A former libsoc from 4pol with questions about the history of Holla Forums especially about gamergate

my impression politically inclined 8gag users is you guys mostly came here after Holla Forumsharbor and split up into ideological factions because of the ability to create your own boards.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=KmkXCsqJee0
davidrovics.bandcamp.com/track/democrats-make-me-wanna-vomit
8ch.net/boards.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

I've been using it since day one, and here's why:

I used to use 4chan's /new/, which was an open forum for all views. I was very happy to debate anybody on socialism. Eventually it turned into Stormfront, any socialist view was shouted down and I no longer had an anonymous forum to discuss politics. Then moot created Holla Forums, meaning it was no longer an open forum but a clubhouse for Stromfront types. I like anonymous forums because there's less of a cliquish mentality, less power tripping and less e-celebrity bullshit, so reddit did not appeal to me. Somebody made Holla Forums so I decided to use it.

Thousands of trillions*

Billions of gorillions*

Gorillions of Gazillions*

I came here because it was the only place you could discuss GamerGate without being censored. I became a regular 8/v/ poster. I had read a bit about socialism before that, and occasionally lurked Holla Forums. A year or so later, I had read a lot more and decided that socialism was right. Holla Forums gradually became a second main board for me, along with Holla Forums.

I only came here last year

Got tired of trying to debate on 4/pol/ and none of the other leftist online communities were my thing

Does that make me a newfag?

If you took the time to lurk and understand the culture, then no, you're not a newfag.

I was aware of Holla Forums's culture even before I started lurking and then posting here.

I've been going on *chan sites since around '05, but stopped a few years ago.

Recently started again, as web 2.0 is full of fail and aids, and other leftist spaces on the net are painfully identitarian.

You have to place it in the broader historical context.
youtube.com/watch?v=KmkXCsqJee0

I saw identity politics sabotage and derail the secular/skeptic community. Then I saw OWS, a grassroots movement for the political independence of the working class which rebuked ties to the Democrats in the wake of Obama's broken promises, destroyed from inside out by the very same identity politics run rampant. It's now clear that government agitators had a hand in this.

Obviously there's going to be a certain level of skepticism when yet more idpol intrudes into the entertainment industry and even more mainstream areas of life. When Porky's "emergency" tactic for OWS is elevated to a prophylactic one which threatens to become routine, the new normal, the term "neo-McCarthyism" isn't all that far off.

For a long time vidya has been one of the most immediately clear examples in recent history of how private profit diverges from social need. Shitty games are produced one after another because they sell. The marketing apparatus is a natural propaganda department, and the leap to ideological propaganda is far more natural than it may first appear.

That individual developers and press can be coerced into praising a totally bunk, ruling class ideology by mere virtue of who signs their paychecks in an incestuous, colluding industry, and that the masses' free access to art, entertainment, and culture should suffer as a result, was a wakeup call to many people here.

We then saw a culturally libertarian consumer revolt against censorship and cronyism co-opted by people who wished to "purge fun" through identical policies, only applied to their own black sheep. Mass diversionary Holla Forums involvement would eventually sink "gamergate" as a coherent movement, as it failed to find any genuine political expression.

Some of us are "refugees" from that time, others have come later. A lot of people have different backgrounds, and the board's real strength is that of an exceptionally big tent with nonetheless a laser-focus on the core problem, idpol, of countless diversionary and ineffectual pseudo-left movements.

came here because my ISP was banned from halfchan, never went to 4/pol/ again.
i can finally have a debate and learn stuff without getting the teenage ad hominem attacks and meme spouting.
Holla Forums was decent 4 years ago, its just trash now

/lit/ is still decent imo
/sci/ was good in, like, 2011. Now it's all 100-level homework, shitty Holla Forums bait, and asshurt oldfags like me shitposting just to be bitter over the lack of quality control and meaningful participation. Every once in a while they have good generals, but I don't stick around enough to actually find them when they happen. I think most of us thought the "prove me wrong" meme was a funny joke because burden of proof obviously doesn't work like that, but that's where it really got its traction as an unironic argumentation strategy.

I used to be on 4pol and I would debate Nazis all the time even though being a single red drop in an ocean of shit males it hard to get your point across.

When gamergate happened the discussion on Holla Forums was heavily censored and people decided the best ode was to move the discussion to Holla Forumsbecause NOTHING GETS CENSORED ON Holla Forums RIGHT?????? Wrong. When the ban hammer started coming down on Holla Forums it became clear that the entire site was compromised and thus began the exodus to Holla Forums. At first all the socialists were on 8/pol/ but we then quickly realized that we could create our own voice where we wouldn't be drowned out by Nazis. The reason why you see a larger presence of Holla Forums users here on this sight is because the epicenter of the shot storm took place on 4/pol/. Don't let any storm weenies tell you different. We are growing and they are stagnating,especially now that the election is over.

