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My friends and I used to visit the *chan sites when we were younger. Sometimes the discussions there were good e.g. if you browse the exercise forums. But then

My friends and I used to visit the *chan sites when we were younger. Sometimes the discussions there were good e.g. if you browse the exercise forums. But then one of my closest friends killed himself silently. That was when I realized that these sites are no jokes. Some of the people there have fallen so deep into the pit of hate and depression. Nowadays I don't even link nor share the name of the sites to my younger friends where I see the early signs of hate growing. My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up, making them socially illfit, making them outcasts and making them blame everything on immigrants and so on when they can't find a girlfriend or friends.

NetOpWibby 7y ago
Oh damn, my condolences.
- throwaway0129 7y ago
  Thank you, I appreciate it.
codingslave 7y ago
I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the forest from the trees. But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here.
- solipsism 7y ago
  But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them Don't go there. Don't say mass shooters aren't at fault. The thing is, you don't need to. Both things can be true -- life is hard and unfair for certain people in certain ways, and that in the aggregate is bound to lead to more mass killings and other negative effects like suicide.. and the ones who decide to kill innocent people are to blame for their disgusting choice. Only the most simplistic and naive ways of thinking try to boil down complex problems into black and white.
  - codingslave 7y ago
    I never justified mass shootings or said it wasn't their fault. I was just stating that things are objectively bad for young men in America. Any kind of therapy or "support", proper raising, etc isnt addressing the issue. Have some introspection and look at your response, you attacked me right off the bat. What was so repulsive in my post? Are these men not allowed to recognize that their life sucks and its societies fault?
    - csydas 7y ago
      Well, since I still go to a lot of secret-handshake-style message boards that get a lot of crossposting from the *chan boards and have such guys, my perspective is a bit different. I will not claim you don't and are wrong, but here's my perspective from what I see daily, both personally and professionally (as I offer as much advice as I can to help these guys get out of the spiral they're in) >...And its societies fault? [sic] Well, that's the problem as I see it. There is a huge issue where a lot of young men do not have healthy outlets for their frustrations and were sold a dream from the 90's-2010's that just doesn't really work anymore. The traditional path of high school > college > job + family isn't the norm anymore, as it just doesn't work well in a lot of regions of the US anymore (I'm from the US, so I'll focus on the US). But, the issue I have with the conversation that tends to happen when these message board groups pop up is that it results in a large number of posters completely removing their own agency from their lives and letting some extremely vile groups of persons tell them: - You're worthless - No one cares about you - You're a low-roll of genetics, and forever a failure - Society values everyone else above you - Corollary to the above point it's the fault of $minority_group_poster_dislikes that you are devalued - There's nothing you can do about it The list goes on. When I do manage to get a chance to talk to some of these guys, when the memes stop and the copy/pasta has run out and you just start getting their own words and responses, you start to realize that what you have is a bunch of people disappointed with themselves, lacking a positive support structure and proper guidance on things that employers, friends, potential partners, and society in general has weird quirks on. The biggest complaint I see is that "no one will hire me because I'm an adult white male", but when we get past the rhetoric they've been spoon-fed and finally get a look at their resume or do a mock interview, the problem is clear, and not to put the blame squarely on them, but it __is that they don't know how to present themselves__. They're shy, they're embarrassed, and they curl up defensively as a result. The message of "it's everyone else's fault but mine" is convenient, and again, this isn't to put the blame squarely on the individuals. US society has failed us in a lot of ways. I stupidly took a literature major in University, and midway through went to a few career fairs focusing on how to get a job because I was getting worried on how I would ever convince someone to hire me with a literature degree. The advisor, while quite nice and pleasant, gave me some awful advice about keyword spamming, phrases that are "guaranteed to work", and so on. Talking with actual recruiters and hiring boards later on, I found out that all of that stuff was non-sense, and instead I just needed to learn how to sell myself and show what I could do, without wasting the recruiter/interviewer's time. Now that I handle interviews as one of the main components of my work, I can see how badly in this area we set __all__ young people up for in this respect. I got lucky, because I could see the forest so to speak, figured out quickly how to talk to employers, how to talk to interviewers, and how to up-talk what I've done without coming off as arrogant. Others are not as lucky. This is just one example, but the core problem is the same; you have a group of young people (men in this case) that just don't know how to both protect (or even have) their own self-identity while still participating in society at large. The communities online that spew this stupid rhetoric and vitriol are the Jim Jones' of the 21st century, and they're just as toxic, and now dangerous apparently. So yeah, society has some failings, but we also have a group of people who are diving head first into a dark spiral that just reinforces the negative feelings and they give away their agency over themselves willingly to some ass who wants to sell them something, or even worse, just wants to make people miserable. At some point these people need to realize that they are doing a lot of this to themselves needlessly, and they can learn to handle the crap hand that society gives all of us. We won't all be millionaires, but it's got to be better than being broke and unemployed posting pictures about how miserable and worthless you are while someone feeds gross propaganda into your head.
