If you lamented the disappearance of the "old internet", well, this was a part of it, and now it may be gone too.
The title is also a fair bit understated.
They're leaking the moderators home addresses and work contact info (for admins, who are(were?) paid moderators)
I think we can lament the old internet and still care nothing for 4chan.
Like it or not, 4chan was a major hub of Internet culture. Especially early on some of the best stuff on the internet happened on 4chan (and a good chunk of the worst, of course)
4chan was founded in 2003. I think reasonable people probably disagree on what constitutes the “early” internet and this is where the argument is. Google had been around for 5 years by this point and I (and I suspect many others) remained blissfully unaware of 4chan for a long time after 2003.
Regardless of date bracketing, I can miss 80's punk and not miss slam dancing.
Maybe someone can list some positive internet culture we got from 4chan that I am overlooking.
This is like saying death metal isn't upbeat music and therefore nothing of value is lost by censoring it. Why does 4chan have to be positive culture to be considered valuable culture?
There's a big difference between "upbeat music" and "positive culture".
"Positive" in this sense isn't being used to mean "optimistic" or "happy". It's being used to mean "healthy for the world at large".
Regardless of whether any of us agree that 4chan was a net-negative, it should be very clear that "music that doesn't have an upbeat sound or themes" is not inherently unhealthy, but "subcultures that are unhealthy for the world at large" definitionally are.
https://www.4chan.org/
You're dismissing the entire site for a handful of events? How is 4chan unhealthy for the world, at large? It was and is a counterculture for discussing life as seen by its members.
I'm not. I'm responding to the specific exchange between you and JKCalhoun. They implied that they didn't know of any positive culture from 4chan, and you took a sharp left turn by misusing "positive"—taking a different meaning of it and comparing that against death metal music, rather than engaging with the actual meaning of what JKCalhoun had said.
I was simply helping to clarify the semantic issue at hand. I don't have enough personal knowledge of 4chan to pass judgement on it one way or another.
> How is 4chan unhealthy for the world, at large?
If you’re interested in research, the summary of controversies and harassment incidents that were worthy of the 4chan Wikipedia page(1) is over 2,000 words long and links to seven other separate Wikipedia entries, and may be a good start.
Also it is very funny that this thread seems to be multiple different posters here insisting that the user JKCalhoun is wrong for not being a fan of 4chan and that personal opinion is somehow ahistorical and in need of correction. Like the goal here is to make that person post “You guys are right I actually like that website now” ?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan
I think the responses would’ve been different if he had made a personal statement rather than a general statement.
What post was that?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43691576
This makes sense. This post that begins with “I think” wasn’t a personal statement of opinion but rather an objective one becau
sniper got h
They definitely have a PR issue then. Because of the handful of events, I've never been interested in hanging out there.
From some of the comments though, there might have been nice boards I would have enjoyed.
HN works for me though. (I can only spread myself so thin.)
Yes there definitely have been some bad actors but you can get that anywhere. As a parent I have seen teens on snapchat make fun of a kid and it gets sent to the entire school. It can happen anywhere. And yes there are lots of nice chill parts of 4chan but also some that are questionable to most people's morals. But the freedom to say what you like on 4chan makes it a very powerful site for both good and bad or those who just don't want to risk their identity being know for criticizing politics as one example. Even here on HN you are restricted on what you can say as HN does have a few guidelines. But I do find HN has a pretty good balance with moderation most of the time. The voting system takes care of most of it.
4chan is widely known for /b/ but it had and has much more than /b. /b was always known for its murk.
Each chan sub category tended to their own niche community and rivalry was little.
/f/ in its hayday was a wonderful creative group for Flash animations and with existent of NewGrounds made the internet fun. It's how I learnt flash and how YTMND came to be.
/g/ has a daily programming thread. I remember the SerenityOS developer used to post webm demos there. I remember seeing plenty of cool stuff.
Someone on /vr/ once started a thread about SNES homebrew and actually made a /vr/ themed one. I wonder what happened to that guy.
If you go look at Andreas’ old videos from 5-6 years ago you can see early versions of Serenity had some sort of shortcut or app specifically for 4chan, with the clover icon and everything.
There’s actually a number of projects that started this way though I don’t know of any that grew up to be as charming and interesting as Serenity OS. Katawa Shoujo is one, though I could definitely see people complaining about the games content. The Tox encrypted messenger is one but I’m not sure that ever went anywhere.
I think most of them, like Andreas, dropped the association with 4chan pretty soon after the project started to gain real traction.
I remember seeing maybe two other operating system projects on /g/dpt/, they didn't reach significant maturity but managed to animate some graphics on the screen. I remember seeing a bullet hell game engine written in lisp, I think it was called gnumako or something along those lines.
This was around 10 years ago...
/dpt/ was where i did a good deal of my learning during university, and the constant /g/entoo posting taught me far more about Linux than I would have learned on my own or through uni.
/g/entoomen taught me a lot about Linux too. The desktop and home server threads also have a lot of gold, people put a lot of effort into their systems. There are even Lisp generals. I remember people attempting the advent of code together and posting progress. There was one person who used a lot of Unicode in the source code.
