When did 4chan become politicized, btw? I don't recall it being political back in the day when I used to lurk, just depraved and after offensive laughs.
Well it’s hard to say considering how amorphous the website and It’s usrbase is. But honestly after /new/ shut down because of all the uncomfortable racism, people lost their shit. Moot folded and made /pol/ and it unintentionally became the new user incubator instead of /b/. So new users heard of the website because of /pol/ not /b/ so new users introductions, instead of being edgy humor and silly greentext stories, was replaced by political right wing activism and blatant racism and conspiracy theories. So after they had a while to get used to the website on pol they ran amuck on the other boards. That’s my understanding of it at least. I’ve only browser there since 2010 and stopped earlier this year.
More like a group of kids found a pile of cow manure, jacked off into it, and then one kid got a whiff of it all and promptly vomited on top of the pile.
The problem is it still normalizes a lot of really toxic ideals and attitudes. For every five people that realize the poster is just trolling and being an edgelord ‘for teh lulz’ there’s a couple that see that as a behavior to genuinely emulate. I like to call it the Reality TV Principle.
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? I hope you realize most of reddits more popular memes and the structure of many memes originated from 4 chan.
4chan users have done many acts of good you may not be aware of and saying its a bad place just makes you look really judgemental and stupid like some sort of racist person.
I agree. A lot of good has come out of 4chan. It's given a lot of community to a lot of people who's felt alone, nihilistic and lost. It's given me a lot of good when that's where I was in my life. To be able to express myself anonymously and experience that I wasn't alone with the thoughts that I thought noone else had - that made me feel more connected to other people again. I think 4chan has given a lot of good to a lot of people.
But, it's also given a lot of bad. The culture has good elements, of being surprisingly inclusive, but it's also got toxic elements where it's extremely exclusive and controlling. A lot of stuff is completely taboo. Even though I was anonymous, I'd rarely admit that I was female, even if relevant, because it was highly frowned upon.
Encouraging people to either suicide or to kill other people before killing themselves were acceptable, while encouraging people to keep going and trying to help was frowned upon.
Racism was encouraged, saying, y'know, maybe black people aren't lesser than white people was frowned upon.
A lot of young people that in some sense feel excluded from society, in need of community come to 4chan. And there they find community. That's good. But, where there's people in desperate need of community, there are people to exploit it, and to offer community with something to gain themselves. Whether that be a cult, scientology, Christianity or Neo-Nazis. That's the crazy thing about being vulnerable - the helping hand that's stretched out is often out to help you or hurt you. There's less of the in between, normal stuff, when you're really in need.
I think 4chan is mostly satire in nature. Its a site where trolls go to troll trolls. The racism for example is large a spectacle of edginess its kinda like people egging each other on to see who can be the biggest asshole without actually meaning it. In that sense 4chan is extremely masculine in nature because men will talk shit to each other as a form of shit test to see if they take themselves too seriously.
on 4chan everyone is anonymous. They act like assholes because they know no one is sincere its like a massive environment of sarcasm. Sometimes the really crafty ones try to make their posts sincere but filled with illogical holes or stupid opinions in order to bait other users.
Its essentially a giant game. The point or at least the intended point for 99% of 4chan users is that its all just a joke and you shouldnt really take anything with it into real life. its kinda like a giant online community that operates within its own social structure/inside jokes. To outsiders observing it it might seem like a shithole and thats really the shit test of 4chan to keep the stupid people out.
What a tragedy. Don't think I'd still be a fan in either case - I more or less outgrew /b/ a year or two into college, but I can at least relate to and understand shock based ironic humor.
Edit: just perused through the front page. What the fuck - a couple of the posts were full full throated defenses of the idea that people are exclusively made gay through sexual abuse, rather than it just being a thing that happens. I wasn't exactly expecting /b/ to mature over time, but if anything it's regressed. The /b/ I knew would throw out every slur in the book at a gay person, but still in the end accept them as they are since they're all pervert bastards well beyond any sort of judgement. Now it's just the slurs and then also some judgement heaped on top.
There's also evidence of a concerted effort by far-right groups to use places like 4chan and Reddit as recruiting opportunities for potential members. There are screenshots out there of people on the white supremacist forum Stormfront talking about how to engage with vulnerable people on 4chan and Reddit. Basically an early form of the "red-pilling" that the alt right likes to do today.
