Yeah you can argue that /pol/ sways far right and you'd be correct, and I don't personally condone most of the opinions that are represented there, but take a look at the general threads, you have a pro-ukraine one and an anti-ukraine one, both with equal representation. I can't think of any other site that has this. Any other website following the classical formula of pseudonyms and upvotes/downvotes, like Reddit, hackernews, and so on, are destined to be an echo chamber. You can feel it here too, even though HN is heavily moderated.
And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse.
If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.
Laughing to myself imagining the people believing you, thinking “hmm methinks I could use a little intellectual diversity in my bubble”, they click over to 4chan, take a big sip of coffee, and… actually look at it. lol
e: I’ll concede you can find different opinions there. Just, I wanna see a video feed of an unsuspecting person actually trying to go there to, like, learn.
There's an adjustment period to understand each boards specific signal:noise. You can't just walk in and find Aristotle and Kant figuring shit out.
Each board has its ridiculous bullshit, groupthink, absurd extremists, edgelords, etc. once you know how to parse that you can quickly navigate to quality posts.
Each board of course has different signal:noise though, somewhere like /lit/ is probably 1:20 whereas /pol/ is probably 1:500-1/1000. But the quality posts are totally different from what you'll find anywhere else. Different users and audience.
>e: I’ll concede you can find different opinions there. Just, I wanna see a video feed of an unsuspecting person actually trying to go there to, like, learn.
Learning about opposing viewpoints doesn't count as learning?
Surely at this point half the content on /pol/ is from professional propagandists and LLM-powered bots, trying to create the impression of a "4chan consensus" to sway anyone stupid enough to be taken in by that.
Why would professional propagandists care to influence a mongolian basket weaving forum? Even if they do succeed, their audience is going to be largely social outcasts with very little power or influence in society.
What, you prefer a bubble? Things were far better before the opposing viewpoints walled themselves off and refused to communicate with the people who disagreed with them. Isn't the political divide one of the big problems in (US) society these days?
> Yeah you can argue that /pol/ sways far right and you'd be correct, and I don't personally condone most of the opinions that are represented there, but take a look at the general threads, you have a pro-ukraine one and an anti-ukraine one, both with equal representation. I can't think of any other site that has this.
It's not so much the voting that makes things lopsided but when posts are ordered or deemphasized based on those votes or if the actual moderators are opposed to free speech ideals. I can think of at least two low-moderation forums that do manage to host people of opposing opinions for the Ukraine war and other topics so it's not like 4chan is particularly unnique, just bigger and better known.
> You're free to go on there and deride any white nationalists you see
Yes but you can do this anywhere. There are a limited number of places where you can openly be a white nationalist without being banned, 4chan is one of them.
That's a weird way to frame a truly free speech environment. Yes, speech is more limited to left-leaning speech on most accepted parts of the internet. That doesn't make a board that allows both to be right-leaning. It means that most of the internet is left-leaning.
Ofc, im simplifying to left vs right here, but that's only in response to calling it a right leaning board.
Truly free, as in no limitation. I would include doxing, slander, and defamation to fall under "truly free speech", yes. That it not me advocating for these things, it is me calling limiting them what it is: limiting speech. We limit them because they can be very dangerous or destructive, not because they aren't speech.
You can also be a communist. You can also be an open source maximalist. You can also be a gay dog furry. You can also be trans. You can also be extremely autistic.
It is good to have a place where people can exist as themselves and be exposed to different ideas. I would wager that most people who go there are far more accepting than the general population.
What is it that you feel like you gain from being exposed to white nationalism?
Being unfazed by horrors isn't a virtue, having scarred your soul like this isn't something to be proud of. You should be uncomfortable talking to a nazi! You should be more than uncomfortable!
Someone might say the same thing about trans people. Should I be extremely uncomfortable talking to a trans person? Of course not. Many people think I should though.
As for white nationalists, when engaging in discussion with someone you disagree with you have the opportunity to change their mind.
We're all human. We won't always agree. I'm happy to meet everybody as human beings.
