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The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

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Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#131

Post by tptacek »

nitrogen wrote: post #117
tptacek wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things. First, you know you're on extremely weak rhetorical ice, and also kind of outside the norms of our community, when you start quoting the dictionary as a rebuttal. The person you're debating told you what they meant; what they meant is no longer a part of the debate. Second, it is very much out of the norms of HN to do email-style alternating quote/response the way you are. It's also very difficult to read…

Second, it is very much out of the norms of HN to do email-style alternating quote/response the way you are. I've seen such used before (though with italics to help the eye find the breaks), when a comment makes too many points or is too complex to reply to without making it clear which part of the comment is relevant to which part of a reply. Is there a better way to format conversations on HN when comments reach th…

I really think the right way to do it is just to write a natural paragraph that refers to what the parent was saying. But what you did, with a single italicized reference at the top, is an HN idiom as well.

A long back-and-forth of quote and rebuttal though is definitely not the style here. That style makes sense in Email and Usenet, because you're often using readers that don't show the parent comment at the same time or in a thread. It makes very little sense here, where we're essentially reading the same comment twice.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#132

Post by cgh »

gruez wrote: post #10

Are ip address blocks registered to defunct companies a relatively common thing? Clearly ARIN isn't regularly checking whether the owners of ip address blocks are still in business, so I'd imagine there are plenty of other blocks that belong to defunct companies.

Similarly, I wonder about internet ports assigned to dormant or defunct companies. I used to work for a company back in the '90s that had their own IANA port assignment for a proprietary database product. Of course, they don't use it anymore as the company and product are both long gone.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#133

Post by nootropicat »

theplague42 wrote: post #108
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #104

> The public face of 8chan is Jim Watkins, a pig farmer in the Philippines who many experts believe is also the person behind the shadowy persona of “Q” at the center of the conspiracy theory movement. It’s funny to me that people think Jim is capable of leading a worldwide movement and has enough opsec not to get caught. Have you seen the guy on YouTube? Give it a watch and decide for yourself. I followed Q (not qan…

What about it makes it "state level"? Dozens of failed predictions. Vague, open-ended insinuations that can be interpreted by anyone in totally different ways. No legitimate information that can't be found with a search engine. Whoever made up Q is similar to Trump in that they identified a group of people with real problems (loss of faith in institutions, fear of losing social power) to whom they could spread propag…

I think the point of Q is to prevent conservative American boomers from organizing, by duping them into thinking that 'their guys' are already winning and they don't have to do anything.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#134

Post by ed25519FUUU »

ibejoeb wrote: post #55
fallingfrog wrote: post #36

I’m pretty sure that anyone who is willing to swallow massively implausible theories like qanon is not the kind of person who will be amenable to logical arguments and fact checking. You can’t just argue those people out if their positions because it’s not about truth for them, it’s about feeling like one is a member of the elect. Denying reality is not a bug, it’s a feature of every millenarian belief system. Facts…

I've been able to avoid it entirely. Can you point to a good primer on qanon? Not an opinion piece or a takedown or anything, just an explainer. The only thing I know is what I've heard from MSM, and that has been that there is a secret cabal of pedophiles, and many members occupy powerful positions.

You can read what the person or people who write as Q post (http://qposts.online/), then you can read the is written about Qanon (https://www.google.com/search?q=Qanon). Warning, they live in different universes.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#135

Post by hutzlibu »

MrMan wrote: post #72
motohagiography wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, her whole thing on private/public is something I'd like to read next, as I have a hypothesis that there is a thread of continuity between the collapse of the Private and the scale of cruelty in the 20th century. These conflicts about chans and censorship and conspiracy theories are artifacts of categories I think we've all seen before. I'd agree that truth in public is as welcome as truth to power, perhaps be…

there is nothing elevated about HN, that is your brain playing tricks on you. Privacy is an illusion, self is an illusion. smart people are manipulated just as easily as dumb people, by people who have been studying how to do it, and now with mass social media, have the tools to do it.

Well, I would say here on HN at least the general bar is higher.

And sure, anybody can be manipulated, but also, with different amount of effort.

Tricking my young family teenage members into buying something shiny they don't really need?

Not too hard, show a cool ad or pay some influencer to feature the product in a way. Getting people of the HN crowd to buy somehing shiny they don't need? Lets say, the new KI assistance?

I would say, that is a lot harder, as most people here understand how (political) marketing works. And once you understand, you don't fall for it so easily.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#136

Post by klmadfejno »

will4274 wrote: post #126
klmadfejno wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but it's more or less what I meant by this line > All the logic in your great wall of text is nullified and is more or less amounting to a reverse straw man. Implying that an outrageous claim has merit because a severely watered down version of it might be accurate. If you think there may be some rich people who engage in with underage prostitutes, you are almost certainly correct. It's kind of dumb…

I see two issues with what you're saying. First, it's not just that some rich people are pedophiles. It's called a conspiracy theory for a reason - there's conspiring going on. The CEO of the Ritz knows that his hotels offer underage prostitutes. The personal concierge directs the CEO to club which is known to be "good for rich people." The club owner knows that the company they outsource to for renting table dancers…

> First, it's not just that some rich people are pedophiles. It's called a conspiracy theory for a reason - there's conspiring going on. The CEO of the Ritz knows that his hotels offer underage prostitutes. The personal concierge directs the CEO to club which is known to be "good for rich people." The club owner knows that the company they outsource to for renting table dancers on the weekends also has dancers doing some prostituting on the side. The other rich attendees of the club (who are not purchasing) can see that that girl is clearly not 21. There's more than just pedophilia going on here - a system of winks and nods whereby powerful people are offered the opportunity to engage in illegal behavior and make no moves against the powerful people who facilitate these opportunities.