- darawk 7y ago
  I think it's essentially draws back to the incel/hikkomori phenomenon. You never see young men in relationships doing these kinds of things...whether it's a white right wing mass shooter or an Islamic suicide bombing. People seem to want to pin these things on ideology, because that's the reason the perpetrators themselves give for what they do. But it seems more likely to me to be a reaction to a life they view as having no future, by which I mean no prospect of a successful romantic relationship with the opposite sex.
  - s9w 7y ago
    The whole incel think was made up rather recently in a coordinated effort. Just one of many counter examples: A couple of days ago an African tried to kill three Germans, succeeding in killing one child. He was the father of three children. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/getoeteter-junge-im-frankfurter-hauptbahnhof-mutmasslicher-taeter-ist-vater-von-drei-kindern/24852136.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/getoeteter-junge-im...
    - darawk 7y ago
      I'm not blaming the incel community. I'm actually essentially taking their side. Our society doesn't help men in that situation very well, and treats them exceptionally poorly. And sure, counter-examples exist, though that particular one isn't really in the same space as this. Certainly people kill each other, and sometimes crazy people kill random strangers. But that was not a mass killing in the sense that this El Paso situation was, or that 9/11 was.
    - Tomte 7y ago
      He was in therapy for mental illness. I'm not sure why you're bringing this case up, but it can't be good.
      - skinnymuch 7y ago
        What does that mean? A lot of people are in therapy and almost everyone could benefit from therapy. Was it some really serious mental illness? Or merely mental health issues when compared to shooting and killing people.
- watwut 7y ago
  Have you read those manifestos or about shooters themselves? Cause lack of opportunities ain't the issue in specific cases I read about. Lack of opportunities is not case of Roger Elliot, Sandy Hook massacre nor columbine. Not in the mail bomb case either nor that one with skater brother (can't recall name now).
- Phlarp 7y ago
  So young men are murdering people by the hundreds in mass shootings, but you don't think it's the young men's fault? surely it is the guns or the Nazi manifestos then?
- rejschaap 7y ago
  > But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here. I read this in Jordan Peterson's voice.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  I heard it said that young people were "the canaries in the coalmine" for the larger problems of society.
noobermin 7y ago
I think this is mistaking the symptom for the cause. I'll admit this is largely my ideology, but large civic disengagement along with dire economic issues are the reasons for festering chan culture, not the other way around. It makes people ripe for accepting narratives that blame immigrants, women, muslims, etc.
- nfoz 7y ago
  It's easy to blame "economic issues" for all sorts of social problems, but I doubt that has much to do with this one. The 4channer-types I've known were mainly from rather well-off families and with tons of means and opportunity. Perhaps even so much that it'd be easier to correlate the other way.
- taurath 7y ago
  It’s not about the narrative I don’t think - it’s about people trying to find communities that accept people as they are, and then what starts out as a joke starts to go too far. The commonality between every right wing mass shooter is that there was an online community - I dont think anyone goes straight to a hate community, they go to the first place they feel like they themselves aren’t treated awfully, and then latch onto whatever the culture is there. So it’s not so much the blaming their lives on others, as it is doing a win for their “team”. I think fundamentally it’s due to the ostracization and lack of any real social support for outcasts in our open society that creates the monsters. We offer nothing and nowhere to go for those who don’t get along, so they end up in the back corners of the internet at the very bottom of the social barrel with nothing to do but fuck with the society that spurned them (or they themselves spurned).
- hibikir 7y ago
  There's a feedback loop, regardless of whether we find the communities virtuous or not. It's not difficult to see how, for instance, the boardgamegeek forums helped turn a very niche strategy hobby into something that has a nice sized shelf at Target, with a market over a hundred times larger than 20 years ago. You still needed people that could enjoy such social pastimes, and different societal changes will have an effect of how many people are even interested in such things, but the meeting ground sure makes a difference, as it reinforces the interest, and makes it easier for people to dive deeper on it. It just happens to be something that we consider harmless, or even positive. o while there sure are more desperate people that have antisocial tendencies, just for economic issues, whether they consider those tendencies to be socially acceptable, and whether delving more on them is something that they will do, depends on finding social validation, and nowadays, we do that on the internet pretty easily. This kind of thing could still happen in the past: History tells us so, but the level of disengagement, and depth of the economic reasons required to trigger the radicalization of people, in one form or another, is far lower than before. It doesn't matter if it's people finding support and advice on how to kill themselves, bulimics seeing that their behavior is normal, or just a teenager that finds other people that likes music from the 50s, or goes very deep into pinball. Similar shapes, except some have deadly consequences.
dgudkov 7y ago
>My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up Can't upvote this enough.
mhh__ 7y ago
I don't know about father figure specifically, but the dialogue you get from many on xChan sites really just makes me just want to talk to them. For every n playing it up, there must be a few who genuinely have these hateful views. I've never been that far down the rabbit hole but I can imagine a lack of any human contact playing a role from my experience.

