>>584459Over the years I have had different feelings about this. I don't think there's a single clean explanation.
1. Imageboards are anonymous so people feel
free to say what they've always thought, and can't get away with in polite society. This is applying to the people who really are reactionary but don't have enough socially acceptable outlets for their thoughts in normal everyday life. This is more about catharsis than trolling.
2. There are people, call them trolls, who aren't really racist/rightoid/whatever in real life, at least not in
practice (which is much more important than whatever is going on in their heads), that is, they don't actually go around discriminating against people in any way that has real material consequences. But they'll say nasty shit online just to be provocative, or hurt people's feelings, or get a reaction from people, because they're fundamentally contrarian attention seekers who want to break social conventions. They're gluttons for outrage.
3. There are people who are very "polite" and "refined" with their reactionary ideology, rather than being disgusting, visceral, rude, outrageous. Sometimes they even think that they aren't reactionary despite being so. Sometimes they think that they genuinely hold the position that is best backed by evidence, etc. Think of the people who will argue with you for hours about black crime statistics without saying the N word once. They're missing a piece of the puzzle but they don't know what it is. They say things like "change my mind." Maybe sometimes they really will. But often they're too stubborn or think your counter-evidence is insufficient or circumstantial.
4. I think there is genuinely a lot of
glow going on. The ruling class benefits from the "rabble" being divided on as many issues as possible. The hypernormalization of bigotry of every kind that can occur on imageboards is highly beneficial. These posts may to a large extent be made by agents of the ruling class, such as intelligence agency employees, or even generated by AI, for the specific purpose of seeding opinions that society may have otherwise moved on from by now due to mass education, increased literacy, internationalism, class solidarity, etc. All the positive forces which can make the proletariat united must be countered by the ruling class. Som
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