In its earliest years /b/ started prank calling the radio show of nazi Hal Turner, then messed with Stomfront as the conflict widened. There was little activist component to this. They just thought it was funny to rile up people who took themselves very seriously.
I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation. 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting word filters that I can't repeat here without my post getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of hate.
I think very little has changed in twenty years really. Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now, when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant contrarianism.
If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call your son gay until he grows out of it.
The edgelord thing goes back way further than 4chan and Something Awful. I remember plenty of racist fascist rapist satanic misanthropist kitten smasher edgelords from the BBS days. It was not serious, though sometimes it was I hate my dad and I just got the new NiN album serious.
At some point something did change though. It was around the same time as Gamergate and it’s been written about extensively. I’ve been into edgy hacker adjacent culture since like 1992 and when the “actual not ironic” stuff landed it was immediately recognizable as something unfamiliar and different. I’m still not sure how many people got “pilled” versus how much of it was some kind of weird collision with normie spaces where people didn’t get the culture.
There was a generational shift in there too. OG hacker culture was GenX and older millennials, the people who grew up with the net pre enshittification. The /pol stuff and GG seems like younger millennials and GenZ.
I am not pretending to have a clue and I don’t think anyone truly does. It’s all a very complex soup of memes and people and influences.
My association was a bit later, mid to late 2010s. I recognize some of the names as well, including one of the top folks that probably onboarded both of us.
That said, my info is not on the list, I assume it was deleted when I left.
What kind of official association could one have with 4chan? 4chan was formative for my early connection to the internet, and I'm really curious what the organization behind it looked like. Was it professionally driven, or just some random guy mailing checks? stuff like that.
I lied about my age and was given janitor access in the mid 2000s. There was a special /j/ board to coordinate on, but it broke relatively early, and you mostly had to hang out in the #janiteam channel on Rizon. I think almost everybody else was underage as well. There was a minimal web overlay that let you delete/escalate posts. You couldn't see people's IPs, but you could see how many outstanding ban requests they had. These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.
We were all offered the chance to become mods in 2010, but moot wanted to see our faces on a Skype call. I thought that was a step too far and just gradually stopped caring after that. Seems like I made the right choice.
On the whole it was barely held together technically and organisationally, mostly run by moot's personal friends, and fun all around. Things were far less serious then.
Sounds about like what I would have expected as a (also underage) user at the time. The suspicion was always that most of the memorable joke chains were probably just one guy self-replying (I always suspected that was the case for the hunter2 meme specifically). It didn't really matter, it was funny anyway.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, and thanks for the fun back then :)
> These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.
Simultaneously one of the best and worst parts about the website was how much a single person could create influence. Some guy spamposting "30-year old boomer" memes eventually turned boomer and zoomer into mainstream terminology.
I remember a long time ago, a general that I would frequent attracted the attention of a lunatic who would frequently try to ruin threads by spam posting corrupted unloadable images until the bumpcap was reached. It made a successful thread with no incidents feel like a moment of success.
I like how this was the origin of the "virgin/Chad memes". Some guy kept spamming a meme about the "virgin walk" to make people feel self-conscious, and then someone made a joke response called the "Chad stride". Years later, those two are inseparable in popular culture.
Mods of any decently sized forum can point to very special users participating in intense sockpuppetry, flamewars, getting back after being banned 20 times, and so on. It's not specific to 4chan.
The nature of 4chan makes it more difficult to distinguish from just normal posting. There's not any kind of paper trail to look at and potentially ID the posters.
It's also somewhat expected on the site from a cultural standpoint? Having a recognizable posting pattern gives flavor to a system that is otherwise composed of completely interchangeable posters. Like /v/ has one guy that constantly makes threads that are designed to devolve as quickly as possible into posting images of anthropomorphic lizards. It's not much of a nuisance so much as it makes the place feel comprised of genuine people.
No, those people (or sometimes groups of people) go to great lengths to camouflage themselves, especially after repeated bans. This is not the case of “all accounts registered to the same e-mail” or “10 different posts from the same IP address” (though those are not uncommon, too, and might be allowed if community rules aren't broken). 4chan is hardly an outlier.
Moreover, you can make hundreds of anonymous posts on your own, but if no one reacts (and considers the thing/idea/joke uninteresting), they will still remain the only replies in your precious shilling threads.
So you were able to find the leak? Because I see reports that it was hacked repeated as fact everywhere on Daily Mail-tier reliable news websites and Reddit posts, but they are all based on “rumors on social media go about that there was a leak” but I've not been able to find the actual leak searching for it. Obviously not many people want to link it but it's also weird that so many people claim to have so easily been able to find it when I cannot.
