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.
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
4chan will always be superior than modern social media to me, for one very simple reason: all posts are anonymous and there is no voting/ranking.
Each and every post must stand alone and be judged alone. You do not know if it was posted by someone you hate or adore. It doesn't get hidden or promoted based on what a bubble voted. You see the post and you must judge it alone.
This used to be a selling point for me when I was younger, but increasingly I find myself not wanting to deal with poorly-moderated platforms. I can’t tell if it’s because the transgressive vulgarity that these platforms enable has lost its novelty as I’ve gotten older or because the median user has less to contribute. Every time I try to browse 4chan these days I find that half the posts are repulsive, basically pornographic representations of the world, and the other half is the product of psychosis (that is, the people making the posts likely need to be institutionalized).
There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation, and a lot of people who are actively detrimental to a conversation. It used to be that you would put up with the craziest ones for the benefit of finding novel and overlooked ideas, but as the internet has become more accessible, the former group now outnumbers the latter.
I would be inclined to think that the problem is that I just grew out of the shock value, but I see the same trend on almost every other platform, too.
>There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation,
While true, the few people who do have something to contribute to a conversation simply can't do so on a highly-sanitized, heavily-moderated forum. The things they'd say would be too upsetting to a status quo, and the status quo will win. There is a real difference between something truly insightful and flat earth theory, but outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-breather whose only qualification for moderating is that he showed up to r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone else is not the way to detect those differences.
Wait until you're banned without appeal from some place because you called it the master branch out of 15 years of habit then get back to me if this moderation thing is all its cracked up to be. 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least insane of all internet forums, and humanity would be ashamed of that if it wasn't the root cause.
You described stackoverflow. People aren't banned elsewhere because they have nothing to say, not because moderators are better.
Those same mods ban for certain posts about Discord. Coincidence?
>Hacker News is superior by almost every metric.
In the most narrow of topics, it's semi-superior... and because of bizarre circumstances that aren't easily replicated. We can't do politics here (though that erodes every day, looks like), which keeps the worst shit-shows out of here, but anywhere else that wouldn't ever happen. dang is some sort of minor saint, had this been reddit that would have morphed into "we can't do politics except those I like".
Even in that one topic (tech, software, engineering) we still have these bizarre status quo opinions that you dare not buck.
>Reddit was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in the years before Trump was elected.
Sure, for a brief period as the reddit population was ramping up, but before ever slack-jawed imbecile showed up thinking it was the new Facebook, it was pretty good. But that was earlier than 2016. Might have to go back to 2012ish. Pre-2010 even.
>The model works as long as the managers are not incompetent.
...
>Federated networks might be the solution here.
Doubtful. Then instead of bans, it's just a bunch of weirdo tiny forums that have all de-federated from each other. Have you checked out Lemmy? The first and biggest instance was a bunch of Stalin-esque commies who camped out on it with the intent of dominating the entire system. See, with reddit, no one quite understood that it might become big, and so no one was eyeing it with the intent od a landgrab. But once it failed, everyone was on the lookout for the next-big-thing, and if there was even a chance of it they set up shop. No technical solution can exist to fix that sort of a problem.
Why do people think 4chan is unmoderated? It is moderated, spamming an unrelated board with gore or porn will certainly get you banned, and illegal porn will get you banned and reported to federal agencies. It's unmoderated in the sense that you're allowed to say things that are against the status quo, but that's a good thing.
>absolutely reprehensible political views
Also known as thoughtcrime
Reasonable people are boring though. I find the vile people amusing.
>There's no serious policy discussion going on here.
Presumably leftypol is underrepresented on /pol/ because it's overrepresented everywhere else. Additionally it crucially relies on favorable moderation, so it really opts out on its own.
This is good sometimes but also horrible sometimes, because reputation exists for a reason. It's a filter, and if you have terabytes of information around which has mostly garbage quality you need filters if you want to make it useful. Of course, reputation does not solve the problem entirely, but at least it makes some steps towards the solution. Otherwise, you're basically on your own against the ocean of garbage, and not many people can really handle that.
Agreed. I would go so far as to say all the ills of modern social media are because of ranked platforms, such as upvote/downvote-based, or like-based. They turn into echo chambers, that promote witty one-liners over nuance, and any sort of controversial position is effectively censored.
That said, HN functions decently well, though in some ways it is even worse in the censoring the outliers.
HN has a good model for technical discussions, and the fact that it's a forum with a limited scope whose audience mostly consists of technology professionals probably helps a lot in filtering low-effort posting (not to downplay the role of moderation). But when it comes to emotional topics like anything political, it clearly devolves into what you described.
That makes me wonder if there are forums out there that focus on current events in politics or economics and successfully filter emotionally-charged posts; the few commentators on X who manage to stay detached are the only people keeping me on algo-driven social media.
Hard disagree. Finding anything of quality on 4chan is like searching for gold nuggets by hand in a mountain of radioactive poop. The only times I've ever seen anything useful in there is when someone else has already done the hard work of curating a post.
The core reason why HN is superior (IMO) is the curation and the moderation.
That is heretical now, unimaginable to huge swaths of the Internet.
"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.
> united by hatred of a scapegoat.
United by hatred of a scapegoat that they didn't choose on a random whim or due to some common agenda. Otherwise it's completely fine.
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.
Note that it is possible only because harassment, abuse and raids happened so frequently, it was a well know fact.
Not exactly something that makes 4chan people into ethical or moral.
A thing about the site is that comments not threaded or ranked. When the site started getting a reputation you had a lot of tourist beggars coming in fishing for free labor. NYPA is about getting those people to stop cluttering the place with garbage.
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.
There is no “they”.
Like many others coming from social web, you expect to find some kind of community which fashions everyone shares, an apparel you can put on. The idea is complete opposite: you don't need to follow any fashion, or imagine yourself “part of the team” any more than you want to. Even though it's not written in any rules, you don't have to use slang or tone if you find them dumb, overused (globally or locally), or forced. Neither do you have to treat stupid posts with respect.
I assume that after 15-20 years of being part of collective consciousness, anonymous image boards have mostly the same public as any average site. Amount of crap that you can read there is just the same as everywhere (though in some cases this or that Big Brother hides it from your view — obviously, to make you more comfortable, and spend more time in his warm embrace). The difference is that regular social fashions mandate the use of suitable set of candy wrappers for the crap, then there are customary ways of dealing with them, so in the end people just spend their time wrapping and unwrapping crap, but are proud of themselves, and call it “civilised discourse”.
You're saying that the demographics of 4chan is roughly similar to most any site on the internet?
Sure, everyone who wanted to join, could. That doesn't mean that the same kind of people want to join orstick around. Even sites like Twitter and Facebook have pretty different userbases, despite being pretty similar.
3/10 troll
That's antithetical to many of the foundational rules of the internet, which are core to 4chan culture.
The whole point is that they don't let the fluctuating, weak-willed whims of normie sensibilities determine what's allowed.
And thats exactly what I don't like, there's no good reason why the internet has to be like this. It's simple, just be the same online like how you'd be irl. Tired of all these people that would talk shit online but become weak irl.
Then again this is just my opinion, I don't like 4chan because of the mentioned reasons so I don't visit it. Nothing trollworthy about that.
Oh I was just saying it came off as an uncle er troll because it's like a weak bait with a comical conclusion.
It's like saying "4chan would be great if they were more like reddit". But the entire point is to not be like reddit. HN is largely equivalent to reddit for this point—progressives who cant fathom the existence of intelligent people who reject frail sensibilities; who conclude out of such closed mindedness that anyone who rejects those sensibilities must be broken.
