Do people actually give these things merit on 4chan, or is it just a joke/dog whistle? I mean, it's sort of funny seeing someone go down the most braindead "critical thinking" episode I've ever seen, but there's no way anyone goes, "Holy.... shit... he's so right!" and mean it seriously. I refuse to believe people are literally that stupid.... But that could be on me, I guess.

[–] MrGG@lemmy.ca 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I haven't been active on 4chan in well over a decade so I can't speak to the state of it now. Do you know anything about "Project Chanology"? Around 2008 a whole lot of us "/b/tards" decided to take on the Church of Scientology, and even went outside and protested in front of their churches. Given the reputation of 4chan-ers as being deplorable neck-bearded basement-dwellers most people were shockingly well-adjusted normal people in person. I would describe it as normal people who found it entertaining to be as shocking as possible online, almost as a form of satire (and possibly against the rapid commercialisation of the internet, would be my guess based on my own experience), but were nothing like their online personas (in the majority of cases). But every once in a while you'd come across someone who didn't quite pick up that it was satire, probably because they had pre-existing bigotries and were looking for like-minded people. (Think about how TheDonald started off as satire, but was quickly co-opted by people that took it seriously).

This particular screenshot reads like satire to me, but the problem is you don't know for sure and odds are good that someone will take it seriously, co-opt the conversation, and turn it into something very serious. That's part of why I starting avoiding 4chan, it used to be offensive memes for that sake of shocking like-minded people / friends, but it eventually became used as a propaganda or recruitment tool for people that weren't "in on the joke" and to "test the waters"

TL;DR: Probably not, but (depressingly) you never know

[–] candyman337@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Knew a group of people like that when I was 13, these were highschoolers, someone from Flickr invited me to their Skype group. They were a group of 4chan users and were all mildly annoyed by me and messed with me a lot. But one dude was really obsessed with being an atheist Satanist and he kept trying to convert me from Christianity to being an atheist Satanist. Now I'm no longer Christian and I disagree with a lot of stuff churches teach, but this guy would go on these better than thou rants it was insufferable. Idk if he just believed the stuff on 4chan or if he was just a douche.

But yeah anyway they tried to pull the old delete your system32 trick on me and by that time windows xp prevented you from deleting it. Well he said he'd send me "special instructions" to fix that error I was getting and get my PC. He sent me a picture of his dick. And there was only like 2 people who thought it wasn't ok for him to do that. I stopped talking to them shortly thereafter. But I was young and dumb and I reached out to the dude to see if I could rejoin the group a year or so later he basically said that he didn't talk to them anymore. He at this point was out of highschool, and I wasn't. He was ADAMANT about adding me on Facebook, rubbed me the wrong way so I said no. Finally he gave up, and over the years I'd just see what was going on in his life, his fiance left him and a lot of people were calling him a creep and stuff.

Not sure if he talked to some other kid or something, but that really put a bad taste into my mouth about 4chaners

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