11 ms·

A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

84 points by zczc 9y ago

aisofteng 9y ago
Website is unusable on iOS (can't scroll in the frame). Direct link to a PDF of the article: http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Stringhini/papers/4chan-ICWSM2017.pdf http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Stringhini/papers/4chan-ICW...
anon6778 9y ago
Previously on HN (2016): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705851 Original version of the paper with "rare pepes": https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.03452.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.03452.pdf
peruvian 9y ago
I'm definitely falling into the "X.com used to be so much better back then!!" trope but I really hate how much /pol/ culture spread throughout 4chan. I spent a lot of time between 2006-2014 on various boards like /a/, /mu/, /g/, and /int/ until suddenly everyone was an "SJW cuck" and everything was politicized/full of angry wannabe-right wingers. Made me quit the site (well, that and other things). Sometimes you just want to meme about the latest bad anime episode, not have a poorly researched debate about race and politics.
- Kec71 9y ago
  Nevertheless, /pol/ and r/the_donald were one of main factors why Donald Trump got elected. This crowdsurfing phenomenon holds tremendous amount of power.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    What's crazy is that in the Bush/early Obama years 4chan was fairly liberal in terms of politics.
    - fiblye 9y ago
      I think one important question to ask here is: what caused the huge shift? Because it's something I noticed as well. Something happened that has pushed much of the general internet and large swathes of the "geekier" parts of the net to the right, and it doesn't seem to be letting up. The media ran with the "Russian shills" thing for a while, but it seems to be running out of steam and people I've known for years who used to lean firmly left are now either fairly far right, or left leaning but absolutely hate the left establishment and support the right purely out of spite.
      - aphextron 9y ago
        >I think one important question to ask here is: what caused the huge shift? Because it's something I noticed as well. It was 8 years of a Democratic, fairly liberal president. People like to rebel against whatever is in fashion. The right wing is now "edgy" because it rails against the prevailing political power The generation of kids who are now posting on 4chan grew up in a world defined by the Fox News anti-Obama 'liberalism is a disease!' rhetoric which has taken over our media in the past decade. Be prepared for a radical push back from Trumpism by the subsequent generations that grow up under the current political climate. I imagine the pendulum will swing back with a vengeance after this one.
        rtx 9y ago
        I am not sure why would you call someone who drones children liberal.
        digi_owl 9y ago
        I find that "liberal" standing alone is useless these days. You really need to prefix it with "social" or "economic".
        vim_wannabe 9y ago
        >The generation of kids who are now posting on 4chan grew up in a world defined by the Fox News anti-Obama 'liberalism is a disease!' rhetoric which has taken over our media in the past decade. Absolutely false, kids do not watch Fox News, and I'm not sure what you mean by 'taken over our media'. The generation of kids now posting on 4chan actually group up watching shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which took one sentence sound bites from people, put labels (you might know which ones) on them and made them into a huge spectacle.
  - eru 9y ago
    Citation needed.
    - Kec71 9y ago
      You will never get citation for that. I've been following those two communities for last three months before election happened (and few months after) and what I can state is onyl empirical. The things they do are amazing. More than 25k+ people working 24/7 to elect Trump is big influence. Note that they were all unpaid and did it by their free will. They even had paid members from opposition (ShariaBlue) to influence their opinions and destroy hegemony of site, but they failed. What do you think who financed this study? You think they were bored so decided to study /pol/ just so they have something to do? Pro Donald sites had much bigger influence in election than most of people will ever realize. Trump himself acknowledges them and his team follows them because news get there fastest.
      - Eleopteryx 9y ago
        I was following /pol/ since Trump's campaign started, back when I was certain he was just a sideshow distraction. Donald Trump's twitter account even winked at /pol/ at one point by tweeting what a 4chan poster asked, as well as copying their meme images. There was and is a very close connection there. It would be difficult to quantify the notion that the absence of /pol/ would have lost Trump the election, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were true.
  - KirinDave 9y ago
    This is a statement without a lot of actual backing. Folks claim it, but it's difficult to prove. Meanwhile we can prove that Republicans suppressed certain types of voters post VRA-repeal. We can prove that laws banning felons from voting impact some groups more than others (unfairly, I might add). We even have evidence (if not conclusive proof) that spearfishing attacks on US voting staff changed voter rolls. It is part of /pol & the altright's rhetoric that they're a large and influential body. They certainly can grab media attention. But I don't think we really see them in particular exhibiting political power.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      I agree that those are issues that should be addressed, but if you feel that Trump's rise wasn't legitimate, then I urge you to spend some time in an area of the country that voted for him. There are many, many areas of the country where people feel like their quality of life has been on the decline for decades and who have lost faith in normal politicians. The "altright rhetoric" may not be influential to you, but it is very influential to a large chunk of the population.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - gizmo 9y ago
