>almost surely disproportionately posted by young white men.
Aside from the fact that you pretty much took the bait with /pol/ there, you should take a look at their irl meetups and compare them to average reddit meetups. You would be wildly surprised by how non-white the average 4chan meetups are.
I didn't 'take the bait', what you're doing is gaslighting.
It's not that I'm a 'snowflake' or 'I don't understand chan humor', what they're doing is actually fucked up and dangerous even if they justify it as 'trolling' or 'irony' that should be ignored.
There is nothing normal about that boards pre-occupation with calling for racial extermination. I don't give a damn if they're posting that 'ironically', there is nothing normal about that type of constant, obsessive 'joking' about mass murder behavior to that degree, and repeating those things so much can lead to people truly becoming obsessed with those ideas, then justifying and actually carrying those actions out (like the Christchurch racial terror attack).
Not recognizing it as trolling and intentional agitation makes it more dangerous. You are taking the bait as the Christchurch shooter intended;
One of the goals of his bloodshed, he wrote, was to “agitate the political enemies of my people into action, to cause them to overextend their own hand and experience the eventual and inevitable backlash as a result.” He said he wanted to “incite violence, retaliation and further divide.”https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/new-zealand-gu...
Never called you a snowflake, but your whole framing of the situation reads exactly like what a journo would write while lacking any semblance of understanding of the source material beyond just the surface level.
>what you're doing is gaslighting
How does me saying that the 4chan isn't as white-dominated as you say it is (with a hard proof, given that you can literally take a look at pictures from irl meetups from both 4chan and reddit, and then compare yourself) count as gaslighting?
>There is nothing normal about that boards pre-occupation with calling for racial extermination.
Will it make you feel better, if I told you that you can go and see those threads in many directions, including Indian-poster threads getting into extermination-tier shitfights with Paki and Israeli posters, as well as threads where Italians and Polacks call for mutual genocide? And let's not forget the asian continent shitfight threads, where there is an eternal argument between Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean posters trying to prove to each other who should've genocided whom at which point in history, with occasional oil being poured into the dumpster fire by Vietnamese and Indonesian posters.
The board isn't pre-occupied with racial extermination. It is pre-occupied with edgy content that you cannot find elsewhere. Given that knowledge, it is understandable why most of it ends up being just wild trash. But there are definitely occasional gems in the rough that can be found there that cannot be found elsewhere.
Well, for just a singular example from /pol/ (since it isn't a board I frequent much at all given the super low signal-to-noise ratio, I prefer more hobby-specific boards, such as /o/ for car-motorcycle discussions and /mu/ for music-related stuff), people there were looking into and brought upon pedophilic allegations against Peter Bright years before he got actually charged with those (which actually happened just last year[0]). Mind you, not claiming that 4chan had anything to do with the guy getting eventually caught. But the fact that they had those allegations with basic reasoning and evidence before there was even a whiff of it in public is definitely something.
Or when they had "journalists" from big publications trying to go there and interview people on the boards, they got fed so much misleading and obviously bs info on purpose before being chased away, it was definitely entertaining to observe. Especially given how obvious it was that the "journalists" in question came in there with a very specific narrative in mind already, and it all got crumbled pretty much in real time.
Not even mentioning stuff like a solution to a novel math problem (which other commenters have already mentioned), which ended up being cited and is relevant to actual ongoing research in a specific math area.[1]
Do those things count as "gems"? That's purely subjective. But that's the kind of stuff I personally appreciate seeing there.
>The Peter Bright article you posted has no mention of /pol.
It wasn't supposed to, I just posted it for the context of the court case I was talking about. It would be more weird if the court decision included those, since they didn't contribute to his arrest or anything.
If you are curious, you are welcome to go to any 4chan archiver websites and search for his name to see those conversations.
>Trolling journalists doesn't sound like "gems", it sounds like a waste of time (and I'm no fan of most journalists).
What sounds like a waste of time to you might sound like good entertainment to others. If anything, I would say that the "journalist" going directly to 4chan and attempting to "interview" people there was much more of a waste of time.
You claimed there was something beyond the surface level racism and white supremacy, but you haven't really provided that. Trolling journalists doesn't make them any less racist, especially when they use racism for trolling.
There doesn't seem to be anything "deeper". Just straight up white supremacy.
[EDIT] (since I'm now throttled for some reason)
You can go on /pol right now and see it's full of white supremacy and hate. You claimed there's some deeper meaning to all of that. There's not though, it is exactly what it looks like.
> You claimed there was something beyond the surface level racism and white supremacy, but you haven't really provided that.
You seem to be hyperfixating on one out of 3 examples I mentioned. Did you miss the part about a proof for an unsolved math problem or early allegations against someone who went on to be charged for that exact same thing years later?
Not even mentioning other boards that are hobby-specific, like /o/ (car-related stuff) or /fit/ (fitness related stuff). If you see no value in it, that's fine. But "everything i don't like has no value" is not the way to live life.
There should be a "Somebody's Law" that when someone on the internet says "can you provide an example of x" and then you provide an example of x, they will usually argue that it's not really an example of x.
I provided an example, the one about an unsolved math problem (the haruhi sequence) that got solved on 4chan and then academically verified to be correct (as well as cited later on in other math research papers). I mentioned it in multiple posts.
I never said it was from /pol/, it was from another 4chan board (/sci/). And I also brought up other boards as well, so I don't know what to tell you.
You also say that my claim about Peter Bright allegations is unverified, but again, I literally was there when those conversations took place, and you are also welcome to go to any 4chan archiver website, search for that name, and you will see the results from those years.
I know there was a correct math proof to a novel and nontrivial problem that was put there by some anonymous user (probably not in pol but in 4chan). Forgot details of it
Aside from the fact that you pretty much took the bait with /pol/ there, you should take a look at their irl meetups and compare them to average reddit meetups. You would be wildly surprised by how non-white the average 4chan meetups are.