NetOpWibby 7y ago

Oh damn, my condolences.

throwaway0129 7y ago
Thank you, I appreciate it.

codingslave 7y ago

I think there's more going on in our current society than is being discussed. What it is exactly, and why its happening, is really hard to tell. We cant see the forest from the trees. But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here.

solipsism 7y ago
But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them Don't go there. Don't say mass shooters aren't at fault. The thing is, you don't need to. Both things can be true -- life is hard and unfair for certain people in certain ways, and that in the aggregate is bound to lead to more mass killings and other negative effects like suicide.. and the ones who decide to kill innocent people are to blame for their disgusting choice. Only the most simplistic and naive ways of thinking try to boil down complex problems into black and white.
- codingslave 7y ago
  I never justified mass shootings or said it wasn't their fault. I was just stating that things are objectively bad for young men in America. Any kind of therapy or "support", proper raising, etc isnt addressing the issue. Have some introspection and look at your response, you attacked me right off the bat. What was so repulsive in my post? Are these men not allowed to recognize that their life sucks and its societies fault?
  - csydas 7y ago
    Well, since I still go to a lot of secret-handshake-style message boards that get a lot of crossposting from the *chan boards and have such guys, my perspective is a bit different. I will not claim you don't and are wrong, but here's my perspective from what I see daily, both personally and professionally (as I offer as much advice as I can to help these guys get out of the spiral they're in) >...And its societies fault? [sic] Well, that's the problem as I see it. There is a huge issue where a lot of young men do not have healthy outlets for their frustrations and were sold a dream from the 90's-2010's that just doesn't really work anymore. The traditional path of high school > college > job + family isn't the norm anymore, as it just doesn't work well in a lot of regions of the US anymore (I'm from the US, so I'll focus on the US). But, the issue I have with the conversation that tends to happen when these message board groups pop up is that it results in a large number of posters completely removing their own agency from their lives and letting some extremely vile groups of persons tell them: - You're worthless - No one cares about you - You're a low-roll of genetics, and forever a failure - Society values everyone else above you - Corollary to the above point it's the fault of $minority_group_poster_dislikes that you are devalued - There's nothing you can do about it The list goes on. When I do manage to get a chance to talk to some of these guys, when the memes stop and the copy/pasta has run out and you just start getting their own words and responses, you start to realize that what you have is a bunch of people disappointed with themselves, lacking a positive support structure and proper guidance on things that employers, friends, potential partners, and society in general has weird quirks on. The biggest complaint I see is that "no one will hire me because I'm an adult white male", but when we get past the rhetoric they've been spoon-fed and finally get a look at their resume or do a mock interview, the problem is clear, and not to put the blame squarely on them, but it __is that they don't know how to present themselves__. They're shy, they're embarrassed, and they curl up defensively as a result. The message of "it's everyone else's fault but mine" is convenient, and again, this isn't to put the blame squarely on the individuals. US society has failed us in a lot of ways. I stupidly took a literature major in University, and midway through went to a few career fairs focusing on how to get a job because I was getting worried on how I would ever convince someone to hire me with a literature degree. The advisor, while quite nice and pleasant, gave me some awful advice about keyword spamming, phrases that are "guaranteed to work", and so on. Talking with actual recruiters and hiring boards later on, I found out that all of that stuff was non-sense, and instead I just needed to learn how to sell myself and show what I could do, without wasting the recruiter/interviewer's time. Now that I handle