[wegfawefgawefg]

To add context, every male in my high school went on that site. Pol was just a place crazy people posted. We used to laugh and read eachother dumb copypastas at lunch with gorgonzola cheese rhymes and bad puns.

The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.

[Philpax]

Hmm, I'm not sure all 15 year old boys do, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Buffalo_shooting

[wegfawefgawefg]

Do you remember when people thought first person shooters made people into murderers because the colombine guy played doom a lot and made a custom wad to simulate the attack?

If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.

Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.

[ogurechny]

Nitpicking:

a) It seems that no one actually saw the school map to state that it really exists.

b) Doom maps are flat 2D blueprints with varying floor heights, they are quite unsuitable to “simulate” any building with multiple floors, not to mention complete lack of realism in everything else in the game (say, player has a speed of a car relative to the environment). There are some tricks in modern ports to combine detached level geometry into seemingly whole thing for niche maps, but those were not available at the time.

c) Trying to copy one's own school, house, or city block is the most stereotypical thing kids do when they find the level design tools. I remember quite a number of Counter-Strike maps that were nice at least visually, if not gameplay-wise, which were made that way. Surely, not everyone put that much work into a typical map made to play a couple of times with friends.

It seems that cases of overreaction to such funny nonsense that still happen after 30 years, despite everything, are something to scratch your head about.

The real situation is more complex. Harris did use game metaphors: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Of course, those cliches are not unique to Doom, and were just borrowed from comics and fantasy. We should generalise. The real hypocrisy is that people like to enjoy media and entertainment about The Hero domination everything and everyone, and don't want to be restricted in consuming that, but, at the same time, they don't like to become mere film extras that get shot by the dozen when some idiot believes in that fantasy a bit too much, and decides to live the dream. This is not limited to shootings. If you hate people so much, but instead of getting guns and ammo get yourself hired by social network data extraction press, it's not a straight path to electric chair, but a “successful IT career”. If you read trashy action packed novels, and consider that crippled offspring of romanticism as ideal life, you can try that high-adrenaline amusement ride, as long as it happens in some distant land, and can be called “military career” by others.

So media and entertainment significantly shape everyone's life, but limiting that argument to a small number of scapegoat cases is cowardice.

[wegfawefgawefg]

The general point though is if 99.999% of people doing a thing are fine, but one wacko who likes the thing does a shooting, the evidence for causal connection between the thing and the wackos impetus is beneath the noise floor.

If you are trying to make the argument that The Heros Journey is subtely toxic and evil, well thats just too sophisticated an argument for me. 70% of humanity believes in god. We live beyond truth and measure. Welcome to monkey planet.

[Philpax]

There's a difference between monkey-see-monkey-do and intentional group self-radicalisation. You don't become a racist neo-Nazi teenage mass murderer de novo.

[asdff]

A subset of the population will always be murderous and delusional about something. Just a fact of biology that not everyone is physically or mentally fit.

[Philpax]

Sure. It's probably not a good thing we have spaces designed to cook the brains of users to the extent that their weakest links are driven to act on their worst impulses and commit ideologically-driven murder, though.

I'm generally on the side of free speech, but having visited /pol/, I can't say it is/was a good place for its inhabitants or society at large.

[asdff]

I didn't realize ideologically-driven murder was an internet phenomenon

[pjc50]

Perhaps the average one does, but some get sucked in, and if there's no Nazi factory where are all the nazis coming from?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqx4wlynjw5o

How many mass shooters had obvious 4chan radicalization roots? Christchurch definitely.

> everything you read online is false

In its own way, this is also poisonous. It enables holocaust denialists and anti-vaxxers: after all, vaccines and holocaust memorials are on the mainstream internet, so they must be false, right?

[asdff]

Next you will be asking for trump to ban rap music to stop drug trafficking

[wegfawefgawefg]

A healthy skepticism is good.

Have you gone on social media recently? It is like 90% nonfactual weirdness. Even here on hackers news its tons of mutually exclusive unfalsifiable assertions of perspective, not fact.

I dont know about your family, but mine is pretty religious. Listening to their conversation during thanksgiving gives me about a 90% nonfact rate.

I think humans are just are not beings of fact in general.

[GuinansEyebrows]

They didn’t in 4chans heyday and they certainly don’t now. Hell, adults with decades of life experience can’t figure this out either.

[rescbr]

> The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.

The real problem is when the internet leaks and boomers assume everything they read online is true.

Worst part of it all? My parents always told me not to trust what's on the internet, and now I have to tell them 99% of what they see on FB or whatever is AI trash and lies.

[LinuxBender]

Adding even more context /pol/ is about who can be the most edgy edgelord of the hour. I doubt there are more than half a dozen actual racists people on it not counting 4Chan-GPT.

[trealira]

It's not hard to find people with a racist /pol/er's opinions in real life, or on other social media like Instagram or Twitter. Maybe /pol/ in particular is/was filled with bots, I don't know, but such extreme racism is not as uncommon as you imply these days.

[LinuxBender]

They put on a good show. Real racist people post videos of the f&#$ed up things they do to others that I won't even describe here. They know better than to use a clear-web site especially one using a CDN to show off their behavior. Those forums are on Tor.

4chan is nearly all angsty edgy teens on their cell phones at school trying to act tough and edgy and even they get arrested when talking tough about cops or pulling shenanigans like defacing or vandalizing property to be cool. That's a different interesting topic. Search youtube for all the 4chan unstable kids getting arrested. It's on-par with all the unstables vandalizing Tesla cars.

[trealira]

Well, I believe you that there are lots of kids there that try to seem racist for 4chan cred, and I guess people would know not to post videos of themselves doing those illegal things.

But I remember they had stuff like "n*gger chimpout" compilation threads, and whenever people talk about what they blame on Jews, they seem to be actually bitter and angry, so they do seem legitimately racist. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of overlap with the people who do commit those acts of violence you're talking about, but even if not, I don't think you could say they're not real racists just because they don't post videos of themselves committing violent hate crimes. The board is just diluted by low-effort threads and bait by users of other boards.

[LinuxBender]

But I remember they had stuff like "ngger chimpout" compilation threads*

I guess that's why we don't really see quite eye-to-eye on this. I've seen all those threads and to me that's just kids being edgy because they know it triggers or activates people. Every group has it's trash and they are just singling out one specific groups shenanigans. The same behavior can be found of every breed of human and they would post it if it was edgy to do so. My breed has no shortage of dumb behavior but when it's posted people feel comfortable laughing at it thus it's not edgy or taboo enough.

As a side note, most of the kids on 4chan are also here on HN. They talk about this site, its users and dang all the time. I'm sure they are not happy that I am pointing out they are just LARPing.

[trealira]

Compilation threads like those seem to me more like ways to make each other angrier and more racist. I think they legitimately just hate black people. Like, there's definitely some element of smug self-aware memey edginess about being racist, but there's also unironic vitriolic racism. But yeah, I guess we just disagree here on this.