My only interaction with 4chan is when one day I discovered a /d/ thread devoted entirely to insulting me. I had never posted on it before, never posted after.
So, I think there is some additional gatekeeping: ability to ignore the fact that the one day the community decided to personally make me a target of their vitriol. :(
This was my experience on Twitter for telling someone they were getting angry, and starting an online mob, at someone who was clearly in the middle of a psychological breakdown. This persons feed went from normal tech stuff for almost the past year replete with good spelling and sentence structure to a sudden flood of reactionary and misogynistic content, 90% of which the structure of sentences barely made sense. While I'm not a mental health professional one of my best friends at the time was a schizophrenic - the behavior is pretty telltale.
This woman captured the image of me with my dog and posted it for her feed calling me a slue of slurs and various labels. I spent the next few days in bed and was afraid to leave my house. I had to delete my Twitter, scrub the internet of that image, and get a new email address because her followers would not stop trying to contact me to continue what I could already see them saying on that Twitter thread. It took Twitter over a week to remove the thread, even though it clearly doxxed me and violated their policies barring inciting harassment.
Personally, I think some people just wake up and choose violence, and other minds can't help but dabble. Sorry this happened to you.
I just found the original Google alert from 2011 and it was actually dis.4chan.org/read/prog/ - maybe I misremembered dis as /d? And it was actually in /prog? I don’t use 4chan so not sure the url templating scheme. The URL now 404s fortunately.
So, I think there is some additional gatekeeping: ability to ignore the fact that the one day the community decided to personally make me a target of their vitriol. :(