• funnystuff97@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      On places like 4chan, it’s used as a kind of dogwhistle. For example:

      My (((neighbor))) came to me the other day, and…

        • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          It comes from an alt-right podcast, where rather than outright say “this person is a jew and jews are bad”, they started making the names of jewish people (or those they suspected of being jewish) echo dramatically so they could have plausible deniability. The textual form of that echo became (((this))).

      • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        this is true but it doesn’t explain why;

        this is the case because IM clients will often put a colon between the username and the message, so simply writing ) gives you “username : )”. it then escaped simple IM clients and now the russosphere uses it even in the absence of the colon.

        • Axiochus@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, it’s one of my favorite little historical developments on the internet. A totally local convention that made perfect sense in the context of mIRC and similar things, yet persisted as an independent meaningful token.

          • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Did it make sense with mIRC? IRC clients wrap the name in angle-brackets, not a colon. This sounds more like AIM.

            • Axiochus@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I remember it with mIRC, but it might have been a false memory, you’re right! Then again, it might have been some custom styling that enabled it?

              Anyway, it definitely is the case for stuff like ICQ (I double-checked 😺).