[xwdv]

It’s not really a negative actually. In order to create good shock-garbage you need to be aware of what is actually shocking. That means the people posting this know some difference between right and wrong, they just choose the wrong path for the purpose of entertainment because the rest of their life is spent going down the boring right path. There’s so many colorful ways to say wrong things but only a handful of ways to say right things.

It would be more concerning if they actually believed their monstrous opinions in earnest and were not even posting them anonymously.

[meowface]

I moderately agree, but

>It would be more concerning if they actually believed their monstrous opinions in earnest and were not even posting them anonymously.

There are still plenty of people who believe their monstrous opinions in earnest but exclusively post them anonymously because they know they would be direly ostracized if they posted anything akin to it with their real identity, or perhaps even a pseudonymous identity.

There absolutely are many people who fall into the other category that you describe, but on an anonymous website like 4chan, the ratio between the sincere and non-sincere hateful and/or psychotic and/or psychopathic posters unfortunately seems to have started gradually skewing further and further towards the former over time. Especially starting after 2014, once Gamergate etc. signaled (and maybe partly caused) the current wave of ideological polarization we've all been living in since.

As the aphorism goes, "Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."

(Commonly misattributed to Descartes but actually coined by an HN poster in 2009, in reference to 4chan /b/: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082)

[xwdv]

How can you prove they are sincere though? It’s Poe’s Law in action.

[meowface]

You can't fully prove it, but there are usually context clues.

There are and will always be posts that are totally ambiguous. "Sincerity" false negatives are probably common. But if you have enough experience in a certain community, you start to be able to pick up on subtle things. False positives are probably not that high.

It's a bit difficult to explain, but it's basically like distinguishing actually crazy people from people faking it. (And that's often exactly what you're doing on anonymous sites, too.) If you have a large enough set of writing samples of two ostensibly schizophrenic people, where one is faking it and one is real, there are certain patterns that only the most brilliant and dedicated and seasoned of trolls can authentically mimic. Most trolls tend to not be that masterful.

https://youtu.be/Mwt35SEeR9w is one example of what I'm talking about.