interviews as one of the main components of my work, I can see how badly in this area we set __all__ young people up for in this respect. I got lucky, because I could see the forest so to speak, figured out quickly how to talk to employers, how to talk to interviewers, and how to up-talk what I've done without coming off as arrogant. Others are not as lucky. This is just one example, but the core problem is the same; you have a group of young people (men in this case) that just don't know how to both protect (or even have) their own self-identity while still participating in society at large. The communities online that spew this stupid rhetoric and vitriol are the Jim Jones' of the 21st century, and they're just as toxic, and now dangerous apparently. So yeah, society has some failings, but we also have a group of people who are diving head first into a dark spiral that just reinforces the negative feelings and they give away their agency over themselves willingly to some ass who wants to sell them something, or even worse, just wants to make people miserable. At some point these people need to realize that they are doing a lot of this to themselves needlessly, and they can learn to handle the crap hand that society gives all of us. We won't all be millionaires, but it's got to be better than being broke and unemployed posting pictures about how miserable and worthless you are while someone feeds gross propaganda into your head.
darawk 7y ago
I think it's essentially draws back to the incel/hikkomori phenomenon. You never see young men in relationships doing these kinds of things...whether it's a white right wing mass shooter or an Islamic suicide bombing. People seem to want to pin these things on ideology, because that's the reason the perpetrators themselves give for what they do. But it seems more likely to me to be a reaction to a life they view as having no future, by which I mean no prospect of a successful romantic relationship with the opposite sex.
- s9w 7y ago
  The whole incel think was made up rather recently in a coordinated effort. Just one of many counter examples: A couple of days ago an African tried to kill three Germans, succeeding in killing one child. He was the father of three children. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/getoeteter-junge-im-frankfurter-hauptbahnhof-mutmasslicher-taeter-ist-vater-von-drei-kindern/24852136.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/getoeteter-junge-im...
  - darawk 7y ago
    I'm not blaming the incel community. I'm actually essentially taking their side. Our society doesn't help men in that situation very well, and treats them exceptionally poorly. And sure, counter-examples exist, though that particular one isn't really in the same space as this. Certainly people kill each other, and sometimes crazy people kill random strangers. But that was not a mass killing in the sense that this El Paso situation was, or that 9/11 was.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    He was in therapy for mental illness. I'm not sure why you're bringing this case up, but it can't be good.
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
      What does that mean? A lot of people are in therapy and almost everyone could benefit from therapy. Was it some really serious mental illness? Or merely mental health issues when compared to shooting and killing people.
watwut 7y ago
Have you read those manifestos or about shooters themselves? Cause lack of opportunities ain't the issue in specific cases I read about. Lack of opportunities is not case of Roger Elliot, Sandy Hook massacre nor columbine. Not in the mail bomb case either nor that one with skater brother (can't recall name now).
Phlarp 7y ago
So young men are murdering people by the hundreds in mass shootings, but you don't think it's the young men's fault? surely it is the guns or the Nazi manifestos then?
rejschaap 7y ago
> But I don't think its young men's fault, I think that things have gotten objectively worse for them. People are responding, and are increasingly responding with huge negativity. I think this has nothing to do with how they're raised, and every thing to do with how they're treated and the opportunities they're being given. There is real discontent here. I read this in Jordan Peterson's voice.
brokenmachine 7y ago
I heard it said that young people were "the canaries in the coalmine" for the larger problems of society.

