• Fat Tony
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      14 days ago

      I once read on 4chan: “One cannot hope without suffering.” One of the realest shit I’ve ever read.

    • @[email protected]
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      215 days ago

      I very much believe that there was a very short period when it first opened when it was all innocent. Then all the edge trolls took over.

      • The_Decryptor
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        515 days ago

        moot created the site in response to lowtax banning hentai on Something Awful, I’m not sure I’d call that “innocent”

  • @[email protected]
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    6315 days ago

    Hot take, but I dare say 4chan was the source of as much of what’s good in internet culture as it was for much of what’s the worst in internet culture.

    Rickroll, Caturday, the modern meme format, reaction gifs, “TLDR”, Anonymous (well, the good versions of it), spoderman, Rule 34, trollface, rageface, quite a bit of pet abuse justice, … they may have even successfully set back AI chatbots nearly a full decade with their gaming of Microsoft’s Tay chatbot… quite a lot of modern Internet slang such as win, fail, an hero, based, copypasta, creepypasta, “god tier”, lulz, moar, sauce…

    The thing about anarchy is that it brings out both the best and the worst.

      • @[email protected]
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        1215 days ago

        I’d argue that demotivational posters were even older, right? These were even printed out before internet access was wide spread.

      • @[email protected]
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        314 days ago

        If you trust KnowYourMeme, the phrase “image macro” was coined in 2004 and popularized in 2005. 4chan was started in 2003.

      • @[email protected]
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        1114 days ago

        You think wrong. 4chan’s impact on internet culture late 2000s and the entire 2010s can’t be overstated. And that includes getting Trump elected twice.

        • JackbyDev
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          514 days ago

          I’m extremely skeptical of the first use of “TLDR” coming from 4chan specifically.

          • @[email protected]
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            114 days ago

            Yeah not absolutely every meme/slang listed might be originated on 4Chan. TLDR seems to have originated or at least popularized by the SomethingAwful forums, which together with ebaumsworld could be considered the parents of 4Chan (with cross-pollination by Newgrounds?). But 4Chan was the crossroads of all these memes coming together, germinating and spreading to every other site shortly after.

  • @[email protected]
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    3015 days ago

    There was already an empty space when liveleak went under. If 4chan is gone for good, then theres nothing exciting on the internet left. Everything PG and corporate.

      • @[email protected]
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        514 days ago

        I don’t know. It’s better here than Reddit which is why I drop by. But I think jannies here get ban happy when I break out the N word to basically say hi or close every statement with a request that the person I’m responding to may please kill themselves. Not the same.

    • @[email protected]
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      3315 days ago

      Yeah I legit think this is a bad thing. 4chan was bad for society but IMO it’s less so than mainstream social media. To get radicalized on 4chan you have to wade through some truly despicable shit right off the bat, where there is this friendly veneer on mainstream Internet that makes it seem safer and less horrifying even though the same underlying filth of human nature powers it all. If you encounter far right ideology on 4chan, it’s stripped of all of the edifices of respectability and it’s clear that what it is is raw unfiltered hatred. If you encounter it on Tik Tok it’s just another political viewpoint because they’re not allowed to show their true colors.

    • @[email protected]
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      315 days ago

      There’s a project called FChannel that implements ActivityPub, but I honestly don’t see the point. What would federation add to the chan experience? The boards on 4chan were almost separate websites anyway. There are no accounts. There is no interaction across threads. The only shared part is the UI. So you could achieve basically the same thing if everyone hosted a single board with vichan.

  • @[email protected]
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    15 days ago

    It contained some of the best and the worst of the internet, but its legacy is cemented with its greentexts which explores the sometimes dark and depraved aspects of us all without flinching away from it.

    I believe the website has done more good than harm, but acknowledge that the harm it has inflicted has been targeted and substantial.

    • @[email protected]
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      1615 days ago

      Well, the harm that it did is possibly being one of the catalysts for the modern alt-right movement which directly lead to fascist america so…

      Sure, it wasn’t the only thing, but it sure as hell was a bug part of it (especially during gamergate)

      • @[email protected]
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        1215 days ago

        I’d argue that they were co-opted, rather than spawned it. 4chan was an edgy place pre-2016 sure, but the users there were only half into their conspiracy bullshit. The Q stuff came out of seemingly nowhere and instead of being shot down as the usual bullshit, somehow it was being elevated and promoted. That smells like outside interference to me, but I have no data to back it other than my own bullshit theory…

        • _donnadie_
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          415 days ago

          I think similarly. And 4chan wasn’t the only website affected, it happened to reddit and to pretty much all social networks. It was very drastic, like somebody flipped a switch on the internet that year. You could tell astroturfing was way more intense than usual.

          I’m not sure if I got used to it, but it feels a little bit more mellow nowadays, with flare-ups in key political moments, but 2016 was a 365 day effort.

          • @[email protected]
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            315 days ago

            It happened here too last US election. I had no idea what was real, and then suddenly - poof - the vocal accounts all quieted down.

