[Lascaille]

>Bodybuilding.com misc & 4chan are super toxic communities.

They're places that provide access to actual human beings though. So many other online communities - especially ones with wide readership - are astroturfed into oblivion.

My take on it is that having to deal mentally with lunatics howling at the moon and screaming about the upcoming Great Replacement is the price you pay for access to actual opinions. That screaming horde is what keeps the astroturfers and consent manufacturers out.

[newaccount74]

> the price you pay for access to actual opinions

But you only see opinions of people who are willing to tolerate the torrent of abusive posts. You won't see the opinions of the silent majority who see the stupid flamewars and decide they'll spend their time elsewhere.

[bluecalm]

Some 4chan forums are completely hopeless (/pol for example) but on others you can find a lot of interesting stuff. As a general rule: as long as it's not politics the discussion is often interesting but then again, it's the case about everywhere.

[Lascaille]

>on others you can find a lot of interesting stuff

There's value to be gleaned from /pol/ if you can stand the lunatics. The skychan threads sometimes yield some interesting conjecture.

4chan is currently the best place for realtime ukraine war footage and analysis, in my opinion.

[s5300]

> There's value to be gleaned from /pol/ if you can stand the lunatics.

While I don’t particularly deny this

> 4chan is currently the best place for realtime ukraine war footage and analysis

Is most definitely a no.

Oddly enough, Reddit seems to be the best for footage, with Telegram likely coming second.

As for analysis, Twitter without a doubt. Is there a load of absolute horse shit? Of course. If you don’t know how to detour that, you shouldn’t care much in the first place.

The only good thing that has come out of 4chan regarding this war is the cope cage. That is indeed hilarious.

[kodah]

There's a certain amount of irony that leaks from a thread talking about how depraved 4chan is that devolves to someone rating the best place to find war footage. I served in a war and I don't think I've watched a minute of footage outside of two documentaries.

[Lascaille]

I'm not saying that I enjoy watching war footage, I'm saying that there's a severe dearth of it in conventional media, to the extent that for the first three days of the war I was saying to myself 'is this war really happening, apparently the tanks are rolling in, where's the footage?'

[Werewolf255]

You're acting like the opinions on these forums are strongly held and like there aren't a significant minority of people 'trying on' personas or personality traits in order to see how others respond to them. I don't see how that's a meaningful distinction from people who have made the color beige their sole personality trait and strongly believe in manufacturing consent at the cost of all other goals.

[Lascaille]

>I don't see how that's a meaningful distinction from people who have made the color beige their sole personality trait

I'm not really sure how to respond to that. It's intrinsically different. It's getting responses from people who don't care what their neighbour thinks about them vs getting responses from people who care in the utmost what their neighbour thinks of them. One is intrinsically likely to be more unfiltered than the other.

If you want to know what sentiment a community actually holds you have to seek out all types of opinions.