Just yesterday I saw a rather interesting discussion about WD HDD internals and possible ways to figure out whether they are SMR drives. Shame this hack cut it short.
/tg/ had some seriously good chess players.
There's a board for everything. People see 4chan and think everything is /pol/. If anything, it's /a/. People have been arguing over which waifu is best girl for 20 years. 20 years.
That reminds me of this classic animation: 4chan city [0]. Which is based on a 2ch animation Nightmare City [1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar4WzQ7KHak
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjdi7a6L_78
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Are there no big list of memes on 4chan? If you took an intersection of that and list of memes in general, you should be able to derive a list and statistical summary figures for internet culture you've got from 4chan.
I might be giving 4chan too much credit but I think in your analogy it’s more akin to 80’s punk (broad subculture) than slam dancing (specific cultural phenomenon).
The way I see it, I lost interest in 4chan because I grew up and became an adult, and so did most of the Internet. We can look back and appreciate our childhood overall while also cringing at the embarrassing parts. 4chan has a lot of both good and bad memories for me and I think the broader Internet as well.
I guess then I'm showing my age. I was already beginning 40 years of age when 4chan became a thing.
4chan: Because even Something Awful had some kind of flawed moral compass
Funny. The moral compass of most people on the internet tends to be disordered enough to make me think Something Awful must have been truly horrific.
For far too many people "I have a moral compass" seems to mean "I don't even have the self-awareness to realize what I'm doing is evil".
So did 4chan, god help you if you abused a cat
There are some things not even Doom music can fix.
You seem to be confusing 4chan (chaotic good) with kiwifarms aka the farms, the true evil descendant of Something Awful (which was chaotic neutral).
I think that's simply which generation is talking. I'm an average (oldish?) millenial and 2003 is about that sweet spot of when I cut my teeth on the web. I was online before getting my butt kicked by koreans on starcraft but I can find old posts of mine starting in those early 2000s.
r9k is the origin of a huge amount of modern youth culture and slang. The obsessive vanity and "looksmaxxing" and all the associated terminology comes directly out of the incel culture on that board. It is extremely mainstream now.
I think anything before Frutiger Aero became popular (and it didn't in 2003) can be considered "early" Internet.
Early Internet is before the Web was its main thing.
Early Web is before most netizens (remember that?) had ever heard or seen the term "blog", and much of the web was folks' "home pages" on whatever weird topic they were interested in (some were effectively "blogging", but that wasn't a term yet—"web log" might see limited use). This was the Nerd Web.
Mid-period is from the rise of "blog" to the rise of the smartphone, Google capitulating in the never-ending war on spammers and ruining itself instead, and Facebook coming about. Roughly '08 would be the end of this period. Call this the Macromedia Flash Web, perhaps.
Everything since that is the Late, or Hellscape, Web, an age dominated to an extreme degree by spam, scams, ads, astroturfing, and absolute insanity becoming normalized and spilling over into real life. This is the part that made it clear we'd have been better off never inventing any of this.
I hope you realize the irony of picking an arbitrary OS theme, something that has no correlation to the Internet in any way, as a meaningful point in the history of the Internet.
As I said it’s all arbitrary. I might pick the time around Google’s founding as the early Internet, others might pick Yahoo, others might pick anything before eternal September.
You're trying to argue that 2003 isn't the early Internet. Seems like you're trying to have your "Ackchyually..." moment right now because you didn't know 4chan existed.
2003 was after the dot com boom and crash. There is no possible definition of "early Internet" that can include 2003.
No, I’m saying the Internet was already in mass adoption for the preceding decade. Talk to old timers and they’ll reminisce that the early days of the internet were great until Eternal September in 93. Others will reminisce about the days of BBS. I’m saying “early internet” is a relative term that has more to do with the person interpreting than any objective definition.
I put the start of the mainstreaming of the internet in July 1993, the month a cartoon was published in the New Yorker captioned, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
Before then, it was quite unusual to see coverage of the internet by the mainstream press (and what coverage I saw took a theoretical or "far" view, i.e., as part of a discussion of governmental policy). After then, coverage exploded.
This is an American perspective: the timing was probably different in other countries.
Let's just call it "pre Facebook/Twitter" Internet, then. Because that's what it is.
It's clearly when AOL started offering a monthly subscription for unlimited Internet usage.
Frutiger Aero didn’t exist before 2017.
It did since at least 2004[1].
[1] - https://yenimedya.aydin.edu.tr/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/3....
That’s dated 2023… am I missing something? The aesthetic did not exist in 2004. It was created in the late 2010s by juxtaposing materials from the early 2000s. This created a new style from old materials. The same way you might combine art deco motifs in new ways in the 1980s, inventing “art deco revival”.
> "The aesthetic did not exist in 2004"
Well, this research states that "Between 2004 and 2013, Frutiger Aero was influential in advertising, media, stock images, cinema, gaming, and spatial design". That's page 4.
