This will be somewhat difficult to prove because the WSB discord (for the hour I was in it) was more or less a walking terms of service violation, near totally consisted of "ironic" racial slurs and "ironic" racist memes, n/f-word everywhere.
It was clearly taken over by folks intending to have it shut down because it did not look like that prior to this GME bet gaining media attention. There is a lot of extremely questionable things happening around this event leading me to think that some very wealthy people are trying to prevent their shorts getting blown up at all costs. Even on HN I’ve been seeing weird posts on these threads.
>It was clearly taken over by folks intending to have it shut down because it did not look like that prior to this GME bet gaining media attention.
That's one theory. Another would be that the gaining media attention caused an influx of users to join a group that equates itself to 4chan, causing moderation issues.
WSB is about the memes, I don't think it's at all similar to 4chan (especially not /b/) and I think it is dangerous for you to assassinate the character of the community in such a dismissive way.
I'm not personally associated (not a member on the boards) but I've seen a lot of discussions float my way over the years and if it became that way now it's unlikely to be from 4chan itself (or a community like it).
But your insinuation here gives credence to many that the internet is eating itself, when it's much more likely to be manipulation from those who stand to lose.
Their tagline is (or was at least) 'if 4chan found a bloomberg terminal'.
I say this as someone who frequented both communities at one time or another: they are very very very alike. I wouldn't be surprised if this who thing is a charade to take money from 'normies' as much a wall street.
Ive been watching the community for atleast 4 years now, and for the most part it's is just random people that use options to gamble (i.e. wild shots at trying to make money but they do have some knowledge). Either way, while terms like retard, autist, and gay are used frequently I've yet to see any racism or any xenophobia whatsoever in the community. And any insinuation of it is usually shut down fast. And While they use that mantra I think WSB is very unlike 4chan (although my exposure to 4chan is extremely limited) and its racism/hate speech.
I don't think "While mocking people with disabilities and homophobia is frequent, I have yet to see any racism or xenophobia" is the defense you think it is.
> I don't think "While mocking people with disabilities and homophobia is frequent, I have yet to see any racism or xenophobia" is the defense you think it is.
I think that it's a bit of a stretch to say that the language they use means they're mocking people with disabilities or homophobia. Using words ironically just to be edgy is completely different from believing others to be inferior or an invasive entity to be defended against. That's very apparent when you talk to, say, an angsty teenager versus an actual ethnonationalist or even just your garden variety civic nationalist.
They might use the same words, but mean them in completely different ways, and actually be expressing very different things. I think that as it pertains to the internet, certain dialects of edgy, slang filled english are as close to a global lingua franca as can be considered possible. You can't paint all of these people with the same brush. Aside from speaking the same dialect of english, they use it to express very different thoughts, no less diverse or varied as those who speak other ones. This nuance will get missed if you overliteralize what they say and take it at face value.
The defense is "while there is mocking of disabilities and gay sexuality, there is not racism and xenophobia". Regardless, its in good fun. There is no intention of actually disparaging those groups. There are plenty of posts about donations to Autism research and other charities.
I don't think anyone is moving goal posts. The people who think those words aren't ok have never cared about intent or whether or not you've donated money to the cause.
Yeah, I read my comment and thought about it, and I fully understand that those words are not acceptable but I feel like its not as severe and most of the time they are calling themselves gay and such, but I fully understand that it still is unacceptable.
This is how 4chan started as well - there's then a steady progression from the ironic mode, to ironic "racism", to ironic racism, to "ironic" racism, to racism.
This one is probably closer to my guess, it would be difficult to moderate half a million new users in a day with an existing mod base, and you can't really just hand out permissions to random memers saying "I'll help moderate" without risking that some nonzero amount of them will just cause havoc anyway.
Yes. The only thing I'd suggest is to call for volunteers from "sane" subreddits that seem to have a good moderation policy and reasonable moderators.
The problem there is that the above people are already likely quite busy, and don't want to take on an additional (unpaid) burden by trying to clean up a sub they don't really care about.
Eh, that blatant offensive nature is a 4chan holdover, which WSB proudly embraces. Plenty of millennials are former /b/ browsers, now in their 30s and some with plenty of disposable income.
I've struggled with this in some friend groups, particularly after having a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.
Not really? Children frequently demonstrate the same behavior. Laugh at the kid with X problem until you have a problem yourself, and now you dislike bullies.
Growing older and realizing in general that things you did when you were younger are bad is fine and dandy, and indeed is "growing up".
But only deciding things are bad when they personally effect you has nothing to do with growing older and is not a good look. It's just selfish myopia.
Being an adult with a consistent moral framework is about being able to say "this is right or wrong", regardless of if it effects you personally or not. If you only notice something is bad when it happens to you, then that's basically what kids do automatically.
Huh, that's strange, because the comment I read said:
> ...particularly after having a child diagnosed with an autism...
Which to me says the dichotomy in particular is "before autism personally affected me" and "after autism personally affected me".
Calling people "autists" as a joke is either problematic and worth calling out or it isn't. You being personally affected doesn't change that. At least that is what I would argue is required from a consistent moral framework.
Don't think that says much about my morals, just that I like them to be consistent / not myopic.
Think about the thread we're posting in. This is basically about a company/industry that was like "these retail investors don't need protecting, they're adults and can make their own decisions, even if it means losing money", until those retails investors started costing them money with their adult decisions, at which point they change their mind and decide "actually they need protecting from themselves".
The way you phrased your comment, it sounded like you did the same, just swap out financial shenanigans for name-calling.
> I've struggled with this in some friend groups, particularly after having a child diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder.
Can you elaborate this some more? Are you saying that you've struggled with this because people take that 4chan attitude they grew up with into their IRL lives and are assholes to your son with ASD?
Figuring out just how they're assholes in real life helps understand and contextualize the problem better. Are they oblivious, or dropping offensive memes at his kid, etc?
Does it really matter? If you reach your mid-30s and haven't figured out that mocking someone with ASD is wrong, I'm not going to waste my time educating you. I'll simply cut you out of my life, gradually or all at once.
?? I asked the question more because I was just curious if there are legitimately like mid-30 year old groups of friends that haven't grown out of this "4chan attitude" of using the n-word, calling people "autists", etc.
I didn't ask out of a sense of voyeurism. More like a, "dang, is this something I need to watch out for when I get older?"
Cheers. And yes, I'm totally aware of how awful and toxic those parts of the internet are, but usually those toxic and awful people hide it more when you talk to them in real life.
most of that is self aware deprecation from other autists. frankly being able to joke and shittalk with eachother makes it a lot easier to deal with having autism and everything that comes with it.
However Discord would have known about this "bad" behaviour for a long time and it wasn't a coincidence that they finally decided to apply a ban hammer, so it's a very weak cover story. Also, racial slurs? You're the first I've heard of racist slurs - I had only heard of people calling themselves/the group retards and autists - meant in an endearing, self-deprecating humour kind of way. I've seen no instances of racism on /r/wallstreetbets - I really doubt on their Discord they'd be allowing racism though.
It's just so blatantly obvious. It reminds me that the final layer of competition is governance, and these "unicorns" funded by the VC-finance industrial complex are going to lose out in the end when eventually good actors come into play.
For the several years I've been following, I've never once seen the n word or anything close to racist memes.
They do make a lot of autism jokes (mostly pointed at themselves) and plenty of f bombs, but neither of which is generally seen as ban-hammer-levels of problematic (whether or not it is is up to you)
