8 ms·

I think you give too much agency to 4chan. It's just a imageboard - an internet forum - that happened to have some subforums related to alt-right. Maybe it had

I think you give too much agency to 4chan. It's just a imageboard - an internet forum - that happened to have some subforums related to alt-right. Maybe it had (has) a bad influence on people, but it's hundred times smaller than Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AlecSchueler 3y ago
Very little in human history has had the reach of those websites you're talking about, and on those users tend to be in their own bubbles. On 4chan, with its millions of users over the past couple of decades, attention is centered around a few boards.
- codingdave 3y ago
  I think you are underestimating the reach of TV before the internet.
  - mauvehaus 3y ago
    For better or worse, TV is paid for by advertisers. On the upside, that does put some limits on how objectionable the content can be before nobody's willing to pay for its distribution.
    - Funes- 3y ago
      On the downside, it does away with ethical and quality standards, in trying to maximize viewership while minimizing cost, which in turn tends to make the content objectionable anyway.
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      Counterpoint, the owners and showrunners of those TV channels decide what is aired and how, so a lot of TV channels have become propaganda outlets for one side or another. Most infamous in the English speaking countries is News Corp / Rupert Murdoch, who has pushed a right-wing, anti-lgbt narrative for a long time now.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      I remember TV from my childhood being just people shooting each other and screaming at each other. Advertisers didn't have any problem with that, or with monsters tearing people apart or with gangster rap.
  - snvzz 3y ago
    Producers vs Consumers.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    I just thought of television as something much more fragmented and localised compared to the billion and more poepie flowing through the same Facebook funnel. I'll grant you that some things in the past did transcend boundaries and gain global reach but those I counted amongst the referenced "few things."
- slingnow 3y ago
  Very little? Let me introduce you to: newspapers, radio, television, books.
  - AlecSchueler 2y ago
    Which newspaper had a similar subscriber number to Facebook?
doublerabbit 3y ago
> To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch. I disagree. Anonymous was an substantial movement. 4chan has long existed before the concept of facebook and to compare 4chan to the new trends of the likes such as facebook or reddit when 4chan is it's own, you can't. Reddit and Facebook have all been designed to cater to the masses; 4chan not so. To rule out that 4chan has never been influential is incorrect.
- underlipton 3y ago
  4chan was founded about 5 months before Facebook and about 2 years before reddit. 2ch and Something Awful are quite a bit older, but it's debatable how much of the cultural DNA of each transferred over.
- _3u10 3y ago
  4chan is definitely old internet, it reminds me of IRC, completely unmonetizable.
api 3y ago
It’s more likely that it was just one of the places that movement coalesced. Others include Reddit before they ban hammered a lot of that stuff, Twitter, and Telegram. As for the origin of the movement I remember saying exactly this way back in 2008 after the bank bailouts: (Paraphrasing a bit) “People don’t realize how much trust has been lost. People want pitchforks. I don’t think they care whether the far left or the far right is handing them out.” The far left did hand out a few, but they tended to sublimate all their anger into race and minority grievances. Their pitchforks didn’t have enough mass appeal, especially to the white working class killing themselves with opiates. The right handed out more classical pitchforks with more mass appeal. They went for the old timey scapegoats of immigrant and minority hate and good old fashioned antisemitism (thinly veiled). They were also the only ones who started talking about “elites.” I remember reading an actual quote on Reddit back then that stuck with me: “if we can’t destroy the financial industry from the left we’ll do it from the right.” Americans have a short memory. We’ve already forgotten the Bush administration and how it burned a century of goodwill toward our country and a trillion dollars or two in Iraq. We’ve already forgotten how banks that imploded were rescued in such a way as to give the executives leading them a bonus and a promotion for imploding them. (The blame for that goes to both Bush and Obama for doing nothing to intervene.) So now people are like “where did all this populist rage come from?” They blame crap like gamergate and 4chan when those were just small lightning rods for niche communities. The USA around the turn of that decade was a pile of oily rags waiting for a source of ignition. The alt right and Trump just saw an opportunity. They didn’t create it, nor did 4chan.
- whaleofatw2022 3y ago
  Yep, and I think that's why so many folks jumped from Bernie to Trump during/after the primaries. They couldn't be given a fair chance for peaceful change so they went for the other change option.
  - api 3y ago
