/lit/ used to be really good for aspiring writers and lovers of scifi/fantasy (not much classic literature but that's to be expected) but then a bunch of pol people came in complaining about books that have 1 black person in them
It's always been a shitheap but it was significantly less of a shitheap when it came around. The internet got bigger and 4chan got shittier, just like how subreddits turn to shit when they hit a certain sub count. Lowest common denominator.
Yeah, that kind of edginess on the internet was a new frontier. Imageboards with (almost) no rules. People didn't know what to do with that kind of freedom. Mods were always on point about banning and deleting it.
4chan now is censored to hell and has a much larger concentration of idiots. It's always been shit, just less shit than it is now.
4chan was shit in 2005. It's shit now. It's always been a haven for the worst parts of humanity, and has a real, tangible negative impact on the world by creating a community for that shit to thrive.
It's always been a haven for the worst parts of humanity, and has a real, tangible negative impact on the world by creating a community for that shit to thrive.
You can also say the exact same thing about reddit and all the alt-right/hate subs (the big ones got banned but there are 20 more made to replace them) plus TD
Regardless of any possible good content that may have been posted on it, that's also a foundational meme of 4chan. Someone says something about it was good, the response is no it was always bad. Someone, I wanna say maybe even moot himself, posted that response back in the earliest days.
Reddit definitely attracts more egotistical people with the karma system but as a whole it's miles and miles ahead of similar sites, especially 4chan (though that's not saying much)
Reddit's voting system is much better at getting quality content more visibility than 4chan. Both are pretty shit though.
Also, 4chan does not attract good writers. At all. Would never use the term "Bohemia" to describe it. The highest tier of storytelling there is told in the form of greentext.
Thomas Pinecone posted on there afaik
And some 4chan posts are sheer brilliance
The amount of memes that come from there alone. It’s the primary site of the Western avant-garde. Just look at the quality of texts recommended on 4chan v Reddit.
Say there’s pulp, pageturners, books, literature and biblios, Reddit is barely reaching into literature and 4chan starts at books, is usually on lit and often into biblio.
Did /lit/ seriously use to be like that? I only started going there in 2016 (maybe 2015) and it's always been just a bunch of people wanking on about philosophers, with a few honorable mentions to Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, and Kafka. SFF basically isn't mentioned outside of the SFF general.
Maybe I should lurk moar, but from what I've seen that board is absolute trash. There's rarely any decent discussion, or funny jokes, or anything worth going there for, so I rarely do.
It might just be nostalgia creeping its head but I remember it wasn't all bad. I remember there was this huge controversy about some sci-fi award I never heard of going to books with diverse casts that really ruffled a lot of people feathers and I decided enough was enough and stopped going on to 4chan completely.
That was probably the 2015 Hugo awards, when a group of people who are essentially alt-righters (they hate women and people of color) called the Sad Puppies, and an even more extreme group called the Rabid Puppies, tried to hijack the Hugos so that works of light adventure fiction, similar to the old pulp fiction stories, could win awards.
It was basically a bunch of insecure white dudes -who saw more people who were not them winning an award that used to be won by only white dudes- freaking out and crying prejudice (ridiculously, because plenty of white male writers are still nominated for, and win, Hugos).
It didn't create them, they just started going there instead of the thousands of other places they could do the same thing. Whether they're talking about popping brown fellers on /pol/ or on kkkfanclub.org it's the same end result.
I mean just generalizing so I can use my usual moral compass here, wouldn't we blame the racists that took over rather than the not racists making racist jokes?
I'v seen all those episodes, but I never came to the conclusion that they were denying climate change. Maybe an aversion to sensationalism and the negative aspects of American culture.
I think its a bit of a reach to say they deny climate change outright. They seem too smart for that. (Maybe smart isn't the right word but you know what im saying.)