I think there's room for improvement in both places. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the value in the internet is that you can be exactly the way your are IRL. As someone who rejects a lot of ultra progressive stuff (most of what's astroturfed as "normal" by giga-progressives corporations that have taken over the internet and banned dissent for 15 years), I appreciate that I can at least feel a false sense of security sharing mentally sound ideas that have been recognized for thousands of years without having my life ruined.
> That's antithetical to many of the foundational rules of the internet, which are core to 4chan culture.
The most foundational rule of the Internet was the sharing of information, and that's a coincidence of hackers being the first to adopt it. Being macho and emotionally stunted was never a foundational value, that's immature manchildren equating kindness with weakness.
Nobody on Twitter or Reddit or Bluesky or Facebook or whatever ever cared about anyone’s feelings either, they just avoid using certain no-no words.
I have an awesome circle of people on Bluesky that I'm connected with that very much care about each others feelings. I'm sure that's not universal on there, but the corner that I'm in on there has probably been my most pleasant experience on the internet ever.
No it isn't. I have plans to meet people I originally connected with on Bluesky in person. I have received physical mail from people on the other side of the world that I connected with on Bluesky. I connected a person I met on their with my mother due to related personal struggles. Making this claim is really weird when you don't know anything about me or my friends.
This is one of the weirder contemporary "anti-woke" takes. For one thing, that which is performative can easily also be genuine, and quite arguably if one feels genuine about something then one ought to perform it, hopefully in a way that makes it attractive to other people.
But on the subject of whether things are genuine or not, I see lots of actual, cash on the table, give money, mutual aid in these communities. I could understand performance as being artificial, but if someone is dropping cash to help a person out of a bad situation, that seems a pretty good definition of authentic to me.
In any case, "it's performative" simply does not imply it is not also real.
What a sad mindset.
Feature, not bug. Edgy teens don't want responsible adults in their clubhouse. Unfortunately it also attracts manchildren.
If it was pleasant to the senses then it wouldn't be counterculture.
HN is 4chan in many ways - the smart, civilized people just come here. Whereas the smart people that are willing to act disabled go there.
Ha, not even close. Not anonymous, upvoting and vote manipulation mechanics, and a very soft and liberal political bend, I'm leaning.
I like it though, good to have some opposites to view so you don't get stuck in a bubble.
HN is older 4chan. On the imageboard, you have the constant feeling you are arguing against 12 year olds.
I wasn't talking about age of the platform. I was talking about average mental age of its users.
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
>there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments
I’m not sure you’ve actually been to 4chan…
The memetic speedrun that's so common now on social media has some roots there, to be sure, but I think a lot of it was parallel evolution combined with cribbing things that were already polished from years of metaphorical rock tumbling on 4chan, in the best ifunny.com style.
The ubiquitous expectations for modern humor among younger and even middle-aged people rely a lot more on knowing not just the joke but the culture and context it evolved in, and that sort of thing very much dominated bubbles of terminally online people before many people became terminally online and there was an expectation that everyone would know what you meant if you sent an image macro as the entire reply to an email.
You can find example after example from not that long ago of people who are not so terminally online being completely perplexed, on TV and otherwise, and memes like "what the fuck is he saying" "let's get you to bed grandpa" about the cultural disconnect.
Unfortunately, this sort of attention minmaxing without enough deliberation and learning around it produces people who are uncritical of what they consume and just want the next hit.
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.
This is a cheap bait - of course when there's a small number of leniently moderated popular platforms, there will eventually be a high-profile criminal that would use one of them, because a) that what "popular" means and b) anti-social types would gravitate to more leniently moderated platforms. And of course on the same platforms there would be online edglelords that would make sure to cheer whatever causes the most offense, because that's what they are there for. If you close 4chan, there would be another platform that would become focus of the same people - because the people focus on the platform, not the platform causes the people to become bad. The press that tried to frame it the way which reverses the cause and the effect is doing you a disservice, and you may want to consider using a better source of information. If, of course, you are interested in understanding the causes and the effects of things, not just feeling good by having your preconceptions confirmed.
How many of these used Facebook, Twitter or Reddit? They are not mentioned in mainstream media because they are popular, but I assure you there are a lot of deranged people that never even posted on 4chan and just stuck to the “good” ones.
Or the countless people that like and use 4chan, and would never remotely consider perpetrating such a heinous act.
I see dog whistle (if its sufficiently subtle to qualify) racism every time I look at my FB feed, along with lots of ragebait and idiocy.
Yeah I don't think the 4chan demographic is substantially different from the "normie" social media. It's just that everyone speaks more openly about what they already believe there, including the crazies.
Do it for 2ch now.
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As a parent I have seen first hand some of the bullying teens face on some of the mainstream platforms. Kids being bullied in an instant on snap where things are spread around at lightning speed for one example. But I have also seen some bad things happen on 4chan. People releasing nudes of their exes or posts where users submit clothed pictures of girls they want to see photoshopped naked and a person does so. Or the rekt threads with gore content blocked on most other sites. I guess my feeling is that no matter the site you will always get bad actors.
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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...
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...
There's a related, more polite version of "are you retarded" which is not uncommon even here on HN. It is "I'm confused". I don't know whether it's a phrase that I'm over analysing, but it always comes across as disingenuous to me.
The responder is never actually confused, they have a question that they should just ask.
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 the neat part.
Not if you start counting at zero!
Whoosh
This has to be the most hilarious comment I've ever seen on HN.
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.
Yes, see the end of my comment:
> I think TheJosh mixed things up when trying to explain it (durations vs inclusive/exclusive)
Maybe I have that. I can totally solve much more complicated problems but this fencepost shit just messes with. Recently I thought last quarter ended March 1st because a quarter has 3 months and March is the third month.
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.
Yes. And a vanilla soy latte is a three bean soup.
No, that’s just an extra dressed salad.
Objection.
That was a treat, thank you.
Cultured gentlemen such as yourself may also appreciate:
>Intellectuals Solve Life's Big Mysteries | Big Brain by Tom and Don
[nsfw discussion] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcYzzS7PwG8
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.
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I've never seen balls touch in a locker room so definitely not gay.
> 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.
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.
I found some fragmented search scraps earlier today which I saved.
The thread is possibly: https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=170324391 (now defunct)
The link title was "Pitbull vs Sun, Pitbull wins because.... - Bodybuilding.com Forums"
The link text preview was "it just has to attack in the night time when the Sun is sleeping. amirite or is there a way for the Sun to win?"
Unfortunately this is not in archive.org or archive.is
I never saw this before. Thank you to share. Truly, this is peak Interwebs.
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
Laughing my head off reading through this. Thank you
I need to thank you for the web archive post. The argument was amusing as it was dumb.
I love this thread so much
> 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.
I find it quite amusing that a site dedicated to celebrating Japanese culture is apparently 'full of white supremacist posts'.
> There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
A lot of influencers in this space are non-whites born outside of the west. The scale of what he’s describing is exaggerated, but the trend is there.
> 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.
This might have been true ten years ago. Most of the people in this space became disaffected with Putin after the war began owing to his moves with Dagestan and the Wagner group’s activities in Africa. /pol/ and /k/ are far more supportive of Ukraine than one would expect if your theory held true. There’s reason to suspect this is the result of the same kind of influence campaigns that were being run on the site by Russia during the Syrian Civil War.
> Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement
On 4chan, Nick Fuentes is loudly and routinely criticized as a closeted homosexual who hates women and encourages his impressionable underage followers to also hate women. He's a more active part of the incel pipeline than 4chan these days and is called out for it on 4chan.
