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A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

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Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#131
post #13
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless, /pol/ and r/the_donald were one of main factors why Donald Trump got elected. This crowdsurfing phenomenon holds tremendous amount of power.

Citation needed.

You will never get citation for that. I've been following those two communities for last three months before election happened (and few months after) and what I can state is onyl empirical. The things they do are amazing. More than 25k+ people working 24/7 to elect Trump is big influence. Note that they were all unpaid and did it by their free will. They even had paid members from opposition (ShariaBlue) to influence their opinions and destroy hegemony of site, but they failed. What do you think who financed this study? You think they were bored so decided to study /pol/ just so they have something to do?

Pro Donald sites had much bigger influence in election than most of people will ever realize. Trump himself acknowledges them and his team follows them because news get there fastest.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> until suddenly everyone was an "SJW cuck" and everything was politicized/full of angry wannabe-right wingers I guess this is actually a response/reaction to the extreme political correctness coming from many places around the World. I think this will last until "society" redeems free speech and people actually begin to have real dialogs.

I would buy this if not for the fact that: 1) simply asking for a modicum of respect is often conflated for political correctness 2) liking the wrong kind of music or finding the wrong hairstyle attractive garners a person this kind of treatment - which is the context GP is referring to and 3) these words are used as silencing tactics in the same way 'racist' and 'bigot' are

I could also argue that it's hard to be a hate speech judge when everything can be a trigger if you get offended.

I don't think if it was a matter of just asking for respect on the individual level, it would go this far. But who knows.

This 4chan phenomena is probably due to their incapacity to articulate on the real world, when in the real world they are already taken as wrong just by playing an opposite moral or political value, or in most cases, for being "privileged".

KEKistan would be the nemesis of PC's "safe space" world, I guess.

Not saying that I agree with all that, just reflecting. I only think that only real dialog will balance this. Not force, not laws. Dialog.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've subbed in "something larger" where I said "broadly representative". Do you think the protests are broadly representative of attitudes at universities? Because sure, I bet that there are more than just the protesters. But colleges have pretty big populations, so the supporters of 40 protesters can still be a couple hundred people out of tens of thousands.

Agreed. I am making a weaker claim than the one you are objecting to. My point is that it is not some irrelevant fringe. I've backed that up with other examples, but I can't show it to you more convincingly. At any rate, I think my point is a response to your question about "interacting with universities" (you didn't ask me, but my point is that doing exactly that won't exactly convince one the claim the other poster…

At any rate, I think my point is a response to your question about "interacting with universities" (you didn't ask me, but my point is that doing exactly that won't exactly convince one the claim the other poster made is entirely wrong).

But that's just my point with the scare quotes. How does a single person go about gaining experience with the thousands of individuals that comprise a given university?

And then there's ~10 million undergraduate students in the USA. Extrapolating from a few thousand people that choose to speak loudly isn't going to paint a meaningful picture of their views.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#134
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people don't follow my ideologies exactly, therefore I'm being oppressed Thats a nasty little remark. Keep it civil.

Why is that uncivil? A lot of online discussion seems to be exactly this.

I would imagine the comment was more to convey "don't hurt my feelings" than to encourage civility, which is a more difficult concept. For ideologues, good means rational means civil means moral means .

Once all words boil down to or , a person can't express or precisely articulate ideas, which manifests in incoherent language.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did we watch the same E3? When did an emphasis on diversity become an "extreme left" viewpoint? Why are you feeling threatened by efforts to undo some of the marginalization of URM in popular media? I don't understand why video game enthusiasts like yourself feel like they're being threatened by more women and minorities in your games - there's still plenty of white male characters and it's not a attack on your ident…

> it's not just nerdy white males who play video games nowadays Not to defend them or anything but the irony is that your indignant reaction illustrates precisely why your viewpoint is so unwelcome to gamers. Having observed the games industry over many years, the gaming public really does want their comic book-like power fantasies and unrealistic heroes and heroines. The rather unsubtle ways that developers tend to…

That's some hardcore mental gymnastics.

