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
And we're over here in our third party, yeah not too far off.
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
Pedophilia is when you murder babies in Satanic rituals OR when you teach kids about gender. They don't consider CSAM to be pedophilia.
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.
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.
Can confirm that I've seen "anarchist" "age liberationists" on fedi claiming that the age of consent and CP being illegal is authoritarian statism
"there should be no legal or moral barrier to what people draw"
Worth mentioning that drawing for the sake of personal, artistic, emotional expression is not the same as drawing porn. Not all nudity is sexual and also, not all depictions of sexuality are pornographic.
Porn differs significantly from other forms of art because its explicit, primary purpose is to sexually arouse the viewer. The difference between Game of Thrones and Sexy Step Sis Stuck In Dishwasher is that you can skip to any timestamp in the latter, get your rocks off to whatever your ape brain is looking at and get pretty much the full experience of what the artwork has to offer. In Game of Thrones, its part of a greater narrative and the things its trying to express are more complicated and require context.
There are things worth expressing through art that justify drawing naked minors, possibly even drawing naked minors in a sexual context. An artist who has themselves been abused as a child might draw something like that to process their trauma, for example.
But the sole message of pornography, the only thing being expressed and what the audience is supposed to feel here is "Don't you want to fuck this
child800-year-old vampire who just so happened stop to aging at the age of 8?"There are valid, artistic reasons for why an artist would want to draw the sexual abuse of children, but that's not what lolicon art is. Lolicon art is pornographic in nature, its explicit purpose is to make the viewer horny for kids (or "child-like bodies" if you want to be extremely charitable). It tries to create feelings of sexual attraction, nothing else.
Go ahead, draw a manga about an 800-year-old vampire girl whose body stopped aging at the age of 8, show us how this affects her emotionally, how society treats her, how it affects her relationships with other people. Especially in regards to her romantic life there'd probably be some very interesting and emotionally intense internal and external conflicts to explore!
But that's not what the overwhelming amount of loli art is. Lolicon art is porn. You're not supposed to feel the struggle of the vampire girl, you're not supposed to feel her despair at the dissonance of how people perceive her versus how she perceives herself and her frustration that nobody takes her seriously even though she has literal centuries of life experience. You're supposed to feel "This child is sexy and I wanna fuck it."
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.
The problem is incoherent self-serving libertinism has no real revolutionary or even progressive potential
Jonah Paretti wrote about this back when he was an academic Marxist. He outlined the general process by which subcultures get recuperated by capital. Then he went and followed his own blueprint, I guess. Now we have Buzzfeed. I have a bunch to say about that article but I’ll leave it at that unless someone’s interested.
Hi, interested. I’m drunk. So the basic premise of Paretti’s paper is this. We form identities based on desire. Capitalism inserts itself into the process of identity creation in order to get us to desire capitalist commodities. Not only that, but this process of adopting and discarding identities is being accelerated by capitalist forces. There’s a lot of psychoanalysis jargon involved in describing how this works.
Paretti argues that countercultures have the potential to avoid recuperation by capital when they offer a positive form of desire rather than a desire based on lacking something. If all your counterculture wants to do is watch pirated media, there’s not a good way to monetize that. But if that counterculture can get bogged down in minutia about the implications of Blu-ray sales, for example, capitalism can and will step in and insert itself into the identity creation process of the subculture. He also cites women’s rights and queer activism as a counterculture which could resist recuperation while outlining how rainbow capitalism would work. And he did this in 1996 and with seemingly minimal background in feminist theory compared to his peers with a focus on it.
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.
TRUE
And I thought Pepe became a meme specifically when 4ch snatched him from that webcomic? Although I know the rightwinger shit mostly came about in 2014 and after, gamergate and "meme magic" and shit
Looking it up apparently the 'feels good man' meme from the comic was posted on somethingawful first, that was going around my circles far outside of 4chan or somethingawful around that time. According to knowyourmeme it was posted on 4chan as 'feels bad man' with the sad pepe and that's probably when it started being more associated with the right, as it became popular on 4chan and body building forums then.
You're like a decade behind. I've come to learn through TikTok that soy as an insult and various forms of phrenology are now mainstream amongst young Zoomer boys
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.
The only appeal of an unmoderated, anonymous imageboard is to enable these same sorts of people.
Just like how the ideology of Elon Musk has infiltrated every part of X dot com (formerly known as twitter), it doesn't matter if a pocket of users use 4chan in a "responsible" way, the culture of the sites admins will always reflect om the culture of its users.
No part of a social media/forum site can exist in a vacuum. Not even communities around Mastodon and Lemmy avoid this.
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.
Two types of reaction to 4chan use:
"Oh my god you've been on it?
" and"Yeah... we were in the shit huh...
"
4chan, somethingawful, and early reddit. All just absolute fucking cesspits.
I dunno. Something awful kicked out all the people who went on to found 4chan.
It was also one of the big online originators of cringe culture, with all that entails - i.e., a shitload of transphobia, body shaming, and ableism.
somethingawful was (and is) bad, but i think it's fair to say it isn't 4chan bad
Don't forget the doxxing and attempting to get people to kill themselves
It didn't, but even if it had that doesn't excuse what it was and is.
Closest I'll come to defending it is, having hung out on there (way) in the past, I still wound up here with you all. The rowdiness of the chapo sub tripped the same neuron 4chan used to.
Hexbear is a old timey bulletin board forum, 4chan is the primordial stew that created reddit
I love 4chan because it keeps 4channers in their own corner of the Internet, one that’s well removed from spaces meant for normal people
but what if not having other 4chan freaks to hang out with meant they had to grow into normal people or never communicate with anyone again?
The whole place can go in the toilet. I will curse Moot daily until the day I die.
I used to visit /tg/ (almost a decade ago now, wow) for the pdf sharing threads but even then would not have defended that board or 4chan as a whole. It's a hive of scum and bigotry, and no number of ttrpg pdfs can change that
Someone in my friend group got really defensive about Kiwifarms being denied service by an isp or something and it's definitely made me think less of them as a person.
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.
You could browse /b/ and it was ok, more fun and quirky stuff than genuinely vile stuff.
Deeply unserious assertion, nowhere on 4ch was ever not a horrendous racist hole. People try to act like 4ch used to be just a quirky funster website but slurs were never ever not the norm
this is true, it was never good, it used to be bad somehow it got even worse
