Yeah. I’m not sure if it’s as common now as it used to be, but there was a time when most of the racism/sexism/homophobia was legitimately ironic and for shock value, and generally 4channers were a lot nicer under the surface.
My experience having used 4chan from around 2012~2016ish was that you could kinda tell when someone was being legitimately bigoted and when they were doing it “for the lulz” or because slurs-as-generic-insults was normalized. Typically the bigots would use slurs as an insult that was focused on whatever community the slur typically referred to. The “”“normal”“” 4channers would just use them generically and would push obvious bigots towards /pol/ (literally called “politically incorrect”; it is/was the containment board for assholes).
The one exception is in green texts, where slurs would sometimes get used to refer to someone’s race, religion, gender and/or sexuality; however, the “good” greentext stories would typically reverse it on the writer, making the writer look like a fool while the person they’re denigrating looks good in comparison.
For the most part, 4chan users were actually kinda cool and could be really kind despite the crusty exterior. There were several times where a thread would take off in which they made it a goal to collectively donate $X to a charity or whatever, but I have no idea if they still do that stuff.
This changed around 2015~2017 (I was still occasionally visiting) during the trump election and got a lot worse after Stormfront was temporarily kicked off the internet. A lot of Stormfront users washed up on the shores of 4chan and proceeded to colonize it. Afaik most of them went back to Stormfront when the site found a new host, but there were a number who stuck around and just made 4chan a lot worse.
As someone who has been on and off 4chan for a good 15 years now, yeah the site’s culture definitely got shaken up for the worst after 2016, but I find most boards can still be welcoming and sometimes even wholesome once in a blue moon, there’s still decent people there.
Yeah. I’m not sure if it’s as common now as it used to be, but there was a time when most of the racism/sexism/homophobia was legitimately ironic and for shock value, and generally 4channers were a lot nicer under the surface.
My experience having used 4chan from around 2012~2016ish was that you could kinda tell when someone was being legitimately bigoted and when they were doing it “for the lulz” or because slurs-as-generic-insults was normalized. Typically the bigots would use slurs as an insult that was focused on whatever community the slur typically referred to. The “”“normal”“” 4channers would just use them generically and would push obvious bigots towards /pol/ (literally called “politically incorrect”; it is/was the containment board for assholes).
The one exception is in green texts, where slurs would sometimes get used to refer to someone’s race, religion, gender and/or sexuality; however, the “good” greentext stories would typically reverse it on the writer, making the writer look like a fool while the person they’re denigrating looks good in comparison.
For the most part, 4chan users were actually kinda cool and could be really kind despite the crusty exterior. There were several times where a thread would take off in which they made it a goal to collectively donate $X to a charity or whatever, but I have no idea if they still do that stuff.
This changed around 2015~2017 (I was still occasionally visiting) during the trump election and got a lot worse after Stormfront was temporarily kicked off the internet. A lot of Stormfront users washed up on the shores of 4chan and proceeded to colonize it. Afaik most of them went back to Stormfront when the site found a new host, but there were a number who stuck around and just made 4chan a lot worse.
As someone who has been on and off 4chan for a good 15 years now, yeah the site’s culture definitely got shaken up for the worst after 2016, but I find most boards can still be welcoming and sometimes even wholesome once in a blue moon, there’s still decent people there.