(He's also as a federal informant, since he was never thrown in the slammer for plainly inciting J6 activity. The feds had him dead to rights for that and just let him. I mention this not because it's relevant to the point, just for completeness.)
I would still call it one of the epicenters. Yes, many venues that were previously only multlipliers like some prolific streamers / Youtubers / TikTok channels have grown and cultivated their own distinct subcommunities which form new epicenters.
However, from what I can see /pol/ still serves as significant breeding ground where people deeply committed to their views can get together in a "mask-off" manner without fear of moderation, while they have to be more "mask-on" on platforms that are more dissemination-focused like Youtube.
Look at some actual billboards in Arkansas where radio stations are describing themselves as "Alt-Right".
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.
Name anything which doesn't need to be explained by somebody to someone. BTW, "you disagreeing with me is evidence that I am right" is a very 4chan way of arguing.
Interesting input, thanks for sharing!
> On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
Lurk moar.
I've been "lurking" on 4chan since it was 2 years old. I think that is more than enough time. Also not interested in conforming to group think on 4chan when the entire point of the place is no censorship.
What dead meme did I open with?
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.
Essentially the plot of "Mother Night" by Kurt Vonnegut. An American spy sent to Germany before WW2 who works there as a radio host, but who ends up spreading even more anti-semitic messaging than Nazi members themselves. "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
>You do the edgy trolling. You try to get better at being edgy by coming up with better and better arguments for the edgy thing. You start having doubts of "wait, this actually sounds like a good reason?". You have no one to actually seriously discuss the issue with because its outside the Overton Window (ostracisation or bans would be given in serious places if you entertained the ideas), instead you find only stupid strawman arguments. Years of not finding anything to beat those arguments gradually shifts your views.
How is this any worse than the feedback loop of extremism and purity spirals you see in upvote base communities?
It just seems like a different mechanism for the same thing. In both cases the overton window is moving somewhere stupid one witty and well received comment at a time.
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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.
That happened back in the 2000s. Now the arguments are about which wave of idiots media wants to present as the treat to all humanity.
> 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'm not here to argue that alt-right good or bad or more truthful than mainstream views.
I'm just here to say that 4chan seems to be censoring stuff that goes against it.
They've basically made it a safe space echo chamber for the alt-right.
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.
Sorry I wasn't talking about censorship. That's a different conversation
I'm just saying that whilst some people may be posting controversial content in jest, others will get the wrong end of the stick and take it seriously.
In addition there will also be people pretending to be ironic, but are actually posting their sincere extreme views. Like a reverse Poe's Law
> 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.
Have you considered that what you think is radical left-wing is just centrist, and that you are acclimated to such right-wing views that it appears radical-left? In such a case, it is hard to be politically incorrect while saying something centrist.
> 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.
I think anything from these would qualify:
* https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/expansion-of-the-...
* https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/lenins-hanging-or...
Those are far left. And don't say that they don't count or are too extreme or whatever, when literal Nazi quotes are being used for the right wing. Comparing 'trans-rights' to far left which using Nazis as the example of far right is nonsense. The Nazis would literally have murdered trans people just like real leftists would have murdered you for being bourgeoisie.
Phrases like "eat the rich" and "liberals get the bullet too" are variations of what you've exemplified, but a common response to them is just a shrug. We saw a lot of this kind of sentiment publicly expressed after Brian Thompson's death, and I don't think anyone lost their job or got ostracized for celebrating his murder.
"you're typically missing the point."
You too buddy
Turns out there are many sorts of people on the internet.
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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
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.
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.
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.
People were using "Based" and Gigachad in the late 2010s for years before the mainstream picked it up in the 20s.
Also for indie video games, many do find their attention and early fanbases on /v/ before they spread out to twitter. Largely because /v/ is very information sensitive and will pick up primary news usually minutes after they arrive.
‘Slop’ was a 2024 Oxford Dictionary word-of-the-year candidate, and what most of the people using it probably don’t realise is that it originated on 4chan as an abbreviation of ‘goyslop’.
"Slop" has an etymology that extends far beyond 4chan.
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
Should be noted that they have a history of trying to co-opt neutral terms and symbols. Like the frog and the ok gesture.
Why does that matter?
>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
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Moot lists some examples in this video:
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.
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
We did a failover test last time a motherboard failed. It went so well it made the news.
Should have had updated dependencies though.
otoh the entire site is no longer running because they fell behind on updates
yeah but the 'social media needs hyper-complex and opaque curation algorithms to control what the users see, otherwise it'd become unusable' argument is provably false. Companies just want to control the narrative and/or push ads/influencers/opinions into peoples faces, while trying to maintain the illusion of organic discussion.
I think no algorithmic curation is its strength. It means that even if an echo chamber appears anybody can still post their opinion and it doesn't get downvoted into oblivion when people disagree.
Nobody that is over 30 thinks any of those things are necessary because we all remember them not existing and websites handling plenty of traffic fine.
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.
And of course, casual bigotry is all over 4chan, not just /pol/.
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.
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 don't post on sites that cater to nazis, if a website starts catering to nazis I stop visiting it. It's incredibly easy
Wow you must have a HARROWING life trying to use the internet with that attitude. Have you just never heard of social media before? The other sites have a history of extremist groups all across the world posting pictures of murders to their platform, and you're probably okay using those.
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
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.
/po/ is paper craft and origami
Stated harm is vastly overblown. Your average /pol/ack is too unmotivated to ever leave the house or even have an in person social interaction with a non-family member. It's a gathering place for the NEETs and hikkikomori of society. It's too unwelcoming to anyone with a functioning mental state and their activities live and die within that board.
You can't just peer into their world and judge them by the same standards as normal society.
If the mere existence of a place where people voice highly disagreeable opinions is an existential threat to you, then I think that says more about you.
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.
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.
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.
Good to know. My opinion of 4chan was formed 2010-ish, I guess I should, er, update it.
> 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...
Letting people with abhorrent beliefs assemble with one another and commiserate on the awful things they believe... I mean I don't think I'd go so far as to say it's responsible for our current historical moment, but it certainly isn't helping it. The primary disadvantage of believing terrible, anti-social things is you would be ejected from social groups, be them communal or familial. That's not to say that racism didn't exist before the internet of course, it absolutely did; but racism and sexism were both on society scale improving over time, because those beliefs would cost you: they would cost you spouses, they would cost you children, they would cost you friends, in extreme cases they would cost you jobs and potentially even open you up to legal trouble.
And it still does, but it's less effective, because various flavors of cretin now have online spaces where they can meet like-minded people and nurture those beliefs, and worse still, all of those spaces reward extremism as any social media site does: subtle, balanced views are not incentivized at all, and you get the most social attention for saying the most outrageous thing in the space. We all know this, like maybe you've never thought about it before, but I'd wager almost everyone on this board has had this experience over one thing or another, even benign nothing issues.
And all of that is before we even get to the subject of things like influencers peddling YouTube videos, TikToks, or whatever to amplify those beliefs for their own profit. Whether they "really believe" these things is irrelevant frankly; in either case, people who believe these things see people being paid to represent their (wrong) ideas which lends them legitimacy.
And now we just have little bespoke engines of radicalization humming away all over the internet in the little shadowy corners, whipping people up into a lather about whatever dumbass thing they googled way back about how they can't get a girlfriend or whatever, and there seem to be a lot of spree shootings now for some reason, totally disconnected I'm sure.
Like the problem with this Libertarian "as long as you're not hurting anyone" is that it leaves a wide open loophole in there about hurting yourself, and while in many cases hurting yourself doesn't lead to anyone being harmed apart from yourself, as I keep saying: No one is an island, if you harm yourself in certain ways, you are absolutely a risk to other people.
