I think I might have figured out what this "fattening" is all about: This is an age war. This is two demographics going head to head over what they think the internet should look like.

In the slightly earlier days of the Internet, you had separate forums for every possible interest, and they generally attracted people inside of a certain demographic. There were teen chat rooms, birdwatching forums, sci-fi forums, boy band forums, and a million other sites, and they all kinda kept to themselves. A racist web site wouldn't "leak" into a quilting web site.

Fast forward a couple of years and you've got sites like reddit catching all of the above groups, and you've also got a push for more anonymity on the internet.

Children and teenagers are pushing social boundaries and experimenting with what works and what doesn't in a society. We all did it, and it's a crucial part of brain development. But here's the rub: on an anonymous internet, age is an unknown. You've got kids starting subs like FPH, and other kids joining in. It is, unfortunately, fairly routine teenage social experimentation; we were all sociopaths at that age.

But the problem on an anonymous internet is that kids can mistake regular kid bullshit for authentic adult human behavior. "Hey, I like laughing at fatties, and looks like a bunch of other people are into it too." They don't realize the people who think they're awful are just adults, they think FPH was created by and for adults.

So I'm thinking what we have on our hands is a clash of ages. Look at the naivety of conflating free speech with message board rules. Think back to your childhood and think of how well the stupidity of FPH or punchablefaces would have plugged in to your 14-year-old mind. Our problem is kids and adults trying to occupy the same discussion space, and realizing that we don't want to talk the same way about the same things.