this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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read braiding sweetgrass, lib
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I sometimes wonder what 4chan would be like today if moot actually had a spine and banned /pol/ before it turned the entire site into a recruiting ground for stormfront and other nazis.
Moot was aware of far right extremists constantly forumsliding the boards, and instead of standing up to the people literally stealing his brainchild right under his nose, he gave the bastards their own imageboard to better organise the 4chan takeover from.
Moot is the biggest cuck in internet history. He saw the nazis coming for his website and he handed it over to them for nothing. And then, when the nazi infection was complete, he sold it to a Japanese right wing scammer and extremist.
4chan was always a shithole of a website, but it used to be more of a hiding place for recluses, weirdos and outcasts than a nazi grooming forum.
I made friends there, shared in hobbies and interests and trolled the shit out of people in online games with the anons.
Now the website is a complete parody of itself.
Did 4chan move right, or did you just move left? I admit I tend to be skeptical of claims that the site used to be better. They smell of rose-colored glasses to me.
Both are obviously true. But 4chan really did just used to be edgy kids and not outright nazism. There was very little moderation so there was everything, but the really popular boards were like furries, bronies, /b/ and other such weirdos and outcasts and big_bob said. Their comment is largely correct, but even in it's less reactionary form it was still an unmoderated forum filled with edgy teenagers and bad actors and pedophiles and worst of all, gamers.
I think it has to be taken in the context of what American counter culture has historically been like (run through with chauvinist libertinism absolutely everywhere, even in spaces that broadly held at least some left wing or positive aspects) as well as the state of the left at the time (absolutely dismal, incoherent, and fragmented in a way that makes the sad state of affairs today look good by comparison).
Like when I was in highschool all the queer outcasts and theater kids were on 4chan, and when I was in college I wound up spending a lot of time on a /tg/ D&D IRC server that one of my old highschool friends invited me to which was run by a gay couple. I can only describe it as that the sort of edgy nihilism and bigotry that ran through 4chan's culture was just sort of tacitly tolerated at the time even by the targets of it, because that's just how bad things were back then and that to engage in counter culture at all meant hardening oneself to it and never letting on that it bothered you.
And then we hit the crystalizing point of gamergate/its surrounding culture war flash points, and at once the chauvinists became militantly worse because instead of just being assholes they now had a unified objective to fight to make things worse by being even more aggressively awful, and at the same time there was a reaction against that and people increasingly stopped putting up with their bullshit and started carving out spaces that were better and less toxic for counter culture.
I was also there in the early days, and yeah, it was better. The shift started somewhere around 2008 to 2010. During the Bush admin, it was a breath of fresh air to see a place that was anti war, anti evangelical, and pro gay marriage. Of course, they were also horrible edgelords trying to keep the normies out by making their site culture completely toxic.
This was very much my experience too. There was very little in actual right-wing politics, 4chan got it's initial reputation because /b/ was the ultimate edgelord place, but even their more popular threads were actually community activities, railing against war and problematic organisations (see: scientology). Pretty much every other board was just a passionate, interested group in their own things.
I mean I never personally quite vibed with 4chan, but it was entertaining and people there actually cared. I remember a spate of cool MS-Paint-Adventure type threads that got really involved and were super fun. I could absolutely understand making friends there.
It really was an internet experiment, it was maybe the first one to show that upholding absolute free speech tends to attract too many nazi outcasts from elsewhere, then nazis make it a nazi community. The early internet pre-2008, this was still a valid way to exist as a site, because there were no "main" sites to get banned from for you naziism, it was just billions of small communities (which I still yearn for).
The entire internet shifted during the Obama years. Liberal both sidesing and 'defend your right to say it' of racist attacks normalized a lot of the hard white supremacy in popular spaces that during the Bush years were largely quarantined to the real stormfront site.
Fascists are xenomorphs, liberals are Weyland-Yutani
Emotionally, I am a leaky flamethrower.
I’ve only ever known 4chan for edgy racist tripe and violent sexual imagery.
When did this mythical 4chan exist? because I’ve known about the site since ~2010
2010is about where things tipped
Same here, I was growing up around the time 4chan was blowing up, and it always had the reputation of being Nazi-adjacent. I was never a poster or lurker though, so my impression of it only comes from hearing about it.
Moot was also just a kid. 4chan was entirely unprecedented. He thought by quarantining the fascists to one board, they would stay there and not fan out to other websites or even other parts of 4chan.
Obviously he was wrong, but we know what we know now because of what happened to 4chan. I don't think there's anything he could have done at the time anyway because a lot of it was a coordinated effort by Stormfront.