> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along

Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only.

It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those places, without exception, are better because they ban the hateful and intolerant.

> The Obama presidency was an incubation period to normalize this. Reddit, Tumblr, and lots of other forums became dominated by liberals censoring conservatives

This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant and it really makes you wonder about the rest of it.

No one is required to tolerate assholes spewing hate no matter how liberal or tolerant you are supposed to be.

Present day racism is carefully calibrated to cause hurt and outrage. That wasn't really a thing in the 2000s even on 4chan. 4chan was more freakshow culture than what Gaming The Algo for Clicks did to our media diet

> This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant

Either I should have expanded on that or you're not recalling the same period of time I am.

The Obama years were when Millennials went to college. They're when broadband and smartphones proliferated.

This is when IRC and the indie web died. This is when platforms became predominant and when censorship became top-down mandated. This is when "app stores" over "unlimited web installs" won.

Everyone entering the internet during this period entered into a world where censorship was normalized. Where the algorithm started to take over.

Those of us who used the internet before the Obama years remember a vastly different internet.

It's not that it was Obama that did this. It's simply a marker in time to denote confluence of changes and generational coming of age that coincided with it.

What is interesting is that the Trump presidencies swung the pendulum of who was being censored in the opposite direction of the pop culture that had originally adopted the platforms and set the 2010's status quo.

> 4chan

I remember an internet before 4chan.

Their anonymity, ironically, became something of a protest to the platformization of the years that followed.

Wasn't there once a lot of pro-LGBT stuff on 4chan? I avoid it, but I've read that it's a melting pot? Just very extreme?

I'm more concerned about Kiwi Farms type places. I know friends of Near, and bullying is something that irks me.

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