There’s no justification given or source cited. You can’t just dig up a paper somebody wrote that agrees with you—you have to actually read the paper to understand what it says and what support it gives to that position.
I see NO support for this position. No reasoning, no primary sources, no secondary sources, not even the personal experiences of the author.
I have not seen any evidence that Frutiger Aero existed before 2017, and 2017 seems like the most likely creation date to me. That’s when it was created, by combining materials from the 2000s in new ways. Call it “bricolage”, perhaps.
Addenda: if you scroll through Google Image search results for Frutiger Aero, you’ll see what looks to me like an obvious lack of actual materials from the 2000s. I see a screenshot of Windows XP, a screenshot of the Nintendo Wii home screen. Maybe a few other random screenshots of apps or web sites. As far as I can tell, Frutiger Aero was invented by taking these few materials and extrapolating a whole aesthetic movements out of it. I see a lot of artwork dated from the 2020s labeled as Frutiger Aero—that’s the true nexus of the aesthetic, Gen Z adults recreating a half-remembered image from their childhoods. Which is fine. It’s just not from 2004. Like how Vaporwave is not actually from the 1990s or 1980s, Vaporwave is from the mid-2010s. I love Vaporwave, but I know that it’s not from the past; it’s a modern remix of elements from the past.
Fruiter Aero is a term that retroactively applies to the style of a certain time. Look at Windows Vista. Windows Vista's design is what we now call Fruitger Aero. Windows Vista came out in 2007. It's a retroactive term, yes, but how can you claim the thing it refers to didn't exist before 2007, when Windows Vista is a shining example of it?
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“Trying way too hard” means “I don’t have anything material to add to the discussion, I just want to mock you for even caring about this.”
Jeezus. Don’t write comments like that. It’s inappropriate.
The term was coined that year but the actual style exists at least since, well, Windows Aero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero#Legacy
I don’t think that this corresponds to the thing called “Frutiger Aero”.
The Windows Aero style existed in 2004, and somewhere around 2017, the style Frutiger Aero was invented, partly based on those styles but partly new.
Just like Vaporwave.
Some aesthetics existed in the past (like art deco), some are invented out of materials from the past (like art deco revival).
Yup, ytmnd predates it a couple year.
Many of the popular internet terms start on 4chan, and then move to reddit and the rest of the internet, and then eventually mainstream news, and 65 year olds mouths. This process takes about 3-5 years.
Looking forward to grandparents sharing wojak memes on Facebook
They have been doing this for almost ten years now.
Small pedantic correction: “major hub of Internet culture” is “major subculture in English-speaking segment of Internet” (American segment?). In many other languages it was irrelevant.
4chan culture itself is derived from polish, finnish and japanese imageboard culture and 4chan has always had a large international userbase.
I’m sure it had. It doesn’t mean it had equivalent influence. In many places people won’t name it in their top 10 cultural phenomena of Internet of that period even if they would remember it, which is far from guaranteed.
It's so funny to read this.
I've been involved in "internet culture" since the early to mid 90s.
The only thing that I heard about that ever came out of 4chan was toxicity.
That's crazy. The whole "dank memes" thing and terms like based, boomer, wojak, and soy are all from channer culture. 4chan managed to brand gen Z as the "zoomer" generation. Its cultural pervasiveness is impossibly deep.
This title says it all: https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/15/4chan_breached/
Yes, very right wing culture.
The internet is BIG and atomized.
When 4chan was young it was only right wing in the sense that people would pretend to be right wing because it was so stupid. Over time the ratio of people pretending to people being serious started to shift...
The jokes became reality. They paved the way.
early belongs to slashdot
Early belongs to Usenet.
Fidonet! BBS!
You can but I think it would make you quite dull
Why? I am not pleased with the government forced pills such as TikTok, Twitter and other such shite shoved down my throat.
You may enjoy the walled garden, I for one don't. Such sites gave you a hole to get away from the dystopian view that these gardens hold.
They gave independence away from forced control.
> "shoved down my throat."
Who shoves it down someone's throat though? I can't remember the last time I used tiktok, probably 3 or 4 years ago, and I don't feel like anyone forces me to.
Vendors. Mobile phone providers, Television companies, News Corporations, Advertising companies.
I am locked out from viewing reading groups unless I have a facebook account. I can't even read reviews on Amazon without a Amazon account.
You do have the choice not to view, watch or use. And if you desire to create your own site for "social media" the uphill battle is so greatly regulated in their honour you can't due to not having the resources to do so.
Have you read the new UK rule sheet for internet websites?
How many sites do I visit where I get a Google popup asking if I want to sign in?
Stack-overflow does this, Reddit does too.
> "But if you desire to create your own site for social media the uphill battle is so great regulated in their honour, it's not possible."
Fediverse exists quite successfully.
You mean an open-twitter clone that caters to a very niche set of individuals? A complex system to work with.
I hate the whole gimmick of 150 character messages. That's not independent like the web was once.
Discord makes you pay to upload videos, sounds and those were all existing on MSN, Yahoo, A!M for free.