You don't have the opportunity to change their mind that's an illusion that works in their favor:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
When you do stuff like this all you are doing is giving them a platform, letting them do PR for their hideous causes. They can calmly discuss the very existence of a group of people and then exit when it suits them. A member of that group is, rightfully, unlikely to have that sort of calm intellectual distance from a conversation about their right to exist.
>But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly
You don't have to watch your words on 4chan though. You can literally just make fun of them.
You can larp as whoever you want to get a rise out of whoever you want. That is mostly what the site is. While you're larping as a nazi you're being exposed to every other political point of view, every gender, every race, and every sexuality.
How many real nazis do you think are comfortable looking at femboy threads all day? Is that really their choice forum? Hate speech and anthropomorphic dogs?
Discarding people rather than their views and arguments is what creates extremists. When you see people as members of a group rather than individuals then you push them towards the extremists of that group.
Edgelords that argue for sport exist of course but they too are people - and might not even believe in whatever ideologies they are meming.
> Someone might say the same thing about trans people.
Sure, they might, but it'd be ridiculous.
Being a white nationalist is a choice someone makes (and continues to make every day) whereas being trans is not.
Further, white nationalism is associated with bigoted actions (including speech) whereas trans is just someone's personal identity that doesn't really affect anyone else. The two aren't remotely comparable.
I don't agree with white nationalism but I don't believe it is a choice someone makes. For the most part, you can't choose to believe something or not. Sure, you can choose to not engage in the actions and speech characteristic of white nationalists, but so can trans people stay closeted.
And you should be uncomfortable talking to someone who is indifferent about supporting industrialized animal torture that is also destroying the climate, just because animals are "lesser" or "created by God for us to eat". But that's like, whatever, not the reprehensible evil in fashion.
Unrelated to this topic, but I don't see a logical way around this.
I guess I shouldn't talk to anyone. Almost unironically. Or should disengage from people who push into my boundaries, who would turn me into a worse person. So any white supremacist who keeps trying to "convince" me would be substantially worse than a meat eater who respects my views and doesn't push.
No, it is NOT ok to be a communist. Communists and white nationalists are morally equivalent, though communism to date has a much higher body count than white nationalism and their methods of execution and torture have on balance been more savage and more brutal.
on that grounds it’s also not ok to be a capitalist… maybe I’m not familiar enough with communism but I didn’t think it inherently included genocide like white nationalism tends to?
A money quote for those who can't be bothered to read: Ultimately, the Cambodian genocide led to the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people, around 25% of Cambodia's population.
And people still want to be communists. Ideology is strange.
This post really illustrates the expansion of terms into meaninglessness. One presumes they're referring to the Allies (who themselves would now be considered extremely racist) stopping the Nazis, who allied with the Japanese and were targeting/killing mostly Jewish and Slavic peoples. The Nazis were specifically pro-German/Aryan and whatever they thought that meant ethnically. They did not see things in today's racial terms. It's absurd to describe them as "white nationalists" because they didn't think that being "white" was good. There were a lot of "bad" "white" people in their worldview.
It also seems unlikely that the Nazis would have succeeded in killing many more millions of people than they did without Allied intervention, but at least this requires some unprovable speculation about alternative histories. Either way, can we stop fighting battles almost a century old? Today's bad guys are not yesterday's and yesterday's good guys are not today's good guys.
It's definitely not OK to a be communist. One of the most hurtful ideologies out there. Proven again and again. It's definitely not OK to be a fascist or an islamist either.
For what it's worth, you can openly be a white nationalist (or black nationalist, or any other kind of racial nationalist) on most social media, even here on Hacker News.
However, you will be moderated if you say anything extremely violent/racist on most social media sites. That's a good thing, in my opinion. I can understand if someone doesn't think it's a good thing that that content is moderated.
I'd take the argument that 4chan isn't a site for the far-right more seriously if 4chan didn't have these explicit rules which they don't enforce (or selectively enforce). But it's pretty clear what kind of rules are allowed to be broken on that site and what kind of rules aren't allowed to be broken. Take one glance at /pol/ for an example.
I disagree. Most websites don't allow white nationalism, so there aren't any white nationalists to bully. On websites like Facebook or reddit, you're either screaming into the void or preaching to the choir.
And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse.
If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.