        Trump's rise wasn't legitimate because it was essentially a con job. Folks in rural parts of the country have been hurt by 30 years of anti-worker policies and, to an extent, globalization. In part they got neglected by regular politicians, but in part simply because jobs moved as the world changed they got left behind. Trump ran a campaign blaming immigrants and Muslims while promising to bring back coal and renegotiating all trade agreements, a.k.a. "winning". The entire campaign was a big lie. Trump lies on a scale that is not comparable to what regular politicians do -- his salesmanship skills allow him to tune in to whatever people want to hear. When the connection between campaign promises and policy gets totally severed democracy dies. White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- anon6778 9y ago
  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.
- aphextron 9y ago
  >I'm definitely falling into the "X.com used to be so much better back then!!" trope but I really hate how much /pol/ culture spread throughout 4chan. I think most of us who grew up on 4chan since '04 feel the same. The cancer of /pol/ and the rise of the 'alt-right' completely took over the culture of the site. It's sad, but I can't bring myself to visit even the SFW boards anymore.
  - devmunchies 9y ago
    I hope its easy to see that the rise of this "cancer" and the alt-right was a natural response to the rise of the extreme left throughout popular media and in society in general. There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism, but when one must keep their conservative views in the closet, and anything conservative (on Reddit, Twitter, or simply at work) is seen as an inferior view point rather than just a different view point, then you will see extreme conservatism concentrated somewhere (in this case, 4chan).
    - dijit 9y ago
      It's a controversial opinion but I agree with you. The inability to even have a discussion with people about left vs right inevitably leads to echo chambers in both camps. The smaller the echo chamber the louder the volume.
      - LyndsySimon 9y ago
        Agreed. I moved from a right wing echo chamber (Boone County, AR) to a left wing echo chamber (Charlottesville, VA) about four years ago. Neither of those communities are currently able to even begin to understand the other.
    - woodruffw 9y ago
      The extreme left throughout popular media? I watched a neoliberal win the democratic primary this past year. We can talk about whether the media was biased in her favor, but that would strengthen my point: they chose her over the progressive candidate. I really don't like this sort of "look what you made me do" thinking, especially when the reaction is to their own boogeymen. If the alt-right wants to blame the left for their rise, they should be honest about their origins: culture wars on the internet, not society as a whole.
- wand3r 9y ago
  > x.com used to be better It did. Elon Musk owned it pre merger with confinity. X.com used to redirect to PayPal; still prob does. So x.com certainly used to be better...
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    Doesn't currently do anything.
    - devmunchies 9y ago
      Are they being literal about "x.com"? I thought they were just just saying <insert whatever old site you used to use a decade ago>.com
      - vertex-four 9y ago
        wand3r is, as a joke. sotojuan isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
  - patrickg_zill 9y ago
    Somewhere I still have an X.com plastic credit card.
- wyager 9y ago
  The /mlp/ cancer was much worse than the /pol/ cancer, and the /pol/ cancer was a predictable outcome of increased censorship by Moot after the whole gamergate silliness. 4chan has definitely gotten worse, but /pol/ is just a small part of it. The single worst factor in the last 5 years is (I suspect) the normalization of Reddit and the massive exodus from Reddit to historically "weirder" websites, including 4chan. The existing culture wasn't big enough/viral enough to successfully integrate/indoctrinate the new users.
- throawayF3jv 9y ago
  Frankly, I disagree that 4chan's decline had anything to do with politics. Rather, it was caused by the internet's uncanny ability to turn any discussion into meaningless shitposting. All the /pol/ vs /anyoneelse/ shit-flinging is just a fight between native and cross-board shitposters, and not different from those of yore (back when it was /b/ and /v/ flinging shit). Your board choice and use of "meme" as a verb tells me you were part of the problem.
- akhilcacharya 9y ago
  It's truly bizarre to see how big of an impact one random, completely irrelevant event (ZoePost, GamerGate) had on the sites culture.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - xorium 9y ago
    The GamerGate drama turned many subreddits and the non-/pol/ parts of 4chan into right-wing echo chambers.
  - slang800 9y ago
    I think you're conflating causation - GamerGate was an expression of /pol/ culture, not the cause of it. I'm sure that the fact that the event made news spread that culture, but ultimately the ideas didn't change.
