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.
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.
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.
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” ?
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.
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.
/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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.