Finally, I was there and using it when the website went down and this did not resemble an actual hack but technical issues. First there were a couple of hours where the website was up but no posts went through for anyone except occasionally when a new threat was bumped, mirroring the normal pattern of downtime issues that sometimes occur and then it just went down completely. This doesn't really resemble how a hack plays out but looks more like technical issues to me.
Even now, going to the front page, it loads for me, except very slowly and incompletely. This does not resemble a hack but technical issues.
Well, so you say, but every single news website that I can find willing to say something on the matter is either The Daily Mail and similar things that also say they based their information on leaks on “social media rumors” or more reputable websites that also say it's a rumor that there's a leak. One would assume if it be so easily found and I'm so incompetent that these news websites could've found it themselves and come with more certain claims.
I'm saying I searched and I couldn't find it but what I did find was many news websites that reported it but said they couldn't confirm these rumors themselves and said they were just that, rumors. I found threads about it on other anonymous textboards where people would have no compunction to post the links and yet they didn't. The news sites don't just say “We obviously won't post the links.” but “We couldn't confirm these rumors.”.
Edit: I finally found one news website willing to actually confirm it though. The Daily Dot claims to have accessed the leaked information and verified it for itself.
Click the HN headline, click the 1st external reference, click the 1st thread. The first post is the leaker speaking. Beware that website, the thread, and 4chan itself, are all, at best, in a legal grey area.
Journalists do this all the time now. They coordinate reporting to manufacture controversy that will hopefully shame advertisers into censoring opinions they find disagreeable.
Most of the time it's a massive cope pulled out of their asses in lieu of any real solution to a societal problem. They've accepted the fact that Americans will not stop mowing each other down with military grade weaponry and have redirected their impotent rage towards cheeky memes instead. I'm sure some French motherfucker has written reams on this sort of phenomenon.
I dunno if it will work on 4chan though. It has always run on an absolute shoestring budget and is not beholden to any demands to grow.
There was a lot of well-founded animosity towards SomethingAwful in the early days of 4chan. How could you respect anybody who paid money to talk to people online? It was so contrary to the spirit of the internet.
SA's brand of snarky balding catfather humour lives on in so many facets of culture, and they all suck hard. Most of Twitter and Reddit were colonised by it. Almost all garbage American comedy seems tinged by it too. Looking past the hysterical headlines about 4chan, SA may have ultimately been the bigger setback to online culture.
The unfunny "redditor" snark based humor comes from The Oatmeal or Joss Whedon or something. SA had epic bigpeeler story threads back in the day, but it wasn't really the same thing. You need upvotes to create the real high levels of cringe posting.
Throwaway. Was involved with 4chan in the 00s. Not ashamed of it, but not proud enough to associate it with my name.
People totally forget about 4chan's textboards, which ran on Shiichan. They're closed now, but even when they were around, nobody would visit them save a couple dozen absolutely insane posters. The militant commitment to stupidity there eclipsed that of its imageboard counterparts. True treasures. None of the even smaller offshoots ever recaptured that flame.
I was still in secondary school when I lied about my age and became a janitor. moot himself was still underage at the time too. I think everybody had access to the admin panel for the text boards, but the interface was so bad, nobody bothered moderating them, even for cool free ringtones spambots.
I haven't bothered with 4chan for a decade now, but it definitely tickles me to see something so purely moronic now so heavily politicised and even feared.
I'm around the same age as moot and lied about my age to sign up for the SA forums, where I first heard about 4chan. It always tickles me pink when people reminisce about the "old internet" because what I remember is way worse.
I suspect there's a tendency for anything with a public, fully anonymous (rather than pseudonymous) format to eventually become something some people use for the worst things imaginable.
For example, people used to write bomb threats and racial slurs on bathroom stall walls at my middle school. Anonymous imageboards are kind of the global version of a public bathroom stall wall. Sometimes there are funny or uplifting things on it, and sometimes the polar opposite.
I'd be interested in pointers to prior art of things which started asinine, and wound up literally deadly.
> I haven't bothered with 4chan for a decade now, but it definitely tickles me to see something so purely moronic now so heavily politicised and even feared.
> I'd be interested in pointers to prior art of things which started asinine, and wound up literally deadly.
I've had a running interest for years in deaths caused by bad software design. "Bad design" doesn't necessarily mean bugs (although in rare cases it can). More often, it means building a system without thinking through the real world consequences, or hewing to an unconfirmed, biased view of how it "should" act in the real world. The 737 Max software that tried to deduce an angle of attack with too few redundant measurements, and discarding unlikely results, is an obvious example of programmer hubris. Facebook's news feed is another example of the failure to consider how individual secondary effects from an interface can engender massively catastrophic events at scale.