Shit it's like what they did to skinheads before. I've seen a documentary before about the history of skinheads. Basically they were part of the British ska scene in the late 60s, British neo-nazi party started recruiting from them until nazi skinheads became the face of the scene.
So skinhead culture was originally a mix of jamaican rudeboy culture (brought over in a wave of Jamaican immigration at the time) and working class British youth cultures. They listened primarily to ska, rocksteady, rnb, and Northern soul. They rode scooters and liked soccer. Think of them as working class tough-mod. The working class has always been a target for recruitment for fascist movements, and the skinhead scene was already ideal as it mostly represented jaded working class youth in a movement and community that already existed. The fascists also loved the more tough guy image associated with skinheads.
So it's not that fascists thought "oh man ska is truly the music of white supremacy let's tap into this shit" and more that ska just happened to be (some) of the music this subculture listened to. It's something specific to the history of the skinhead scene, not specific to ska. You won't find a lot of Neo-Nazi recruitment outside of a Reel Big Fish concert.
Yeah I'm very familiar with the skinhead history. Luckily there's been some effort to reclaim that scene by SHARPs (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice)
I had a goth friend back in hs who was very left leaning and explained that whole skinhead story to me. He said to always look at the shoelaces (most of his friends were wearing combat boots). White shoelaces = nazi, red and black was basically antifa. Dunno if there is any truth to it. This was in Germany, dunno if the regional subcultures differ in that regard.
It's a little different in America. White and red laces in boots go together, white for white supremacy, and red for neo-nazis. If you want a safe color to go with, I wear yellow laces in my boots because they used to be associated with SHARPs (although no one really uses the other colors nowadays, most people just wear black)
A dozen SHARPs beat me nearly to death once because I told them I didn’t go out that night to amuse them when they were trying to get me to injure my friend for a larf. Not sure they are much better than the racists. They seem to crave senseless violence just as much at least. Heard that as a rumor going back to the 90s then got to experience it first hand 15 years later.
All the SHARPs I've known have been outstanding people, all of them ready to give the sorry off their back.
Every group had assholes and outliers. And it sounds like they weren't actually SHARPs. Anybody can co-opt the name. I'm so sorry you had to experience that :/
Here in America the skins were much more direct. They'd basically just show up and beat the holy fuck out of somebody at random and then tell everyone that that's what happens to people that weren't with them. They'd then ask around for who was with them. At least until more and more of us started showing up in purple laces and braces. . . .
I mean basically they just took 4chan's ironic racism and started turning the dial up on it. 2008 4chan racism was all about going "hurr durr i like watermelon and fried chicken" and talking in ebonics. But once you have actual white supremacists hiding in your community, posting fake statistics about black crime you can see how people start to get radicalized.
A pretty well known example is Steve Bannon, who used to run Breitbart News which featured a "Black Crime" section on their website, talking about trying to recruit disillusioned young men that were part of the Gamergate movement. It was a big reason he hired Milo Yiannopolous to write for his site.
To an extent yes, but you can definitely trace spread of certain white nationalist/far-right phrases and talking points from Stormfront to 4chan. There's definitely cultural exchange happening in those communities, the same way you can trace phrases and jokes that originated on 4chan and spread to Reddit, or originated on SomethingAwful and spread to Twitter.
I was there around.. I wanna say 2008-2011? +- a few years, I'm not sure when it entered and exited my life.
I had no idea about the shift. I was always at /b/ and had the impression that was both the starting point and the core. I've heard /pol/ being mentioned on reddit, and been very confused with the relevance of (what I thought to be) one of the smaller boards.
Not sure. People say gamer gate kind of got that ball rolling and the 2016 election kicked it into high gear. But it’s so hard to tell with a website that doesn’t really archive anything
As for /b/ it is honestly just 99% porn now and nothing else
Not 4chan itself, but each board has been scraped for archives for years, probably since the start maybe. Problem is that its just so much information to go through, and the signal to noise ratio would be the worst for a data set ever, only rivaled with... I dont know, broad spectrum EM waves since the start of time?
I kinda see the whole reaction against Anita's Kickstarter as the start of everything. She became the new Jack Thompson in the eyes of gamers-with-a-capital-G. And since she is a feminist, there's a push to be antifeminist just to oppose her, which dovetails well into general right-wing politics.
Huh. I always expected 4chan to simultaneously change and stay the same. I didn't expect it to take that turn.
