17 ms·

I've spent a fair amount of time on 4chan/pol/ for over a decade and my opinion is moot is a decent guy who sold it after he tried to reign in GamerGate and was

I've spent a fair amount of time on 4chan/pol/ for over a decade and my opinion is moot is a decent guy who sold it after he tried to reign in GamerGate and was loudly criticized on the site for it. I don't think Google would have hired him if it weren't for that redeeming quality. I'm fascinated by 4chan because it is a kind of underground United Nations. It's anonymous so people around the world can express themselves - even in a way I might find horrifying - and I can get an idea of concerns people have, though they might be concerns left unsaid im polite society. It's anonymous but your national flag is automatically assigned, and if you hide this or use a "meme flag' like a pirate flag, you will be criticized and ignored as a likely troll, trying a "false flag" operation. 4chan/pol/ is interesting, I don't know about the other boards since I don't visit them.

at_a_remove 6y ago
I have been on 4chan since at least '05, according to my files. The way people write about it is just ... such a Rorschach blot. Just as an example, that "redeeming" word you used, I would have said "damning." I watched the spin machine rev up like a centrifuge before that really hit the press, I read the ZoePost early on and thought Depression Quest was just awful before I knew word one about who wrote it. There's so many boards, each with its own culture, but people get out of it whatever bugbear they desire.
- watwut 6y ago
  Depression quest being good or not, being only for some kind of person or all is completely irrelevant. And should be irrelevant to anything that happened after. Even if it would be the worst game in the world. Cause the really normal response to and small game you don't like is to not play it and maybe write a bad review. Not what happened.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    Correct, but also correct that afterward, you could not critique the game at all without being "a literal Nazi." The journos (as shown in their private mailing list) closed ranks amazingly quickly. I watched perfectly reasonable critiques get removed from comment sections before the comment sections were inevitably shut down "to promote better discourse." As usual, it isn't the crime, it's the coverup that gets you, and GamerGate was a great example of that.
    - watwut 6y ago
      There is literally no wonder they "closed ranks" given crap that was going on. And I know, because I personally seen that crap. The level of asshollery going on in general absolutely makes understandable that someone would go trigger happy. And no, the whole issue was not about quality of single indie twine game. That is just nonsense.
      - PicassoCTs 6y ago
        It was a attempt by obviously outsiders to establish cultural dominance in a sphere, where they were neither welcome nor wanted. Call it SJW-Colonialism and it was repelled by the natives. To go to battle to tell people what they should accept as their escapism, from up high, was a new low.
superflit 6y ago
Welcome to /pol/ you will never leave.
- okareaman 6y ago
  It's more interesting now for a couple of reasons. The board was raided by "social justice warriors" during GamerGate and many stayed to keep arguing. Another reason is 4chan/pol/ is tamer that it used to be. The worst kind of uninteresting stuff moved to 8chan after GamerGate.
  - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    I suspect some also go siphoned off when the larp that was Q migrated from 4chan to 8chan.
bruiseralmighty 6y ago
Started as a /b/tard circa '08 and now read mostly /pol/ and /lit/ because their threads most often follow an argument to its completion. This makes for good reading IMO. Still go back to /b/ occasionally although the flavor of that board has shifted to a more twitter-like direction that I do not favor. It remains one of the few places online where I can read shitposts with actual artistic merit. Some Facebook groups are only just now maturing to the stage where good satire exists. I have a theory that forums mature like humans going from childhood name-calling to adult dialectics. But then again /b/ seems to be regressing so maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Wait, have you ever had an argument go to completion on /pol/? I almost never have. On /lit/, maybe, but on /pol/ either you get no actual engagement, all the serious replies are drowned by spam and the thread necros, or one of the argumentators when called out simply stops replying or switches to shitposting. You can sometimes have a good argument to completion, but it's very rare. Unless the argument is something the 4chan hive finds uncontroversial or is empathetic to.
bumblelad 6y ago
>I'm fascinated by 4chan because it is a kind of underground United Nations. Always fascinating how they refer to themselves. You have n-words. Then potato n-words for the irish (and lithuatians) Pasta n-words for italians Bongs for the british Leafs for canadians Burgers and Amerimutts Toothpaste for the netherlands Gypsy for hungarians and romanians (who are at a perpetual shitposting war against each other) Hohols for the ukranians Finngolians The usual suspects for anyone of any asian country, extra special hate towards the chinese and Xi's internet army. and on and on No matter what nation of the world you are from, they will find an insult for you. It's endearing in a way really. Oh and also there's someone shitposting from a research facility in Antarctica.
- solosoyokaze 6y ago
  > You have n-words That you have to blank that out and none of the others, should tell you everything you need to know about how equal or "endearing" this is. Bongs, Leafs, Burgers... This is all white supremacy no matter how someone tries to reframe it.
  - esyir 6y ago
    They also have americunts and amerifats if that makes you feel any better.
    - solosoyokaze 6y ago
      Still proves my point. You don’t have to censor that.
      - esyir 6y ago
        To their credit, they don't exactly censor anything. The entire voldemorting of the word is one of the more inane things about PC culture. That PC culture cares primarily about black targeted insults doesn't really say much about the inherent "badness" of the word.
- pgt 6y ago
tqi 6y ago
> and I can get an idea of concerns people have, though they might be concerns left unsaid im polite society. That's an interesting point. How do you tell if something is a real concern that is left unsaid vs just a fake concern? Or the difference between a concern that is quite prevalent vs a concern that is just being astroturfed?
- lobstrosity420 6y ago
  You can't, really. But no internet forum is immune to astroturfing and lying. Be it Hacker News or Reddit or 4chan. Just use your best judgment and don't take any of it too seriously.
hourislate 6y ago
I have found I can spend hours on 4chins reading some of the most interesting stuff on the Internet. It takes some work and time but there is gold there. There are some scary smart/genius anons posting.
- okareaman 6y ago