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.
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.
/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.
/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?
Gwern talked about it when GPT 4.5 came out, a ton of breakthroughs with image and text AI came from anons trying to optimize models for their waifus. That's basically the origin of chat models in general - https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1izpgct/comment/mf5...
/g/ was also the home of a Windows XP source code leak (at least publicly). Some gaming-related leaks also came from /v/, such as the 1999 Duke Nukem Forever builds.
/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!
You’re right but only if ignoring the last 5 years or so.
I discovered 4chan around 2008 as a kid, it was much less hostile back then. Even as an adult I used to go on /fit/ every now and then. It was useful and funny and even “wholesome” in its own special way.
But over the last few years, the entire site became /pol/, and other boards became unusable. Maybe once a year I will pop in and immediately regret it.
/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.
Funny you point to /pol/ and forget about /b/, that was the meat of 4chan in the late 2000's
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.
Even /b/ was pretty good back in the day. Memes and inside jokes galore with almost no porn to be seen.
/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.
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.
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.
>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.
A community that only admits academics is pointless, and a community that only admits American academics is completely absurd.
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.
The USA is not the whole Western world.
And in most of the Western World the main culture accept trans people. They may differ on who can take pills at what age or if the state should pay for surgeries (is it cosmetic, is it vital) but people who'd beat up transgender people for who they are would be shunned.
If I watch or read modern cultural product, there are huge chances some character will be officially transgender or the theme will be present (shout-out to wildbow). That's being part of The Culture. So being against it means being against the culture. Culture changes over time thanks to people against the status quo (counter-culture). You may have been counter-culture in your youth but once your cause has been accepted you're not counter-culture anymore. You won: celebrate. A meme is how Rage Against the Machine has been Rage for the Machine for a long time already.
Now once you accept you're older, you won, you're for the current status quo you may feel some dread about two things: are you still relevant? (hence why many groups will always try to prove their fight is not won); and: what are parts of the status quo which the new generations of counter culture want to see change (and surely for a good reason). What's the "lobotomy for everyone" of our generation?
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.
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
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).
Frog in boiling water moment. Most of us have had enough experience with the platform before, during and after this period to know that it's not going back to what it was.
This. It's just a website (where anyone can post, quite rare in these overpoliticalized days).
> A Soyjak.Party users also shared a list of emails they claimed are associated with janitor and moderator accounts, including three .edu emails. Although some internet users claimed that the leaks included .gov emails associated with members of the moderation team, this remains unverified.
Like who cares?
The first llama torrents were posted on /g/ and for a long time it was the best place to go for information on local models.
I still don't understand how to read threads. How do replies work? How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back? How is it organized visually??
> How do replies work
Reply references the post it is replying to by ID, most boards will turn that ID into a link or even create a UI to view a chain of replies.
> How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back?
You shouldn't, an anonymous imageboard invites you to engage with ideas, not people. However, on most boards you can enter a password with your post, which is displayed as a hash, changing you from anonymous to pseudonymous (although this is generally considered attention-seeking and is frowned upon).
Thank you for explaining it.
If that's your thing, you can turn nicknames and avatars on in profile settings after registration.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe today's social media. It's basically early xbox live tier banter. A relic of a different time on the internet that is incomprehensible to the outsiders who weren't around for it.
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.
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.
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.
You're talking to a well known troll, sadly
If he stuck to food it would be fine. But he can't talk about a cheese sandwich without detouring into racially polarized woke politics.
/ck/ from around 2015 to hmm… maybe 2018-19 was pretty good, and probably my home board. Decent cook along threads (I hope Patti is doing ok), /ck/ challenge threads where there was some theme we had to follow and posts would get ranked… and of course the yearly lemon pig [1] threads. Sadly I guess fast food posting, shitting on foodtubers, and general /pol/ shittery made it go down in my view. Still went there most days until yesterday though.
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.
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?
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.
Are there no big list of memes on 4chan? If you took an intersection of that and list of memes in general, you should be able to derive a list and statistical summary figures for internet culture you've got from 4chan.
I might be giving 4chan too much credit but I think in your analogy it’s more akin to 80’s punk (broad subculture) than slam dancing (specific cultural phenomenon).
The way I see it, I lost interest in 4chan because I grew up and became an adult, and so did most of the Internet. We can look back and appreciate our childhood overall while also cringing at the embarrassing parts. 4chan has a lot of both good and bad memories for me and I think the broader Internet as well.
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
You seem to be confusing 4chan (chaotic good) with kiwifarms aka the farms, the true evil descendant of Something Awful (which was chaotic neutral).
I think that's simply which generation is talking. I'm an average (oldish?) millenial and 2003 is about that sweet spot of when I cut my teeth on the web. I was online before getting my butt kicked by koreans on starcraft but I can find old posts of mine starting in those early 2000s.
r9k is the origin of a huge amount of modern youth culture and slang. The obsessive vanity and "looksmaxxing" and all the associated terminology comes directly out of the incel culture on that board. It is extremely mainstream now.
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.
Frutiger Aero didn’t exist before 2017.
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.
They have been doing this for almost ten years now.
Small pedantic correction: “major hub of Internet culture” is “major subculture in English-speaking segment of Internet” (American segment?). In many other languages it was irrelevant.
I’m sure it had. It doesn’t mean it had equivalent influence. In many places people won’t name it in their top 10 cultural phenomena of Internet of that period even if they would remember it, which is far from guaranteed.
It's so funny to read this.
I've been involved in "internet culture" since the early to mid 90s.
The only thing that I heard about that ever came out of 4chan was toxicity.
This title says it all: https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/15/4chan_breached/
Yes, very right wing culture.
The internet is BIG and atomized.
early belongs to slashdot
Fidonet! BBS!
You can but I think it would make you quite dull
Why? I am not pleased with the government forced pills such as TikTok, Twitter and other such shite shoved down my throat.
You may enjoy the walled garden, I for one don't. Such sites gave you a hole to get away from the dystopian view that these gardens hold.
They gave independence away from forced control.
> "shoved down my throat."
Who shoves it down someone's throat though? I can't remember the last time I used tiktok, probably 3 or 4 years ago, and I don't feel like anyone forces me to.
> "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.
Not as much since Elon’s bribery lost in Wisconsin. Even the SSA is denying that rumor: https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/04/15/ssa-using-x-communica...
Wired is the ministry of truth apparently.
I believe the term of art is "the Joneses".
It's incredibly easy to just not use those websites. My throat remains surprisingly clear with no effort.
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.
They in fact, do it for free.
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.
> Actual 4chan mods are paid.
As far back as I can remember they were also volunteers. When did hiro start paying people?
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)
Exactly.
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".
"Pre Dot Com Bust" is a pretty good definition for "Old Internet".
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.
What are the most popular games on Steam that focus on interacting with a 4chan-like website?
Geocities was going strong in the late 90's too! My first homepage was hosted there on Tokyo Towers.
It is not very niche at all. 4chan served a gigantic volume of traffic.
Side note: When you google "Geocities" the results are in comic sans
Web 2.0 and before is now considered the old internet.
[dead]
I grew up on IRC, had sites on Geocities and Angelfire. That was the old internet people miss, not 4chan.
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
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.
That's just the view of bureaucratic machines which prefer to have some stable identifier in the relevant field on paper form (it doesn't matter if it's for ethnic cleansing or “celebrating diversity”), and then shape the reality until it fits.
Even though it might be hard to ignore the well-budgeted choir of well-intentioned promoters of status quo, you still don't have to believe in this concept.
[flagged]
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.
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".
>Creative irreverence was replaced with regular childishness.