    I wish I’d gone around the Internet screen shotting comments from Reddit and Twitter from 2008 until 2016 so future historians could understand. A lot of this stuff got purged. Some others I remember (paraphrasing): “I can’t throw a Molotov cocktail into the White House but I can throw a Trump.” “I hope Trump does as much damage as possible.” “When Trump said he’d do something about outsourcing I decided I’d die for this man. I don’t care what else he does. He can eat a baby on live TV.” (This was a self described former union Democrat from Michigan.) The left almost gets it. “A riot is the voice of the disenfranchised.” They just need to understand that for many, especially in 2016, Trump was a riot. They were electing him to do harm, explicitly. In some ways America’s short memory is a strength. It keeps us from getting caught up in stupid ancient conflicts like the Middle East. America tends to at least mostly move on. But it also means we walk around in this perpetual fugue state not understanding why anything is happening. If you don’t know US history from 2001 until 2008 you can’t understand what’s happened since.
FabHK 3y ago
FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later Reddit, Twitter, Instagram; and web sites such as Thought Catalog, later Jezebel, xoJane, Rookie Mag, and the Daily Dot, then everydayfeminism.com, Salon, Vox. I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social media and even mainstream media, they originated on Tumblr and 4chan, respectively. I wonder whether one could quantify/measure it somehow.
- kevindamm 3y ago
  I would posit that the proportion of "originated from 4chan" notes on knowyourmeme.com are an indicator of its outsized influence.
  - _3u10 3y ago
    4chan is the America of the internet, the only reason it has outsized influence is because ideas were allowed to incubate. Most memes and ideas went no where but some had a chance to multiply without getting stamped out by the censors.
  - sen_armstrong 3y ago
    I wouldn't bet much on KYM's provenance research. Memes spread so far so fast on the information superhighway, those that started on some Korean photography forum or Russian anime newsgroup, you'd never know if you weren't there ... or know where to look. KYM often cites 4chan because it's popular, in English, and well-archived (ironic indeed) and KYM editors will take the earliest hit from the third-party archives as provenience, when the archive itself might be younger than the meme. You can find discrediting examples in the mid-2000s thread collection the internet archive recently released ("archive ten billion"): memes appear in the chanological record years before they anywhere Google knows of. But how can you know that's the real origin? Even "Know your memes" first appears in there as a /b/ catchphrase in April 2006, but you must notice that's also when the /b/ posts in the collection begin. Edit, another example: 4chan is also known as a Mongolian basket-weaving forum, among other things: corruptions descended from the meme of referring to anime as "Chinese cartoons". An old 4chan saying, as KYM finds? No, it came from that Russian anime newsgroup, ru.anime.chainik, after its parody FAQ from 2002 was translated by users of an associated LiveJournal group and added to a since-deleted Uncyclopedia article. Q: Что такое аниме? A: Китайские порнографические мультфильмы. The full FAQ is on the author's website, which is still online, shounen.ru/anime/tech/afaq.shtml But is it entirely original to that newsgroup? Some of those terms seem to have come from FIDO...
krapp 3y ago
> To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch. As far as the alt-right goes, this is true, but they're definitely responsible for Pizzagate and QAnon. One might consider those the genesis of a "post alt-right" movement but it might also be too soon to tell.
underlipton 3y ago
No, there was a concerted effort to radicalize the site. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-turn-4chan-into-the-internets-racist-engine https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu... My serious but unsubstantiated suspicion is that this was part of a neoconservative campaign, which included the likes of GamerGate, all in the interests of defanging and commodifying observant, critically-minded, tech-savvy young people (mostly men, mostly white) who otherwise would have found themselves on the progressive end of the political spectrum (as per their class affinity). If you ask many of them, they will tell you that they were "red-pilled" after Occupy Wall Street so spooked the establishment that "wokism" was deployed to split the bottom 3 wealth quintiles and pit them against each other. My take is that the premise is correct (OWS did indeed push the elite to take class solidarity as a serious threat in a way that they hadn't previously), but that the conclusion is wrong. Rather, "red-pilling" was the intended remedy, and "meme magic" was the vector. Case-in-point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905726 and parent.
bloopernova 3y ago
Stormfront targeted 4chan because the "not your personal army" crew could be easily turned into whatever the white supremacists wanted. All you had to do was say "this will offend people" and 4chan rushed off to do exactly that, over and over. 4chan was originally just a contest to show how much something doesn't bother them, because they were still competing with each other like a clique of schoolkids, and any feelings were viewed as weakness. Also, 4chan spawned QAnon. That was absolutely "starting a movement".

