7 ms·

Dubs and I upvote. >Like all recovered edgelords who came of age in the early 2010s, I somewhat miss the heyday of image-boards like 4chan. They were the final

by mmsc 2y ago

Dubs and I upvote. >Like all recovered edgelords who came of age in the early 2010s, I somewhat miss the heyday of image-boards like 4chan. They were the final bastion of the wild-west early internet before the nazis ruined everything. Extremely true. I don't know anywhere like those times these days. Where do the young people/trolls hang out and push to the edge of acceptance these days? Or is the culture of "getting right to the edge of getting banned but not crossing the line for lulz" and "act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not" dead?

jakey_bakey 2y ago
The 4channification of the mainstream is quite sad - it took all the unpleasant sociopathic politics and none of the fun! > act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not This is basically how I market my blog :)
pests 2y ago
Find a lot of it on discord.
sanex 2y ago
I think a part of what happened has to do with >"act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not" Some people were joking and some weren't, or were just too dim to understand that it was a joke, and then when they all showed up in Charlottesville to march. They were mostly serious except for that one poor guy who still thought it was a meme and ran away.
- jampa 2y ago
  There was even an old 4chan joke for this: "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." -Rene Descartes
  - mmsc 2y ago
    The amusing thing being that the original source of this is hn, not 4chan [1]. deserves a spot on https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights imo. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082
  - stavros 2y ago
    My god, DarkShikari... I haven't heard that name in a decade.
hooverd 2y ago
Eventually, the ironic becomes unironic. If you're pretending to be an idiot, eventually you'll find yourself surrounded by actual idiots. Or bigots.
gbalduzzi 2y ago
Instagram reels. There is a ton of content with dark jokes, black humor, very provocative content and even "nazi" memes and people send it to each other to laugh about it. Those reels usually have very few likes / comments but A TON of sends. I personally am on multiple group chats where we only send each other those kind of memes. The thing is, instagram being a huge echo chamber. Before you have no idea those exists, and once you are in you see a ton of those
- chatmasta 2y ago
  The echo chamber on Instagram is deep. Even when there are a ton of comments, they’re sorted beginning with the most “relevant” (i.e. worldview affirming). So if you’re viewing a controversial video, you’ll see comments echoing your own beliefs, and others will see the opposite. You’ll both move onto the next video thinking “wow, everyone agrees with me!” I deleted instagram last year and haven’t reinstalled it. Those reels are so addicting. I’m glad I never installed TikTok because I imagine it’s just as bad. I still suffer from YouTube Shorts but at least the mobile web UI is janky enough to eventually push me out of its trance.
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    TikTok has the same issue. Two people can see the same video, come to opposite conclusions, and only see comments that agree with them. TikTok is maybe the last bad echo chamber of the big short video platforms: stitches encourage some sort of debate and expose you to snippets of opposing view points, and the algorithm gives you at least a chance of finding new types of content you also like. But it's only the least bad, it's still very bad. Especial once you factor in your own confirmation bias and the comment algorithm
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Instagram is a special level of degeneracy. That is an app made for the masses. I never used tik tok, but youtube shorts gives me actual quality content while instagram feels like its gunning for a mix of reality TV, post 2005 history channel, and animal brain fondling. Although I will admit that Instagram has their advertising insanely dialed in. The content is gross junk food but the ads I have actually clicked before.
ivan888 2y ago
> Dubs Not sure if anyone else noticed the item id of this comment does indeed end in 88?
- jakey_bakey 2y ago
  Dubz get!!!
- dpedu 2y ago
  Particularly ironic since it mentions nazis...
probably_wrong 2y ago
I want to argue that there are some rose-tinted glasses at play. /b/ (which is what most people think of when they think about 4chan) has been considered "no longer good" since at least 2006 [1], probably earlier. And even by that time they were already organizing raids and causing real harm to communities, both online and offline. I'm not sure that it's 4chan the one who has changed but rather that the world got a lot more connected [2]. A 2010 edgelord may say "pool's closed" while a 2025 edgelord may say "it was a Roman salute", but the spirit behind is probably the same. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:4chan/Archive_4#Death_of_/b/_due_to_fame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:4chan/Archive_4#Death_of_... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  All of this 100%. And on a more personal level, while I had a grand old time as a 3edgy5me t(w)eenage boy on the early, "free" internet, that time has left me with numerous mental scars I carry with me every day. - Thanks to shock sites, for showing me things a 13 year old kid really should not be seeing, and I wish I meant something as banal as pornography. I'm still occasionally haunted by images I've seen to such a degree where I have to take short breaks at work to compose myself. - Thanks to political discussion boards, which turned important, real life issues and global problems that have genuine life or death stakes for people who weren't me into an alternative to sports that also let me pretend I was in any way intellectually superior to my peers for simply being willing and able to regurgitate conservative political propaganda that I barely comprehended. - Thanks to the entire thing, for helping me nurture a shut-in mentality, that other people were too much work to be worth it, that my peers were dumb and not worth my time, that they wouldn't understand me at all and so involving myself in school was completely pointless, ensuring I would have no social life or skills whatsoever when I graduated high school and later college. Instead you gave me an entire other world of similarly uninformed, loud assholes to live in that would completely dissolve by the year 2009, leaving me 20 years old with no idea who the fuck I was, or what I believed in, ripe for recruitment into reactionary politics that would make me an insufferable douchebag for the next 10 years or so until I managed to pull my head out of my ass.
Goronmon 2y ago
Community size and reach plays a big part in this. Aside from the the whole "Am I trolling as a racist or am I a racist trolling?" issue, communities get away with a lot more when they are smaller, more insular and more hidden from the public. Once the community starts to bleed out beyond the immediate site, you start to run into issues. Not just because the jokes and content are spreading, but the attitudes behind those jokes. And those attitudes (even if they make up just a portion of the users) have a tendency to not be great. I think a perfect example of this would be what happened on Reddit with the /r/antiwork subreddit. As soon as the community got too large and started spilling into other areas of the site, the cracks started to show. Culminating with the interview by one of the mods (?) on Fox News I believe. All of a sudden a chunk of the users are questioning "Wait, this is who I'm siding with?" and then the only people left are the people who aren't bothered.
- mmsc 2y ago
  Well said, and I think it extends to many communities which are founded on negativity of some sort: eventually people move on, except for those so-filled with negativity, it is all they have.
bbor 2y ago
Or is the culture of "getting right to the edge of getting banned but not crossing the line for lulz" and "act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not" dead? Yup, among the sane! If there are any bastions left, we’re working on eradicating them. Honestly kinda baffled someone could type this sentence with the implication that this is a good thing…
- mmsc 2y ago
  >Yup, among the sane! If there are any bastions left, we’re working on eradicating them The communities of trolls trolling trolls have been replaced by larger communities of nazis training nazis to attack and terrorize. Thank you for eradicating the former, paving way for the latter.
  - bbor 2y ago
    …I really don’t think Nazis are taking over because of a lack of bad faith Internet discussion.
square_usual 2y ago
> Where do the young people/trolls hang out and push to the edge of acceptance these days? Discord. It's all underground. The public internet is hostile to it, everyone has had to built their own spaces.
mise_en_place 2y ago
They're still around, they just happen to be on X/Telegram. Roughly speaking they're in two camps: Groypers and BAP-adjacent Yarvinites. I suppose both are "Nazi" in the sense they are anti-intellectual and anti-egalitarian. Some are paid. Some do it for free. I don't see much of an equivalent on the left, maybe extreme far left Zizarian types or femcel/misandrists.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Terr_ 2y ago
There's a very good video series that deconstructs "The Alt-Right playbook", with respect to how they exist between other communities, recruit new members, rhetorical argument, etc. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLJA_jUddX...
rosstex 2y ago
No one noticed that you did, in fact, get dubs