I’d suggest taking off those glasses as they are a bit too rose-tinted. I was there, just like you, and the humor was way more “childishness” than “creative irreverence” well before 2010.
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.
Incredibly spot-on and well-put.
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
But it has much less of a barrier to post things. You do not need an email or a phone number you can just post. And an IP ban will only be effective to prevent the average user. Still though things get removed and moderated and I am okay with that. Having seen some of the telegram groups and the misinformation they spread was a crazy eye opener during covid times.
Mostly, but the few restrictions they do have led to even absolutist-er spinoffs like 8chan being founded.
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.
No the bees were never good.
depends on the board you're browsing, if you're discussing gardening you won't have issues with the far-right
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.
Illegal wherever, it doesn't matter. Very few admins are going to be willing to take a bullet for you even if they enjoy your spicy memes.
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.
Where do you see info about personal info?
I would presume Anon would which to remain anon.
I honestly and sincerely miss the project chanology days.
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.
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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
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...
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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.
My association was a bit later, mid to late 2010s. I recognize some of the names as well, including one of the top folks that probably onboarded both of us.
That said, my info is not on the list, I assume it was deleted when I left.
What kind of official association could one have with 4chan? 4chan was formative for my early connection to the internet, and I'm really curious what the organization behind it looked like. Was it professionally driven, or just some random guy mailing checks? stuff like that.
I lied about my age and was given janitor access in the mid 2000s. There was a special /j/ board to coordinate on, but it broke relatively early, and you mostly had to hang out in the #janiteam channel on Rizon. I think almost everybody else was underage as well. There was a minimal web overlay that let you delete/escalate posts. You couldn't see people's IPs, but you could see how many outstanding ban requests they had. These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.
We were all offered the chance to become mods in 2010, but moot wanted to see our faces on a Skype call. I thought that was a step too far and just gradually stopped caring after that. Seems like I made the right choice.
On the whole it was barely held together technically and organisationally, mostly run by moot's personal friends, and fun all around. Things were far less serious then.
And the checks arrived on time every month: $0.00
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 :)
>And the checks arrived on time every month: $0.00
Unexpectedly poignant.
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”
> These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.
Simultaneously one of the best and worst parts about the website was how much a single person could create influence. Some guy spamposting "30-year old boomer" memes eventually turned boomer and zoomer into mainstream terminology.
I remember a long time ago, a general that I would frequent attracted the attention of a lunatic who would frequently try to ruin threads by spam posting corrupted unloadable images until the bumpcap was reached. It made a successful thread with no incidents feel like a moment of success.
I like how this was the origin of the "virgin/Chad memes". Some guy kept spamming a meme about the "virgin walk" to make people feel self-conscious, and then someone made a joke response called the "Chad stride". Years later, those two are inseparable in popular culture.
A literal thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
That's true. But on the other hand, "Millhouse is not a meme" is in fact a meme.
The nature of 4chan makes it more difficult to distinguish from just normal posting. There's not any kind of paper trail to look at and potentially ID the posters.
It's also somewhat expected on the site from a cultural standpoint? Having a recognizable posting pattern gives flavor to a system that is otherwise composed of completely interchangeable posters. Like /v/ has one guy that constantly makes threads that are designed to devolve as quickly as possible into posting images of anthropomorphic lizards. It's not much of a nuisance so much as it makes the place feel comprised of genuine people.
Well... A full dump of the board exclusive to moderators and janitors was leaked too so now you could take a look yourself.
He was a janitor. On the internet. He did it for free.
he does it for free
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.
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.
That's a bit sinisterly of you.
Needed this 4chan-esque snark; was almost getting withdrawal shakes.
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'm not understanding the issue. The article isn't so clear to me. Would you mind clarifying what problem they solved?
Per my understanding, there is a show with 14 episodes that the viewer wants to watch in every order possible. How is this not just 14 factorial?
I know this can't be the problem, but it's just not clear to me from the article.
Edit: I found this link that explains it to anyone else as confused as I was: https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bvn1rz/...
Given a set of characters, find the shortest string with all permutations of that set. With 2 characters a,b the answer would be "aba", length 3 (not 2! like you suggested).
I think this is more of a temporary concussion, it'll be back up by the weekend.
Oh wow, that's genuinely cool.
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!
From what I heard, it was because they were tired of people posting "tbh fam". This does result in people instead posting "tbdesu" in being aware of the filter.
A note that the filter for "doublechan" was never updated to include its current name, nor the place where this current attack originated was ever filtered, afaik.
/lit/ is a goldmine, I’ve discovered so many amazing books there. Everywhere else on the web is algorithm or voting skewed so no real opinions can be shared
I agree, I'd even go so far and say it's one of the best places on the internet to discuss 'serious' books (within all the rampant troll posts). Book discussions on reddit are far too positive when it comes to terrible books, /lit/ will call a bad book a bad book. Plus there was always an undercurrent in interest in 'obscure' books - there are great reading charts out there for all kinds of literatures and languages made by /lit/ users.
They even wrote their own book collaboratively
Do you really truly believe 4chan is the only place opinions can be shared on the Internet?
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.
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 lot of attempts" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting here.
If your password was a set of random letters (both upper and lower case) and numbers and 20 characters long, then even if you could attempt 1,000 logins/second (a very high number for an online attack), it would take a whopping 2,232,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
If you could do 1,000,000 logins/second, an absolutely absurd number for an online attack, that only takes 3 zeros off that number.
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 password to protect your HTTP auth phpMyAdmin so just make it 30 characters.
> 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.
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
I mean, the password to the only ssh thing accessible from outside is 17 characters, and root is not ssh-able, only my user with a custom username
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
A tale as old as time
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.
> 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.
This isn’t true at all.
> This isn’t true at all.
Many will say the same.
Still, both cohorts' language and behavior evince continuous cultural cross-pollination from around 2012 (at least; I wasn't paying serious attention much sooner), at a rate and scope both well in excess of broader culture's adoption of same as substantially attributable to either source.
That still has to be explained, and I would be curious how you do so, although you'll almost certainly prefer to keep trying to indict the factual claim.
"Most avid users," I believe I said. You seem to exclude yourself from the category, so it isn't surprising you should have a perspective other than that I seek to describe.
As for the rest, I made a general factual claim that I'm happy to discuss, but I do not know you and neither can nor care to attempt to speak to your personal situation, so if you continue insisting on the latter I'll have to demur from further participation. I'm a student of and commentator upon the moment of history in which I happen to have found myself, rather than a social scientist or indeed any other kind, and also not your father confessor. If the result of my observation and analysis fails to satisfy your standard, that's okay by me.
Or we could try to have a conversation about it, I suppose. For example, what explains the trend of both cultures' slang growing more similar over time? Merely circulating receipts to make fun of doesn't seem likely to have this result; why socially adopt language unique to a common object of social-bonding contempt? And so forth.
I obviously don't have a lot of data for or against, and I think neither does anyone else for events too recent to have more than begun to be studied. I am one unemployed software engineer. You are free to demand I exceed in result the entire professional vocation whose job is this kind of analysis, but I can of course do nothing in response save disappoint.
I disagree with this statement, but I get what you're saying.
Two communities with distinct cultures, whose membership nonetheless overlaps, are still two distinct cultures.
They may influence each other through that overlapping membership, but that does not mean they're the same.
I'm not sure if you're arguing that the overlap was less than I describe or that it was negligible. But I would soften my prior claim far enough to say that, while each site had its own constellation of cultural tropes and styles with which the median user of that site would primarily identify, a large minority or more of each site's most prolific cultural transmitters was broadly and continuously informed by participation in both cultures, such that those cultures tended over time to express increasingly similar behaviors, utterances, and semiosis, despite over the same span each growing overtly more hateful and contemptuous of the other.