    - LyndsySimon 9y ago
      I disagree. GamerGate was the cause for the rise of right-wing social media power. Milo wasn't know outside those circles until after the controversy got the mainstream consciousness, and now he's a staple on all of the right-wing sites I frequent. The idea that the largest gun forum on the internet would be regularly discussing posts by Milo and Gavin McInness would have been laughable before GamerGate. "Based Stickman", "Dave", etc. wouldn't exist if not for it. From the perspective of the "new right", GamerGate was the first time a community does up against the cultural warfare of the left and won. It was the point where the left went from being counter-culture to being "the establishment". For the first time in generations, the social outcasts were conservatives, not liberals. It's now rebellious and cool to want to marry and start a traditional family. You can be booed off a stage for saying things like "the husband should provide for his family". The right has grabbed this and incorporated it into their identity; the left hasn't figured out yet that they've become what they thought they were fighting. They're the Man.
      - 9y ago
- daniloassis 9y ago
  > until suddenly everyone was an "SJW cuck" and everything was politicized/full of angry wannabe-right wingers I guess this is actually a response/reaction to the extreme political correctness coming from many places around the World. I think this will last until "society" redeems free speech and people actually begin to have real dialogs.
  - cholantesh 9y ago
    I would buy this if not for the fact that: 1) simply asking for a modicum of respect is often conflated for political correctness 2) liking the wrong kind of music or finding the wrong hairstyle attractive garners a person this kind of treatment - which is the context GP is referring to and 3) these words are used as silencing tactics in the same way 'racist' and 'bigot' are
    - daniloassis 9y ago
      I could also argue that it's hard to be a hate speech judge when everything can be a trigger if you get offended. I don't think if it was a matter of just asking for respect on the individual level, it would go this far. But who knows. This 4chan phenomena is probably due to their incapacity to articulate on the real world, when in the real world they are already taken as wrong just by playing an opposite moral or political value, or in most cases, for being "privileged". KEKistan would be the nemesis of PC's "safe space" world, I guess. Not saying that I agree with all that, just reflecting. I only think that only real dialog will balance this. Not force, not laws. Dialog.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  I feel like this about the Internet at large. Gone are the days when you could go a long time without reading this kind of hate, or even its more moderate variants. It's not like this hate wasn't always there, but it's near-omnipresent now.
maximumkek 9y ago
How will /pol/ ever recover??
- mishurov 9y ago
  tfw you fell into the machine learning meme
awirth 9y ago
If this is a subject that interests you, I'd recommend reading Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right[1]. It's a really level-headed look at online identity politics. It's an extension of her The Baffler article "The New Man of 4chan"[2], from last year which went into /r9k/, but in her book she analyzes both "sides" (4chan and tumblr, if you will) which I thought was really interesting analysis, even considering I watched it all unfold as it was happening. [1]: http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies [2]: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle https://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
There is no way to study 4chan. It's like an electron, if you measure it, it's position will change and you'll be back to the start. the majority of /pol/ posts (about 84%) are either neutral or negative They are looking at a board full of "trolls trolling trolls" as they like to put it and then coming to the conclusion that everyone is negative. The leap then is when it comes to tying it to hate speech in the same context as would be elsewhere. “Nigger” is the most popular hate word, used in more than 2% of posts, while “faggot” and “retard” appear in over 1% of posts. I submit, based on my experience with /b/ in the past, that there is a different context behind the use of these words on 4chan versus the rest of the world. In fact in both of those cases a poster, typically "OP" is called one of those terms, viscerally and without thought for content or demographic makeup (largely because it's not known). So for example if you post a picture that is silly or not particularly relevant then a string of "OP is a faggot" comments will commence in an almost ritualized manner. Further, it's only in the rarest cases that someone from outside of 4chan finds their way to any one of the boards (not crawled by google AFAIK) and then posts something, not understanding the community, it's like metafilter in that way. It's a self selected group of trolls, hackers and curious people. So I think this study comes to the wrong conclusions: However, we are confident that our findings can serve as a foundation for interesting and valuable future work exploring fringe groups like the alt-right, hate speech, and online harassment campaigns Extremely doubtful. 4Chan would be considered a "Chaotic Neutral" character. They do terrible stuff and great stuff, but no group can harness it for their own purposes. "Not your personal Army" is a common theme - which the study didn't even pay attention to. If the group smells blood they will attack, no matter who it is or what cause, "4 teh lulz." I mean that's where "Anonymous" basically originated. This is a great example of how embedding yourself into a culture is the only way to understand it - which these researchers didn't do.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- formula1 9y ago
