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.

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[–] ashinadash@hexbear.net 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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 reddit-logo because we were all just terminally online and posted everywhere.