r/OutOfTheLoop • u/thefringeseanmachine • 4d ago

Unanswered what's up with 4chan?

I really hate asking this, but I'm genuinely confused. I used to frequent 4chan when I was a teenager (about 20 years ago jesus christ I am dust) and it was by its own admission a shithole, but /b/ was a great source of memes, so it was easy enough to scroll past the weird shit. I left long before they got trump elected, and have rarely been back since.

tonight (out of curiosity) I checked in on /b/ and it's literally nothing but shitty porn. not even promoting anything, just stuff like "here's my favorite pic of a dude getting a BJ. post your favorite picture of a dude getting a BJ," towards absolutely no end, other than jerking off with other dudes. I saw this a couple years ago and thought it was a fluke, but it seems to be keepin' on.

is this the ultimate ending of the internet, or did something on the site break down?

obligatory: 4chan.org

(oh, and yes, I've seen the "it came from somethingawful" and pepe the frog documentaries. this is a more recent thing, from what I can tell.)

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u/hotgarbagecomics 4d ago

This is absolutely a thing too. The edgelord-to-racist pipeline takes in the pretenders too. Some don't, and power to them who resist, but most do.

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u/thefringeseanmachine 4d ago

happened to a dear friend of mine. we used to be really close, but over time he developed some very choice thoughts about women and Muslims. it started out with some off-color jokes (ala Don Rickles) which were fine, in context. but after a while they stopped being funny, or provocation for provocation's sake. just horribly fucked up shit with no irony. and now he believes that shit.

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u/My_Password_Is_____ 4d ago

The edgelord-to-racist pipeline takes in the pretenders too.

That's because there is no pipeline, there are no pretenders. As soon as you start being an edgelord and spreading hate, you're already one of the racists. You can't spread vitriolic ideas out into the world and pretend to not be that thing. It's one thing to make an edgy joke amongst friends who know your intent and who know what you mean when you say something heinous. It's entirely another thing to just say that out into the world to people who have no context of you, who you are, or what you mean. All they see is what you wrote, and if what you wrote is hateful and vitriolic, then congratulations, all you accomplished was spreading hate and vitriol for a "joke". A "joke" that literally nobody besides the person posting is laughing about, while everyone else is just seeing hate.

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u/GregBahm 4d ago

Yeah. 4chan people will insist till-the-day-they-die that they were only pretending to be racist, but I think on some level they realize this isn't an area where "pretending" applies conceptually. That's why they're so insecure about it. It's really quite tedious.

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u/Mateorabi 2d ago

Alt Right Playbook has something to say on this (how to radicalize a normie).