  While I appreciate the idea that nature is hard to predict. We have seen many cases where nature has a predictible flow. Now, predicting it and influencing it are two different concepts. And while a board based on mania and joy of free thought may be predictable, influence it may be more difficult due to an effective way of self preservation and reliance on truth based entertainment
hhh000 9y ago
install gentoo
makomk 9y ago
Extreme left is probably not quite right, "totalitarian left" would probably be closer to the mark. A left that considers all its views and actions beyond question and wields social justice ideas as weapons against dissent. For example, remember how every criticism of Hillary Clinton the neoliberal warmonger was and still is blamed on misogyny? How Sanders and his supporters were smeared as sexists and racists and all sorts? Every single idea in the modern social justice arsenal has become a cynical tool to protect the powerful and the status quo. And don't even get me started on the gloating about poor, lower-class white folks dying of drug addictions, or the articles in rags like the Guardian hoping for the day when demographic shifts mean the Democrats don't have to care about what happens to them anymore because their votes are irrelevant; Richard Spencer couldn't come up with a better fucking argument for white supremacy if he tried. It doesn't matter that none of this is actually left-wing, because it's beyond criticism or challenge.
- s_kilk 9y ago
  The thing you're talking about is not Leftism, it's Identitarianism. Remember, the left-right dichotomy is about how the means of production should be owned and controlled. While the Left does also stand for such progressive causes such as anti-racism and anti-sexism, the contemporary Liberal/Clintonite strain of Identitarianism doesn't have much overlap with actual Leftism.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Not quite. Back in the day the left-right thing happened over who backed the king of France or not, by where they physically stood in the room. And it was very much a social rather than economical thing back then. Keep in mind that right-wing has often been used synonymously with conservative. As in preserving the social status quo of classes and whatsnot. Later on, with socialism/communism coming into play, workers parties and traditional leftist parties found much common ground. In Norway we have this "hilarious" situation where we have two parties names Venstre (Left) and Høyre (Right), whole both are to the right politically speaking of Arbeiderpartiet (Workers Party). BTW Venstre is a bit player in Norwegian politics these days, while the biggest parties are Arbeiderpartiet and Høyre (the two taking turns leading the government in cooperation with various smaller parties). During the last 4 years Venstre has even acted as a underwriter of the Høyre lead government, even though they keep voicing disproval of their actual policies.
Alfredo123 9y ago
4chan and 9gag have been my fav. places to discuss politics and make all sort of comments.
ViktorV 9y ago
I live in the EU, and what I see is that the two sides ( progressives / modern conservatives ) almost say the same things with very subtle differences, and the real difference is the way they talk. I saw a comment here that stated that a neoliberal won against a progressive which is right. But every poll shows that Bernie would have won against Trump. This basically means that the right wingers actually agree with the progressive talking points: global warming, health care, and a little bit of anti globalism. This also means that Hillary didn't represent these. I've also seen here that there is there is no left wing push. Some talking points of Hillary are the best example of that, for ex. "vote for me because I'm a woman". Many people who think that there are no major differences between a man and a woman will think that this statement is sexist. There is a push to be kind with everyone and it is forced on people very hard ( NASA guy with the shirt ). This is very real as you can see in many comments. This like racism against black people in the U.S: if you ask black people many will say that they never experienced it, same like conservatives, but this doesn't necessary mean that it doesn't exists. My main point that the progressive movement has two sides: one with important issues which are physically influences our lives, and one which wants social change. IMHO the social changes they want aren't that great, and the means they try to achieve that are very very bad. The mainstream part of democrats turned to the social part, and that caused this change. My question for liberals here, who just don't understand why 4chan changed: Do you think what I've stated here is true? Why not? If yes then why the connection between the alt-right and leftist push is wrong?
flycaliguy 9y ago
I did a fair bit of browsing on 4chan's /pol as well as the less chaotic 8ch dot net /pol. I don't have strong evidence but I got the sense that there was more than just trolls trolling trolls. It felt like psychological operations. It felt like a community with calibrated narrative control and engineered content by motivated parties. A lot of memes designed to target sexual insecurity. At the top of the messaging, a mutation of the "Pick up artist" school of evolutionary psychology designed to create a racist world view.

