Knew a guy for a while, one of those types who loves to say “most of 4chan isn’t bad, it’s only /b/ and /pol/, here look at this funny meme they made” I rolled my eyes whenever he said something like this but figured he was just in denial.
Then one day I mentioned to him that I cut contact with someone for defending drawn CSAM, explaining that I did it because it’s used to groom minors and accustom them to being sexualized, and his response was “I don’t care, it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect the kids, there should be no legal or moral barrier to what people draw”
Anyone who browses or defends 4chan is a fascist, a pedophile, or most likely both. Every interaction I’ve had with them only gave me further proof.
Still wild to me how Q came from all of this, saving the children yelled out by pedophiles.
US right-wing politics has a real 4chan vibe to it these days, it’s been weird to watch 4chan ideas and vernacular become mainstream
I believe the fundamental divide in American politics today can be boiled down to 4chan vs. reddit
4chan vs. reddit
and just like republicans vs. democrats they’re not as different as they’re made out to be
I think Redditors would be full mask-off if their usernames were anonymous like on 4chan. Not all that different, but Reddit feels more “Polite” than 4chan.
Malcolm X quote about foxes and wolves except it’s about reddit and 4chan
It originally lost steam on 4chan so they migrated to 8chan, notorious for CP lol. The owner is also living in the Philippines (is white), so I’m assuming there’s some Epstein shit there.
You should watch the q anon documentary from a couple years ago. The owner and his kid are massive creeps.
Pedophilia is when you murder babies in Satanic rituals OR when you teach kids about gender. They don’t consider CSAM to be pedophilia.
I lurked a lot on 4chan back in the day. You could browse /b/ and it was ok, more fun and quirky stuff than genuinely vile stuff.
When that changed you could maybe use the more niche boards, like /mu/ or /tg/. I used /sp/ a lot before i just stopped visiting. Now it’s just pure racism and white supremacy on all the boards.
Appropriating their memes and lingo can be cool and good. But defending 4chan is pointless and a red flag.
Yes. One of the real fascinating things about 4chan to me is that despite being almost universally reviled, it is a huge meme exporter. Wojaks, pepes, rage comics… all stuff that is or was mainstream, that started on good ol 4channel dot org.
It makes more sense in the historical context: 4chan was incoherent libertine-slanted counter-culture shit for about the first decade of its existence. Like when I was in highschool all the queer theater kids and general outcasts were avid 4chan users, and while it was still awful then it’s not like the mainstream norms of the time weren’t as bad or worse. That’s sort of what western counter-culture has been like, just a bunch of incoherent self-serving libertine shit that hated the establishment because the theocratic mainstream was getting in the way of their treats, and in general counter-culture is where new culture comes from even if it remains on the fringes itself.
The problem is incoherent self-serving libertinism has no real revolutionary or even progressive potential: where it pushes for liberation it does so because it wants to be free itself, and it is just as capable of being reactionary and chauvinist as it is anti-establishment when it inevitably comes to perceive the left as a bigger threat to its treats than the establishment. And that’s what happened with 4chan and the broader counter cultural movement it was part of: the far-right propaganda funding temporarily shifted from theocracy to astroturfed fascism and it successfully convinced a whole bunch of self-serving chauvinist treatlads that the right was no longer coming for their treats but that women and minorities were, causing a schism where everyone in the sort of vaguely-left-by-american-standards counter culture either reformed and moved left or became a babytalking anime frog nazi, with only a few weirdo grifters like v**sh trying to keep the pre-gamergate chauvinist libertine sucdem counter culture alive.
But also there’s the fact that people on 4chan were extremely terminally online and so just spread things by also posting aggressively everywhere else. It’s like how r/chapotraphouse had a massively outsized presence on because we were all just terminally online and posted everywhere.
It makes so much sense when viewed in this way. Concise, accurate, informative. A far better explanation than the tired old “People who enjoy pretending to be idiots will inevitably be crowded out by actual idiots who think they’re in good company” chestnut.
Pepe being BAD was spread on 4chan but he was around before that, I miss when he was just a fun guy and it had no associations like it does today :'( I think the fact that so much of it is exported while being reviled helps show how many people support vile things but won’t express it unless they are in supportive company.
Some people brought up 4chan during work. I said something like “yeah it’s terrible” and the girl I work with (who apparently didn’t know anything about it up to that point) asked “you used it?” I said “I used to when I was a kid.”
In hindsight, I should’ve feigned ignorance and just act surprised and disgusted when someone brings it up lol.
Careful, there’s a sizable pocket of leftists online who’ll accuse you of being a tyrannical purist for even daring to imply that drawn CSAM is fucked up.
I’m a leftist, I have to draw sexual content to pay the bills. I’ve never accepted a commission for something like that. I would rather go hungry than draw something like that. No idea how a “leftist” would ever defend such a thing.
Wut?
I welcome their hatred
Any place where someone can call me multiple slurs because i dont like the same video game as them is a bad place
4chan used to be good, then the first post was made and it was all downhill from there.
4chan, somethingawful, and early reddit. All just absolute fucking cesspits.