Everyone at my school knew of NewsGrounds, mySpace, BeBo, LiveJournal. Me and my friends had hosted ProBoards forums where we used to discuss stuff. You can't even do that according to the new Ofcom laws.
> "You mean an open-twitter clone that caters to a very niche set of individuals?"
It's not just one instance and not even one frontend existing for what can be described as "fediverse". Decentralization is the whole point.
> "a very niche set of individuals?"
Everything depends on the instance you're using. Some of them, like mastodon.social, are very active, others are not.
> "I hate the whole gimmick of 150 character messages"
Find a better instance. On the one I use it's 2k characters limit.
> "That's not independent web like it was."
Yes, because it's a whole new level of independence. NewGrounds, Myspace and everything you mentioned are centralized platforms, which is practically vendor lock-in, because you're dependent on just one vendor for everything you do on these platforms, while on fediverse, you aren't. Instances are completely (except for showing posts from one another) independent from each other - there's no central "authority" controlling all of them like there would be on a centralized platform. Thousands of them exist for every frontend imaginable, and you can create one yourself.
There is a reason why common people picked Bluesky instead of the fediverse.
Yes, and that is because "common" people became used to centralized platforms and don't bother. That's also why fediverse's main audience is techies.
The American government is actively working to move its communication exclusively to Twitter.[0]
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-administration-r...
Not as much since Elon’s bribery lost in Wisconsin. Even the SSA is denying that rumor: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/04/15/ssa-using-x-communica...
Wired is the ministry of truth apparently.
I believe the term of art is "the Joneses".
It's incredibly easy to just not use those websites. My throat remains surprisingly clear with no effort.
It actually isn't, have you ever tried attending any real life function? An account with Meta is almost a requirement to even get in the door.
Thats insane. I have never been carded for a meta account IRL.
If you live outside of a city in America you will be shocked how many community events are organized and advertised exclusively on Facebook, how many local businesses eschew any online presence aside from a Facebook page, etc. Some towns got into the internet in 2012-2015 and basically got stuck there.
Uh, yes? What kind of functions are you trying to attend? If you go to C3 and show people your Facebook account, you will rightfully be mocked (unless it's an admin account you're not supposed to have).
Pretty much any major gathering of people older than 25 will have people asking for your facebook/instagram. At least in my experience. This includes real life functions like fundraisers, meet-ups, club events, anything involving a charity or an official event. As someone without a Meta account, I'm just as shocked by it as anyone else.
You better believe 4chan is as much of a government space as those other social media sites are. Just because you don't have to give three forms of ID and a mobile phone number to post doesn't mean they're not involved.
It's an illusion, a very believable one in an internet where billionaires try to goad you to include your name and address with every thing you post. I don't see why people care so much about Doxxing when every social media company makes them do it for free.
They in fact, do it for free.
Isn't it a running joke that the Jannies don't get paid?
I'm reliably informed they do it for free.
> Isn't it a running joke that the Jannies don't get paid?
You're think about reddit and why it is the way it is from an editorial perspective and what kind of people have the time to mods 100+ subs for free...
But that ceased to be true long ago. While some of the supermods aren't paid by reddit directly, they might be paid by other orgs to mod and influence reddit, corporate or 'grass root'...
Some others simply hijack subs to sell their own products.
Go back.
The joke on 4chins actually is that the Jannies do it for free. Never cared to fact check it, but it is a popular saying.
Also sage in all fields
What does Reddit have to do with this?
"Jannies" (janitors) are pseduo-mods on 4chan (the subject of the linked thread) who clean up posts and do other work, for free. Actual 4chan mods are paid.
> Actual 4chan mods are paid.
As far back as I can remember they were also volunteers. When did hiro start paying people?
I'd hardly call it the "old internet". It is very niche, and has not been around that long really - like what 2003 or something? Nothing compared to e.g. Geocities which was early-mid 90s IIRC which I'd argue had more relevance to people than 4chan.
"Old Internet" doesn't have a very defined meaning, but I think it has more to do with design and functionality than a hard date. While I don't think relevance matters, 4chan is much more relevant than you think. Having a niche is part of the old Internet. Websites used to be niche, but deep, instead of websites like Wikipedia, which are broad and shallow (compare the Castlevania dungeon [0] to the Wikipedia article for Castlevania, for example). Then compare 4chan's limited number of boards with reddit's endless subs. 4chan's design is early web 2.0, doesn't require you create an account, allows (pseudo) anonymous posting, content is mostly unfiltered, unmonetized, free & thought of as ephemeral, etc.
0 - https://castlevaniadungeon.net/dungeon.html
> 4chan's design is early web 2.0, doesn't require you create an account, allows (pseudo) anonymous posting, content is mostly unfiltered, unmonetized, free & thought of as ephemeral, etc.
That is hardly unique. There are any number of phpbb (and other) boards that allow mostly the same that were/are/will continue to be the same. The only difference is the clientele and noteriaty, but I'd argue 4chan is basically the same thing as somethingawful is/was in that regard. People act like 4chan was this ground-breaking thing but it was just one of many many similar boards.
