Yeah, I'd love that! If you can, whenever you mention a channel, could you also add a couple of words about what it's about or what makes it interesting? I'd really appreciate that

I really appreciate you taking the time to write all that out. Thanks for such a detailed reply.

Where do memes in the Western internet actually come from? Back in the day where I lived, most memes came from VK. There were dedicated meme pages that made original stuff, and then a bunch of other pages that just reposted it. These days, pretty much all new memes come out of small Telegram communities. So where do they come from on your side of the internet?

I've heard a bit about how 4chan started, mostly because I know about its Russian counterpart, 2ch. It's pretty pro-government these days, and the guy who owns it openly supports Putin.

I also remember hearing this theory that 4chan was somehow started with FBI help or whatever, but I never cared enough to actually look into it.

But you mentioned banning anime pedos. Why do these edgelord types always seem to come out of that whole scene?

In Russia, a lot of 2ch's early culture was tied to this guy, Maksim Martsinkevich. You can Google him if you want. He's mostly known for hunting down alleged pedophiles, filming himself beating and humiliating them, and all that. I don't really feel like getting into the details, but those videos are still all over the internet if you're curious.

There was even one time they went after a Russian government official. There's honestly a lot you could say about the whole thing.

I just don't get why this kind of stuff always seems to overlap with the alt-right.

What was your first thought when you read my post?

I don’t know that much about the English-speaking internet specifically, not the internet as a whole. Of course, if at some point in your life you decide to check out what Linux is, you’ll probably end up going down the rabbit hole, then you start digging deeper into stuff like Matrix, Zen Browser, self-hosting, open-source projects, privacy tools, alternative social networks, weird forums, niche communities, etc.

I could’ve obviously asked this on Reddit, but honestly Reddit has never really been a place where I got actual answers neither for my own questions nor for other people’s. Whatever the topic, there are always tons of people who just comment to comment, a lot of edgelords, and a lot of unnecessarily toxic users.

Does a word like “dumbass” even insult any specific group? That was honestly the first thing that came to my mind. We also have words that you probably shouldn’t use because they’re offensive to certain groups, but most swear words in our language are basically just words built around the idea of a “sexual act,” kind of like “fuck” in English. We just have way more of those words. For some reason, English doesn’t really have that many swear words. German is the same if anything, it’s even more boring.

As far as I understand, English has “insults” and “slurs,” with the second one specifically meaning words aimed at a certain group of people. I don’t use those.

Recently I've been watching more essay-style content where people analyze different cultural phenomena (but not at all in the popular science/educational sense). For example, critical reviews of shows like The Sopranos, analyses of 90s TV commercials, or discussions about some specific cultural trends or phenomena. I just find it interesting to hear people talk about these kinds of things

Yeah, I figured as much. It's just that the internet in post-Soviet countries is kind of unique in that sense. It's really isolated, but at the same time incredibly dense. These days, pretty much all online life revolves around Telegram. The thing is, it's almost impossible to get into it if you weren't born here. Not because you wouldn't understand what's being talked about you just wouldn't know where to even start looking.

Blogs are actually still alive here. Pretty much everyone I know has a personal Telegram channel where they just post about their life. It honestly feels a lot more like the early internet. Those channels have everything, and the biggest reason is that Telegram has very little moderation, so you can find literally anything there.

If you're interested, I can give you an example. In Ukraine there's this guy named Sasha Fokin. When he was a kid, he appeared on a Ukrainian TV show that basically tried to help struggling families. I'm sure every country has some version of that kind of show. Back then he became known as a "problem child" I won't get into the details. Fast forward something like nine years (I'm not exactly sure how many), and now he runs a Telegram channel where he talks about his favorite transgender adult performers, posts coprophilia, and argues about politics. Stuff like that is actually pretty common across the post-Soviet internet, especially in Russia. If you're curious, I can name a few more people.

My point is that there's very little moderation, so you end up with a lot of fringe personalities, but also a lot of genuinely interesting subcultures and discussions. If all you read is Facebook, I feel like the biggest news you'll see is that firefighters rescued another cat from a tree. I'm not saying I'm specifically looking for fringe content in the English-speaking internet, but I do want to see the kind of stuff people actually talk about. It just so happens that people in the post-Soviet internet are really into weird, fringe content, so over here it's basically mainstream.

I mostly added the image just to catch people's attention. I think I know which word you mean now. I had no idea it was used as a slur against disabled people in English I honestly thought it was just a regular insult. Sorry, I don't always catch the connotations of certain words since I'm not a native speaker.