84 points by zczc 9y ago

Website is unusable on iOS (can't scroll in the frame). Direct link to a PDF of the article: http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Stringhini/papers/4chan-ICWSM2017.pdf http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/G.Stringhini/papers/4chan-ICW...

anon6778 9y ago

Previously on HN (2016): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12705851 Original version of the paper with "rare pepes": https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.03452.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.03452.pdf

peruvian 9y ago

I'm definitely falling into the "X.com used to be so much better back then!!" trope but I really hate how much /pol/ culture spread throughout 4chan. I spent a lot of time between 2006-2014 on various boards like /a/, /mu/, /g/, and /int/ until suddenly everyone was an "SJW cuck" and everything was politicized/full of angry wannabe-right wingers. Made me quit the site (well, that and other things). Sometimes you just want to meme about the latest bad anime episode, not have a poorly researched debate about race and politics.

Kec71 9y ago
Nevertheless, /pol/ and r/the_donald were one of main factors why Donald Trump got elected. This crowdsurfing phenomenon holds tremendous amount of power.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  What's crazy is that in the Bush/early Obama years 4chan was fairly liberal in terms of politics.
  - fiblye 9y ago
    I think one important question to ask here is: what caused the huge shift? Because it's something I noticed as well. Something happened that has pushed much of the general internet and large swathes of the "geekier" parts of the net to the right, and it doesn't seem to be letting up. The media ran with the "Russian shills" thing for a while, but it seems to be running out of steam and people I've known for years who used to lean firmly left are now either fairly far right, or left leaning but absolutely hate the left establishment and support the right purely out of spite.
    - aphextron 9y ago
      >I think one important question to ask here is: what caused the huge shift? Because it's something I noticed as well. It was 8 years of a Democratic, fairly liberal president. People like to rebel against whatever is in fashion. The right wing is now "edgy" because it rails against the prevailing political power The generation of kids who are now posting on 4chan grew up in a world defined by the Fox News anti-Obama 'liberalism is a disease!' rhetoric which has taken over our media in the past decade. Be prepared for a radical push back from Trumpism by the subsequent generations that grow up under the current political climate. I imagine the pendulum will swing back with a vengeance after this one.
      - rtx 9y ago
        I am not sure why would you call someone who drones children liberal.
        digi_owl 9y ago
        I find that "liberal" standing alone is useless these days. You really need to prefix it with "social" or "economic".
      - vim_wannabe 9y ago
        >The generation of kids who are now posting on 4chan grew up in a world defined by the Fox News anti-Obama 'liberalism is a disease!' rhetoric which has taken over our media in the past decade. Absolutely false, kids do not watch Fox News, and I'm not sure what you mean by 'taken over our media'. The generation of kids now posting on 4chan actually group up watching shows like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which took one sentence sound bites from people, put labels (you might know which ones) on them and made them into a huge spectacle.
- eru 9y ago
  Citation needed.
  - Kec71 9y ago
    You will never get citation for that. I've been following those two communities for last three months before election happened (and few months after) and what I can state is onyl empirical. The things they do are amazing. More than 25k+ people working 24/7 to elect Trump is big influence. Note that they were all unpaid and did it by their free will. They even had paid members from opposition (ShariaBlue) to influence their opinions and destroy hegemony of site, but they failed. What do you think who financed this study? You think they were bored so decided to study /pol/ just so they have something to do? Pro Donald sites had much bigger influence in election than most of people will ever realize. Trump himself acknowledges them and his team follows them because news get there fastest.
    - Eleopteryx 9y ago
      I was following /pol/ since Trump's campaign started, back when I was certain he was just a sideshow distraction. Donald Trump's twitter account even winked at /pol/ at one point by tweeting what a 4chan poster asked, as well as copying their meme images. There was and is a very close connection there. It would be difficult to quantify the notion that the absence of /pol/ would have lost Trump the election, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were true.
- KirinDave 9y ago
  This is a statement without a lot of actual backing. Folks claim it, but it's difficult to prove. Meanwhile we can prove that Republicans suppressed certain types of voters post VRA-repeal. We can prove that laws banning felons from voting impact some groups more than others (unfairly, I might add). We even have evidence (if not conclusive proof) that spearfishing attacks on US voting staff changed voter rolls. It is part of /pol & the altright's rhetoric that they're a large and influential body. They certainly can grab media attention. But I don't think we really see them in particular exhibiting political power.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    I agree that those are issues that should be addressed, but if you feel that Trump's rise wasn't legitimate, then I urge you to spend some time in an area of the country that voted for him. There are many, many areas of the country where people feel like their quality of life has been on the decline for decades and who have lost faith in normal politicians. The "altright rhetoric" may not be influential to you, but it is very influential to a large chunk of the population.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - gizmo 9y ago
      Trump's rise wasn't legitimate because it was essentially a con job. Folks in rural parts of the country have been hurt by 30 years of anti-worker policies and, to an extent, globalization. In part they got neglected by regular politicians, but in part simply because jobs moved as the world changed they got left behind. Trump ran a campaign blaming immigrants and Muslims while promising to bring back coal and renegotiating all trade agreements, a.k.a. "winning". The entire campaign was a big lie. Trump lies on a scale that is not comparable to what regular politicians do -- his salesmanship skills allow him to tune in to whatever people want to hear. When the connection between campaign promises and policy gets totally severed democracy dies. White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
anon6778 9y ago
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.
aphextron 9y ago