Also for 4chan, you'd only go to 4chan to go to 4chan. People went to geocities and xoom and angelfire and all the other old internet things for niche website content from individuals, not because of the site that hosted it. It's like going to a bar to chat vs going to a library to study: going to the bar/4chan is an undeniable part of the culture, but let's not pretend it is anything significantly different amongst a constellation of other chat/forum sites (somethingawful, fark, ebaumsworld, discord, IRC etc etc etc)
The point wasn't about if 4chan is unique.
Exactly.
This is the dumbest nitpick, but:
> 4chan's design is early web 2.0
Web 2.0 (even early) was very JS heavy, coming down from the advent of Mootools/Prototype/etc and had a very specific visual design sense.
4chan is easily the last of the Web 1.0 sites, probably up there with Craigslist. They very much "just fucking work".
"Pre Dot Com Bust" is a pretty good definition for "Old Internet".
22 years is old. Nobody knows what geocities is, it has no relevance. It’s like talking about brands of telegraph wire.
Geocities was the place to create and visit homepages for a large percentage of people using the internet in the 90s. You can see its influence in games such as Hypnospace Outlaw and modern hosts like Neocities.
Hypnospace outlaw and neocities, both even less known lol
What are the most popular games on Steam that focus on interacting with a 4chan-like website?
There are none because people can just go on 4chan and post.
Geocities was going strong in the late 90's too! My first homepage was hosted there on Tokyo Towers.
It is not very niche at all. 4chan served a gigantic volume of traffic.
Side note: When you google "Geocities" the results are in comic sans
Web 2.0 and before is now considered the old internet.
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I grew up on IRC, had sites on Geocities and Angelfire. That was the old internet people miss, not 4chan.
The initial leaker is most likely not the same parties as the ones tying email addresses and usernames to people's "real identities", if you look at the thread where the leak was announced.
Say what you will about 4chan but I am concerned for the team managing it - them and their close ones are certainly going to be exposed to a whole lot of viciousness soon :(
> them and their close ones are certainly going to be exposed to a whole lot of viciousness soon
Isn't viciousness the notorious bread and butter of 4chan?
Most boards on 4chan, like the origami board, food and cooking, pets and animals, retro gaming, toys, etc are relatively harmless and are just a different way to participate in discussions than using discord or reddit.
The staff has cut down a lot on organized harassment that 4chan was notorious for in recent years. Those people migrated to private discords, telegrams, and other forums (like kiwi farms, soy party, etc). Ex, #gamergate was mostly an 8chan, Twitter, reddit, and IRC phenomenon - #gg people would get banned if they tried posting about it on 4chan
Live by the sword, die by the sword I would say. You don't get to enjoy raising leopards and also get to be surprised when you become lunch one day
They certainly don’t get to claim any kind of moral high ground, but as a bystander I can feel empathy for someone hit by a drunk driver, even if the victim had driven drunk before in the past.
Any increase in human suffering is unfortunate, regardless of one’s take on just desserts or karma or whatever.
I’d say it’s more like a high-profile NRA member getting shot. Unfortunate but it’s hard to miss the irony.
That’s fair, similar point. Reasonable people can both appreciate the irony and feel bad for the victim. Few people IRL have the sociopathic “they had it coming so I just want to watch them bleed out” attitude that we see so much of online.
Damn, the culture they have bred and actively maintained is now going to be turned against them?
It might end up making them more sympathetic people on the long term. They might realise the seriousness of what they have done to others.
"The culture" of 4chan varies from board to board and even thread to thread.
the serious crime of... deleting egregious posts from a website
You don't like to lump people into groups by race/country of origin but find no cognitive dissonance in lumping people together by platform choice.
Yes.
People can leave the platform. They can't leave their race.
That's just the view of bureaucratic machines which prefer to have some stable identifier in the relevant field on paper form (it doesn't matter if it's for ethnic cleansing or “celebrating diversity”), and then shape the reality until it fits.
Even though it might be hard to ignore the well-budgeted choir of well-intentioned promoters of status quo, you still don't have to believe in this concept.
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One of those is something people are born into without choice. The other is chosen because of their tastes.
"Wow, you'd group people by their actions and beliefs but not by immutable characteristics they were born with?!" /s
While a precise estimate is difficult to gauge it is supposed by professional analysts that a majority of hacks are state sponsored.
If the hacker is a state actor then I don't think anyone has learned anything about Free Speech.
Was part of it. As somebody who has been trapped there since 2004, I'd say it evolved into a part of the normal internet between 2010 and 2016 (i.e. it had already fully transformed before Trump's first term), where "normal internet" means being infested with uncle-on-Facebook-tier political posts, "jokes" where the punchline is "I hate my political enemies", etc. Creative irreverence was replaced with regular childishness.
Mostly because, as more people came online, they mistook offensive humor for conservatism; and thought "counter-culture" meant "being opposed to the political party currently in power", rather than "being opposed to political parties".