Cryptocurrency also started asinine, and is becoming increasingly deadly, as it facilitates ransomware attacks on hospitals and infrastructure. Any car manufacturer claiming to be "FSD" right now also meets the definition.
Whenever stories warn us about the dangers of technology, from Daedalus to the Terminator, they're really warning us about hubris. When tinkerers make machines or programmers write code based on their idea of how things should go, or how they're expected to go, based on their personal prior experience or fondest wishes, that's usually when shit goes off the rails.
> I'd be interested in pointers to prior art of things which started asinine, and wound up literally deadly.
I first heard 4chan mentioned in conversation around 2005 or so. It was a remarkably different cultural phenomenon then, as everyone has noted. I had been a regular reader of TOTSE's BBS long before 4chan emerged. TOTSE fits your description of a forum with humble beginnings in the 80s BBS counterculture, which ended up appealing exclusively to antisocial pursuits.
Indeed, I would say that even now the extant textboard and irc users are still attempting to push the boundaries of sophisticated stupidity and they have become experts at it.
Perhaps related, on this page musing about Wikipedia (https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Wikipedia.html): "It is founded on the unfortunate belief that people will always do good things and be nice to each other, and after a few spectacular years that everyone involved will remember, it falls apart in a miserable, unhappy mess, which everyone will later insist they had no hand in."
That belief isn't unfortunate - technological optimism or what Wired once called "extropianism" is just the same as every other kind of utopian fantasy. And when you're young, and kind, and full of love, and think the world can be fixed if only everyone had the tools and the motivation to express their best selves, it's seductive. And it should be. Because if teenagers and twentysomethings were as cynical and resigned as the rest of us, we'd be doomed. Every generation architects some new utopian paradigm, and has to go through its own process of disillusionment as they watch the mob tear it limb from limb. Ultimately, the best you can hope for is that people learn from history and don't repeat the same mistakes.
But that is exactly what happens: Human civilization is a generational loop of genocide and treachery. All of these wonderful things we enjoy exist in spite of everything we are.
Yeah, but I see some incremental progress. Legal systems, institutions, human rights, technology that alleviates misery (as opposed to gadgetry, or worse, tech that enalaves people). It's definitely been two steps forward and one step back. Unfortunately, we seem to have entered the back step. Friend said to me the other day "we peaked so hard in the early 90s". Hard to argue with that.
That's true, and moot left right before things took their major turn (possibly precipitated by Gamergate, which moot soon banned all discussion of; he left about 6 months later), but 4chan /pol/ is still more extremist than even Stormfront, and nearly as uniform in terms of beliefs. It's not quite as bad as 8chan /pol/, but 8chan /pol/ is as bad as or perhaps even more extreme than Nazi Germany's actual "Der Stürmer", and is where a lot of the far-right mass shooters have posted.
Other boards have varying concentrations of /pol/ injected, with /mu/ ("Music") having a spread of far-left, left-leaning, right-leaning, and far-right posters, and /tv/ ("TV / Movies") and /biz/ ("Business / Finance", but mostly just cryptocurrency gambling/scams) being almost exclusively right-leaning, and mostly far-right.
Low-censorship forums tend to be 90% idiocy, 10% really interesting and accurate takes on reality that are suppressed elsewhere. Often they also have a lot of brilliant humor. So I would not say that they are purely idiotic, just largely idiotic. To me it is often worth it to dig through the idiocy in search of the awesome content.
Memes have been weaponized in the modern political era. Anecdotal, of course, but I have read interviews with Qanon/hard core Trump folks and a lot of them started with pretty neutral or even liberal views that shifted over time. Many of them attributes the red pill and right wing memes as a contributing factor to their radicalization. Despite your labeling it stupid and moronic these forums do have the power to shift political narratives. I’m not passing judgement on these forums, but I no longer view them as harmless toys. Real people are shaping their world views on these forums and they are having a noticeable impact in the world.
Young people can be very bored and lazy and are very impressionable at the time in their lives when they may end up on these counter culture style forums.
Yeah nah. I think all that radicalisation is more easily explained by America being a terrible country full of miserable people. I thought (re)creating /pol/ was a bad move at the time, but it's very out of touch to blame some naughty anime website for the mess your country is in.
I think dismissing the negative effects so out of hand is silly. Ideas have power. You can’t hand wave things away that easily. I’m not blaming 4chan and sites like it either, it’s more of a trend across the entire Internet. The forums are just part of the story. I am amused, but not surprised, a former chan user would casually dismiss such a correlation. It is at least an idea worth exploring.
I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation. 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting word filters that I can't repeat here without my post getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of hate.
I think very little has changed in twenty years really. Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now, when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant contrarianism.
If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call your son gay until he grows out of it.