  This too. There are some really smart people arguing positions that I never see argued in the mainstream press. I have much better understanding of pro-gun people now than I used to. I still don't agree with them, but I am closer to understanding.
  - xtracto 6y ago
    That's the reason I frequent r/ccw . Although I'm not from the US, I find interest in understanding the CCW culture; Their reasoning and thoughts. I've learned quite a lot from there through the years.
- causality0 6y ago
  Indeed. /pol/'s main value is entertainment at the sheer level of batshit insanity but the number of times they've either been startlingly prescient or else had serious insider knowledge is significant. I've seen things there that took days to hit CNN. For example, claims about Peter Bright's pedophilic exploits hit /pol/ years ahead of his arrest.
  - dls2016 6y ago
    This really gets to the core of my love/hate relationship with the "weird" internet. I was an Ars-poster ~20 years ago and hadn't heard any of those rumors. Never ventured into 4chan for more than 5 minutes at a time. But I did spend a lot of time in the Gawker comment section and reading things like the Crazy Days and Nights blog. It definitely gives you a different perspective on journalism. There are so many stories which exist in a different plane, completely known by mainstream journalists but unreported for decades. It's insane. Always reminds me of the classic 1978 Johnny Rotten interview BBC interview where he calls out Jimmy Savile. (Video features a gross Piers Morgan pretending like he never heard about Savile.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OzI9GYag0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OzI9GYag0 We don't need the white supremacy, but we as a society do need the crass asshole who's not afraid to knock down the elites by a peg or two. (And the John Stewart "jesters" of the world do not count.)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pcbro141 6y ago
We're talking about this site? (NSFW): https://boards.4chan.org/pol https://boards.4chan.org/pol Looks more like an international white supremacist convention than United Nations to me. And I'm not saying that just because they love using the n-word so much, but that is one of the reasons. Most posts on there don't seem to be from a diverse audience. They mostly seem to be from the perspective of a young racist white male audience, which is a very small percentage of the world population. It's very obvious 4chan pol is disproportionately young white supremacist males with all the n-word, misogynist, anti-Jew obsession, white nationalism obsession that dominates the discussions. I guarantee you the discussion/perspective there is overwhelmingly dominated by young white males with very few female perspectives (50+% of the population) and non-White perspectives (majority of the population).
- urthebiased1 6y ago
  You know there's plenty of antisemitism around the world, especially in places like Iran, which officially denies the Holocaust, that isn't coming from a "white supremacist" place, especially not in the context of American white supremacy. Considering that we know for a fact that you don't know the ages, genders, nationality, or races of the people with these beliefs, and can only see their beliefs posted anonymously on 4chan, and then you think you have enough information to extrapolate that these people must be white, male, and young, says a lot more about YOUR prejudices than the people on 4chan, quite frankly. You see hate and just assume the hateful are the gender, race, and age, that you perceive to be the enemy.
  - pcbro141 6y ago
    White males make up a disproportionate amount of white nationalists compared to the total population (obviously...?), and white nationalism is disproportionately represented on that board. Thus I suspect that white males make up a disproportionate amount of posters on /pol/. I'm sure there are other races posting racist things there as well, but I said disproportionately young white males tend to post white nationalist talking points, which I stand by and this shouldn't offend anyone. I am in no way implying most white males are white supremacists. I'm saying most white supremacists are white males which is an uncontroversial obvious statement that I stand by. You cannot convince me that most white nationalists are non-white, that's a silly deflection.
pcbro141 6y ago
In order list of threads from browsing /pol/ for people who want to know how 'diverse' it is without visiting: - Anti-vax - Anti-gay parents - Goose - Ben Shapiro praise thread with a dash of anti-semitism and a whole lot of "i hope all ni**rs die" - Praising George Floyd mural vandalism - Anti-transgender - Praising white nationalism/white ethnostate - Praising 'national rape day' - Anti-Islam - Anti-race mixing - Illuminati - Celebrating police shooting blacks - British royals news - Anti-mask, anti-Biden - Silver - Anti-liberal white women as betrayers of the white race Keep in mind I just am reading the threads in order. This is not diverse at all. Maybe 'diverse' in the sense that these white supremacists are posting from across North America and Europe. This is almost all far right white supremacist and misogynist talking points (strong overlap between the 2), almost surely disproportionately posted by young white men.
- andyxor 6y ago
  /pol is awesome what are you talking about it has nothing to do with race, calling George Floyd an overdosed junkie is just stating the facts.
  - the_benno 6y ago
    Cops aren't allowed to murder people on sight -- "junkie" or otherwise. Never understood why people seem to think this is a compelling argument.
    - jrsj 6y ago
      There is an argument being made by many on the right that the overdose was his actual cause of death because he spoke of not being able to breath etc before he was restrained & had a large amount of fentanyl in his system. That being said, the initial autopsy said this was only one factor and most people with this view are misreading that autopsy, which still stated the primary cause of death was compression of the neck.
      - illiilliiililil 6y ago
JohnBooty 6y ago
I've spent a fair amount of time on 4chan/pol/ for over a decade and my opinion is moot is a decent guy who sold it after he tried to reign in GamerGate and was loudly criticized on the site for it. I don't think Google would have hired him if it weren't for that redeeming quality. This is my personal impression of moot as well. Some private pictures were taken from a user's account on my old site, and published to 4chan circa 2007. Chris was very sympathetic and was eager to help take the pics down and/or find the culprit. Even though parts of 4ch turned into an absolute cesspool, that is not who moot is. He simply created an anonymous free-speech platform.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
4chan is obviously not repræsentative for the public at large, no forum is, and that different subboards have very different overall views there highlights this. Most of the other boards hate /pol/ by the way and “Go back to /pol/.” is commonly heard elsewhere, which shows the differing views.

