The only "raids" I can remember in recent history are things like online polls to choose the new Mountain Dew name or "who do you think won the debate last night polls", but then again maybe it just doesn't make headlines or have the unified goal like stuff from the 2000s did (chanology, etc).
It was 2006 IIRC. I was a teenager at the time and the raids were my favorite thing about /b/. I think we made up like 80% of the callers to Tom Green's online talk show - he was really getting a taste of his own medicine, after having grown out of such antics himself
I didn't take part in anything like trying to drive people to suicide as described in the boingboing post in another comment in this thread. Once 4chan banned raids I moved on (and also aged out of such behavior).
4chan was a different place then. It's hard to imagine people assembling in Guy Fawkes masks to protest scientology today
You are probably thinking of "raids" in the wrong sense, in that you probably think the raid needs to be funny. However, they are discussing /pol/ and online harassment instead.
The researchers point out they looked for YouTube links and Twitter hashtags. As for not making headlines, you probably just aren't remembering GamerGate, and the harassment of roughly every public feminist figure in the last 10 years. And that's really just the tip of the iceberg.
There was a big crack down in the early 2010s, at least on 4chan. Most of the boards that the people who were into that sort of thing were smaller and didn't tend to have the same activism bent that the older invasion stuff did.
I agree, 4chan doesn't seem to be as active or popular anymore.
Last time I checked /b/ was nothing like it used to be, it's full of pornography these days, and /pol/ is a far right echo chamber (I swear I remember years and years ago it used to be more left leaning? Maybe I'm wrong though, never visited too often).
It's always been an incomprehensible blob of every possible opinion at once. Most of the things that are said are not even real opinions people hold. Things are said just to see what kinds of responses it gets. I don't believe it makes sense to try and classify the site as of any political side.
How quickly people forget about GamerGate and when /pol/ had to be shutdown because of all the raids. That was literally the cause of 8chan's creation.
You do realize that 4chan memes were referenced at Christchurch? It's great to be an optimist and assume that everyone is secretly just kidding, but clearly not everyone got the memo. There are really crazy people there who take these calls to action deadly serious.
I didn't imply that everyone is kidding. Only that all opinions are going to be represented whether that person believes it or not. One person does not speak for everyone. They only speak for themselves.
People commit atrocities in the name of religions and we don't seem to blame the entire organization for a single extremist.
> Taxi Driver formed part of the delusional fantasy of John Hinckley Jr.[26] that triggered his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, an act for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity
Its great to be an optimist and think movies don't cause harm, clearly not everyone got the memo, there's some really crazy people out there.
they were more anarchic and had a lot of quote-unquote "ironic" fascism for lulz, but they were targeted by for real nazis and fascists as a recruitment ground the ironic hatefulness became real hatefulness and drove away anyone that wasn't a legit nazi.
The tale I heard was that 4chan raided Stormfront and then the latter turned around and invaded 4chan and made it into Stormfront for nerds, but I have no clue if that story is true.
>4chan doesn't seem to be as active or popular anymore
That's what you get with a heavily-centralized Internet: Everyone and their dog consumes all their media and spends most of their day on the same handful of platforms--not that spending it on 4chan, of all places, would be better, but you know what I mean.
/pol/ has almost always been an echo chamber of whatever opinion was deemed fringe from what I remember. I seriously doubt anyone cared about Ron Paul winning the election other than the fact that they wanted to see what he would actually do in office, as it is with Trump right now - the general stance is Trump is horrible, not because of his policies, but because of the low impact of his policies compared to what anons had in mind would have been enacted.
It still has an air of anarchy/anarcho-capitalism as it always had, the tone has just shifted more towards the anarchism element.
And as it stands now, 4chan is still the most popular imageboard, which is largely why /pol/ is a blob of opinions where the only thing anyone can agree on is that they hate each other.
I wouldn't say /pol/ is as anarchist as it is simply nihilistic. The common thread among all the various opinions shared on 4chan throughout its existence is that nothing matters and it's all just a game.
> the general stance is Trump is horrible, not because of his policies, but because of the low impact of his policies
Low impact?
What were they hoping for, global thermonuclear war? US Civil War 2?
If wayoutthere's post is to be taken as correct, and they actually are nihilistic and think this is all "a game" - then they should be considered a very dangerous "group" of people. Seemingly advocating for regional or planetary existential threats - and coming close to implementing such actions (and some could argue that to an extent they have been successful - just maybe not as successful as they wanted?) - well, that is insanity.
And it shouldn't be tolerated or encouraged.
The world isn't perfect. Our global and regional societies aren't perfect. We're human - nothing we do is perfect. All we can do is try to do better next time. The answer to this imperfection is not to destroy everything. I find it sickening that there are large groups of people who not only think this way, but have found each other, and have organized to try to make their sick dreams come true.
An important function of free speech is that it is a release valve and warning system for widespread discontent. If highly charged opinions start forming themselves into organized groups, it’s a hint that something needs to change, structurally. (And not repression of that opinion, that’s only blindfolding yourself and allowing the problem to grow until the release is more violent.)
> /pol/ is a far right echo chamber (I swear I remember years and years ago it used to be more left leaning?
I noticed a lot of conspiracy or somewhat alternative sites went very right wing several years back. I used to love visiting sites like AboveTopSecret for entertainment value as it used to have a lot of in depth threads about ayys, for example. Nowadays it's a right wing political board.
I mean, when you say things like "I've been casually doing X, and I never saw anyone do Y", it's classic observer bias.
> anything I'd constitute as a raid
Also moving the goal posts. Are you disagreeing with their definition of a raid, or are you saying the data they measured was made up?
Just like when Reddit was in hot water for hosting The Fappening (2014 leaks of iCloud photos), there were still plenty of users who enjoyed the site and never came across any of the stolen material. Does that mean it never happened? Similarly, you can enjoy 4chan, no one is taking that away from you, but it's not really right to say "I never saw it, so it didn't happen".
