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There certainly are anodyne parts of 4chan--but they're obviously, to the point where your post comes off as disingenous, not the problem. Hell, they could migr

There certainly are anodyne parts of 4chan--but they're obviously, to the point where your post comes off as disingenous, not the problem. Hell, they could migrate back to Something Awful, like a lot of us who grew up ended up doing. (Which, just recently, torpedoed FYAD, the last vestige of the edgelord era. The FYAD types seem to have fucked off to 4chan and elsewhere. Nobody was surprised.) Hate speech is abhorrent and its purveyors should be ostracized from decent society. But you can deal with the crazy screamer on the streetcorner. The organizational facet is not merely distasteful but threatening. These are places to air doxxed information. They're places to gin up raids. Remember "4chan is not your personal army"? It isn't real anymore, if it ever was. For the last five years, 8chan in particular (largely because 4chan has an ownership group that maybe-just-maybe is scared of real consequences, which tells me that real consequences work) has been the personal army of a lot of sadsacks who, just to name one facet, really really really want to make the lives of women who have the temerity to make or talk about video games really horrible. These places are literally-not-figuratively hives for fascists to radicalize the clueless, and that is a threat at a societal level.

bitwize 7y ago
How dare people go through Zoe Quinn's tweets and discover that she was in a consensual relationship with the man she claims raped her at the time said rape was supposed to have occurred! The people who did this have no other motive than to punish her for being involved in video games while having a vagina! Such hate speech, and all institutions complicit in its spread, needs to be blotted from existence immediately!
- Craighead 7y ago
  This is a rather poor quality post. This is HN, not KIA.
heartbeats 7y ago
But they already are. The crazy screamer on the street corner causes an actual harm to you. To avoid 8chan is trivial; just don't go there. That people get radicalized going there seems like a poor argument. If I understand you correctly, the principle is the following: 1. Someone holds acceptable views. 2. They visit 8chan. 3. They now hold abhorrent views. Why should 8chan be blamed for this, or rather, what did they do wrong here? Don't you agree that people have the right to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers?
- eropple 7y ago
  Radicalization is not about opinions, it is about convincing the radicalized to undertake acts of violence and threats thereof for a political purpose. You get, yeah, that these are also places where these little shitheads gather and decide who to brigade (the aforementioned "oh, hmm, that lady has opinions about video games, let's try real hard to destroy her life" dreck that the various chans indulge in when they're bored), that geek each other up to the point where somebody thinks sending a SWAT team at somebody is a great idea? And that the management is shockingly hands-off about letting them do it and have been for years now?
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Swatting is quite illegal anyway - and so is plotting a 'swatting' online, by the "clear and present danger" standard. Free speech is irrelevant to this. Brigading might be a problem but both sides are doing it, so why blame only 4chan and the like while letting Twitter and Tumblr off the hook?
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    >the aforementioned "oh, hmm, that lady has opinions about video games, let's try real hard to destroy her life" dreck that the various chans indulge in when they're bored What are you referring to when you say this? Because if you're referring to Gamergate then that's quite a mischaracterization. I'm not saying that bad things weren't done during it, but it wasn't about hating on women in video games. And aren't most swatting incidents unrelated to chans? Mostly it seems to have been about people getting angry at one another playing video games or related to streamers of video games. Does that make Twitch complicit?
    - fl0wenol 7y ago
      >but it wasn't about hating on women in video games. Are you saying it was about integrity in video games journalism? I wish I could express a figurative glance over the top of my reading glasses without an image macro.
makomk 7y ago
One of the more, ah, interesting things about this is that a lot of they key activists who've been pushing for this crackdown on online speech literally are the Something Awful edgelords. If I recall rightly, at least one of them is now on the NYT editoral board making sure that the proper SA-social-justice ideas are disseminated from its pages. There's a good few journalists out there who graduated from SA too.

bitwize 7y ago

How dare people go through Zoe Quinn's tweets and discover that she was in a consensual relationship with the man she claims raped her at the time said rape was supposed to have occurred! The people who did this have no other motive than to punish her for being involved in video games while having a vagina! Such hate speech, and all institutions complicit in its spread, needs to be blotted from existence immediately!

Craighead 7y ago
This is a rather poor quality post. This is HN, not KIA.

heartbeats 7y ago

But they already are. The crazy screamer on the street corner causes an actual harm to you. To avoid 8chan is trivial; just don't go there. That people get radicalized going there seems like a poor argument. If I understand you correctly, the principle is the following: 1. Someone holds acceptable views. 2. They visit 8chan. 3. They now hold abhorrent views. Why should 8chan be blamed for this, or rather, what did they do wrong here? Don't you agree that people have the right to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers?

eropple 7y ago
Radicalization is not about opinions, it is about convincing the radicalized to undertake acts of violence and threats thereof for a political purpose. You get, yeah, that these are also places where these little shitheads gather and decide who to brigade (the aforementioned "oh, hmm, that lady has opinions about video games, let's try real hard to destroy her life" dreck that the various chans indulge in when they're bored), that geek each other up to the point where somebody thinks sending a SWAT team at somebody is a great idea? And that the management is shockingly hands-off about letting them do it and have been for years now?
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Swatting is quite illegal anyway - and so is plotting a 'swatting' online, by the "clear and present danger" standard. Free speech is irrelevant to this. Brigading might be a problem but both sides are doing it, so why blame only 4chan and the like while letting Twitter and Tumblr off the hook?
- Mirioron 7y ago
  >the aforementioned "oh, hmm, that lady has opinions about video games, let's try real hard to destroy her life" dreck that the various chans indulge in when they're bored What are you referring to when you say this? Because if you're referring to Gamergate then that's quite a mischaracterization. I'm not saying that bad things weren't done during it, but it wasn't about hating on women in video games. And aren't most swatting incidents unrelated to chans? Mostly it seems to have been about people getting angry at one another playing video games or related to streamers of video games. Does that make Twitch complicit?
  - fl0wenol 7y ago
    >but it wasn't about hating on women in video games. Are you saying it was about integrity in video games journalism? I wish I could express a figurative glance over the top of my reading glasses without an image macro.

makomk 7y ago

One of the more, ah, interesting things about this is that a lot of they key activists who've been pushing for this crackdown on online speech literally are the Something Awful edgelords. If I recall rightly, at least one of them is now on the NYT editoral board making sure that the proper SA-social-justice ideas are disseminated from its pages. There's a good few journalists out there who graduated from SA too.