at_a_remove 6y ago

I have been on 4chan since at least '05, according to my files. The way people write about it is just ... such a Rorschach blot. Just as an example, that "redeeming" word you used, I would have said "damning." I watched the spin machine rev up like a centrifuge before that really hit the press, I read the ZoePost early on and thought Depression Quest was just awful before I knew word one about who wrote it. There's so many boards, each with its own culture, but people get out of it whatever bugbear they desire.

watwut 6y ago
Depression quest being good or not, being only for some kind of person or all is completely irrelevant. And should be irrelevant to anything that happened after. Even if it would be the worst game in the world. Cause the really normal response to and small game you don't like is to not play it and maybe write a bad review. Not what happened.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  Correct, but also correct that afterward, you could not critique the game at all without being "a literal Nazi." The journos (as shown in their private mailing list) closed ranks amazingly quickly. I watched perfectly reasonable critiques get removed from comment sections before the comment sections were inevitably shut down "to promote better discourse." As usual, it isn't the crime, it's the coverup that gets you, and GamerGate was a great example of that.
  - watwut 6y ago
    There is literally no wonder they "closed ranks" given crap that was going on. And I know, because I personally seen that crap. The level of asshollery going on in general absolutely makes understandable that someone would go trigger happy. And no, the whole issue was not about quality of single indie twine game. That is just nonsense.
    - PicassoCTs 6y ago
      It was a attempt by obviously outsiders to establish cultural dominance in a sphere, where they were neither welcome nor wanted. Call it SJW-Colonialism and it was repelled by the natives. To go to battle to tell people what they should accept as their escapism, from up high, was a new low.

superflit 6y ago

Welcome to /pol/ you will never leave.

