[sudosysgen]

It is and it isn't. These kinds of people are just much more dilute on Reddit, and is much bigger than 4chan.

On a bit of an off-topic, the progression of 4chan from where it was in ~2013 to where it is today is fascinating.

[ashtonkem]

Reddit tends to be a lot less nuts than 4chan, but when Reddit gets locked into a thing a lot of people follow the trend.

[heavyset_go]

"Gamergate"[1] broke a lot of brains all across the internet in 2014 and for several years later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

[imtringued]

Gamegate is pretty much what you get when you have corrupt game review sites. When people do backroom deals to buy good reviews with money there is always plausible deniability so the powder keg was already there, it was just waiting for the fuse to trigger.

The fuse was triggered by a random computer novel getting a 10/10 review because the reviewer had a relationship with the developer of the novel. "Gamers" don't go to game review sites to see the reviewer's girlfriend's computer novels. Corruption became extremely obvious now and was given a visible face called Zoe Quinn and therefore everyone started directing their hate against media to that visible face. Of course the media then tried to spin it as an anti women thing even though it was an anti media thing. Obviously media reporting won't be reporting negatively about itself. Nobody is going to release articles about how many bribes they have taken to promote certain games.

[Ekaros]

Game reviews being bought by publishers is a long known fact, even from 90s. Maybe not direct money exchanging hands, but pages for early access and such. And everyone knows to laugh at IGN's and others' reviews. Knowing that they are just paid for hypemachines... Or at least don't dare to be truely critical for fear of not getting access next time. Still they do deliver marketing briefs in nice package so they kinda have a place.

What really triggered the gamergate was that writers directly attacked their audiences, with suspiciously similar articles from multiple-source at nearly same time. And that they care more about themselves and their buddies than their audience. And many don't even self-identify as hobbyist... Which really should be death knell for any hobbyist media.

[ralfd]

I think the underlying cause is that the business model changed. In the past, up to 2010, the gaming media were mostly physical paper magazines and were bought by gamers with hard cash. If they didn’t cater to gamers they would simply lose their audience.

But nowadays gaming media is much broader, from some random blog or YouTube let’s play channel to bigger news sites. And online news attention is everything and controversies are just generating more clicks.

[Izkata]

That whole article needs to be taken with a very heavy dose of skepticism. The whole controversy was essentially consumers vs media, and wikipedia only takes "verified sources" - that is, media - so it's heavily biased.

[dannyw]

I'm fascinated by this topic. Do you have any writeups you'd recommend for further reading?

[sudosysgen]

I don't really, I experienced it first-hand. This article seems okay though : https://lithub.com/from-anon-to-alt-right-the-dangerous-tric...

[dannyw]

Thanks to oldhatemach for the writeup. I appreciate it.

[sudosysgen]

oldhatemachs write-up is inaccurate. 4chan isn't what it is because it's a magical place of anonymity where your opinions are considered in a vacuum. 4chan is what it is because, as time goes on, the website attracted the people that were getting banned from pseudonymous websites. As these kinds of people accumulated and accumulated, the website became progressively more toxic in every way, which drove out people who didn't enjoy that, which gave the most toxic members hegemony.

It's also not true that 4chan has stopped doxxes and raids. Just yesterday /pol/ was full of people that were scouring everything they could to doxx the security guard involved in the shooting. 4chan was also counterraiding the leftist bunkerchan to have revenge on them making a meme about the facial features of the kind of people that enjoy /pol/.

And it's also wrong that 4chan is a paragon of free speech. It used to be, but as the userbase started harboring more and more fascists, and as more and more of them became janitors, they started censoring leftist posters unless they refrained from, well, anything that makes a Chan a Chan.

4chan in general is also highly resistant to evidence that goes against their narrative, and won't shy away from accusing the authors of any study they disagree with of being part of a Jewish conspiracy.

Most of all, the biggest meme in that post was calling /pol/ "slightly grown up from their libertarian idealism, [...] now with a hint of conservatism". /pol/ is openly fascist. As in, Julius Evola, Swastika, Black Sun, genocide, kind of fascist.

People who spend their time talking about the day of the rope being censored isn't what drove them to violent tendencies, what drove them to violent tendencies is a mix of being socially recluse, racist, white males, egged on by literal Nazis who saw the opportunity to radicalized them, all of that in a community so repulsive to anyone else that few enjoy being there.

It's not even that creative either. The main mascot of /pol/ was stolen from some random webcomic, the wojak came from Krautchan, and so on. It's just slight memes from someone else's art and a few puns. It's not a main creative force of the internet, far from it.

Those are the dynamics behind 4chan becoming what it is. Purely anonymous websites in a pseudonymous majority will inevitably become a disaster. That poster is someone who was carried down the rabbit hole and can't realize just how extreme and wrong their opinions are, who can't realize what their values became, trying to convince themselves their worldview and website isn't as insane as it is.