You keep treating this as “one regrettable thing that happened to him at one moment in time that could have happened to anyone”. Like a car accident when you get your learners’ permit or something.
He created this thing that is significantly contributing to the US being the closest to civil war that it has been in generations. Creating it it took years. Defending it took years. Then he spent years trying to ignore it. Now he’s spending years not atoning for it. He chose to collect a lot of money for it. He chose to take a lucrative job based on his work on it.
This is not a brief moment in time. He’s made thousands of bad decisions around this. Every day he doesn’t speak out against it is another bad decision.
If you think this could be you, well, now I’m terrified of you.
So your whole reason for defending this guy, who you don’t know, who still trades on his own name, is because you made up some vision of yourself where you could have done this? You know nothing about this now millionaire who used his awful site to sell himself to google, and still refers to himself proudly as the founder of 4chan, and yet you think you could be like him if you were “unlucky?”
Come on. It couldn’t have been you because it wasn’t you, because I hope you’d realize that you’re a better person than that.
You’re running around talking about 15 year olds when you should be talking about 26 year olds, that’s how old he was when he “left” 4chan. And even so, with 15 year olds, you’re acting like every 15 year old on the planet could accidentally do something like this, when in reality, 15 year olds are faced with moral decisions every day and tens of millions of them choose to do the right thing.
You have no idea who this guy is, what he’s feeling, or what he himself wants. You do know he’s not apologized a single time for 4chan, and instead has turned it into millions for himself. You’re pretending he wants to get away from it, yet everywhere he goes, in all the socials, everywhere, he refers to himself as “moot, founder of 4chan.” Maybe you should, instead of inventing imaginary yous or inventing his feelings, maybe you should let his actions speak for him?
I do wonder if the plug had been pulled on 4chan at any time over years, how fast it would have reformed elsewhere. The bad actors and edgelords would have found a new home.
That’s not a defense. “If I didn’t do it, someone else would have” is never a defense. If they don’t want to accept the consequences, let the cup pass to that someone else.
Yeah I don’t think 4chan would’ve ever been replicated if say it got canned before Project Chanology. That was the inflection point where its mass appeal got large enough to be something more than a random site with assholes on it. As a result, it did some tiny slivers of good but mostly it’s shown the less humane parts of our society that they too can change things (usually for the worse). Also, there are other worse sites that shed off like 4chan like a certain farming website that I won’t name due to how…obsessed they are with tracking people. So I’m glad that 4chan these days is considered more niche. I wish would’ve closed like YTMND did.
It took like all of one day before someone (Brennan) built a 4chan clone after Poole finally banned drawn/digitally manipulated images of fictional (and often real) children or those with child-like features. That said, with every fork, significantly fewer people stumble onto each of these worse boards. Where 4chan has millions of monthly visitors, 8chan had merely hundreds of thousands. Other image boards created after the ban had even fewer visitors.
Chanology’s organization was mostly done on IRC. Most ops were. For better (Chanology) or worse (the time they attacked women in gaming). Chanology was also mostly driven by Canadian users; the first real-world Chanology deployment was in Edmonton, after all. Those involved in Chanology went on to be active in the canadian version of Occupy and did the whole Stop Harper campaign in 2011 and 2015.
Even in my rinky dink city in 2015 there were still anons dressing up in suits to protest Harper. Stickers from the campaign were plastered on every stop sign in a four block radius, some of which are still there.
All actions have consequences, negative and positive.
… And Poole’s actions have mostly had negative consequences.
This is an argument against deplatforming, except that we know deplatforming works. Whatever new home they find will be smaller and less organized, so their power is reduced. Whoever hosts them next, we can then go after them. Deplatforming Nazis never ends, but it’s how we win. Marginalizing them is asymptotic. They never quite go away, but we can render them moot.
It’s also worth noting that even with many fewer people 8chan stressed under the load and he had to give up ownership in less than a year because he couldn’t figure out how to fund it.
The trouble is we now have the well-funded professional Nazis moving in with Parler, Gab, and the gaggle of wannabes. While I hope that they get shoved to/off the fringes of the net, or otherwise self-destruct, Mercer money could probably buy connectivity somewhere.