okareaman 6y ago
It's more interesting now for a couple of reasons. The board was raided by "social justice warriors" during GamerGate and many stayed to keep arguing. Another reason is 4chan/pol/ is tamer that it used to be. The worst kind of uninteresting stuff moved to 8chan after GamerGate.
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  I suspect some also go siphoned off when the larp that was Q migrated from 4chan to 8chan.

bruiseralmighty 6y ago

Started as a /b/tard circa '08 and now read mostly /pol/ and /lit/ because their threads most often follow an argument to its completion. This makes for good reading IMO. Still go back to /b/ occasionally although the flavor of that board has shifted to a more twitter-like direction that I do not favor. It remains one of the few places online where I can read shitposts with actual artistic merit. Some Facebook groups are only just now maturing to the stage where good satire exists. I have a theory that forums mature like humans going from childhood name-calling to adult dialectics. But then again /b/ seems to be regressing so maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about.

sudosysgen 6y ago
Wait, have you ever had an argument go to completion on /pol/? I almost never have. On /lit/, maybe, but on /pol/ either you get no actual engagement, all the serious replies are drowned by spam and the thread necros, or one of the argumentators when called out simply stops replying or switches to shitposting. You can sometimes have a good argument to completion, but it's very rare. Unless the argument is something the 4chan hive finds uncontroversial or is empathetic to.

bumblelad 6y ago

>I'm fascinated by 4chan because it is a kind of underground United Nations. Always fascinating how they refer to themselves. You have n-words. Then potato n-words for the irish (and lithuatians) Pasta n-words for italians Bongs for the british Leafs for canadians Burgers and Amerimutts Toothpaste for the netherlands Gypsy for hungarians and romanians (who are at a perpetual shitposting war against each other) Hohols for the ukranians Finngolians The usual suspects for anyone of any asian country, extra special hate towards the chinese and Xi's internet army. and on and on No matter what nation of the world you are from, they will find an insult for you. It's endearing in a way really. Oh and also there's someone shitposting from a research facility in Antarctica.

solosoyokaze 6y ago
> You have n-words That you have to blank that out and none of the others, should tell you everything you need to know about how equal or "endearing" this is. Bongs, Leafs, Burgers... This is all white supremacy no matter how someone tries to reframe it.
- esyir 6y ago
  They also have americunts and amerifats if that makes you feel any better.
  - solosoyokaze 6y ago
    Still proves my point. You don’t have to censor that.
    - esyir 6y ago
      To their credit, they don't exactly censor anything. The entire voldemorting of the word is one of the more inane things about PC culture. That PC culture cares primarily about black targeted insults doesn't really say much about the inherent "badness" of the word.
pgt 6y ago

tqi 6y ago

> and I can get an idea of concerns people have, though they might be concerns left unsaid im polite society. That's an interesting point. How do you tell if something is a real concern that is left unsaid vs just a fake concern? Or the difference between a concern that is quite prevalent vs a concern that is just being astroturfed?

lobstrosity420 6y ago
You can't, really. But no internet forum is immune to astroturfing and lying. Be it Hacker News or Reddit or 4chan. Just use your best judgment and don't take any of it too seriously.

hourislate 6y ago

I have found I can spend hours on 4chins reading some of the most interesting stuff on the Internet. It takes some work and time but there is gold there. There are some scary smart/genius anons posting.

okareaman 6y ago
This too. There are some really smart people arguing positions that I never see argued in the mainstream press. I have much better understanding of pro-gun people now than I used to. I still don't agree with them, but I am closer to understanding.
- xtracto 6y ago
  That's the reason I frequent r/ccw . Although I'm not from the US, I find interest in understanding the CCW culture; Their reasoning and thoughts. I've learned quite a lot from there through the years.
causality0 6y ago
Indeed. /pol/'s main value is entertainment at the sheer level of batshit insanity but the number of times they've either been startlingly prescient or else had serious insider knowledge is significant. I've seen things there that took days to hit CNN. For example, claims about Peter Bright's pedophilic exploits hit /pol/ years ahead of his arrest.
- dls2016 6y ago
  This really gets to the core of my love/hate relationship with the "weird" internet. I was an Ars-poster ~20 years ago and hadn't heard any of those rumors. Never ventured into 4chan for more than 5 minutes at a time. But I did spend a lot of time in the Gawker comment section and reading things like the Crazy Days and Nights blog. It definitely gives you a different perspective on journalism. There are so many stories which exist in a different plane, completely known by mainstream journalists but unreported for decades. It's insane. Always reminds me of the classic 1978 Johnny Rotten interview BBC interview where he calls out Jimmy Savile. (Video features a gross Piers Morgan pretending like he never heard about Savile.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OzI9GYag0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OzI9GYag0 We don't need the white supremacy, but we as a society do need the crass asshole who's not afraid to knock down the elites by a peg or two. (And the John Stewart "jesters" of the world do not count.)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pcbro141 6y ago