>I'm definitely falling into the "X.com used to be so much better back then!!" trope but I really hate how much /pol/ culture spread throughout 4chan. I think most of us who grew up on 4chan since '04 feel the same. The cancer of /pol/ and the rise of the 'alt-right' completely took over the culture of the site. It's sad, but I can't bring myself to visit even the SFW boards anymore.
- devmunchies 9y ago
  I hope its easy to see that the rise of this "cancer" and the alt-right was a natural response to the rise of the extreme left throughout popular media and in society in general. There is nothing wrong with moderate conservatism, but when one must keep their conservative views in the closet, and anything conservative (on Reddit, Twitter, or simply at work) is seen as an inferior view point rather than just a different view point, then you will see extreme conservatism concentrated somewhere (in this case, 4chan).
  - dijit 9y ago
    It's a controversial opinion but I agree with you. The inability to even have a discussion with people about left vs right inevitably leads to echo chambers in both camps. The smaller the echo chamber the louder the volume.
    - LyndsySimon 9y ago
      Agreed. I moved from a right wing echo chamber (Boone County, AR) to a left wing echo chamber (Charlottesville, VA) about four years ago. Neither of those communities are currently able to even begin to understand the other.
  - woodruffw 9y ago
    The extreme left throughout popular media? I watched a neoliberal win the democratic primary this past year. We can talk about whether the media was biased in her favor, but that would strengthen my point: they chose her over the progressive candidate. I really don't like this sort of "look what you made me do" thinking, especially when the reaction is to their own boogeymen. If the alt-right wants to blame the left for their rise, they should be honest about their origins: culture wars on the internet, not society as a whole.
wand3r 9y ago
> x.com used to be better It did. Elon Musk owned it pre merger with confinity. X.com used to redirect to PayPal; still prob does. So x.com certainly used to be better...
- vertex-four 9y ago
  Doesn't currently do anything.
  - devmunchies 9y ago
    Are they being literal about "x.com"? I thought they were just just saying <insert whatever old site you used to use a decade ago>.com
    - vertex-four 9y ago
      wand3r is, as a joke. sotojuan isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com
- patrickg_zill 9y ago
  Somewhere I still have an X.com plastic credit card.
wyager 9y ago
The /mlp/ cancer was much worse than the /pol/ cancer, and the /pol/ cancer was a predictable outcome of increased censorship by Moot after the whole gamergate silliness. 4chan has definitely gotten worse, but /pol/ is just a small part of it. The single worst factor in the last 5 years is (I suspect) the normalization of Reddit and the massive exodus from Reddit to historically "weirder" websites, including 4chan. The existing culture wasn't big enough/viral enough to successfully integrate/indoctrinate the new users.
throawayF3jv 9y ago
Frankly, I disagree that 4chan's decline had anything to do with politics. Rather, it was caused by the internet's uncanny ability to turn any discussion into meaningless shitposting. All the /pol/ vs /anyoneelse/ shit-flinging is just a fight between native and cross-board shitposters, and not different from those of yore (back when it was /b/ and /v/ flinging shit). Your board choice and use of "meme" as a verb tells me you were part of the problem.
akhilcacharya 9y ago
It's truly bizarre to see how big of an impact one random, completely irrelevant event (ZoePost, GamerGate) had on the sites culture.
- deleted 9y ago
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- xorium 9y ago
  The GamerGate drama turned many subreddits and the non-/pol/ parts of 4chan into right-wing echo chambers.
- slang800 9y ago
  I think you're conflating causation - GamerGate was an expression of /pol/ culture, not the cause of it. I'm sure that the fact that the event made news spread that culture, but ultimately the ideas didn't change.
  - LyndsySimon 9y ago
    I disagree. GamerGate was the cause for the rise of right-wing social media power. Milo wasn't know outside those circles until after the controversy got the mainstream consciousness, and now he's a staple on all of the right-wing sites I frequent. The idea that the largest gun forum on the internet would be regularly discussing posts by Milo and Gavin McInness would have been laughable before GamerGate. "Based Stickman", "Dave", etc. wouldn't exist if not for it. From the perspective of the "new right", GamerGate was the first time a community does up against the cultural warfare of the left and won. It was the point where the left went from being counter-culture to being "the establishment". For the first time in generations, the social outcasts were conservatives, not liberals. It's now rebellious and cool to want to marry and start a traditional family. You can be booed off a stage for saying things like "the husband should provide for his family". The right has grabbed this and incorporated it into their identity; the left hasn't figured out yet that they've become what they thought they were fighting. They're the Man.
    - 9y ago
daniloassis 9y ago
> until suddenly everyone was an "SJW cuck" and everything was politicized/full of angry wannabe-right wingers I guess this is actually a response/reaction to the extreme political correctness coming from many places around the World. I think this will last until "society" redeems free speech and people actually begin to have real dialogs.
- cholantesh 9y ago
  I would buy this if not for the fact that: 1) simply asking for a modicum of respect is often conflated for political correctness 2) liking the wrong kind of music or finding the wrong hairstyle attractive garners a person this kind of treatment - which is the context GP is referring to and 3) these words are used as silencing tactics in the same way 'racist' and 'bigot' are
  - daniloassis 9y ago
    I could also argue that it's hard to be a hate speech judge when everything can be a trigger if you get offended. I don't think if it was a matter of just asking for respect on the individual level, it would go this far. But who knows. This 4chan phenomena is probably due to their incapacity to articulate on the real world, when in the real world they are already taken as wrong just by playing an opposite moral or political value, or in most cases, for being "privileged". KEKistan would be the nemesis of PC's "safe space" world, I guess. Not saying that I agree with all that, just reflecting. I only think that only real dialog will balance this. Not force, not laws. Dialog.
- deleted 9y ago
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TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
I feel like this about the Internet at large. Gone are the days when you could go a long time without reading this kind of hate, or even its more moderate variants. It's not like this hate wasn't always there, but it's near-omnipresent now.