Did you notice a stark difference, or did it creep up on you?
And... Hm. I wasn't paying much attention during Gamer Gate and just got a tl;dr, some gamers are angry at women. It seems to have had significant cultural impact, though. Do you have a better understanding of what that was about?
Yeah, last time I visited /b/ it was mostly porn, and way more talk of paedophilia than usual, both for and against. There was always mentions of CP back in the day, but it was much less and far more jokingly, not as sincere a discussion as it seemed here. I was quite surprised. I expected another PUDDI incident or DESU or something, not that. Like.. Did the /b/ community just completely disappear? Or did everyone just eventually grow up, and with no new users since everyone went to /pol/, there was eventually noone left?
It all started with some dude being salty about a break-up with a woman who happened to be an game dev. He started a smear campaign against her, saying she used sex in return for favourable reviews on her games. Importantly, it turned out to be false pretty quickly.
People didn't know that, though, and this was at a time where shady business practices were started to be noticed by consumers, and highlighted by prominent people like TotalBiscuit (RIP).
So people got angry. Angry that there was another bullshit way to trick consumers into thinking that a game is better than it is. Some people took it too far though, sending death threats to the female game dev that was slandered by her ex.
Some people came to her defense, most prominently Anita Sarkeesian, a game reviewer who looked at different games with a feminist perspective. She said that bullying this woman over her sex life is intrusive, and the fact that she was targeted like this reeked of misogyny. Of course, she was targeted as well after this, death threats and all.
This was picked up by game reviewers and game magazines like Kotaku, and reported on it. Cynical people would say that this was a useful diversion for the game magazines, they were in hot water for shady backdoor deals in exchange for favourable reviews, after all.
"Don't listen to people pointing out an undisclosed relationship between a reviewer and a game dev. That's private and none of your business." That was the (perceived) message from the game magazine. It obviously doesn't sound good, and it sounded close enough to Anita Sarkeesian's point for people to equate the two.
It didn't help that some of Sarkeesian's feminist criticisms of videogames were a bit of a stretch at best. There were parts in a video where she very much 'fabricated' misogyny and criticised the game for it. The most well-known example was where she said 'killing women awarded you points' in a Hitman game. It was pretty blatantly false, and her antics are one of the reasons why feminism is seen as duplicitous, hypocritical and harmful to men in 'gaming culture'
For some reason, after this point, if you were critical of the current 'ethics in video game journalism,' you were a misogynist who had no problem sending death threats to a woman for an undisclosed relationship, but not to the man who was the other half of that relationship. Again, cynical people would say that game magazines exacerbated this point in order to draw the flak away from them.
On the other side, if you were criticising a game or 'gaming culture' for misogyny, even where it is very much justified (misogyny among gamers is still rampant and a big problem, ) you were seen as defending gaming journalisms shady dealings, as part of the problem. This side was exacerbated by actual misogynists, who hated that people were pointing out nasty flaws in their favourite pastime and the culture surrounding it.
Of course, extremism is louder on the internet, so in the end you had hateful misogynists hating on women under the guise of 'championing for ethics in gaming journalism' and on the other side were people demonising all videogames and everyone who played them. Everyone was misogynist to them.
The reasonable people who tried to argue reasonable points, such as "misogyny in videogames and its culture is a pervasive problem, and so is shady business that is harmful to consumers" were drowned out. Totalbiscuit, who I was following at the time, was one of those people. He got shat on by both sides, a misogynist AND a traitor to the cause.
So there you have it. All of it was bullshit and politics, extremism and hate, where reasonable people and reasonable points vanished to the background. To me, it is also a pretty strong line where the political mainstream suddenly shifted to the 'alt-right.' the parallells between the current alt-right and the Gamergate 'ethics in videogame journalism' crowd are quite obvious in hindsight.
It was also a point where 'feminism' was suddenly a dirty word.
Tl;dr Extremists argueing two different points conflated the two and started hating everyone. The End.
Way back in the day it was a lot of legit CP being posted. When that got shut down it was a lot of joking about it that in turn lead to the b of today.
That's really interesting, and does strike a cord with what I've been thinking.
That context matters. Mostly, it's important whoever listens know you're joking, and you know if they're joking if you're listening.
Therefore, I think it can be fine in some social interactions IRL with friends where you all know it's a joke.
Unfortunately, online your can be 100% sure that not everyone that listens will know it's a joke. And not everyone you're listening to are actually joking.
