I remember the chan dorks having various splits, with some contingents being more sympathetic to leftism and the others being the exact same racist pedophiles they are now. Like one person said here a while ago, they used to be horrible in a whole bunch of different directions, now they’re more focused on being horrible in very specific ways.
I was there when they decided to take on Scientology, with some regarding it as some kind of personal moral crusade to go after an evil organization, and then another half being against any attempt to do serious real-world political movements. The latter half didn’t have the word cringe back then, but that’s what they would have called it.
on one hand, scientology raids, animal abusers doxxed, anon hacks and data dumps of unethical companies.
on the other hand, pool’s closed, fandom of a certain space movie, the advent of /pol/
truly a land of contrasts
I remember always getting confused about their treatment of Hal Turner. It was a pretty common thing back then to prank call anyone who had a call-in show, like with Tom Green. With Hal Turner they mocked him both for being racist and for not being racist in the correct way, they didn’t like that he was a serious racist rather than the meme joke style racists they were. I remember them really laying into him on one show immediately after Obama got elected and relentlessly mocked him by gloating about Obama’s victory. It was weird. For a while the overwhelming attitude was a kind of pointless nihilistic hatred in every single direction possible, because they found it funny, no matter how incoherent that made them.
Then I’m convinced their moderation teams actually got usurped by a bunch of stormfront mods and then after gamergate happened Cambridge Analytica started doing little trials testing how much they could steer discussions