Praise Marxism-Brennanism.

Makes not males

I never followed gamergate, it all seemed ridiculous to me. Never got why such a fuss was made about it. Just seemed like typical crony shit.

I know what you mean about trying to debate on 4/pol/ though

The core problem is capitalism. Idpol is, however, capitalism's useful idiot, and Holla Forums's unique position derives from our understanding of that fact.
I agree with everything else you said, though.


Holla Forums came here well after the GamerGate boards and Holla Forums.

How are we growing? The future certainly looks bleak for leftists

There was massive, coordinated censorship of GamerGate-related discussion across almost every popular discussion site. It was unprecedented, and served as a wakeup call for a lot of people in both the video game community and the political shitposting community. When trying to discuss a recent, relevant journalistic scandal is cause for being banned and labeled a woman hater/sexist/bigot/whatever, you're quickly forced to confront the true face of idpol, and see it for what it is: a cudgel to silence dissent, and nothing more.

I think he meant /leftpol/, not leftism per se.

I really didn't care about the substance of the issue until it started getting censored. That was really the only thing I gave a shit about.

No, I was there and I watched it happen. Holla Forums came here once generate threads started getting censored.

Gamergate was right about literally everything.

I was talking about Holla Forums specifically.

What was the subject tho
The core problem of society is obviously class rule, we are in agreement. Fighting it effectively requires understanding why, how and where other "movements" fail.

Holy fuck look at the board listings were actually bigger than Holla Forums the staple of the entire site. Holy fuck.

...

This agrees with what I was saying to begin with.

That was never true here.

I know that in hindsight. But at the time it just didn't really cross my radar.

Could Holla Forums be fertile ground for us?

Then I must have misunderstood you.
A lot of Holla Forumsyps here are under the delusion that they "were here first" and "made Holla Forums what it is," which is blatantly untrue. I assumed you were doing the same thing.

I see a fair bit of Holla Forums vs. Holla Forums shitposting on Holla Forums. But I wouldn't engage in it, or try to recruit directly from there; Holla Forums's problem with offtopic political shitposting is already huge. We have a big enough presence on this site that everyone here knows about us already. If you want to convince the occasional Holla Forumsirgin to lurk here more, some more vidya-related lefty memes like are probably the right way to do it.

Addendum: We could also have more leftist vidya threads. Games like Deus Ex and New Vegas explore a lot of political themes, including ones relevant to (and sometimes supportive of) leftism. Deus Ex is largely about the corporate control of society that capitalism causes (although they don't put it in those terms), and New Vegas tackles a lot of subjects, one of them being anarchism (although, again, they don't call it that).

We could just have video game threads and talk about the ideologies represented in the various products or whatever. Critiques from a lefty perspective are useful

I mean in the sense that they brought all the traffic here they are half right but lets be honest with ourselves when we say that this site was an irrelevant backwater before the exodus.

OWS was a astroturf porkie playground from start to finish.

Wrong.

There's that one guy making a video about analzying leftist vidya. Try posting that on Holla Forums when it's done and see if it gets censored by the mods. It might start a shitstorm on Holla Forums either way.

I came here because I was a leftists who also happened to enjoy chan culture. I could care less about some the gamer identity or video games in general

exaggeration.

I actually came here from /a/. Heard about Holla Forums from the gamergay crowd and saw the /a/ here was comfier and had less Holla Forums shitposting. Then the Holla Forums exodus ruined /a/ and Holla Forums became my main board. Supposedly /a/ has gotten better both here and on 4chan, but I don't really care to discuss anime and manga anymore.

I was here because m00t is a backstabbing traitor.
Then I found this board and I kinda liked it here so I stayed.

idpolers, apologize!
This is the exact same shit going on with other communities.

i came here because of stormfags on reddit and frogposters on twitter

m00t was a faggot and a backstabbing cunt who tried to declaw the most popular imageboard for sale, but good lord, that image is autistic.

always been exclusively on 4/b/ since '07
always been a Marxist Leninist but kept it to dedicated forums and offline
just happened to find this board when Holla Forums was mentioned '15

Came to Holla Forums for GG, got frustrated with the infighting and lack of meaningful action, but it did get me to break from liberalism outright. Saw Holla Forums in the list of boards, checked it out, and stayed.

I still like moot. He's a decent guy, but his normal faggory ultimately resulted in a large disconnect between him and the site. Banning gamergay from Holla Forums was 100% okay in my opinion, but banning it from Holla Forums was completely fucked. He was an awful admin all around even if I think his heart was in the right place.

