>The problem with the Alt-right on the internet is that they often are just trolls trying to be as offensive as possible.

After watching and participating in this for years, I don't think this is true anymore.

The people who found it funny to piss off people by pretending to be Nazis ended up attracting actual Nazis and were eventually replaced by them.

It's much less funny to pretend to be a white supremacist when you know half the country actually agrees with you.

I can respect that view but I don't personally view that as the bigger problem. I think that the amount of liberals who think that genuine right wing political views are alt-right is also a very small group. Also I'm not sure they are always just trolling, to use r/the_Donald as an example again it's one of the larger subreddits and it frequently has Islamophobic comments upvoted (and somewhat less often there will be racist or misogynistic comments, too) that aren't jokes and there is no one there to troll. I know it's a backlash against recent spcietal changes and hopefully it will eventually die down but the fact that there are some reasonably sized communities online which have normalized hate speech is really worrying to me. Even the highest tiers of the US political system have shown themselves receptive to those hateful messages so it's hard to see it as just a minor problem.