[–]supergooduser 43 points 23 hours ago
I discovered the ChrisChan comprehensive history last year and devoured all 60 hours of it. I've never seen anything like it and it's endlessly fascinating. Essentially you have this autistic person who just consistently makes the wrong decisions in life and never learns from prior mistakes, and it just leads to bonkers wtf moments. Even before trolls got involved their life was insane. Like, they would walk around campus with a giant placard with a list of criteria for a girlfriend, one of the requirements was "no minorities" that's the insane bonkers shit that happened WELL before the internet trolls even got there.
Anyways... when I finished it, like any good tv show you want to talk about it with other people. That's where Kiwifarms came in.
The reason you're there is because of incredibly mentally ill people utilizing the internet which opens them up to interaction. It's 4chan derivative, part fansite and part citizen investigations.
The fansite portion makes up 1/3rd and is pretty interesting. A common topic with ChrisChan is "what was the point of no return" and everyone makes a strong theory for their particular point. That's fun, but admittedly you're talking about a real, living, mentally ill person.
The citizen investigation makes up another 1/3rd and is to basically "expand the narrative", it's doxing essentially, looking up online records to corroborate stories or find new ones. In the case of ChrisChan it did lead to people going to his house and neighborhood, going through his trash, and talking to people he knew. Again... if you're talking about a cold case where someone is looking for closure, this behavior can be seen as good, but with a living, mentally ill person, it's harassment.
The 4chan part is just the LULZ, low effort posts, trying to be as shocking as possible. That's like the 'decor' of the place, the way a restaurant might be themed Tex-Mex or something.
The problem comes from when the citizen investigation and the 4chan part overlap. This is where they'll bait the person, create fake identities, either in the guise to get more information, sometimes to help the person, or most often, to troll them into doing embarrassing if not outright harmful things.
In the case of ChrisChan it's exhausting the times the internets fucked with them, but notable examples, getting his psychiatric records and publishing them online, talking to his private therapist and posting the conversation online, physical harm, encouraging them to commit criminal activities, etc.
It's like a group of teenagers encouraging themselves to do something illicit like "throw a rock at that sign" "oh shit you hit the store behind it" builds up to "bet you can't break that stores window" to "dare you set a fire in the cash register"
It starts out relatively innocuous, but it's still harassing a real living mentally ill person, but you're just so fascinating, but it's a VERY slippery slope to just outright fuck with them.
Particularly when creating a fake persona is so effective to draw out new information, probably the best tactic. Just... "i've read up on this so much, wonder what it'd be like to talk to them, I'll make a fake dating profile meeting their exact criteria, it worked, holy shit it worked TOO well, wonder if I can get them to send me something, they did"
And you're already in ethically if not legally dubious areas, it would take very little effort to be like "hey... that psychiatric report, it'd really turn me on to have a copy of it" but at that point, you're stealing someone's medical records and posting it online, but you'll also get infamy in the community.
The whole thing is just fascinating to me.
Also... it really plays on the mental illness or circumstances of the lolcows. Often they're on public assistance, and developmentally challenged. Someone showed them the internet and they can use it "just enough" or they rely on it for monetary or validating reasons.
There was a guy at a cyber security conference who gave a talk about how to take down the infamous hacker group Anonymous (which is brutally effective). They DEVOURED the guy. An entire army of elite level hackers went after him. But he recovered. How? He just went offline. It's kind of like hiding out from the cops, use cash, don't use your real name, small changes. But really all you need is an e-mail account and a browser to get shit done. After about a year Anonymous forgot and moved on.