yet the rotting carcass is still around stinking
Comment on 4chan hacked and taken offline. Hacker reopens /qa/ and leaks all admins emails.
hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago4chan died a long time ago.
demonsword@lemmy.world 4 days ago
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
Sort of like US Democracy.
IllNess@infosec.pub 4 days ago
When do you consider it died? 2015 when Poole sold it?
Hansae@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
2016 when MAGApedes inavded the site.
WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Not invaded. The existing 4chan user-base was targeted with fascist propaganda!
It was literally ground zero for fascist PsyOps, starting with gamergate. Steve Bannon even mentioned gamergate as a pivotal moment in the success of their propaganda.
Hansae@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Debatable, there was a influx of new users around that time with reprehensible views. I used 4Chan as it was happening.
hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
But 4chan banned Gamergate posts. That’s one of the reasons why 8chan was made.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The same year Twitter died then.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
When the protests against scientology happened. Long before it was sold.
The “protests” devolved into some of the cringiest irl meetups of online communities I have ever come across (yes, worse than dashcon), and it caused so much media attention that it accelerated the “eternal september” problem the site always had exponentially.
Motherfuckers forgot the golden rule about “hiding your power level”, which at the time at least meant doing your best to appear relatively normal in public and went full “I’m a horribly socially maladjusted mess with bad hygiene who can only communicate via tired memes, look at me! Look at me! I know memes! Haha longcat is long am I right?”.
A lot of people remember the cringe of reddit’s “When does the narwhal bacon?” forced meme attempt at the world’s most embarassing “secret pass phrase” bullshit. The scientology “protests” were significant orders of magnitude more cringe.
4chan was never a secret club, but the sheer agressiveness of non-tolerance towards obviously new posters helped to maintain a very low bar of “quality”. I’d argue that’s needed to maintain any semblance of a community on an entirely anonymous image board that has minimal moderation. Shitty threads would get saged relentlessly, eating up the maximum comments a thread could have and drowning out any discussion in the shitty thread, all without bumping it back up to the top. Hit the reply limit and the thread slides off the bottom, gone forever.
But as more and more people unfamiliar with what shitty community existed came in, there hit a point where they outnumbered the old guard, and the already low quality of discussion tanked.
/b/ used to have discussion threads about all sorts of shit. Actual thought provoking stuff now and then. Funny stories. Occasionally legitimately good OC. It was the breeding ground for most of the memes and meme formats that spread to the internet at large. Mudkipz, rickrolling, EFG (the progenitor of trollface and rage comics), lolcats, advice animals. All /b/.
Now it is almost entirely people sharing photos of women they know that they’ve downloaded off the ladies’ social media accounts to jerk off to. Previously they would have been chased off to the dedicated porn (or softcore) boards using fire, pitchforks, and spam of the most digusting images the internet had until the posters got the message. Or at the very least they would have been bullied into a single thread at a time instead of taking over almost every thread on the board.
Instead it has all devolved to the absolute lowest common denominator.
/b/ (and by extension 4chan as a whole) has always been a cesspit. I’m not trying to deny that. There’s screenshots out there of it back when the post count hadn’t breached 1000 that show that it was shit even in the very very beginning. Back when it was almost exclusively m00t, W.T. Snacks, and their friends from Something Awful. That said, it used to be engaging to scroll through because you could stumble upon some legitimately good discussion. It hasn’t been worth even trying to look for good discussion on /b/ for well over a decade.
The retro videogames board was a brief shining return to quality for a few years after it was created, even managed to find, back up, and translate some things that had been lost media. The DooM threads used to be the place to be for new DooM wads. Even that board’s pretty shit now too.
Rooty@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I used to frequent the /tg/ board, it had people making homebrew conceptual RPGs - the kind of stuff that the indie RPG scene pretends to have invented. Sorry to see the site go, but it was inevitable.
Brutticus@lemm.ee 3 days ago
I miss /tg/. it held out longest from the /pol/ siege. Like nazis would still be there, but it was still a place where you could talk about games and be reasonably sure people wouldn’t talk about nazi shit. I lurked until maybe the first Trump election, whereas I had given up on the rest of the boards long before.
Brutticus@lemm.ee 3 days ago
All of these things are correct, but I would like to posit there was a specific era when it actually became intolerable, and that was about 2013 or so. It was a gradual process, but you noticed more and more “normal threads” getting hijacked and brigaded. Baw threads, or threads where people would post tumblr core sad images (mostly about missing ‘her’) got hijacked by incels (who said something like, “shes fucking chad bro” although the incel vocabulary had yet to be calcified.) You laugh you lose (YLYL) threads got brigaded by people “banana posting” or flooding the thread with images of a specific meme of a banana opening his peel like a trench coat and “exposing” himself to a pair of apples. It was boomer shit, but their alleged point was that YLYL was cringe.
Now, were Baw and YLYL cringe? Maybe. But they were also like, “normal” threads. Normal users would come and post normal content. YLYL threads (and their cousins, Epic threads) were how board culture was preserved, posting collages of greentext posts of particularly noteworthy threads or stories or interactions. The point wasn’t to point out cringe. It was to radicalize young male users who self identified as unlucky in love, to degrade board discourse so no one wanted to even post in “culture” threads, and to either radicalize the young and impressionable who might be receptive to Nazi messaging, and to push away those that were not. 4chan always tolerated Nazis, and there is an old proverb against it.
Moot used to get a ton of hate from the Nazis, because he actually tried to police them. I don’t know if they targeted him or just got lucky, but they had been trying to get rid of him of a while. He left after users found his girlfriend was cheating on him, and posted the photos on 4chan. months later, trump descends a golden escalator…
chunes@lemmy.world 3 days ago
How could anything be better than Doomworld for new wads? That’s wild.
Brutticus@lemm.ee 4 days ago
I wonder about this sometimes.
Poole knew he had a contentious base of users. I remember in 2013 or 2014, 4chan users posted photographic evidence his gf was cheating on him, and I think it broke him. I dont blame him for selling the site, but 18 months later… I wonder if Moot knew he was holding back the end of the world.
FolknForage@lemm.ee 3 days ago
I wonder if Poole has done any interesting interviews on the intersection of 4chan and the modern fascist propaganda machine it bred.
Brutticus@lemm.ee 3 days ago
I have this dream that one day I’ll like, sit next to him on an airplane and have a chance to ask him.
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Around then for me. Hiroyuki allowed /pol/ to happen when moot tried it and ditched it quickly. Too many people started thinking their farts didn’t stink. I went there for anime discussions when every other popular site was a hugbox.