maximumkek 9y ago

How will /pol/ ever recover??

mishurov 9y ago
tfw you fell into the machine learning meme

awirth 9y ago

If this is a subject that interests you, I'd recommend reading Angela Nagle's Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right[1]. It's a really level-headed look at online identity politics. It's an extension of her The Baffler article "The New Man of 4chan"[2], from last year which went into /r9k/, but in her book she analyzes both "sides" (4chan and tumblr, if you will) which I thought was really interesting analysis, even considering I watched it all unfold as it was happening. [1]: http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies http://www.zero-books.net/books/kill-all-normies [2]: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle https://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle

deleted 9y ago
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AndrewKemendo 9y ago

There is no way to study 4chan. It's like an electron, if you measure it, it's position will change and you'll be back to the start. the majority of /pol/ posts (about 84%) are either neutral or negative They are looking at a board full of "trolls trolling trolls" as they like to put it and then coming to the conclusion that everyone is negative. The leap then is when it comes to tying it to hate speech in the same context as would be elsewhere. “Nigger” is the most popular hate word, used in more than 2% of posts, while “faggot” and “retard” appear in over 1% of posts. I submit, based on my experience with /b/ in the past, that there is a different context behind the use of these words on 4chan versus the rest of the world. In fact in both of those cases a poster, typically "OP" is called one of those terms, viscerally and without thought for content or demographic makeup (largely because it's not known). So for example if you post a picture that is silly or not particularly relevant then a string of "OP is a faggot" comments will commence in an almost ritualized manner. Further, it's only in the rarest cases that someone from outside of 4chan finds their way to any one of the boards (not crawled by google AFAIK) and then posts something, not understanding the community, it's like metafilter in that way. It's a self selected group of trolls, hackers and curious people. So I think this study comes to the wrong conclusions: However, we are confident that our findings can serve as a foundation for interesting and valuable future work exploring fringe groups like the alt-right, hate speech, and online harassment campaigns Extremely doubtful. 4Chan would be considered a "Chaotic Neutral" character. They do terrible stuff and great stuff, but no group can harness it for their own purposes. "Not your personal Army" is a common theme - which the study didn't even pay attention to. If the group smells blood they will attack, no matter who it is or what cause, "4 teh lulz." I mean that's where "Anonymous" basically originated. This is a great example of how embedding yourself into a culture is the only way to understand it - which these researchers didn't do.