> gaming public really does want their unrealistic heroes and heroines > diversity damages immersion

So which is it? You don't like shoehorned diversity because it's unrealistic, but you're fine with unrealistic heroes? When have "gamers" ever raised a fuss about the immersiveness of white characters in exotic countries? And of course, games are "fictional settings in a fictional story" whenever it suits the narrative, but somehow a black assassin in the new Dishonored "damages immersion in the game." It's just interesting to see the obvious bias when the same people who comment "who cares," "it's just a fantasy story," when tilda swinton plays the Ancient One or emma stone plays Hawaiian-Chinese character but turn around and cry "muh immersion" whenever any character in a video game coincidentally isn't white. Diversity isn't some morality piece that you shove in a game to fit some "SJW agenda" (and please, 99% of video games made are not filet mignons by any stretch of the imagination), it's a reflection of a multicultural reality that has been warped for decades - the kneejerk reaction that some "gamers" have to any counterbalancing is honestly just thinly veiled racism.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#137
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> White rural America has every right to be angry, but that doesn't excuse embracing a racist con artist like Trump. 1. Blaming outsourcing and illegal immigration is not racist. If American citizens need to compete against people who are willing to work very hard for less than minimum wage, that hurts the wages and quality of life of Americans. Our labor laws exist for a reason. 2. Many people were aware of how non-…

1. There is no clear evidence that illegal immigration has a meaningful influence on wages. Undocumented people mostly do jobs Americans refuse to do. For the past 30 years wages haven't kept up with productivity growth, I'm sure you've seen the charts. Meanwhile expenses for housing, education and healthcare have exploded. Framing immigration as the primary cause of economic stagnation is wrong, because it is a mino…

1. If H1Bs are shown to have depressed wages of computer programmers etc., why would it not be logical to expect illegals to depress wages?

If there were 12 million fewer people in the USA (the laughably low "official" number of illegals in the country), would demand for housing be less? Demand for doctors and related health care?

Even former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, Robert Reich, in TV interviews, admitted that "Undoubtedly access to lower-wage foreign workers has a depressing effect [on wages]".

2. Quoting 1 article from a progressive magazine (which incidentally, endorsed Hillary Clinton) to "prove" the voting behavior of over 100 million people is kind of ridiculous.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#138
post #19
post #4

I'm definitely falling into the "X.com used to be so much better back then!!" trope but I really hate how much /pol/ culture spread throughout 4chan. I spent a lot of time between 2006-2014 on various boards like /a/, /mu/, /g/, and /int/ until suddenly everyone was an "SJW cuck" and everything was politicized/full of angry wannabe-right wingers. Made me quit the site (well, that and other things). Sometimes you just…

> x.com used to be better It did. Elon Musk owned it pre merger with confinity. X.com used to redirect to PayPal; still prob does. So x.com certainly used to be better...

Somewhere I still have an X.com plastic credit card.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#139
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was quite possibly gamergate in 2014. I don't think dragging up the whole culture war here is valuable, but clearly a large portion of the gaming community were left feeling mistrustful of the gaming media. That war continues as background noise at this point, but is still a powerful influencer on many left-vs-right subjects.

I've never really understood gamergate. I vaguely recall there were some accusations of favouritism by games journalists towards some female game makers. What I don't understand is how this spiralled out of control. Was it mostly fueled by people jumping on a bandwagon or is there something I'm missing?

With the disclaimer that I don't fully understand Gamergate myself, and the following account sounds possibly incomplete, it seems like a workable summary of part of the subject. https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g9tit/e...

Edit: I suppose I could note, some of the Youtube personalities who (I have heard) supported the movement are currently staunchly anti-feminist. I'm not certain how central they were to the movement at the time, but they may be relevant to the comments others have made involving the impact of the group.

Re: A Study of 4chan’s Politically Incorrect Forum and Its Effects on the Web [pdf]

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're conflating causation - GamerGate was an expression of /pol/ culture, not the cause of it. I'm sure that the fact that the event made news spread that culture, but ultimately the ideas didn't change.

I disagree. GamerGate was the cause for the rise of right-wing social media power. Milo wasn't know outside those circles until after the controversy got the mainstream consciousness, and now he's a staple on all of the right-wing sites I frequent. The idea that the largest gun forum on the internet would be regularly discussing posts by Milo and Gavin McInness would have been laughable before GamerGate. "Based Stick…

> Milo wasn't [known] outside those circles until after the controversy got the mainstream consciousness

Yeah, I watched Milo get popular too, going from an occasional guest on Sky News to someone that people riot about... He's pretty amusing for the amount of controversy he generates. However, I don't think he has changed the culture of /pol/ (as OP said), I think he was propelled by it.

> It's now rebellious and cool to want to marry and start a traditional family.

I don't think GamerGate focused on that particular aspect. From what I saw, GG was just about bashing the media and exposing how journalists will work together to push certain narratives. Traditionalism is more prominent within the alt-right, and that wasn't pushed into the media spotlight until Hillary did a speech attacking them around August 2016. By that time, GG had died down and even Milo had pivoted his brand to alt-(right|light) talking points.

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