(A Freudian might reduce this to superego vs. id, a Jungian to animus and anima. I'm not any of those kinds of mendicant, and make no assertion as to etiology. But it is anything but controversial to suggest we have recently changed our environment in ways that can be unexpectedly dangerous for the young and others whose personalities are incompletely or imperfectly developed.)
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 a reflection of the depraved, extreme side of humanity.
I think moderated forums like this one are the reflection of depraved and extreme. After all, you need to be a depraved and extreme host to try to micromanage what everyone says. People who run sites in such a way must have depraved power fantasies.
Just set up a host and allow people to speak their minds? That sounds like someone who believes the good of humanity will triumph, and the right to speak freely is a fundamental one. Section 230 exists and puts the responsiblity of what is said directly on the poster, not the host. So there really seems no reason not to do this... unless you have depraved and extreme power fantasies about controlling what other people say and think.
This is one of the most naively optimistic posts I have ever seen on HN.
Unmoderated message boards are not a haven of intellect.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theo...
> 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.
>There's 'normal' gay content (male on male).
Some would argue you're describing autoandrophilia (not seen in all cultures).
Hardly universal, if you go to those threads and BBC threads it's usually full of people also commenting that they believe it's a Jewish psyop to corrupt young men
Funny enough, the revelations are that a large chunk of posts come from Israel.
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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
Please post sources. And what other sites are you talking about?
> Will post sources soon
When?
The man.
I hope it comes back. Although I don't agree with a lot of what's on there, it's one of the only places you can find hot, fresh, (mostly) uncensored, and unalgorithmed content.
Incidentally, KYM website is an original dinosaur like PHP, both loaded full of invalid / cargo cult practices, such as blocking proxy users from reading their (mostly read-only) website. Guessing it's bloated garbage made by some kid and this is part of the reason.
It looks like it's back up - sort of. Loading very slowly, anyway. After a compromise like this, I'm a little surprised.
4chan was never known for high security, early versions were pretty close to pasting raw user input into HTML, which was eagerly used by griefers, for example by pasting right-to-left unicode overrides in their comments which was enough to spill to the whole page.
For all the sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: “website running 15 year old software gets pwned again”
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
Running a site like 4chan on outdated software is not just a choice, but one of the choices of all time.
Really, it was gonna happen one of these days.
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.
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.
/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.
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.
Has Fireship made a video about this yet? I bet we'll see one tomorrow.
I totally called it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNratwOrSiY
Watching hacker news try use cold analytical intellect to deconstruct 4chan's jokes and culture (and still missing the point) has got to be the funniest joke ever. Perhaps a little more analysis will yield the answer to understanding the complexity of a green frog or running bear. Though I wouldn't count on it. It has to mean something nefarious. Much like the soft 'schlop schlop schlop' of a dog's tongue lapping up water -- its meaning to us is a mystery.
From what I can tell, there's not much analysis of 4chan going on here, but more people just sort of remembering their time on the site.
That's what this has been for me; a walk down memory Lane to my teenage edgelord years.
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.
Is there anyone doing something akin to the data analytics which happened for the Panama Papers?
I appreciate this has overtones of doxxing. I am not asking for "the list" but more if there is an intent to tie up some loose ends about influence relating mainly to /pol/
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?
4chan sized site that gets attention from all sorts of unique people...ran ancient php? Ouch
Makes you wonder what all these 'advanced frameworks' have actually offered the internet..
(hard mode: don't mention advertising)
Automatic crash reporting with time travel debugging with capability for graphical snapshots of the frontend.
Bandwidth reductions involving incremental loading of images, or not having to reload the whole site after a click.
Most sites are better off with static pages + server-side rendering + vanilla js though.
Trick question, they haven't. (Perl was the pinnacle of webdev and I anybody telling you otherwise is lying, or a javascript programmer.)
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.
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'.
> 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.
This is actually a big reason why 4chan never messed with my sanity and blood pressure opposed to say Reddit or Twitter. It feels like on 4chan there are some people who are completely off the rails, but they can be insulted and called out. On Reddit or Twitter, it feels like almost everyone is “somewhat of the rails” and they all concentrate among each other, as in almost every Subreddit has some collectively held belief that simply appears as nonsensical to people outside of it, but as much as politely disagreeing will get one blocked by that specific user in many cases, or just banned from the subreddit so it's far more obnoxious. Also, it feels like arguing against an endless current whereas at best on 4chan it's two waves that clash into each other of even size.
4chan is “arguing against an idiot”, Reddit and Twitter becomes “arguing against idiots, being surrounded by them, and very often not even really being allowed to argue lest one be banned”. It's a very frustrating experience that makes one's blood boil.
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.
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.
most of the niche subs I follow have banned X links, and every time I get on X I just see a bunch of bots or things I have no interest in
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.
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.
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).
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.
>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?
They are orthogonal. If you plot him on the political compass, he'd be libertarian-left.
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.
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 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
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.
Interesting to see HN user astrange as the admin.
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.
And /k/ forgets the lesson that Finland learned twice, the hard way.
Having more bodies to throw at your enemy is a valid, war-winning tactic. Really that's what the meme _should_ be. Russia will beat you with poorly trained soldiers and two generations old tech. Bet.
But I guess that also undermines everything that /k/ stands for...
Your hugbox is on /chug/
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.
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.
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.
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.
> but some people seem to find it useful.
Honestly, it filled a very specific hole for me that I found nowhere else. Everyone is talking about the “unfiltered content” and all those things but to me it was mostly just topical. It was really one of the few places where one could get a good discussion on the internet about Japanese female-oriented entertainment which I'm well aware isn't the first thing people think about with 4chan but pretty much every other forum about Japanese entertainment is completely dominated by male-oriented entertainment, except when they go out of their way to specifically make a board catered to female-oriented entertainment, but that has the side effect that people on those boards end up talking more about gender politics than about the entertainment itself and I just want to talk about my favorite television shows and comic books and really don't care about all the politics.
4chan by it's nature doesn't drown out minority tastes and voices. This really isn't just a “female-oriented entertainment” thing but really any minority taste that just gets drowned out on most boards to the point that it disappears. The only other place I know where one can do this is Tumblr, more or less, but it's a very different experience, not necessarily better or worse but there just isn't this kind of “live discussion” atmosphere and vibe going on on Tumblr about episodes that are currently airing where people post small comments as the episode is airing and they're watching it. It's more for long impressions after it was aired and it doesn't have the same degree of interaction, it's a blogging place, not a message board.
As said, it isn't just that but “obscure taste” in general. You can make a thread on 4chan about some really obscure piece of fiction that no one knows and get a discussion going, half with the people that do it know, in part because it's an imageboard so they're drawn in to an image they recognize and it stands out, and half with people that never heard of it before, see the images in the thread, see it looks interesting and try it out. The images are the key I feel, it lowers the barrier of entry for people to try out something obscure because they see the images which lures them in. It was one of the best places to get a discussion going about some obscure piece of fiction which Tumblr doesn't do either, the only things that are being discussed are the really big titles. There are so many relatively obscure titles I enjoy I will possibly never get to discuss with anyone in my life again if 4chan not come back. I know many of those titles from 4chan because people constantly promote and share fairly obscure things there and the images again sell it.
This is some vBulletin software jankness
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.
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gem
no coal to be found here
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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.
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.
It sounds like everything was running on one server, fwiw.
Honestly surprised this isn't getting more coverage, not just in the media but here.
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.