Someone in the GGG pointed out something interesting. A decade and change ago, the left violently protested every globalist meeting, and they utterly hated Soros. Nowadays, the neo-left slavishly supports globalization because muh diversity, and Soros, altho unmentioned, funds a fucking shitload of their organizations. I know it sounds paranoid, but it seems to have worked waaaaay too well not to have been a conscious effort at COINTELPRO.

just recently when we got ahead of Holla Forums in the user count i did the math

iirc our boards growth rate over 1 year was roughly 110 % (also before the recent reddit drama, so no influx of this influencing this trend).
despite the election year and the Trump memeing Holla Forums only gained about 16 %

Well, we were smaller. What's the growth in absolute terms? Anyone got some charts?


feels bad man
davidrovics.bandcamp.com/track/democrats-make-me-wanna-vomit

I think a combination of people's negative reaction to Holla Forums shitting up imageboards, economic crisis, the spread of our memes, and /leftpyol/ becoming a bogeyman have fueled it. Not super thrilled at our board being flooded by the non-imageboard crowd, but I guess it's good we can spread leftism. Should be okay so long as they assimilate and don't bitch about anime.

it was also a bigger growth in total numbers, we doubled i think.

someone had linked an archive of 1 year ago user counts. just tried to find it in the catalog but i guess it's gone already.

*doubled as in had in total numbers twice as many new users

well, compared to Holla Forums i mean, duh. fuck me, i'm going to bed.

the left has been the victim of subversion for decades. paranoia is entirely reasonable. if you aren't paranoia you're not paying attention.

I never really browsed Holla Forums before, but I came here because I heard about it via GG. I mainly just used h for this thread >>>/h/763 . I saw Holla Forums appear just after it had been established, thought what the fuck is this shit, and stayed for this board.

I remember thinking we had a lot of posters when we hit 400 users.


Completely backwards, in my opinion. GG wasn't political until the corrupt journo/indie clique tried to make it political by labeling their detractors as bigots. Holla Forums made things worse by contextualizing it into a Jews vs. whites thing, like they always do, but that came later.


You mean you looked at 8ch.net/boards.html


Why do you think this is the case? There are a lot of memelords here, I think most of them came from other parts of the site, or from halfchan.

I am pretty sure there is a way to get graphs up of your board performance, but like the logs, they're not fucking linked anywhere and the only way to find them is to bookmark them when you see them.
Is c0demonkey on IRC? Is anyone here on IRC? Somebody ask him.

Holla Forums may have had the largest negative impact on gamergay, but I still don't think it belonged on Holla Forums. Maybe a /vg/ thread at best. It was clearly political from the very start.

I still do some drive by posting there every now and again. It's pretty fun watching them get flustered by someone daring to use words like socialism positively. There's another user who has been posting a "communism general" there, with a logo and everything. fun times.

Strongly disagree. It was on the level of Gerstmann being fired for his K&L review, and no more political than that scandal. It didn't become a politicized shitstorm until the clique circled the wagons and started suppressing the discussion. To be fair, though, they did that really early on. I think it took them about 10 days before they pushed the "Gamers Are Dead" articles, if memory serves.

I came to Holla Forums in the first few weeks of migration because I really wanted Gamergate to actually lead somewhere.
As time went by it was obvious that it was getting subverted by autistic pol-fags and their "BASED" e-celebs and I quickly grew bored of it (although i did try to continue fighting for gamergate,but on another site until even those people grew bored of it thanks to pol).
Then after moot deleted Holla Forums on 4chan and the whole 2nd migration of stormniggers and other autistic retards came in flooding the site i quickly became bored of all the retarded threads and shitposting to anyone who didn't fit their world view.
I still remember that one retard on Holla Forums's /his/ board who would shit on any sort of leftist thread or any thread about non-white history calling it SJW propaganda (i believe he was an Albanian trpfag,the Illyrian guy am not sure).
So any board I went to went down the same shitty road of getting filled with retarded pol-fags and with shitposting and off-topic threads.
After I found about Holla Forums ( i think it was during 2015,I do remember it was a long time before Alunya was created,and Bunker posting was a huge thing back then)I decided to stay around.not only because it corresponded with my world view (I will admit it plays a huge role) but because at least the userbase isn't retard and willfully censoring (I mean is there even a thread in which anarkiddies and tankies don't fucking fight).
Reddit never seemed all that appealing to me,mostly because it's filled with underaged retards who think memes are funny,circlejerks and censorship of any opinion that differs ever so slightly.Also the upvote system is horrendous and it ipromotes bandwaggoning and downvoting anyone who disagrees with the status quo.Also the fact that it's not anonymous makes it even less appealing because it leads to cliques and e-celebs getting all the attention.

I came to Holla Forums probably two years after /mlp/ was created on halfchan. By then I was already starting to see the decline of posting quality across all metrics on all boards, and Holla Forums certainly wasn't helping by derailing every thread and claiming that their retardation belonged on every board merely because of how big Holla Forums was itself.

I feel bad that I haven't posted on mulp for so long
I miss giving praise to smutty