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formula1 9y ago
While I appreciate the idea that nature is hard to predict. We have seen many cases where nature has a predictible flow. Now, predicting it and influencing it are two different concepts. And while a board based on mania and joy of free thought may be predictable, influence it may be more difficult due to an effective way of self preservation and reliance on truth based entertainment

hhh000 9y ago

install gentoo

makomk 9y ago

Extreme left is probably not quite right, "totalitarian left" would probably be closer to the mark. A left that considers all its views and actions beyond question and wields social justice ideas as weapons against dissent. For example, remember how every criticism of Hillary Clinton the neoliberal warmonger was and still is blamed on misogyny? How Sanders and his supporters were smeared as sexists and racists and all sorts? Every single idea in the modern social justice arsenal has become a cynical tool to protect the powerful and the status quo. And don't even get me started on the gloating about poor, lower-class white folks dying of drug addictions, or the articles in rags like the Guardian hoping for the day when demographic shifts mean the Democrats don't have to care about what happens to them anymore because their votes are irrelevant; Richard Spencer couldn't come up with a better fucking argument for white supremacy if he tried. It doesn't matter that none of this is actually left-wing, because it's beyond criticism or challenge.

s_kilk 9y ago
The thing you're talking about is not Leftism, it's Identitarianism. Remember, the left-right dichotomy is about how the means of production should be owned and controlled. While the Left does also stand for such progressive causes such as anti-racism and anti-sexism, the contemporary Liberal/Clintonite strain of Identitarianism doesn't have much overlap with actual Leftism.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Not quite. Back in the day the left-right thing happened over who backed the king of France or not, by where they physically stood in the room. And it was very much a social rather than economical thing back then. Keep in mind that right-wing has often been used synonymously with conservative. As in preserving the social status quo of classes and whatsnot. Later on, with socialism/communism coming into play, workers parties and traditional leftist parties found much common ground. In Norway we have this "hilarious" situation where we have two parties names Venstre (Left) and Høyre (Right), whole both are to the right politically speaking of Arbeiderpartiet (Workers Party). BTW Venstre is a bit player in Norwegian politics these days, while the biggest parties are Arbeiderpartiet and Høyre (the two taking turns leading the government in cooperation with various smaller parties). During the last 4 years Venstre has even acted as a underwriter of the Høyre lead government, even though they keep voicing disproval of their actual policies.

Alfredo123 9y ago

4chan and 9gag have been my fav. places to discuss politics and make all sort of comments.

ViktorV 9y ago

I live in the EU, and what I see is that the two sides ( progressives / modern conservatives ) almost say the same things with very subtle differences, and the real difference is the way they talk. I saw a comment here that stated that a neoliberal won against a progressive which is right. But every poll shows that Bernie would have won against Trump. This basically means that the right wingers actually agree with the progressive talking points: global warming, health care, and a little bit of anti globalism. This also means that Hillary didn't represent these. I've also seen here that there is there is no left wing push. Some talking points of Hillary are the best example of that, for ex. "vote for me because I'm a woman". Many people who think that there are no major differences between a man and a woman will think that this statement is sexist. There is a push to be kind with everyone and it is forced on people very hard ( NASA guy with the shirt ). This is very real as you can see in many comments. This like racism against black people in the U.S: if you ask black people many will say that they never experienced it, same like conservatives, but this doesn't necessary mean that it doesn't exists. My main point that the progressive movement has two sides: one with important issues which are physically influences our lives, and one which wants social change. IMHO the social changes they want aren't that great, and the means they try to achieve that are very very bad. The mainstream part of democrats turned to the social part, and that caused this change. My question for liberals here, who just don't understand why 4chan changed: Do you think what I've stated here is true? Why not? If yes then why the connection between the alt-right and leftist push is wrong?

flycaliguy 9y ago

I did a fair bit of browsing on 4chan's /pol as well as the less chaotic 8ch dot net /pol. I don't have strong evidence but I got the sense that there was more than just trolls trolling trolls. It felt like psychological operations. It felt like a community with calibrated narrative control and engineered content by motivated parties. A lot of memes designed to target sexual insecurity. At the top of the messaging, a mutation of the "Pick up artist" school of evolutionary psychology designed to create a racist world view.