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

AlecSchueler 3y ago

Very little in human history has had the reach of those websites you're talking about, and on those users tend to be in their own bubbles. On 4chan, with its millions of users over the past couple of decades, attention is centered around a few boards.

codingdave 3y ago
I think you are underestimating the reach of TV before the internet.
- mauvehaus 3y ago
  For better or worse, TV is paid for by advertisers. On the upside, that does put some limits on how objectionable the content can be before nobody's willing to pay for its distribution.
  - Funes- 3y ago
    On the downside, it does away with ethical and quality standards, in trying to maximize viewership while minimizing cost, which in turn tends to make the content objectionable anyway.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    Counterpoint, the owners and showrunners of those TV channels decide what is aired and how, so a lot of TV channels have become propaganda outlets for one side or another. Most infamous in the English speaking countries is News Corp / Rupert Murdoch, who has pushed a right-wing, anti-lgbt narrative for a long time now.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    I remember TV from my childhood being just people shooting each other and screaming at each other. Advertisers didn't have any problem with that, or with monsters tearing people apart or with gangster rap.
- snvzz 3y ago
  Producers vs Consumers.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  I just thought of television as something much more fragmented and localised compared to the billion and more poepie flowing through the same Facebook funnel. I'll grant you that some things in the past did transcend boundaries and gain global reach but those I counted amongst the referenced "few things."
slingnow 3y ago
Very little? Let me introduce you to: newspapers, radio, television, books.
- AlecSchueler 2y ago
  Which newspaper had a similar subscriber number to Facebook?

doublerabbit 3y ago

> To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch. I disagree. Anonymous was an substantial movement. 4chan has long existed before the concept of facebook and to compare 4chan to the new trends of the likes such as facebook or reddit when 4chan is it's own, you can't. Reddit and Facebook have all been designed to cater to the masses; 4chan not so. To rule out that 4chan has never been influential is incorrect.

underlipton 3y ago
4chan was founded about 5 months before Facebook and about 2 years before reddit. 2ch and Something Awful are quite a bit older, but it's debatable how much of the cultural DNA of each transferred over.
_3u10 3y ago
4chan is definitely old internet, it reminds me of IRC, completely unmonetizable.

api 3y ago

It’s more likely that it was just one of the places that movement coalesced. Others include Reddit before they ban hammered a lot of that stuff, Twitter, and Telegram. As for the origin of the movement I remember saying exactly this way back in 2008 after the bank bailouts: (Paraphrasing a bit) “People don’t realize how much trust has been lost. People want pitchforks. I don’t think they care whether the far left or the far right is handing them out.” The far left did hand out a few, but they tended to sublimate all their anger into race and minority grievances. Their pitchforks didn’t have enough mass appeal, especially to the white working class killing themselves with opiates. The right handed out more classical pitchforks with more mass appeal. They went for the old timey scapegoats of immigrant and minority hate and good old fashioned antisemitism (thinly veiled). They were also the only ones who started talking about “elites.” I remember reading an actual quote on Reddit back then that stuck with me: “if we can’t destroy the financial industry from the left we’ll do it from the right.” Americans have a short memory. We’ve already forgotten the Bush administration and how it burned a century of goodwill toward our country and a trillion dollars or two in Iraq. We’ve already forgotten how banks that imploded were rescued in such a way as to give the executives leading them a bonus and a promotion for imploding them. (The blame for that goes to both Bush and Obama for doing nothing to intervene.) So now people are like “where did all this populist rage come from?” They blame crap like gamergate and 4chan when those were just small lightning rods for niche communities. The USA around the turn of that decade was a pile of oily rags waiting for a source of ignition. The alt right and Trump just saw an opportunity. They didn’t create it, nor did 4chan.

whaleofatw2022 3y ago
Yep, and I think that's why so many folks jumped from Bernie to Trump during/after the primaries. They couldn't be given a fair chance for peaceful change so they went for the other change option.
- api 3y ago
  I wish I’d gone around the Internet screen shotting comments from Reddit and Twitter from 2008 until 2016 so future historians could understand. A lot of this stuff got purged. Some others I remember (paraphrasing): “I can’t throw a Molotov cocktail into the White House but I can throw a Trump.” “I hope Trump does as much damage as possible.” “When Trump said he’d do something about outsourcing I decided I’d die for this man. I don’t care what else he does. He can eat a baby on live TV.” (This was a self described former union Democrat from Michigan.) The left almost gets it. “A riot is the voice of the disenfranchised.” They just need to understand that for many, especially in 2016, Trump was a riot. They were electing him to do harm, explicitly. In some ways America’s short memory is a strength. It keeps us from getting caught up in stupid ancient conflicts like the Middle East. America tends to at least mostly move on. But it also means we walk around in this perpetual fugue state not understanding why anything is happening. If you don’t know US history from 2001 until 2008 you can’t understand what’s happened since.