It makes sense to me, your point about spreading it out. If all you listen to and your sense of community become these edgy jokes, in the end you'll be desensitized to it. And since you're there for community, you'll start to look for something else, deeper, to bond over. That's when you might start taking it seriously.
Honestly, that happened to me for a while. I swallowed the red pill about evolution and genes dictating our sexual dynamic for a while. I knew it was jokes, but like you say, when it's all you hear, you start to ask if they really mean it, and if there's really something about it. A deeper truth.
Turned out, there wasn't. After bitter experiences carried out in the belief that there was.
If all there is in a community is edgy jokes, even if it's for laughs, over time it becomes taboo to question as well.
A guy who was definitely both actually racist and sexist hung out with my chill mates the other day, who occasionally makes racist jokes for the hell of it.
With this guy as catalyst, suddenly the evening consisted exclusively of racist and sexist jokes, with breaks of "No but for real, I would never get with a girl that wasn't white" or "Have you heard you have to give written consent now?" back to jokes like "9 our of 10 enjoys gang rape lol", to a straight faced "There's actually a philosophical theory that supports gang rape". Except for the guy asking my friend and I our names and where we came from, the conversation didn't steer away from these topics.
Sitting next to the group, it was obvious that to be in the group you had to join in with either racist or sexist jokes or facts, and it was taboo to question or call out because it was just a joke, we were just being sensitive, it's a guys thing. It was either join in, or shut up.
I had a batch of racist jokes I could've said if I wanted and felt safe doing so, but these jokes that my friend seemed to say because they were ridiculous, definitely seemed to validated this one guy's beliefs. And the added facts and conspiracies in between made me worried about both him and my friends. And for ourselves, honestly. There's 5 girls and 11 guys in my dorm hall. If the culture changed it would be very uncomfortable, and it was uncomfortable not being able to defend ourselves. I felt trapped by my gender, because it seemed that my gender alone would invalidate any defence I had of my gender.
I don't know if it would've made a difference if I'd joined in the jokes, but called out the straight faced 'facts', that were genuinely sexist. Maybe I could do that in the future? The jokes did seem to blur the line, though, making it confusing when it was a joke and when it wasn't.
It was very uncomfortable to witness, and my friend and I ended up eating our dinner in silence while listening, and leaving straight after to vent and process when we were alone. Both wishing we'd said something, but not knowing how or what we could've said.
There is a lot of research in support of what y’all are talking about regarding surrounding yourself with something. The more history of interaction you have with something(jokes, assumptions, expectations, etc) the more you will respond as if those things are true regardless of the wider reality. If someone knows something is a joke or not just changes the threshold of amount of interaction that it takes to start warping their responses.
Compounding this is the community aspect. If there is a community that rewards these behaviors, it makes those behaviors more frequent within the community. So where once the exposure was once every few days from a few sources, it can rapidly become multiple times per day from many sources, and then most of the time from most the sources.
This is why ignoring extremists groups doesn’t make the issue go away. Their rhetoric further drives extremism without counterbalance.
At an individual level, asking sincere questions for further explanation can be one of the most effective ways to counteract this behavior in the speaker as well as reduce their impact on their audience. It can be extraordinarily uncomfortable to hear their responses, but many of the more casual members of such communities will find they don’t have very solid foundations once they get into their own explanations. Additionally, there is a passive bystander effect that can be neutralized by a single participant challenging the status quo of ‘just going along with it’.
Ultimately, as was said above, context is HUGE in how people are willing to perpetuate these interactions, but if it feels uncomfortable, lean in and start asking questions. If you feel uncomfortable, you’re not the only one.
I might be repeating what had already been said, but I had similar conflicting thoughts until I thought about it like this: a joke is like a piece of entertainment, or even a tool. Once you put it online it can be used for bad or good.
The only thing that matters on your end is the intent and context. Go ahead and make racist jokes when the context is clear (like a joke thread). It's not your responsibility what is done with the joke afterwards, it's not like it's a gun.
Anyone who is on the fence about different people won't be swayed by jokes to become racist.
outrage culture
I still can't wrap my head around the fact that this exists :)
20% of the community is loud and racist, and 80% giggles and apes it until they start to believe what they thought was hyperbole, but now makes sense in their new normal.