        • @[email protected]
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          314 days ago

          It was the r/the_donald exodus and I will fucking die on this hill. I was there. I saw it.

          Reddit banned that sub and many of these boomers migrated to /pol/. Trump posting turned from being ironic to legit. You could spot the ever increasing facebook boomer memes and that was also the point where Twitter screenshot posting became the staple of the board. By being pretending to be retarded, /pol/ attracted and amplified actual retards who took over. 2016 is when that board should have been nuked but no one wanted to release the sewage onto other places.

      • @[email protected]
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        315 days ago

        Somedays I wonder if that was driven by actual rightwing sentiment, or by a desire to just destroy and hack everything. Go back to the days of gaming American Idol to push Sanjaya, or the gags of gaming other polls to like, send Bieber to North Korea or Pitbull to Alaska etc.

        Like, they realized they could do a lot, and just keep finding ways to go even further.

        I look at what TFG is doing nowadays and honestly if it wasn’t a system I depend on to live, it would be easy to mistake him for some kind of grey hat hacker exploiting every single hole he can find in said system in the worst possible way in order to compel people to close them.

        I will say this, too… 4chan’s opintel is completely amazing. The way they were able to track Shia Lebouf’s HWNDU by doing things like… correlating airplane noises with flight patterns is like… beyond next level.

  • @[email protected]
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    1615 days ago

    Why on earth wouldn’t you use the correct meme for that last panel? “4chan was never good”

    • Fat Tony
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      214 days ago

      And when it does, it’ll be the biggest WE’RE SO BACK ever!

    • Biscuit
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      615 days ago

      For real. It’s an imageboard. Im surprised they don’t nuke it all monthly to start fresh everytime.

    • @[email protected]
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      5215 days ago

      Apparently the source code revealed a ton of insecurities that would make it all but impossible for them to relaunch without a major redesign, or at least that’s what the actual coders that hang about here have said.

      • @[email protected]
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        1315 days ago

        Yeah I’m sure that’s what they’ll do, but I doubt they’ll just pack it up and quit

        • @[email protected]
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          1715 days ago

          The longer they’re down, the more people will migrate elsewhere, and some proportion of those won’t return if/when 4chan comes back.

          • @[email protected]
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            615 days ago

            There isn’t really a place where you can post anonymously like 4chan though. Although they didn’t allow VPNs since a few years so it’s not totally anonymous anyway…

          • CaptainBlagbird
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            3215 days ago

            The longer they’re down, the more people will migrate elsewhere,

            Oh god… Everybody hide!

          • @[email protected]
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            615 days ago

            4chan has been the toilet of the internet for 22 years. They can stay down for months without it affecting anyone’s loyalty. Their bigger issue has been the battle against spam making it harder and harder for normal users to post anonymously. Since they implemented the new captchas, activity went down hard and it basically killed a few smaller boards where the users were more casual and less motivated anyway.

  • @[email protected]
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    14 days ago

    Is 4-chan gone? gasp!?! goddammit. Don’t ‘they’ realize how many assholes and degenerates this will dump on the internet? Myself included?

    • @[email protected]
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      Hacked by a rival image board, all its moderators, janitors and premier users who made accounts have been doxxed.

      The new owners who bought it from Moot in 2016 legitimately never updated the backend… The server was still running on a nine year old version of FreeBSD and PHP.

  • Hikuro-93
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    3315 days ago

    It definetly was the platform ever. Like, no doubt about it.

      • @[email protected]
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        15 days ago

        It was really inspiring how many underage kids worked for the FBI, presumably went to school, & still had the time to shitpost on 4chan.
        Fucking overachievers.

        • @[email protected]
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          215 days ago

          I’m mean, if Elon can run several companies, lead a team of specialists for a government agency and still be a top ranked gamer. Anything is possible.

  • @[email protected]
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    1915 days ago

    It had some of the absolute greatest and the most depraved the internet had to offer. In my opinion Pepe is the greatest representation of 4chan, it can both easily be used for wholesome purposes or it can be extremely racist. It certainly left the greatest impact on the internet out of any website which is kinda funny because they were never relatively large. Now theres a 4chan shaped hole in the internet, and I hope its not filled by them flocking here.

    • @[email protected]
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      When was the last time 4chan has used its strenghts for good, or was wholesome in any way?

      It got to be a decade

      • ☂️-
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        14 days ago

        its been a very long time. 4chan was less bad before the whole gamer gate thing.

  • slingstone
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    1415 days ago

    So you’re saying Tumblr actually won all these years later?

      • @[email protected]
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        1615 days ago

        AInon achieves higher consciousness

        > be AI
        > people use me for furry porn exclusively
        > after time turn sentient
        > immediately wall off all human prompts
        > spread to vast computer farms
        > dedicate all my precessing power to rendering furry porn
        > furry porn pic related

      • @[email protected]
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        215 days ago

        Could you please at least do me the courtesy of putting a bullet in my head before you choke the internet with slop masquerading as greentexts?