The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

>I came up with the original concept of 8chan while on a psychedelic mushroom trip. I was past the peak and was on the tail end of the trip, and I just decided to browse 4chan because that's what I did when sober. I was still tripping pretty bad though so I kept seeing these fractal patterns and I wrote down the words "infinite chan" to remember for later.

>The next day, I was able to put into words more of what the site would be like. I was inspired partly by the admin of 4chon.net, savetheinternet, who routinely refused to make requested boards for users. I wondered what it would be like if there were a Reddit-style imageboard where anyone could make a board without express admin approval, and began hacking on the imageboard engine I knew best to make it a reality: vichan. I decided to expire boards after inactivity so that it didn't get full of dead boards like Reddit does with dead subreddits, and released version 1 of 8chan two days later.

https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/interviews/qa-with-fredr...

There's some rough language - I would say on average the chans are certainly more direct and less signaling, but the lows are pretty equal for both sites. Death wishes are very common on both.

And of course what you interpret as hateful is massively defined by your beliefs. If you define using wrong pronouns as such, then you're gonna have a bad time on the chans. But so would you on Twitter for having a photo with a MAGA hat.

The chans can be surprisingly humane and supportive. Truly so and not just for social points. Their usual dismissive description is not matched by the actual content. Which is understandable since honestly at the moment, a very good chunk of the content is by bots and organized groups.

Related: I recently posted a long article on all sorts of c++ stuff on a technical Reddit. It also contained criticism of Git. People got their god damn pitchforks! They told me to give up my job, told me I'm a bad coder, they went through reddit and git histories, looked up accounts on other sites and sent me things to my private E-mail that carry a prison sentence in my country. And the mods didn't even remove any of it. Because I criticized Git. But they do insta-ban people for using the wrong pronouns.

Things are not like they seem if you're not in the 'in'-group. Deviate just a little and people come for you - on Twitter like on Reddit. There's no such thing on the chans.

These calls for censorship are dangerous in so many ways not being addressed. There are two primary issues at hand in my eyes though. One, that the censorship engine that many think will only apply to those "crazy crackpot conspiracy theorists" will eventually be turned on them at some point in the future. Two, is that instead of actually filtering out "crazy conspiracy theorists" it will only filter out the "individual crazy conspiracy theorists", while the other entities at play will have (more) free reign to run amok than they already do and have.

I'm trying keep this meta, and not get into particulars for obvious reasons, but as a singular example to make a point; I particpated in one of the largest conspiracies in the last two decades, but it was a state and mainstream media sponsored one; the Global War on Terror (GWOT). If the deep state (in the original Peter Dale Scott sense of the term) wanted another Iraq equivalent today, how do you think this would be applied to people who fought against it? To ask the question is to answer it. As a matter of fact, this has happened more recently in a few cases, but most Americans just are completely unaware of the massive amounts of death and destruction being carried out in their name... because the media doesn't talk about it, and those that do are labelled... you guessed it... So for those who constantly clamor to use the "but these conspiracy theories are dangerous because of real life consequences!" angle are focusing on outliers (that should still be addressed) while ignoring the thousands of deaths of people of a different color half the world away, either at our hands, at the hands of those we finance, or at the hands of those we supply weapons to.

The bottom line is everyone is a conspiracy theorist, it's just that some people don't like certain ones, and clamour to silence those voices, not just for them, but for everyone. The term itself was brought into the perjorative by the CIA in an attempt to discredit anybody who questioned the Warren commission. The entire history of the world is a history of conspiracy! I tend to lean towards Michael Parenti's disdain heaped on what he calls "coincidence theorists", because thats what so many rebuttals and "debunkings" end up being.

By taking this ridicule and censor approach, instead of addressing things like half-truths and limited hangout psyops (of which Qanon certainly is), what happens is those who question things of this nature are forced further into isolated, filter bubbled communities that then become extremely defensive. This is not the way to address these things... but to be honest I think the pendulum may have swung too far already. It's too popular (even if much of it is manufactured popularity, a nice play on words of Chomsky's manufactured consent) a position. It's just another in the long line of boogeymen the state and other actors love utilize for other purposes. Communism! Terrorism! Protect the children! ... Conspiracy Theory! I suggest you don't fall for it. I also try not to blame too harshly those who do... after all, I fell for the GWOT in my younger and dumber days, as many of us did in the months and years after 9/11, and didn't get my brain back till I got out of the military.

A few quotes from old comments of mine: "One issue is that people seem to have completely forgotten what inductive logic is, and how powerful it can be. Of course evidence (deductive logic) is preferred wherever possible, but in the arena of intelligence agencies and billionares who spend a lot of time covering up their tracks (especially by degrees of seperations), you aren't going to get that evidence except in the most rare cases. Even in the cases where the evidence does show up, it is often covered up, destroyed, lost, inadmissable, gag ordered, blackbagged, etc."

"my anecdotal experience has been from starting with only one maxim. That I would rather know the truth than the lie, in particular the ugly truth over the beautiful lie. What started out for me just as the meager attempts of a USMC Iraq combat vet to understand his own place in what could truly be called a vast conspiracy (the war), became a lifelong journey of transformation in understanding the bigger picture of the realities of this world. Let me tell you, it is so much more conspiratorial than most would ever want to know (and I base this upon good, strong evidence, and where that is lacking, good inductive logic). I think most people honestly would prefer the beautiful lie. My problem always has been and probably always will be when those who prefer the lie try to tell me the lie is truth, and then attack when incredulity inevitably rises as a reaction."

I keep thinking about doing an hn "I am a conspiracy theorist, ama." right before I burn this account. Is now the time? I think I would need to discuss how to approach that delicately with mods first.