>Creative irreverence was replaced with regular childishness.
I’d suggest taking off those glasses as they are a bit too rose-tinted. I was there, just like you, and the humor was way more “childishness” than “creative irreverence” well before 2010.
Considering that the people posting this "creative irreverence" were the same guys calling you a "stupid f*gg*t n*gger piece of sh*t" on Halo 2/3 and CS when they got noscoped from across the map or whatever, "It's just a joke" has always been somewhat suspect. It would be wrong to say that there was no element of tongue-in-cheek-iness and hyperbole, of course. It just wasn't completely innocent, broadly speaking.
Of course, in a post-Bioshock Infinite world, there's really no excuse for not grokking how time and distance from the origins of a cultural behavior pattern can warp even well-meaning notions that aren't regularly re-examined and tuned to align the intention with the zeitgeist. If the Sarah Silverman-esque posters ever looked up and realized, "Oh, they don't know it's a joke, they're ACTUALLY Nazis," it was too late to shift things back. (Unless you were in a Boondocks thread on /co/, in which case correction was freely forthcoming.)
Probably didn't help that at least one mod wanted 4chan to become more racist, on purpose.
Incredibly spot-on and well-put.
> mistook offensive humor for conservatism
Something happened in the post-2010 times along with the Tea Party, and offensive humor - especially overt racism - became a mainstream part of conservativism, all the way to the White House.
> "jokes" where the punchline is "I hate my political enemies"
Hence the laughter in the White House at refusing to follow the court order to return their political enemies from the overseas prison.
4chan may have died, but Trump is more the first 4chan President than Howard Dean was the first "internet candidate", and especially Musk the Twitter Presidential Vizir is the heir to this culture.
Is it considered part of it? From my understanding, the culture has changed significantly and post get auto deleted eventually, so it’s not a good archive either. The only thing old about it is it’s web design
the mechanics are old
there's no other online community i know of that still allows fully anonymous posting
the culture changed, but the "environment" causing the culture there to be the way it is still same as the original.
the bump/delete mechanics work well to promote the most controversial, most engaging content, without any advanced statistics or ML.
despite being a shitty place, i don't feel advertised to, spied or in any way abused _by the software itself_ while browsing it
Posting on 4chan just kept becoming increasingly user hostile, especially for casual users, you had to be really determined to post something: posts started requiring 24 hour email verification, and after that you had to wait ~10 minutes before being allowed to post, and finally you had to complete a nearly impossible captcha which could lock you out from posting for an undetermined amount of time just for failing. It became apparent that the owners were pushing the gold pass pretty damn hard, and it's advertised on literally every board page.
That’s true. The captcha is impossible without the 4chan pass.
soj.ooO [1] which is similar on the other hand doesn’t have the captcha.
[1] https://soj.ooO
Not sure what this random unknown website has to do with 4chan. It's similar only insofar as both things let you post. Soj requires a sign-up so no anon posting at all, and the community structure is a pretty clear rip-off of Reddit with /p/[sub] instead of /r/[sub]
What is your affiliation with it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rasengan shows some previous shilling, FWIW.
> there's no other online community i know of that still allows fully anonymous posting
Doesn't 8chan/kun still exist?
> there's no other online community i know of that still allows fully anonymous posting
Usenet?
It even has the issue of old posts disappearing when the retention at your UNIX system / ISP rolled over.
Posts always got auto deleted. Maybe you aren't familiar with how it worked.
I haven't been there in like a decade but if nobody bumps your thread eventually your post falls off the last page and gets deleted no?
Yeah and if threads hit a certain reply count, they get bump locked.
every board had it's own independent archiving service after a while, so board culture ended up stickier than the original design. there's some interesting stuff in there
4chan is not "old internet". Not even close. It's predated by a bunch of forums (including 2channel) on the Internet, some anonymous.
As far as image boards go, 4chan is the first successful (and longest surviving) English-speaking 2chan clone.
2chan is a japanese site.
Do you think that 4chan is going to disappear forever for this? Just wait a bit and it will be back.
Also where did you see that they are leaking home addresses and work contact info? I think they just leaked the emails (I don't understand why home addresses and work contact info should be present in the 4chan database, everyone moderating the site for free).
I'm not up to speed - but isn't that a free-speech absolutist site?
4chan has global rules and board-specific rules.
Racism, hate speech in general, as well as anything illegal, will quickly result in deletion and IP ban.
The site will also, as it's obvious, cooperate with authorities, when it comes to crimes.
4chan is far from being a free-speech absolutist site.
But it has much less of a barrier to post things. You do not need an email or a phone number you can just post. And an IP ban will only be effective to prevent the average user. Still though things get removed and moderated and I am okay with that. Having seen some of the telegram groups and the misinformation they spread was a crazy eye opener during covid times.
Mostly, but the few restrictions they do have led to even absolutist-er spinoffs like 8chan being founded.
Every website that allows content uploaded by users have moderators, you can be absolutist as you want but you can't allow CP for example, you also need to handle DMCA (unless you live in a country that couldn't care less).