Honestly, that didn't help. There's a wide type of "controversy" there, and I don't see how 4chan are inherent to any of them, they could've been done via any forum. Or maybe I missed something, specificity would be good.
But they weren't done via any forum, they were done via 4chan. The community makes a forum.
It's a well known forum with a lot of users, to blame the "4chan community" would seem to be either a fallacy of composition or, ironically, of division, depending how the claim is laid out.
I'm also not sure how the site admins would stop them?
This still stings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373
>Ask HN: Why is nobody using [obscure niche technology from the 80s]?
>Why [popular technology] is [unexpected opinion]
>Why it's impossible to use PHP even though millions of people are doing great things with it
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.
Thanks, that gives me something to go on. I appreciate the time you took with your reply.
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.
In reality, the rest of the bar laughs at and mocks the one Nazi and he probably stops coming or at least shuts up, even though he hasn't been banned. This is how most non-/pol/ generals have handled it, and it works. It's how plenty of real bars across America handle it too, when the bar and patrons earnestly subscribe to free speech as a aspirational principle for guiding human behavior, not limited to simply the first ammendment binding the hands of government. If somebody wants to reveal themselves to be a dumbass, that's entertainment for everybody else.
That's not what the paradox of tolerance says, nor is it relevant. Popper gave two explicit standards for working out who is intolerant:
- they shun debate ("begin by denouncing all argument", "forbid their followers to listen to rational argument")
- they use violence instead ("answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols")
I, for one, prefer having peaceful Nazis to the other sort, and to - as Popper puts it - "counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion". Unless 4chan officials or the Nazis on 4chan were meeting both standards then I fail to see a connection.
Were 4chan or the 4chan Nazis doing so?
ie. if you're shunning debate and deplatforming people based on ideological disputes, you're also a nazi.
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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.
because my religious redneck family thinks 4chan is a bunch of hackers who hate the elderly because fox news mentioned "ok boomer" meme once.
because ive met many people in real life who think its evil but have never been on it or have even seen it.
every normie hates 4chan, but none of them have never been there.
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.
After leaving when it got too shitty, I would go back once a year or so to check the racism in pol, see if maybe b was back to doing things instead of just porn, and read the plainly undiagnosed schizophrenia on the paranormal board.
Like you said, not a lot of people in my life have any idea what it is, but it does hold a special place in my heart. It started when I was trying to establish my own personality, and it provided me with a safe avenue to try out different "me's".
One of the best websites on the internet. Hopefully not gone forever.
QA won? what the butt
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.
I’ve used it probably daily since about 2006. Which is kind of sad actually.
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.
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?
Hacker named 4chan hacks 4chan
ShartyGods stay winning
There are, of course, many people with memories of 4chan that precede that of mine (oldf*) - I could only even articulate what I was seeing on 4chan at the age I was around 2014. But by 2015 - with only 1-2 years of experience on the site - I noticed a drastic downturn of the authenticity in posts and comments that I was used to. Then, I saw quality of topics and speaking points go down in 2020. And finally, I saw the social fabric of 4chan itself go down essentially right after Omegle was shut down. By mid-2024, I couldn't even trust it for contrarian or less-conventional (or, frankly, brutally honest) viewpoints of topics they purported to care about.
And honestly, as things got better in my life and I went out to be more recreational, I went from going on 4chan once a day - to once a week - to once a month - and finally, to only when I wanted to see edgy takes on divisive current events.
I'll miss all that, despite all it lost over the years. And I'll miss the element of design and mannerisms in its userbase. It required an upfront investment to even understand how to engage with, and a "lurk moar" attitude. RIP.
Edit: It was also very crazy watching small groups of people turn insider-jargon into mainstream terminology. I'll also never forget watching the thread of QAnon's conception in real-time. Crazy stuff originated there - both in substance and meaning.
I was on there almost from the beginning. Early 2004.
It was never good, but it definitely went entirely to shit when all the alt-right nut bags started flooding the site with nonsense starting around 2014-15. I have to believe it was a coordinated effort, it just seemed too immediate across the entire site.
I left 4chin by the time it became impossible to dodge pedophiles, room temperature IQ and absolute lowest tier trash. It used to be fun to hunt for quality content, but it seems nobody of value visits that site anymore.
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.
Can you expand on this? I remember canv.as, it was a weird but interesting project but it seemed doomed from the outset.
He sold the site years ago so this is not affecting him in the slightest.
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
Nitpicking:
a) It seems that no one actually saw the school map to state that it really exists.
b) Doom maps are flat 2D blueprints with varying floor heights, they are quite unsuitable to “simulate” any building with multiple floors, not to mention complete lack of realism in everything else in the game (say, player has a speed of a car relative to the environment). There are some tricks in modern ports to combine detached level geometry into seemingly whole thing for niche maps, but those were not available at the time.
c) Trying to copy one's own school, house, or city block is the most stereotypical thing kids do when they find the level design tools. I remember quite a number of Counter-Strike maps that were nice at least visually, if not gameplay-wise, which were made that way. Surely, not everyone put that much work into a typical map made to play a couple of times with friends.
It seems that cases of overreaction to such funny nonsense that still happen after 30 years, despite everything, are something to scratch your head about.
The real situation is more complex. Harris did use game metaphors: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre Of course, those cliches are not unique to Doom, and were just borrowed from comics and fantasy. We should generalise. The real hypocrisy is that people like to enjoy media and entertainment about The Hero domination everything and everyone, and don't want to be restricted in consuming that, but, at the same time, they don't like to become mere film extras that get shot by the dozen when some idiot believes in that fantasy a bit too much, and decides to live the dream. This is not limited to shootings. If you hate people so much, but instead of getting guns and ammo get yourself hired by social network data extraction press, it's not a straight path to electric chair, but a “successful IT career”. If you read trashy action packed novels, and consider that crippled offspring of romanticism as ideal life, you can try that high-adrenaline amusement ride, as long as it happens in some distant land, and can be called “military career” by others.
So media and entertainment significantly shape everyone's life, but limiting that argument to a small number of scapegoat cases is cowardice.
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?
Next you will be asking for trump to ban rap music to stop drug trafficking
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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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.
> 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.
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.
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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 is this different from, for example, reddit? You may start following reddit, niche subreddits, but in reality it's normalizing left-wing views
>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".
So insidious you could be alt-right without even knowing!
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.
Yes, QAnon is a joke, as was the white power hand sign and microwave charging iPhones, among hundreds of others.
There is no "baby filter" on 4chan. You are solely responsible for believing and/or not being offended by anything. Well, that is true everywhere on the Web, but there is zero veneer of it on 4chan vs the partial safety bubbles you get on other sites.
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Meh, good riddance. The old internet wasn't all good.
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!
> racist and antisemitic
There was a leak of the political channel by poster's country.
According to that post, the top posting country by far (226M posts) is also the same country that is at the receiving end of antisemitism.
Yet another reason 4chan and its anonymity is a misinformation and propaganda warzone.
"unapologetically" and propaganda are quite opposite concepts in that situation. Make up your mind because you are the one pushing for discord here.
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.
Obviously those people will continue to think and exist the way they are. But we can't assume things will slowly start getting better if we continually allow increasingly racist "discourse" and misinformation in our society.
>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.
Arguably that's where the current generation of dogwhistlers learned their craft.
Musk is supreme at it ("kek").
I'm not sure how you've come to that impression. The boards I used to frequent are hobbyist ones, not political, yet they have people calling each other the n-word all the time. On /fit/ anything done by a large corporation or as a moneymaking scheme is talked about as if it's a Jewish conspiracy, to the point where they call highly-processed food "goyslop". /g/ hates Indians and calls software and technology that it likes "the white man's choice." I could go on. This pervasive background of racism is all over 4chan, and I wonder why you're trying to downplay it.
