All of these things are correct, but I would like to posit there was a specific era when it actually became intolerable, and that was about 2013 or so. It was a gradual process, but you noticed more and more “normal threads” getting hijacked and brigaded. Baw threads, or threads where people would post tumblr core sad images (mostly about missing ‘her’) got hijacked by incels (who said something like, “shes fucking chad bro” although the incel vocabulary had yet to be calcified.) You laugh you lose (YLYL) threads got brigaded by people “banana posting” or flooding the thread with images of a specific meme of a banana opening his peel like a trench coat and “exposing” himself to a pair of apples. It was boomer shit, but their alleged point was that YLYL was cringe.
Now, were Baw and YLYL cringe? Maybe. But they were also like, “normal” threads. Normal users would come and post normal content. YLYL threads (and their cousins, Epic threads) were how board culture was preserved, posting collages of greentext posts of particularly noteworthy threads or stories or interactions. The point wasn’t to point out cringe. It was to radicalize young male users who self identified as unlucky in love, to degrade board discourse so no one wanted to even post in “culture” threads, and to either radicalize the young and impressionable who might be receptive to Nazi messaging, and to push away those that were not. 4chan always tolerated Nazis, and there is an old proverb against it.
Moot used to get a ton of hate from the Nazis, because he actually tried to police them. I don’t know if they targeted him or just got lucky, but they had been trying to get rid of him of a while. He left after users found his girlfriend was cheating on him, and posted the photos on 4chan. months later, trump descends a golden escalator…
All of these things are correct, but I would like to posit there was a specific era when it actually became intolerable, and that was about 2013 or so. It was a gradual process, but you noticed more and more “normal threads” getting hijacked and brigaded. Baw threads, or threads where people would post tumblr core sad images (mostly about missing ‘her’) got hijacked by incels (who said something like, “shes fucking chad bro” although the incel vocabulary had yet to be calcified.) You laugh you lose (YLYL) threads got brigaded by people “banana posting” or flooding the thread with images of a specific meme of a banana opening his peel like a trench coat and “exposing” himself to a pair of apples. It was boomer shit, but their alleged point was that YLYL was cringe.
Now, were Baw and YLYL cringe? Maybe. But they were also like, “normal” threads. Normal users would come and post normal content. YLYL threads (and their cousins, Epic threads) were how board culture was preserved, posting collages of greentext posts of particularly noteworthy threads or stories or interactions. The point wasn’t to point out cringe. It was to radicalize young male users who self identified as unlucky in love, to degrade board discourse so no one wanted to even post in “culture” threads, and to either radicalize the young and impressionable who might be receptive to Nazi messaging, and to push away those that were not. 4chan always tolerated Nazis, and there is an old proverb against it.
Moot used to get a ton of hate from the Nazis, because he actually tried to police them. I don’t know if they targeted him or just got lucky, but they had been trying to get rid of him of a while. He left after users found his girlfriend was cheating on him, and posted the photos on 4chan. months later, trump descends a golden escalator…