No, it's mostly a cancer survivors support group. Every third post was about cancer, what is causing it, and frank expressions of helplessness in the face of it.
About half the posts were pornography, racist rants, or memes making fun of someone, often for being mentally handicapped.
Five percent was accusing the moderators of sleeping on the job.
Edit: I love that people are down-voting this, it really shows how much people like to have an opinion even while they can't recognize even the most obvious things that requires any information about the subject.
My understanding is the cancer was mostly killing bees.
No the bees were never good.
depends on the board you're browsing, if you're discussing gardening you won't have issues with the far-right
There are no true free speech absolutist sites on the open internet. To run a site under free speech absolutist principles would require allowing and refusing to moderate illegal content.
People like to confuse "free speech absolutism" for "tolerating right-wing speech" because the free speech absolutist narrative has been pushed by right-wing accelerationists, but every site has its limits, even 4chan.
And you don't even need to go that far. Off-topic posts could result in a swift 3-day ban. There were even words and phrases that could get you autobanned the second you hit submit.
“Illegal” where? There's a lot of different illegal stuff in a lot of different countries.
The elephant in the room is that USA appointed itself as a policeman for the whole network. Demands of its state and business entities are somehow tied to the fact that there is no true free speech on the open internet.
Illegal wherever, it doesn't matter. Very few admins are going to be willing to take a bullet for you even if they enjoy your spicy memes.
Well, but who shoots that bullet? It doesn't appear out of thin air. We shouldn't consider that it all happened “by itself”, it has formed quite recently, and the memory is fresh. In addition to that, we can see that quite specific topics attract attention of that internet cop, and he's pretty ignorant about the rest. It seems that the choice is somehow guided by the spectacle presented to public inside the US, and changes with political fashions.
It's not so much that we lament the old internet, we lament that the new internet cannot be built because incumbents like google have distorted the playing field with shitty algorithmic SEO practices-- which really has nothing to do with 4chan at all.
Where do you see info about personal info?
I would presume Anon would which to remain anon.
I honestly and sincerely miss the project chanology days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology
But really, 4chan-style bullshit took over the rest of the internet. At least in the old internet, it was self contained there. If someone spouted nonsense they read on 4chan, you could easily dismiss them as a crank. Now everyone is posting and reposting bullshit on a multitude of microblogging shitsites.
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I have leftist friends who grew up looking at memes on 4chan. As adults they remember it fondly.
As bad as Trump is, most of the opposition to him is just tribalism. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, about 10% of people are always cruel, 10% are always kind, and 80% are in play. From your comment I think you would fit right in on 4chan since you seem to advocate anonymously destroying people that you don't know, without any process, if you vaguely (without really knowing anything about it or bothering to check) think they have crossed you in some way.
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Hate makes odd bedfellows at times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
No historian but wouldn't it be fair to call Hitler a zionist?
Do you think they voted for Kamala? One more contradiction won't make a difference to nazis...
Also Hitler was a Zionist too [1]. Israel's goal of housing every Jews on Earth somehow aligns with antisemites of the world wanting to get rid of them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement?wprov=sfla1
I think humanity is really amazing. If someone is anti-Nazi, and also anti-Israel, they manage to find a way to believe that Jews are Nazis. There's no level of cognitive dissonance that could slow you down, is there?
The Nazis were NOT in favor of a Jewish state. They wanted to be able to say they tried this, they tried that, so it's not their fault they had to do a holocaust. They wanted justification. You don't actually advocate in favor of a group while simultaneously building camps to murder them. Although, I suspect you probably have some 'opinions' regarding the details of the holocaust.
You're staring right into the inner workings of the Ministry of Truth. War is peace, peace is war, etc. The Hacker News you once knew is dead.
Nice try, but no cognitive dissonance here. My previous comment proved Nazis can also be Zionists, and you would know it if you deigned open the link I joined to it.
I never claimed that Jews are Nazis, in fact, America's Zionists are mostly Christian nationalists, seeking to get rid of Jews on their national territory. And like the German Nazis before them, they find common ground with the Zionist project of moving all Jews to an ad-hoc state in the Middle East.
Unlike them, I do not believe in the "Jewish Question" (prime topic on 4chan btw) and I am perfectly fine with Jews living in my country, sharing my bread, etc.
My condemnation of Isreal only concerns itself with the way Palestinians have been treated since the creation of the state: systematically depossesed of their lands and sometimes outright eliminated. Note that "Jews" (as if they were a singular entity) aren't at the origin of the project. That is to be found in the League of Nations [1].
Please refrain from conflating anti-zionism with anti-semitism in the future, and of labelling everyone you disagree with as suffering from "cognitive dissonance".
[1] https://israelforever.org/state/Mandate_for_Palestine_Jewish...
When someone robs a bank, and puts a gun in the face of the teller, they are both in agreement. Both of them want to get the money out of the drawer and into the bag as quickly as possible. The bank robber is not aligned with the teller, they aren't allies on this topic, they're not on the same side, the fact that the teller wants to do the same thing the bank robber wants is because of the threat of murder. The teller never considered that it would be a good idea to put all the money in a sack until the gun was put in his face.