noobermin 7y ago

I think this is mistaking the symptom for the cause. I'll admit this is largely my ideology, but large civic disengagement along with dire economic issues are the reasons for festering chan culture, not the other way around. It makes people ripe for accepting narratives that blame immigrants, women, muslims, etc.

nfoz 7y ago
It's easy to blame "economic issues" for all sorts of social problems, but I doubt that has much to do with this one. The 4channer-types I've known were mainly from rather well-off families and with tons of means and opportunity. Perhaps even so much that it'd be easier to correlate the other way.
taurath 7y ago
It’s not about the narrative I don’t think - it’s about people trying to find communities that accept people as they are, and then what starts out as a joke starts to go too far. The commonality between every right wing mass shooter is that there was an online community - I dont think anyone goes straight to a hate community, they go to the first place they feel like they themselves aren’t treated awfully, and then latch onto whatever the culture is there. So it’s not so much the blaming their lives on others, as it is doing a win for their “team”. I think fundamentally it’s due to the ostracization and lack of any real social support for outcasts in our open society that creates the monsters. We offer nothing and nowhere to go for those who don’t get along, so they end up in the back corners of the internet at the very bottom of the social barrel with nothing to do but fuck with the society that spurned them (or they themselves spurned).
hibikir 7y ago
There's a feedback loop, regardless of whether we find the communities virtuous or not. It's not difficult to see how, for instance, the boardgamegeek forums helped turn a very niche strategy hobby into something that has a nice sized shelf at Target, with a market over a hundred times larger than 20 years ago. You still needed people that could enjoy such social pastimes, and different societal changes will have an effect of how many people are even interested in such things, but the meeting ground sure makes a difference, as it reinforces the interest, and makes it easier for people to dive deeper on it. It just happens to be something that we consider harmless, or even positive. o while there sure are more desperate people that have antisocial tendencies, just for economic issues, whether they consider those tendencies to be socially acceptable, and whether delving more on them is something that they will do, depends on finding social validation, and nowadays, we do that on the internet pretty easily. This kind of thing could still happen in the past: History tells us so, but the level of disengagement, and depth of the economic reasons required to trigger the radicalization of people, in one form or another, is far lower than before. It doesn't matter if it's people finding support and advice on how to kill themselves, bulimics seeing that their behavior is normal, or just a teenager that finds other people that likes music from the 50s, or goes very deep into pinball. Similar shapes, except some have deadly consequences.

dgudkov 7y ago

>My personal belief is that all of this is happening due to a lack of a proper father figure for boys growing up Can't upvote this enough.

mhh__ 7y ago

I don't know about father figure specifically, but the dialogue you get from many on xChan sites really just makes me just want to talk to them. For every n playing it up, there must be a few who genuinely have these hateful views. I've never been that far down the rabbit hole but I can imagine a lack of any human contact playing a role from my experience.