>>812014because in ye olde days of 4chan, traffic was much faster than today, threads would go fast, and so you felt like you could get away with more, so people said a lot of edgy shit that was mostly tongue in cheek, and they used the thin veneer of plausible deniability that is provided by anonymity to bolster the argument that everything is said in jest and shouldn't be taken seriously. hell, that's still 4chan/b/'s tagline:
>the stories here are works of fiction.. blah blah only a fool would take anything written here seriouslythe newfags didn't get the memo; they genuinely harbor those extreme positions, but act like they don't, I guess because they think that thin veneer of plausible deniability still applies, but it's clear that it doesn't because times have changed; you got prominent public figures online and in the media referencing 4chan culture, which is sort of a microcosm of internet culture as a whole for the past 20 years or so, and on top of that you got the united states government and its glowies running intelligence operations there, not to mention researchers and various self-interested parties harvesting data as well; therefore it's clear that 4chan's notoriety has propelled it into the public spotlight in a way that makes its users much more visible, even behind the veil of anonymity. it used to be that, if you were on 4chan you were a nerd or a weeb; now, if you're on 4chan, you're viewed as a miscreant, a menace to society, and there's likely something very wrong with you.
plus there's the curious theory that jefferey epstein coerced moot into making /pol/ to platform all the stormfags, who got louder and screechier than before, in the wake of gamergate and the 2016 trump election. supposedly, 4chan/new/ used to be a more nuanced and politically neutral place; /pol/ replaced it as an echo chamber for white supremacy. this is why anonymous online nazis on the *chan webring act the way they do; they think that by prefacing everything with "it's just memes brah" that everything they spew can be disregarded as edgy adolescent shitflinging, but more than that, they think that they can populate any imageboard they want and they'll be in good company, amongst other nazi white supremacists.
fortunately, 4chan is dying a slow death, and in another 5 years or so will probably be entirely dead, and imageboards in general are dying a collective death, with very few users, and are being propped up by bots or an extremely small number of regulars. how much traffic does /leftypol/ get on a regular basis, sitewide? I'm sure you can see metrics for that somewhere. it's probably tiny in comparison to 4chan, but it's purported that 4chan is botted to hell and back - likely to keep assholes like rapeape and hiro earning some kind of revenue - so if that's true, the actual numbers that 4chan does daily are much smaller, if even 15% of their traffic is bots.
course, this only accounts for how people behave online. in terms of how people behave in reality, it's much simpler; they don't want to outwardly associate with white nationalism/supremacy/nazism because it makes them look back, and they have something to lose if it is known that they subscribe to such beliefs.