by mmsc 2y ago

jakey_bakey 2y ago

The 4channification of the mainstream is quite sad - it took all the unpleasant sociopathic politics and none of the fun! > act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not This is basically how I market my blog :)

pests 2y ago

Find a lot of it on discord.

sanex 2y ago

I think a part of what happened has to do with >"act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not" Some people were joking and some weren't, or were just too dim to understand that it was a joke, and then when they all showed up in Charlottesville to march. They were mostly serious except for that one poor guy who still thought it was a meme and ran away.

jampa 2y ago
There was even an old 4chan joke for this: "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." -Rene Descartes
- mmsc 2y ago
  The amusing thing being that the original source of this is hn, not 4chan [1]. deserves a spot on https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights imo. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082
- stavros 2y ago
  My god, DarkShikari... I haven't heard that name in a decade.

hooverd 2y ago

Eventually, the ironic becomes unironic. If you're pretending to be an idiot, eventually you'll find yourself surrounded by actual idiots. Or bigots.

gbalduzzi 2y ago

Instagram reels. There is a ton of content with dark jokes, black humor, very provocative content and even "nazi" memes and people send it to each other to laugh about it. Those reels usually have very few likes / comments but A TON of sends. I personally am on multiple group chats where we only send each other those kind of memes. The thing is, instagram being a huge echo chamber. Before you have no idea those exists, and once you are in you see a ton of those

chatmasta 2y ago
The echo chamber on Instagram is deep. Even when there are a ton of comments, they’re sorted beginning with the most “relevant” (i.e. worldview affirming). So if you’re viewing a controversial video, you’ll see comments echoing your own beliefs, and others will see the opposite. You’ll both move onto the next video thinking “wow, everyone agrees with me!” I deleted instagram last year and haven’t reinstalled it. Those reels are so addicting. I’m glad I never installed TikTok because I imagine it’s just as bad. I still suffer from YouTube Shorts but at least the mobile web UI is janky enough to eventually push me out of its trance.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  TikTok has the same issue. Two people can see the same video, come to opposite conclusions, and only see comments that agree with them. TikTok is maybe the last bad echo chamber of the big short video platforms: stitches encourage some sort of debate and expose you to snippets of opposing view points, and the algorithm gives you at least a chance of finding new types of content you also like. But it's only the least bad, it's still very bad. Especial once you factor in your own confirmation bias and the comment algorithm
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Instagram is a special level of degeneracy. That is an app made for the masses. I never used tik tok, but youtube shorts gives me actual quality content while instagram feels like its gunning for a mix of reality TV, post 2005 history channel, and animal brain fondling. Although I will admit that Instagram has their advertising insanely dialed in. The content is gross junk food but the ads I have actually clicked before.