The idea that you can separate Zionism from a thousand years of pogroms and genocide is ridiculous and stupid, and the idea that Nazis are somehow 'on the side of' any Jews, in any scenario, is ridiculous and stupid. Maybe, just maybe, if you didn't murder and isolate and oppress Jews for a thousand years they wouldn't have felt the need to find a place away from you. Maybe if you don't put a gun in their face bank tellers won't start wanting to put all the money in a pillow case.
> America's Zionists are mostly Christian nationalists
I assume you are Polish or something? Hungarian? Ukrainian? The combination of comfortable, casual antisemitism, belief in silly antisemitic conspiracy theories, and lack of knowledge about the US makes me think so. Most US Zionists are Jews, because we didn't cook all the Jews who live here in big ovens. Secondarily a lot of Evangelical Christians are pro Israel due to a combination of cultural and weird religious reasons (they think Israel has to be a Jewish state so they will rebuild Solomon's Temple so that Jesus has a place to land when he comes back). There is very little (so little you would struggle to find it) antisemetic Christian Nationalist sentiment in the US compared to pro-jewish Evangelical Christian sentiment. Evangelical Christians don't want Jews to leave the country or move to Israel, the concept that this is even a valid opinion would be completely foreign.
> Unlike them, I do not believe in the "Jewish Question" (prime topic on 4chan btw) and I am perfectly fine with Jews living in my country, sharing my bread, etc.
It's their country too, right? That's what you meant? Your careful veneer is slipping a little here.
Why twist every word out of my mouth? Why be so disingenuous?
> the idea that Nazis are somehow 'on the side of' any Jews, in any scenario, is ridiculous and stupid.
Then what do you make of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement?wprov=sfla1 ?
I never pretended that Nazi Germany was an ally of Israel or Jews or whatever. Simply that at some point in history, Nazis and Zionists shared a single interest. Do you debate this too?
> if you didn't murder and isolate and oppress Jews for a thousand years they wouldn't have felt the need to find a place away from you.
Wtf is wrong with you? Why use "you" as if I was the one committing those atrocities?
Do you not believe Jews can live in Europe? That colonizing Gaza is made justified by past genocide, necessary even? Perhaps you believe in the "Jewish Question" and think Jews can't cohexist around other populations? I do not.
> I assume you are Polish or something? Hungarian? Ukrainian?
No. Stop assuming.
> It's their country too, right? That's what you meant?
Of course it's what I meant you slimey dishonest idiot. I do not care about the religion/ethnicity/gender of my fellow citizens. What do you not understand in "I don't believe in the Jewish Question"?
Let me reiterate my position once and for all, so you can stop baselessly attacking me. Israel is currently committing atrocities in Gaza, and for that reason alone I am condemning it.
I do not believe in the "Jewish Question", this means I don't think having Jewish citizens in my country is an issue. Same thing as for any other "group".
Therefore, I don't believe the Zionist project was necessary in the first place. That said, I am obviously not advocating for the disbanding of Israel and a "return". That would cause tremendous harm for no good reason. What I want is for the colonization of Gaza to stop, is that too much to ask without being labelled a rabid anti-semite?
You can dress it up however you want, but your pathological need to insist that Nazis were pro-zionism is not historically accurate and it is frankly insulting. From the link you posted: "In the post-war period, the agreement has sometimes been cited by anti-Zionists, anti-Semites, and critics of Israel (Ken Livingstone, Lyndon LaRouche, Louis Farrakhan, Mark Weber,[28] Joseph Massad,[29] Mahmoud Abbas[30]) as evidence of Nazi support for Zionism[31] or Zionist collaboration with the Nazis.[32]"
From the footnotes of the link you posted: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/world-history/ado...
What you keep saying is just basic antisemetic rhetoric. I wonder where you were exposed to it?
From my previous comment:
> I never pretended that Nazi Germany was an ally of Israel or Jews or whatever. Simply that at some point in history, Nazis and Zionists shared a single interest. Do you debate this too?
This is huge waste of time. You have made up your mind: I am a rabid anti-semite for some reason. Why? What can you possibly gain by alienating me?
I have been to anti-racism marches including marches against anti-semitism. You barely know me but insist I am using "basic anti-semitic rhetoric". I fear there's nothing I could say that would change your mind on such a ridiculous and disgusting mischaracterization of my person. Goodbye.
You have insisted like 3 times in this thread on pushing this theory that Nazis were pro zionism. It's historically inaccurate. It's insulting. You can read the wikipedia article you posted for details. I don't know why you want to push this, but you are the one pushing it.
I agree in theory being anti-zionism does not logically imply someone is anti-semetic, but it's also true that antisemites usually describe themselves as just being anti-zionist and then they probe to see what they can get away with in terms of denying the holocaust and pushing antisemetic tropes.
If you don't want people to think you are an antisemite, don't push antisemetic theories.
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