[OT] How Reddit Became a Worse Black Hole of Violent Racism than Stormfront

Subreddits such the Chimpire offer a window on to just how awful some of the darkest corners of the Web really are.

Oh, if you only knew.

Look, for all the shit that's on Reddit, it should be said that even at its worst, the website is merely a glass surface, hiding the really bad stuff on the Internet. Things like the racist subs are just smokescreens, placing shock images and videos highly because deep down, really deep down in the Internet, there are the people who make those videos and images, share them among their peers, and say "look what I did to this dirty n*gger" and shit like that.

I'm not even talking about Tor. I'm just talking about websites that don't pop up on the first page of Google Search. All you have to do is register a website in a country that doesn't really care about what's hosted on its servers (hell, you could do that in this country with unscrupulous hosting services) and you're in business.

People act like websites like that would get shut down and the people arrested for murder, but the prevalence of CP on the Internet proves that's a goddamn lie. It takes federal agencies months to move on a case (because, as was mentioned during the infamous 8chan CP incident, the fed won't make a move until they have rock-solid evidence), and it gets even harder with just a few extra words on your webpage. Slap something like "This is a parody" or "No one was harmed in the making of this video" and people will generally believe that, because deep down we all want to believe that there really aren't shitty people in the world.

It also provides an added layer of security for people like us. How, do you ask? Well, for every person on the Internet who posts in a racist sub is another IP address tracked and logged by one of the biggest websites on the planet. Sure, changing IPs is an easy to do trick, but even the most heinous of people fall into patterns. By being devils we know, they are easy to see. I'd rather have a racist asshole plotting in front of me so I can see what he's doing, rather than one hiding in a corner of the world, keeping his plans among himself and his friends, until it's time to strike.

To few it in a much milder (though still serious light), which to you would be worse? Would you rather KiA be allowed to post freely so we can see the face of GG, or would you rather it not exist so they don't get nearly as much publicity (and derision) as they do now? Sure, in a perfect world, KiA and 8chan wouldn't do what they do, but I can say that about countless other things.

See, those two areas are known and understood areas. It's the areas you don't know about that you should be afraid of. GG is far too public and relies too much on that to hide behind an unnamed imageboard, but other groups don't require that kind of publicity.

It's something to think about. Sure, areas like what the author describes are obvious on Reddit (I still don't know how I feel about the BlackPeopleTwitter sub because it seems like harmless fun most of the time, but the sub FatPeopleHate or whatever its called ends up on /r/all every few days or so), but they also aren't nearly as big as everyone wants to believe. Hell, this sub is bigger than CoonTown, and it's a fairly chill place.

Remember the video from earlier - the one about anger and how it moves ideas. The reason those subs seem bigger than what they are is because they piss you off. The thing that makes you mad is going to stick in your head better than that witty comment you read. What you do is to not let it control you.

As a final note, I'm not saying not to be critical. I'm not saying you shouldn't be mad. I'm not even saying that you shouldn't mock it. What I am saying is that you - not this sub, not the website in general, not those that make you mad - you should control yourself. Don't feed into their hate by spewing hate in return. That just makes it bigger and bolder. Measure yourself, understand what's going on, and before you react with anger, react with reason. Tear down what the sub is doing not because you're pissed off, but because what it's doing is genuinely damaging something important. Whether it be videogame culture or how blacks are treated around the world, a measured response is a far better, more cognizant, more reliable voice than one that acts out of anger. The angry one might get more hits and upvotes, but in the end all you're doing is fueling the fire.

Don't be that person.

/r/GamerGhazi Thread Link - gawker.com