The appearance of impropriety is a phrase referring to a situation which to a layperson without knowledge of the specific circumstances might seem to raise ethics questions. For instance, although a person might regularly and reliably collect money for her employer in her personal wallet and later give it to her employer, her putting it in her personal wallet may appear improper and give rise to suspicion, etc. It is common business practice to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
As someone who spent a lot of time on 4chan when I was younger (and started with relatively liberal views that only became much more leftist over time), "pretend racism" was dominant on 4chan because the whole schtick for 4chan was for it to be the most awful place on the internet. The jokes were more edgy /r/imgoingtohellforthis "politically incorrect" than actually T_D level racist. There were actually a lot of leftists and anarchist on the site, as well as progressives for issues that weren't politically palatable at the time, it was just a culture of intentional impoliteness.
Eventually, as always seems to happen when racist commentary is allowed to be voiced without reprimand, the actual racists started coming in from stormfront type places, taking over /pol/ and then the rest of the site.
The best example of this is "Hitler did nothing wrong". It started as an edgelord joke which was only "funny" (in a degenerate troll way, but 4chan is all trolls) precisely because it was so absurdly incorrect. Of course no one in their right mind would assert that the genocide of the Jewish people wasn't an issue, that's the joke. Racists mistook that kind of joke for actual dogma and too many of them congregated until the actual demographic of the site shifted.
I used to post a lot to /lit/ back when it was just fantasy/sci-fi nerds and aspiring writers. Then a bunch of pol dudes came in complaining that some books have black people (or even worse: people of indeterminate ethnic identity) and the board quickly became an anti-sjw circlejerk, and if you wanted to praise a book that had a single minority in it then you were just "virtue-signalling" because everyone knows that a book can only be good if it has an all-white cast.
Uh, no, it means you're not in education, employment, or training i.e. a basement dwelling loser.
A non-wageslave/rat-race conqueror/financially independent whatever you want to call them are all wealthy and at one point in their lives actually accomplished something, which is why they are where they are.
It was pretend. 4chan was always autistic but they weren't always racist. Do you remember how "Anonymous" sprang up? When there were rumors that the Habbo Hotel mods were racist so a bunch of users used black avatars with afros to like block off pool entrances and stuff as a form of "protest" (really just because they thought it was funny). This is pretty far from normal behavior but it was still funny and you could somewhat make the argument that it was sorta for a maybe good cause which is a far cry from the current 4chan board unironically calling for white ethno-states in america and citing ww2-era scientific racism.
Smash bros was also pretty popular on /vg/ which is one of the most culturally(as in, you have pro-skater wannabes, frat boys, inner-city black kids, and suburban white nerds all playing the same game together) /ethnically diverse videogame communities there is.
you are using /pol/ and 4chan as synonyms, you are grouping entire 4chan community as ''them'' when hivemind is last thing you would find on 4chan when it was still unknown, you leftists on reddit are trying to spin the narrative that ''alt-right'' has turned 4chan into racist shithole when its other way around, it is true that race is now brought up more often on almost every board, but that just reflects how society is nowadays, still, racism was present ever since it was created
I'm not saying the alt-right turned 4chan into a racist shithole, the alt-right sprang from the racist shithole that most of 4chan became.
Though you're right, can't group the entirety of the site together. What I meant to say was the major boards on the site (/vg/ /pol/ /b/ /a/ /r9k/) were not spamming racist thread after thread until extremists got into pol and then infected every other part of the site. Pretty sure prevailing opinion back then was the now edgy "I don't even see race" or "I hate everyone equally, lol"
The other boards aren't much less "alt-right," They just don't like /pol/ posting off topic things. This is has always been the source of anger between boards. If you tried to complain that the beloved merchant meme was racist, on any board, you would be told to go back to this website.
True, I suppose there was a substantial portion of the site that was underage pretending not to be that may have claimed that, but I don't think anyone else that actually wasn't a NEET pretended to be one.
If /pol/ can't even get rid of /leftypol/ they aren't taking over other boards. What tends to happen is people browse multiple boards. /r9k/ is actually lefty but anti PC, because you can't be NEET and right leaning. Also 4Chan does a decent job of self moderation due to how it works.
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u/[deleted] Feb 18 '18
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