the off topic forum used to be a slime pit where everyone hated each other. bring back the toxic days

Wow, wow, wow

I am gone for a few days and THIS happens....
we clearly cannot let it be that way....

yes we can

Warzone.com players encouraged the Montana mall shooter to kill
The alleged shooter warned people not to go shopping just hours before the Westlake, Montana, mall massacre, later being heralded a leader of the "feline uprising."

The Off-topic forum of "Warzone.com," an online Risk site, has inadvertently continued to attract dark, maladjusted and dangerous characters – misogynists, racists and homophobes at ease behind a computer. It’s a chaotic wilderness that allows contributors to share ideas under a veil of relative anonymity.

At a time when more Americans have died from gun violence than terrorism and school shootings are shamefully commonplace, killer incel Tabmothy Juggerson stormed a US mall and murdered shoppers in what looks to be an attack on black people and "peafowls," or attractive neurotypical men.

Now it’s come to light that before the terrible mass-shooting, a Warzone.com Off-topic thread – with over 650 posts – urged the Montana shooter on.

Is this what you want? We only narrowly avoided it last time. Off-topic doesn't need to become a radicalization chamber again.

ETA: Just to be clear, the above article is fake. It's what could've happened, not what did happen, if we'd continued down the toxic radicalization path OT was on.

Edited 2/25/2021 20:23:49

There are two factors in my opinion that contributed to the decline of the slime era as you put it. First, the community in general has declined and the forums aren't the place to be anymore. Second, the internet at large has been slowly moving away from open topic discussion forums since around 2010.

I don't see the open topic discussion forum as a "radicalization chamber," I think it has the opposite effect. Socialization is good, forcing people into a corner to suffer from delusions without correction is actually what causes madness. In the hyperindividualistic culture autists are expected to overcome their problem on their own. The pharmaceutical industry has pills to 'correct' their neurochemistry, but nobody gives them friends and gets them involved in social events, so they continue to have socially unacceptable opinions. When they are put into situations they usually suffer ridicule and harassment which only reinforces their opinions lol.

Edited 2/24/2021 22:15:30

The 15-year-old off-topic foroomer

Socialization is good, forcing people into a corner to suffer from delusions without correction is actually what causes madness.

Insular communities that discuss the same topics among one another tend to develop radical views. Group polarization like this is a well-studied phenomenon (see: firehouse effect). If you have, for example, firemen that regularly discuss politics at the water cooler (and this becomes the majority of many of their members' political discussion diets), you'll find them drifting toward radical viewpoints originally held by only one or a few members and not realizing that they're getting radicalized.

This was happening on the OT forum. We had a small group of hyper-active commenters, many of whom discussed politics more on the Off-topic forum of this site than they did elsewhere. As a consequence, we had a good few radicalization events because this of tendency of isolated networks to form, coupled with other group stupidity factors like social cohesion- most of you kids on OT want the other OT kids to like you. This site has at least 2 Nazi clans (NAW, Wolfsangel, and I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting one), and we've had multiple public breakdowns on this forum like Paugers and Tabby. And plenty of people on here buy or bought into pseudoscience and conspiracies. You can go to the Warone chill zone server and watch the same phenomenon play out in real time.

Even your comment is chock full of fringe weirdo views that you do not seem to recognize as fringe. Weird focus on autism, again, too. This forum keeps going back to that for some reason.

I get where you're coming from, but discussion/socialization alone- in theory and certainly in practice- does not function as a deradicalization mechanism, because not all social discussion is the same. Check out the Off-topic Forum of Tiger Droppings, the LSU football fan forum- those guys are straight up crazy and don't at all realize it. When you have this ghettoization of forums, where people discuss politics and controversial topics in niche communities that aren't really related to those topics, you wind up with the same thing as the firehouse effect: poorly-adjusted people with off-kilter views. If you have a burning desire to talk about politics or your other weirdo social opinions, talk about it either in real life (in a non-self-selecting community) and brave the ridicule (congrats, you're talking to people who aren't radicalized and will be able to detect your off-kilter views) or in a large, healthy forum that doesn't select for ideological agreement. Instead, of course, y'all just keep pushing your retard views in small corners of the internet where people are too tired or uninvested to challenge them (or in your words, "ridicule" and "harass" you), and so you and others get pushed into the self-radicalization vortex. Your choice, I guess. I'll admit, it's fun to watch. And I guess it works out in the end because y'all, like Karl and Tabby and Paugers, wind up derailing your lives and minimizing the risk you pose to society.

Edited 2/25/2021 01:47:59

Too many words, can u give me a tldr

@Orannis: https://www.warzone.com/Forum/296687-sieg-heil-antisemitism-please

This is what OT used to be. (And no, Tabby wasn't being ironic. Felinism and anti-peafowlism were his actual beliefs. He has a LessWrong account where he repeatedly debated those issues. And he went off the deep end in public view here instead of getting help. He's not the only person like that.)

Edited 2/25/2021 03:44:25

Once I looked in the old forum threads out of curiosity, and I like the modern forums better than the 2014-2015 forums except for a few actually good threads

Edited 2/25/2021 04:30:30

https://youtu.be/-BOAYXbPMrQ

Keep on posting. You've almost said enough for me to be able to report this to the FBI before you go shoot up a school somewhere.

I hope you realize the insane person manifesto you're attempting to write usually only ends in one of two ways- shooting yourself in the head in the middle of Harvard Yard, or inflicting your insanity upon other people through some sort of pathetic terrorist attack. So which one is it gonna be? Mitchell Heisman or the Unabomber?

Fucking Cringe my BRO

Gotta say I support emperor justinian in bringing back the extremists.

It's too calm for my liking right now.

Glad I'm not alone in this effort

If you're investing a significant amount of your time and effort thinking you're only pretending to be a complete idiot, I've got bad news for you.

Rikku, I think this makes up for the cringe in the rest of my responses on that thread. It still rings true for Off-topic today.

I remember finding tabby’s less wrong account. If it makes you feel any better, the morons there didn’t like him either.

fatal oof to Knyte's response

Check out the Off-topic Forum of Tiger Droppings, the LSU football fan forum- those guys are straight up crazy and don't at all realize it.

what is the link? I'm curious lol

OverForeigner: here's a starting place - https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/election-2020/

It was one of the best places on the internet to monitor 2020 election conspiracies as they arose. Basically this place picked up, amplified, and rebroadcasted those stories within minutes.

You also see similar phenomena on the Bodybuilding forums.

Edit: oh that place has been wiped. But check anything else under the rant subcategory. Like https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/o-t-lounge/ and https://www.tigerdroppings.com/rant/politics/

Edited 2/26/2021 06:20:25

2015-2016 OT forum was hilarious to read through. Just hyperradical extrremeists yelling at each other. Also inline images for everyone! Thanks Lolicon for ruining the fun!

Bring back old fourm better time weeeeee