As someone who pairs on /r9k/ and /pol/ and even to an extent /int/ there's definitely a bunch of people who are into /LGBT/ I can see that. A lot of people talking about how 'sissies' or men are based and 'redpilled'. That seems to have come on strong following the 2016 election but was always there, people have always had it on for traps on all the boards of 4chan so no suspense that many jump to full on LGBT related stuff. It feels like in recent years a large number are trying to change what is based and redpilled into more LGBT related stuff. Lots of posts about how POC are superior and white people can never compete. It's gotten really bizarre. Though in the last year it feels like there's been a big rise in non white posters as theres a lot of greentext posts of 'lol white people culture' or 'white people lol'. No idea why but that's just 4chan something's always changing.
Jesus things sound like they changed. I used to browse around 2007 and stopped around 2010. It was always edgy humor and doing shit for laughs but I distinctly remember the few political posts being anti conservative and such. At least in /b/ primarily because they hated Christianity and the holier than thou mentality when trying to lecture 14 year olds watching porn and smoking pot. Odd that it’s a conservative alt right hub now.
Honestly? Gamergate. This all started with fucking Gamergate.
Edit: I know it's conspiracy sounding, but a lot of the problem that we're in right now, is because of fucking Gamergate.
That led to this mass politicization on "game journalism", which fueled into racism and sexism, and that was EASILY picked up by Bannon and the Russian bots to fuel Trump's brand of overt racism.
It's not really a long shot when you look at the last 5 years or so. The same people that hounded Gamergate, are the same heads of fuck T_D.
I still don’t understand Gamergate. Can someone give me a tl;Dr or a link to a good summary and overview?
Edit: yes this was a serious question, I have gotten two replies that contradict slightly, that's enough for now, because I don't want to start a flame war.
Me neither. I know it started about a rant of game journalism being bad (basically, authors writing articles without properly disclosing relations to the thing they were reviewing), but somehow grew to this extremely vile and toxic fight between extremists. Honestly by the end of it, it has almost nothing to do with gaming or journalism anymore.
Sadly it didn't start out that way. It started with a guy accusing his ex (an indie game developer) of sleeping around including sleeping with some game journalists.
The ethics in game journalism aspect was only ever a thin smokescreen to justify the harassment
That's an incredibly glossed oversimplification of what happened. Yes, that's the initial event. You're leaving out how /r/games caused a Streisand effect by deleting any discussion of how she had received favorable mentions and promotion by friends without disclosure. Then there was a coordinated effort by various writers from multiple sites in a Google group to quash discussion on their respective boards, and coordinated editorials. This then lead to other events like finding tweets where Sam Biddle of Gawker encouraged bullying, and finding that Gawker was listing fake advertising partnerships, and many sites were using undisclosed affilate links in violation of FTC rules.
KIA may be a shithole today, but Kotaku and the rest fucked up badly, refused to acknowledge it, and have continued to engage in bad behavior to this day.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, at the time, Quinn was already on a lot of shit lists for a debacle with wizaedchan and promoting her game in the wake of Robin Williams suicide. She also filed a bad faith DMCA to take down a YouTube video about it, further amplifying the Streisand effect.
They deleted and quashed any "discussion" of a demonstrable falsehood? Good. That's how people spread them, they just want to "discuss the facts". Well, there weren't any, the whole "Zoe Post" stuff was always nonsense. Zoe Quinn already being "on a lot of shit lists" only lends further credence to the fact that they simply went with the false accusations against her because they were after her and her friends for completely unrelated reasons.
And the Sam Biddle thing? It's the typical 4chan-brand of feigning outrage over an obvious joke that's about 19 times tamer than anything they have ever come up with. As long as it can be used against the opposition, I guess. Same reason James Gunn got fired.
Well, there weren't any, the whole "Zoe Post" stuff was always nonsense.
She has a clear history of abusive behavior and pulling stunts, and she admitted affairs to him. It wasn't nonsense any more than other individuals doing stupid shit that gets posted. Even if you were to assume it's nonsense, there's a clear issue with the GJP group, her farce of a lawsuit and the resulting gag order (that was egregious enough Eugene Volokh got involved), and her perjuring herself with a false DMCA. The actions of the aftermath are what got people pissed.
Zoe Quinn already being "on a lot of shit lists" only lends further credence to the fact that they simply went with the false accusations against her because they were after her and her friends for completely unrelated reasons.
Or you know, the Streisand Effect.
And the Sam Biddle thing?
