I haven’t heard anything about them in quite a while. It’s like they were a hot-button topic of conversation, and then everyone just stopped talking about them. If they’re still around, what would be the reason they seemingly disappeared from the news?

      • shani66@ani.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        33
        ·
        9 months ago

        It’d be genuinely moving, if it was about anything else. The last hold outs of a wilder Internet? I’d cry. A bunch of dipshits clinging desperately to a storm of nonsense? Only tears that’d come from that is if i laughed too hard.

        • HolyDuckTurtle@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          10
          ·
          9 months ago

          I can still feel it when I think the vast majority of these people are vulnerable individuals who have been led to be believe they’re being victimized. Things like QAnon provide a the right-wing equivalent of a safe space and community for them.

          It’s got to be tough seeing it slowly tumble away.

        • angstylittlecatboy@reddthat.com
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          9 months ago

          The last hold outs of a wilder Internet?

          In a way they are. They just also serve as a reminder of why not too many people want that wild internet anymore.

    • assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      42
      ·
      9 months ago

      Don’t forget the people with active unmanaged mental illness. They will 100% believe in their delusional thoughts and won’t have the insight to know that they’re ill.

      • Riccosuave@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        28
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        9 months ago

        Yes, but that subculture has always been there, looking to latch on to the next new obsession or more aptly for the obsession to latch on to them. In fact, in some ways it used to be kind of quaint to read some truly off the wall posts from the ancient days of r/conspiracy circa 2008 where the lines blurred and you didn’t quite know if you were witnessing unadulterated, unchecked madness or the well rehearsed LARPing of some terminally online troglodyte.

        Then all of a sudden it turned into this entirely different thing where it became clear to me at least that there was a loosely organized group of people with severely warped and nihilistic ambitions that were attempting to bridge the gap and conduct a social experiment where they wanted to see how far their weaponized autism could infect into the real world. The answer was all the way to the president of the United States. It was both strange and fascinating. Maybe we will all be so lucky that it will just be left as some obscure footnote of history, but I doubt it. The systemic realities that lead to Q are still there, and future versions of this kind of parasitic mind viruse will be much worse as technology continues to improve. What it will look like, I don’t know, but I’m not eager to find out either.

      • seaweedsheep@literature.cafe
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        22
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        Q would leave breadcrumbs, because he needed to be as vague as possible to sound like he knew what was going to happen, right? The people who would interpret those breadcrumbs were called bakers. Yes, I know breadcrumbs are from bread that’s already been baked, but that’s what they decided to call themselves to create an Us vs Them feel. So the “bread” in this image means there are things to be interpreted or reinterpreted yet.

    • Match!!@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      9 months ago

      kinda miss 4chan sometimes. btw if you’re trying to censor the slurs, you missed one (the one for “newbie”, though I’m enough of an oldremoved to know that’s just how 4chan talks)