We're talking about this site? (NSFW): https://boards.4chan.org/pol https://boards.4chan.org/pol Looks more like an international white supremacist convention than United Nations to me. And I'm not saying that just because they love using the n-word so much, but that is one of the reasons. Most posts on there don't seem to be from a diverse audience. They mostly seem to be from the perspective of a young racist white male audience, which is a very small percentage of the world population. It's very obvious 4chan pol is disproportionately young white supremacist males with all the n-word, misogynist, anti-Jew obsession, white nationalism obsession that dominates the discussions. I guarantee you the discussion/perspective there is overwhelmingly dominated by young white males with very few female perspectives (50+% of the population) and non-White perspectives (majority of the population).

urthebiased1 6y ago
You know there's plenty of antisemitism around the world, especially in places like Iran, which officially denies the Holocaust, that isn't coming from a "white supremacist" place, especially not in the context of American white supremacy. Considering that we know for a fact that you don't know the ages, genders, nationality, or races of the people with these beliefs, and can only see their beliefs posted anonymously on 4chan, and then you think you have enough information to extrapolate that these people must be white, male, and young, says a lot more about YOUR prejudices than the people on 4chan, quite frankly. You see hate and just assume the hateful are the gender, race, and age, that you perceive to be the enemy.
- pcbro141 6y ago
  White males make up a disproportionate amount of white nationalists compared to the total population (obviously...?), and white nationalism is disproportionately represented on that board. Thus I suspect that white males make up a disproportionate amount of posters on /pol/. I'm sure there are other races posting racist things there as well, but I said disproportionately young white males tend to post white nationalist talking points, which I stand by and this shouldn't offend anyone. I am in no way implying most white males are white supremacists. I'm saying most white supremacists are white males which is an uncontroversial obvious statement that I stand by. You cannot convince me that most white nationalists are non-white, that's a silly deflection.

pcbro141 6y ago

In order list of threads from browsing /pol/ for people who want to know how 'diverse' it is without visiting: - Anti-vax - Anti-gay parents - Goose - Ben Shapiro praise thread with a dash of anti-semitism and a whole lot of "i hope all ni**rs die" - Praising George Floyd mural vandalism - Anti-transgender - Praising white nationalism/white ethnostate - Praising 'national rape day' - Anti-Islam - Anti-race mixing - Illuminati - Celebrating police shooting blacks - British royals news - Anti-mask, anti-Biden - Silver - Anti-liberal white women as betrayers of the white race Keep in mind I just am reading the threads in order. This is not diverse at all. Maybe 'diverse' in the sense that these white supremacists are posting from across North America and Europe. This is almost all far right white supremacist and misogynist talking points (strong overlap between the 2), almost surely disproportionately posted by young white men.

andyxor 6y ago
/pol is awesome what are you talking about it has nothing to do with race, calling George Floyd an overdosed junkie is just stating the facts.
- the_benno 6y ago
  Cops aren't allowed to murder people on sight -- "junkie" or otherwise. Never understood why people seem to think this is a compelling argument.
  - jrsj 6y ago
    There is an argument being made by many on the right that the overdose was his actual cause of death because he spoke of not being able to breath etc before he was restrained & had a large amount of fentanyl in his system. That being said, the initial autopsy said this was only one factor and most people with this view are misreading that autopsy, which still stated the primary cause of death was compression of the neck.
    - illiilliiililil 6y ago

JohnBooty 6y ago

I've spent a fair amount of time on 4chan/pol/ for over a decade and my opinion is moot is a decent guy who sold it after he tried to reign in GamerGate and was loudly criticized on the site for it. I don't think Google would have hired him if it weren't for that redeeming quality. This is my personal impression of moot as well. Some private pictures were taken from a user's account on my old site, and published to 4chan circa 2007. Chris was very sympathetic and was eager to help take the pics down and/or find the culprit. Even though parts of 4ch turned into an absolute cesspool, that is not who moot is. He simply created an anonymous free-speech platform.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

4chan is obviously not repræsentative for the public at large, no forum is, and that different subboards have very different overall views there highlights this. Most of the other boards hate /pol/ by the way and “Go back to /pol/.” is commonly heard elsewhere, which shows the differing views.