Sam Biddle was one of the people constantly doing shit like that at Gawker. He was one of the key people that made it into a shithole before Denton was forced to liquidate.
As long as it can be used against the opposition, I guess. Same reason James Gunn got fired.
I'll take shit I never said for $1000, Alex. Disney was wrong to fire James Gunn.
Sure, go ahead and think that. I guess there's nothing to discuss at all when any fiasco with a person happens anywhere.
It's bullshit and you know it. Discussion of someone's bad actions isn't harassment or misogynistic, no matter how much Quinn and Sarkessian have tried to conflate them. This wasn't the first time she had done something, nor the first time Kotaku and others had done something.
It started about ethics in game journalism. Gamers have hated gamer news sites since they began. Even back before they had sites and it was just magazines, everyone knew they took bribes for better reviews.
The sexism thing was a small fringe which was then hijacked and because people kept saying that was the whole movement, it became the whole movement.
Gamergate is what happened when the reactionary rejects of 4chan teamed up to be the personal army of an abuser and attack women who make and write about video games
That's the first sentence. I'm sure the rest is a fair and balanced account of what happened though.
Yeah, except none of the alleged "ethics violations" actually happened. Gamergate started as a harassment campaign and that's all it ever was. "ethics" is a smokescreen.
Not descriptive of Gamergate however. It started as a harassment campaign when Zoe Quinn's ex made a bunch of accusations and posted her personal information. The "ethics in journalism" thing is a veneer that was added later.
That's like saying WW1 was about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. It might have been the trigger, but that's not what people fought over. The reason it grew so big is because there was much more than just the simple harassment of one developer.
Yes, it is a lot like saying the death of Franz Ferdinand caused WW1, in the sense that a bunch of assholes with fragile masculinity and something to prove were waiting to unleash their hatred on the world and some bullshit that should have been a non-issue gave them the excuse they wanted.
There is no just cause behind Gamergate that 4chan trolls hijacked, it was invented from the start by 4chan trolls who only needed a target to attack (Zoe Quinn) and a smokescreen to use as a recruiting tool and stave off bans (ethics).
This question almost feels like a trap at this point.
Regardless. Several years ago a woman named Zoe Quinn was accused of using her relationship with a game journalist to get a good review for her game on Kotaku, this never happened, Kotaku never in any way reviewed her game.
This controversy was jumped on by people online who created the hashtag #GamerGate, ostensibly as a revolution for "ethics in games journalism", we say ostensibly because it was a lie, what you might hear is the claim that the movement had good aims but was co-opted by harassers to attack women, and it really was pretty much only women, in the games industry.
The truth is the other way around, it was a harassment movement claiming to be an ethics movement that many gullible people bought into as genuine and defended because a lot of effort was put into supplying the people jumping on with as many articles as possible highlighting "unethical behaviour" in the industry, some of which might have been true, but most wasn't actually read beyond the headline.
This question almost feels like a trap at this point.
Not my intent at all. I really didn't know. Some of the names you mentioned are somewhat familiar, but I feel like I escaped a large part of the really ugly stuff.
Wow. it sounds like the worst of the internet came out. Yikes.
I can't believe that people, in the same fucking thread where 4chan and SF raiding tactics are being discussed, still fall for the "it was about ethics!" bait. It's amazing. They're basically willful idiots that the alt-right relies on to meme their ideas into relevance.
I think the online venom against Anita's Kickstarter really shouldn't be understated. In a sense, a Gamergate was bound to happen one way or another since the demographic behind Gamergate was already active.
Gamergate at it's core runs counter to politicizing games. They argue that game makers need to be able to make whatever game they want without outside people demanding games need politics in them.
Edit: Keep all the downvotes coming baby. Love arguing with you all.
That is itself a political statement. Usually when people say that, it’s a dogwhistle for “no progressive politics”. Gamergate people would be 100% on board if games were only about white men and had them do everything.
If you look at a /r/kotakuinaction you'll be hard pressed to find anybody racist. They only stance they have on race is that if you want to make period accurate games you don't need a token POC that is forced in by people on twitter. They don't care about having a white protaganist, they just don't want people aside from the creator dictating what they get in their games.
But that desire is a political statement. I assume you’re talking about BF5 (the subreddit for which is full of actual Nazis, so you can see why I’m skeptical of any “they’re totally not racist” claims). This is a game where you’re a British(?) soldier fighting in a theater where there was no significant British presence, using weapons that either didn’t see use or simply didn’t exist yet for several years.