And? Is the claim made more meaningful by these specifics?

> The second thing is that you're missing the point around alignment. These people DON'T align themselves with each other. They frequent the same forums as each other (e.g. 8chan) and disagree with each other on those forums. It's only in the eyes of the media and in people influenced by the media that the various flavors of conspiracy people are actually aligned.

People who regularly meet and discuss things are aligned on the part that counts. They might not be organized, but they're definitely aligned

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#137

Post by charlchi »

theplague42 wrote: post #114
s9w wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on who you are on what you define as hate. The sites both have a very clear political preference. And both are harsh towards the other. But the chans due to the way the work have less of a vendetta style activism and mostly ignore or ridicule outsiders. 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.…

One regularly talks about killing Jews and one doesn't.

In South Africa, twitter users make regular calls for the killing of white people, about as regularly as 4chan/pol has calls for killing jews.

The other day twitter refused to remove of an extremely hateful image of 2 white people's decapited heads being held up by 2 black women.

So no, they are about the same. One platform will ban hate speech from some groups but not from others.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#138

Post by njharman »

bitdizzy wrote: post #103
dragontamer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best antidote for bad ideas and conspiracy theories is transparency and public debate. I've been on the internet for decades. I fully disagree with this. EDIT: Mass bannings, aka an "Exodus Event", was the solution to almost all major conspiracies I've witnessed. 1. When GameFAQs LUEsers gained conspiracy theories against the website and other reckless behavior, to the point of harming the website, the solution…

Goodness! Someone else who remembers LUE. It's refreshing that someone else has noticed the repetitive cycle of the Internet. There were white supremacists taking advantage of usenet from the beginning. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" is useless pablum to someone like me who has seen the same people acting in bad faith pushing the most pernicious ideas on each communication platform that comes and goes for decade…

So, the banning worked. There is no opinions you don't like on the internet anymore?

And all the reporting and exposure from protesters and activists, and portrayals in media aka sunshine. Hasn't reduced racism and gender bigotry over last 50 years.

I've been alive 50 years. Everything is better now than in the 70s 80s or 90s.

There are louder fringers, amplified by internet et al. But, society at large has, is, and will continue to progress to less bigotry.

Re: The Now-Defunct Firms Behind 8chan, QAnon

#139

Post by Jetrel »

jmnicolas wrote: post #15
happytoexplain wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is not to convince conspiracy theorists that they are wrong, the goal is to prevent them from hurting people or society and, to that end, keep the dangerous ones from organizing anonymously online in large numbers (I honestly don't know if that's possible).

If I'm not mistaken the NZ killer was on 8chan? It's the same argument with serial killer movies (at the risk of showing my age there was a strong controversy with "Natural Born Killers" at the time): you don't kill people because you chatted on the internet or watched a movie. You kill people because you had it in you. The things you were exposed before might color your act but that's it.

I've long been sympathetic to ideas like this - I remember as a little kid, blowing off the big stigma around the (then-novel) 3d shooters that had just come out, like Doom. Ironically I agree with exactly what you said, but simultaneously think you might miss something in the analysis. I think that maybe a better way to phrase the idea is:

In the rare case that you're positive for a trait, you can be incited to it by stimuli.

For example, if you have an anger-management problem, you can live quite peacefully, left alone, but you are uniquely dangerous to provoke. Behaviors and stimuli that are harmless to other people cause a violent outburst from you. Same thing with alcoholics and, for example, pedophiles - stimuli that provoke no negative behavior from other people will provoke it in someone positive for a trait. Violent media left us with a tiny driblet of actual killers because only a tiny fraction of people are positive for a trait of being stone-cold killers.

--

So what are we afraid of? We have barely any actual killers. We're afraid of enablers.

We have a tiny, tiny group of people that will dare to do crimes (say, shooting up a synagogue) when there are clear and present consequences for it. I'm quite sure, however, we have a still small, but much, much larger group that are "latent" trait-positive for violence. They'd do it - if they could get away with it.

What we're really scared of is a third group - which might be a group so large that it could be anywhere from 30-60% of our society. People who could be coerced into not caring about the violence. That third group is the people who are trait-positive for gullibility (and several other related traits). I think it could very well be "most people" - a plurality if not a majority.

These are what enable horrible things. People who have bought into propaganda really don't do anything, and that's exactly what's so horrible about them; because they don't express some sort of obvious, negative externality in their neighbors and coworker's lives, nobody really cares if they believe horrible things. Because they don't really "act on" those beliefs - they don't go out and do things that hurt people.

But they also don't intervene when a crime aligning with their beliefs is perpetrated.

And that's what's so scary.

When a black man would get lynched in the old south, the real thing that made it possible was the hundreds of other bystanders who felt like the black guy deserved it. If they didn't exist, such a killer would rapidly be brought to justice. But instead, since so many were okay with it (and even cheered it on), not only would the killer get away with the act, but quite a few much more "minor" trait-positive people participated in it - people much less naturally driven to kill, but who could work up the courage to do so if they could get away with it.

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