ivan888 2y ago

> Dubs Not sure if anyone else noticed the item id of this comment does indeed end in 88?

jakey_bakey 2y ago
Dubz get!!!
dpedu 2y ago
Particularly ironic since it mentions nazis...

probably_wrong 2y ago

I want to argue that there are some rose-tinted glasses at play. /b/ (which is what most people think of when they think about 4chan) has been considered "no longer good" since at least 2006 [1], probably earlier. And even by that time they were already organizing raids and causing real harm to communities, both online and offline. I'm not sure that it's 4chan the one who has changed but rather that the world got a lot more connected [2]. A 2010 edgelord may say "pool's closed" while a 2025 edgelord may say "it was a Roman salute", but the spirit behind is probably the same. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:4chan/Archive_4#Death_of_/b/_due_to_fame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:4chan/Archive_4#Death_of_... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
All of this 100%. And on a more personal level, while I had a grand old time as a 3edgy5me t(w)eenage boy on the early, "free" internet, that time has left me with numerous mental scars I carry with me every day. - Thanks to shock sites, for showing me things a 13 year old kid really should not be seeing, and I wish I meant something as banal as pornography. I'm still occasionally haunted by images I've seen to such a degree where I have to take short breaks at work to compose myself. - Thanks to political discussion boards, which turned important, real life issues and global problems that have genuine life or death stakes for people who weren't me into an alternative to sports that also let me pretend I was in any way intellectually superior to my peers for simply being willing and able to regurgitate conservative political propaganda that I barely comprehended. - Thanks to the entire thing, for helping me nurture a shut-in mentality, that other people were too much work to be worth it, that my peers were dumb and not worth my time, that they wouldn't understand me at all and so involving myself in school was completely pointless, ensuring I would have no social life or skills whatsoever when I graduated high school and later college. Instead you gave me an entire other world of similarly uninformed, loud assholes to live in that would completely dissolve by the year 2009, leaving me 20 years old with no idea who the fuck I was, or what I believed in, ripe for recruitment into reactionary politics that would make me an insufferable douchebag for the next 10 years or so until I managed to pull my head out of my ass.

Goronmon 2y ago

Community size and reach plays a big part in this. Aside from the the whole "Am I trolling as a racist or am I a racist trolling?" issue, communities get away with a lot more when they are smaller, more insular and more hidden from the public. Once the community starts to bleed out beyond the immediate site, you start to run into issues. Not just because the jokes and content are spreading, but the attitudes behind those jokes. And those attitudes (even if they make up just a portion of the users) have a tendency to not be great. I think a perfect example of this would be what happened on Reddit with the /r/antiwork subreddit. As soon as the community got too large and started spilling into other areas of the site, the cracks started to show. Culminating with the interview by one of the mods (?) on Fox News I believe. All of a sudden a chunk of the users are questioning "Wait, this is who I'm siding with?" and then the only people left are the people who aren't bothered.

mmsc 2y ago
Well said, and I think it extends to many communities which are founded on negativity of some sort: eventually people move on, except for those so-filled with negativity, it is all they have.

bbor 2y ago

Or is the culture of "getting right to the edge of getting banned but not crossing the line for lulz" and "act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not" dead? Yup, among the sane! If there are any bastions left, we’re working on eradicating them. Honestly kinda baffled someone could type this sentence with the implication that this is a good thing…

mmsc 2y ago
>Yup, among the sane! If there are any bastions left, we’re working on eradicating them The communities of trolls trolling trolls have been replaced by larger communities of nazis training nazis to attack and terrorize. Thank you for eradicating the former, paving way for the latter.
- bbor 2y ago
  …I really don’t think Nazis are taking over because of a lack of bad faith Internet discussion.

square_usual 2y ago

> Where do the young people/trolls hang out and push to the edge of acceptance these days? Discord. It's all underground. The public internet is hostile to it, everyone has had to built their own spaces.

mise_en_place 2y ago

They're still around, they just happen to be on X/Telegram. Roughly speaking they're in two camps: Groypers and BAP-adjacent Yarvinites. I suppose both are "Nazi" in the sense they are anti-intellectual and anti-egalitarian. Some are paid. Some do it for free. I don't see much of an equivalent on the left, maybe extreme far left Zizarian types or femcel/misandrists.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Terr_ 2y ago

There's a very good video series that deconstructs "The Alt-Right playbook", with respect to how they exist between other communities, recruit new members, rhetorical argument, etc. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLJA_jUddX...

rosstex 2y ago

No one noticed that you did, in fact, get dubs