidence that goes against their narrative, and won't shy away from accusing the authors of any study they disagree with of being part of a Jewish conspiracy.
Most of all, the biggest meme in that post was calling /pol/ "slightly grown up from their libertarian idealism, [...] now with a hint of conservatism". /pol/ is openly fascist. As in, Julius Evola, Swastika, Black Sun, genocide, kind of fascist.
People who spend their time talking about the day of the rope being censored isn't what drove them to violent tendencies, what drove them to violent tendencies is a mix of being socially recluse, racist, white males, egged on by literal Nazis who saw the opportunity to radicalized them, all of that in a community so repulsive to anyone else that few enjoy being there.
It's not even that creative either. The main mascot of /pol/ was stolen from some random webcomic, the wojak came from Krautchan, and so on. It's just slight memes from someone else's art and a few puns. It's not a main creative force of the internet, far from it.
Those are the dynamics behind 4chan becoming what it is. Purely anonymous websites in a pseudonymous majority will inevitably become a disaster. That poster is someone who was carried down the rabbit hole and can't realize just how extreme and wrong their opinions are, who can't realize what their values became, trying to convince themselves their worldview and website isn't as insane as it is.