FabHK 3y ago

FWIW, the book The Identity Trap by Yasha Mounk attributes the popularisation of what it calls the Identity Synthesis to social media such as Tumblr, then later Reddit, Twitter, Instagram; and web sites such as Thought Catalog, later Jezebel, xoJane, Rookie Mag, and the Daily Dot, then everydayfeminism.com, Salon, Vox. I think it's conceivable that, while these ideas on the left and right later entered all social media and even mainstream media, they originated on Tumblr and 4chan, respectively. I wonder whether one could quantify/measure it somehow.

kevindamm 3y ago
I would posit that the proportion of "originated from 4chan" notes on knowyourmeme.com are an indicator of its outsized influence.
- _3u10 3y ago
  4chan is the America of the internet, the only reason it has outsized influence is because ideas were allowed to incubate. Most memes and ideas went no where but some had a chance to multiply without getting stamped out by the censors.
- sen_armstrong 3y ago
  I wouldn't bet much on KYM's provenance research. Memes spread so far so fast on the information superhighway, those that started on some Korean photography forum or Russian anime newsgroup, you'd never know if you weren't there ... or know where to look. KYM often cites 4chan because it's popular, in English, and well-archived (ironic indeed) and KYM editors will take the earliest hit from the third-party archives as provenience, when the archive itself might be younger than the meme. You can find discrediting examples in the mid-2000s thread collection the internet archive recently released ("archive ten billion"): memes appear in the chanological record years before they anywhere Google knows of. But how can you know that's the real origin? Even "Know your memes" first appears in there as a /b/ catchphrase in April 2006, but you must notice that's also when the /b/ posts in the collection begin. Edit, another example: 4chan is also known as a Mongolian basket-weaving forum, among other things: corruptions descended from the meme of referring to anime as "Chinese cartoons". An old 4chan saying, as KYM finds? No, it came from that Russian anime newsgroup, ru.anime.chainik, after its parody FAQ from 2002 was translated by users of an associated LiveJournal group and added to a since-deleted Uncyclopedia article. Q: Что такое аниме? A: Китайские порнографические мультфильмы. The full FAQ is on the author's website, which is still online, shounen.ru/anime/tech/afaq.shtml But is it entirely original to that newsgroup? Some of those terms seem to have come from FIDO...

krapp 3y ago

> To say it has single handedly started a movement is a huge stretch. As far as the alt-right goes, this is true, but they're definitely responsible for Pizzagate and QAnon. One might consider those the genesis of a "post alt-right" movement but it might also be too soon to tell.

underlipton 3y ago

No, there was a concerted effort to radicalize the site. https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-turn-4chan-into-the-internets-racist-engine https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7aap8/the-man-who-helped-tu... My serious but unsubstantiated suspicion is that this was part of a neoconservative campaign, which included the likes of GamerGate, all in the interests of defanging and commodifying observant, critically-minded, tech-savvy young people (mostly men, mostly white) who otherwise would have found themselves on the progressive end of the political spectrum (as per their class affinity). If you ask many of them, they will tell you that they were "red-pilled" after Occupy Wall Street so spooked the establishment that "wokism" was deployed to split the bottom 3 wealth quintiles and pit them against each other. My take is that the premise is correct (OWS did indeed push the elite to take class solidarity as a serious threat in a way that they hadn't previously), but that the conclusion is wrong. Rather, "red-pilling" was the intended remedy, and "meme magic" was the vector. Case-in-point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39905726 and parent.

bloopernova 3y ago

Stormfront targeted 4chan because the "not your personal army" crew could be easily turned into whatever the white supremacists wanted. All you had to do was say "this will offend people" and 4chan rushed off to do exactly that, over and over. 4chan was originally just a contest to show how much something doesn't bother them, because they were still competing with each other like a clique of schoolkids, and any feelings were viewed as weakness. Also, 4chan spawned QAnon. That was absolutely "starting a movement".