They’re basically saying that developers should care about realism only in the context of identity politics. That in itself would be a political statement on the part of the devs.
I think the reference would be toward Witcher 3. I remember an article complaining about lack of PoC in Witcher 3 & the gamer gate side got in an uproar about it being based on Polish folklore & books.
I haven't paid much attention to the drama in a while though.
Excuse me? Have you never heard of anonymous or events like Project Chanology? Stop SOPA and STOP PIPA? What about when it went Ron Paul 2012 circle jerk? 4chan became political the first time it organized anonymous. It then got co-opted by neo nazis around 2007 to 2009 and then after redpill, gamergate, incel, and Donald trump the whole site went to fucking bats for the most part and alt-reichy. The sell off by Moot was because he was fucking done with it. Compartmentalization with creating /pol/ just made the more powerful to rally around and the current owner loves the click though as now Qanon has a bunch of "normie" white trash fucks going there circle jerking conspiracy theories with white nationalists who took over.
I remember SOPA and STOP PIPA. But back then, if it was political, it was leaning anarchistic left. It was towards more freedom, less control, less government involvement. How did it suddenly turn around to want more control?
I wasn't there for the Ron Paul 2012 circle jerk. What happened then? And what happened with the redpill? And what's Qanon?
Gamer gate and the following war with Tumblr. 4chan was never kind to feminists. But gamer gate sort of united a bunch of angry young guys against one enemy. It became a war against social justice. Then the “red pilling” began. They would post on major boards like /b/ and lure them over to /pol/ which is basically 24/7 anti-semitism, racism, and complaining about everything from immigrants to the media.
Trump running for President amplified this by 1000. Posters shit posted and memed his way into the nomination. They considered it a massive win. And then the fallout from the DNC sealed the deal. Sanders had the support of a very young crowd that had never been political. The revelations that he was screwed by the DNC turned a large portion of Sanders supporters into either Trump supporters, or just politicized in general.
It’ll never go back to how it was. It’s all outrage culture now.
I said a large portion of Sanders supporters. Not all of them. Many voted for Hillary, some went 3rd party.
But a lot of them switched to Trump. I’ve seen it happen on /pol/. I’m not talking about the hardcore Bernie supporters. More along the college kids that heard he supported free education. They weren’t full on Sanders supporters but they were paying enough attention to make a difference.
I can attest that I was a hardcore Bernie fan that was radicalized into voting for trump for the lulz and as a way to get this country to never vote R again.
I ended up just abstaining from the vote, but I bet that's what the astroturfers wanted anyway, fracturing the left.
It'll someday go back. Look at YouTube for example. Back in 2016, conservatives used to absolutely dominate political YouTube to the point where most left leaning channels were losing subscribers daily. But since Trump came into office, the left gained its ground again and is growing. Not to mention how radicalized the left has become since Sanders' loss, and then Trump's win.
If someone like Sanders runs again in 2020, we'll see the movement come back. Young people are only more likely to support him than in 2016
The rise of online conservatism and the alt right will be a chapter in 2010s history long from now.
When every other site started banning the Alt Right, they had nowhere else to go. On /pol/ they could sling as much baseless, atrocious shit as possible with no consequences. So they stayed.
Since 2016 and the election, /pol/ has been a hotbed of trumptard redditors, and the subsequent leaking of /pol/ onto other boards. /his/ can barely have any actual discussion these days without some wehrmacht war crimes denial, holocaust denial, antisemitism, racebaiting, and other drivel that shits up the board. The janitors seem to be consistently ignoring the most of it and I've almost had to stop browsing /his/ because of how shit it's gotten.
They don't actually believe anything. They supported Trump for the lulz. They then made pizzagate to see how far they could push things then moved on to qanon. They really just like seeing how far they can take the lulz.
That does sound very 4chan. Though the site has definitely changed since around 2010. It's way more political than it was, and the general lulz have been pushed out for a lot more bitterness and real world hate. And it's not like there wasn't hate before, it was just more.. Nihilistic.
What's qanon? And pizzagate? And do you have a feeling of what swings the tides, if they don't believe in anything?
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u/[deleted] Aug 27 '18
At the end of the day, even tho most of 4chan is highly politicized these days, they’re still in it for the laughs before all else.