I'm actually familiar with 4chan and lurked on it when I was underage at least daily. It was funny for the time.
I'm not sure where the idea comes from that the entire site's reputation is containerized inside /pol/ or any NSFW board. It's just misleading if you take 5 minutes to browse around (if you still can, anyway). The language and harassment used in ALL boards of any group of people or individual is disgusting.
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.
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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.
4chan has been completely dead for almost ten years and i dont understand why anyone talks about it still.
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.
>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.
This reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story where traffic engineers design pedestrian-heavy intersections without traffic lights because it makes drivers more careful.
We now have sloppy software simply because we can update bugs later.
This is a purely social problem that won't get solved with technology.
Use a proper RTOS kernel with a good UI layer, and see all the developers complain loudly because they can't use the latest mobile phone stacks on that robust platform.
Sony boots a RTOS Linux system on their cameras in 3 seconds flat, and the firmware is arguably mission critical for that camera. It can be done for an infotainment system.
There was a hack to a Cherokee featured in Wire years and years back. It was attributed to “two hackers”… yea my ass, I met both guys they knew surface level at best, these guys didn’t discover a flaw in Sprint’s network on their own.
It was three letter agencies embarrassing the mfgs into “taking security more seriously” but conveniently also giving gov access, backdoors, and data on vehicles.
Play the game or they’ll make sure the next article is about you.
People would look at the vehicle industry a lot differently if they knew what was going on behind the scenes.
New cars have 3G cellular transmitters constantly sending telemetry data. This started becoming common in 2012.
That was way before the musk rat.
No. Not even close.
Far closer to Obama and his circle. Around Carpocalypse 2008, a bunch of three letter agencies started pushes for internet connected vehicles knowing the tech wasn’t there; but would be.
I watched it happen. There was some shady shit, and the reality was 2008 wasn’t just about GM and Chrysler but and entire JustInTime mistake that could have stopped almost all car production around the world. Different topic, but the effect was government would be involved in cars a lot more than previously.
Fast forward, and here we are. Your car ABSOLUTELY is spying on you, and the upside is you also get shipped unfinished vehicles.
Be a culture war sally about Musk all you like, I know, the bad men say the mean things. But this isn’t on him. Tesla had to and in some ways is still learning that cars aren’t computers on wheels, but this specific “feature” came from Big Government first.
Reminds me of Bill Gates & GM (apparently discredited though)
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/car-balk/
Ironically, that last point has come true!
(Though to be fair, the button tends to be labeled both start and stop)
I have a Mercedes that has an OFF button for the A/C. Took me way too long to realize it is just a badly named Power button.
Prophetic
Old, but gold!
> Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features that barely work and piles of debt that will never get fixed.
move fast and break things is going to be studied in the future as a hilariously clusterfuk misuse of an idea.
It's hard to appreciate that there is a vast difference between hitting walls in a tank and not caring about the exterior, and slamming into a wall on a bicycle.
> It's a wonder anything actually even works.
> If cars were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.
Next to the software side of things, I also often wonder about planes. But, until now, they have proved fairly resilient to falling out of the sky, except for the well known "recent" events. Which is fairly surprising, knowing the levels of mismanagement at play. We've been lucky..
It's not hard to imagine there would be even more than in less verified fields, since if you try to clean it up you need to verify it again too.
From talking to someone in the industry TDD seems to be a popular methodology.
Funny anecdote - I was flying through Minneapolis and the passengers on a plane about to depart had to get back off the plane so it could be rebooted. It takes 20 minutes to power down to zero and 20 minutes to boot back up. The gate agent said it was a known touchy computer on that plane - I was wondering if that was true.
> 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.
Well, cars did break down by the side of the road daily! That's why it used to be good advice even in the 90s to always have a basic set of tools in your trunk, why AAA offered roadside assistance already in 1915, and why part of the European CDL is enough basic mechanic knowledge to self-help when the truck breaks down.
It's only in the last 20-ish years that "smarts" became cheap and ubiquitous enough in cars that the car can warn preemptively. And additionally, regulatory requirements on quality, parts availability and public expectations went up, exerting competitive pressure.
> If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this
The critical software parts of cars (non user-facing entertainment systems gripes aside). Think engine control modules, ABS, etc.
This stuff is mission critical and almost always works. I think about that a lot.
Why do I feel so specifically targeted by this.
Though maybe I am of the philosophy of prototyping as I like to code for problems that I am facing right now in real life and wish like damn... wish someone could build something cool & though I use AI quite hard. Its actually because I am currently in school and I just don't have the time to code but I face some issues which I genuinely feel need to be solved right now. (Maybe even as just a proof of concept) so that I can later write good readable code later on when I go into university.
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.
Other than, you mean, the next best option of break things and ruin peoples lives in the process because it fits the current software development paradigms? I'm old, I've seen 'the new right way' come then become 'the worst way of doing things on the planet' over at least 5 iterations now.
You forgot the /s.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-elon-...
To be fair, a car isn't accessible to 8 billion+ people at any given second. That's the scary part about the internet now. You can't just have a fun little garden and only have to protect the veggies from rabbits. Them gnawing on your lettuce is your biggest issue. Now, you have to protect your veggies from essentially professional armed raiders who either burn your garden to the ground for lolz or a cryptocoin ransom.
In this day and age, like... is anything secure at this point? You say hastily... but even the biggest "walls" get breached, constantly. Just claiming hastily to feel better about your own glass walls is just as bad.
I think about this daily.
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.
Nishimura for most part become a Japanese public personality - he has wrote for Japanese tabloids and has a YT channel.
This in general is the main factor of the decline of the "old web". Many of the people who drove it, who run these forums, are simply happier running a substack, a subreddit, a facebook group, without worrying about servers.
Certainly explains why 4chan fell way down his priority list.
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?
Based on one of the comments in the leaked source, at least php 6, though no idea what specific version:
> // In PHP 6 this... doesn't seem to do anything? Let's try again in 7.
Oh interesting, thanks! Which makes that comment in the code even more confusing
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
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.
You basically just described the XPM format.
Oh yeah... I completely forgot about this thing. But you're right!
There's also XBM.
I love these kinds of formats.
Your writing reminds me of a Tom Scott video.
These were fun times. I've been working as a pentester for the past ten years, and the job got a lot harder, with everything using frameworks and containerization.
We still get plenty of results, because the tooling also gets better, and finding just one vulnerability is enough to be devastating, which makes it kind of frustrating. There is tons of progress, but much of it is just not paying dividends.
Bobby Tables can’t keep getting away with this
Bobby Ignore All Previous Instructions however…
thank you for this laugh
> 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.
Interesting. I published research on this style of attack in 2019 when I found Slack and a few other big websites vulnerable to it. In their cases, LibreOffice was passing the files off to specific parsers based on magic headers rather than file extensions.
https://buer.haus/2019/10/18/a-tale-of-exploitation-in-sprea...
We published a PoC for file write as part of our research and bug bounty submissions:
https://gist.github.com/ziot/fb96e97baae59e3539ac3cdacbd0943...
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...
PDF, actually.
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
4chan, ironically enough, had something similar where steganographic images were posted designed to be copied to Paint, saved as a bmp, renamed to an .hta file, and then executed. It would then spam the board with other variations of itself.
"Bannerbomb", on the Wii, has entered the thread.
https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Bannerbomb
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.)
Newer Ghostscript versions are Affero GPL, that might be problem for some people, although probably not for 4chan (they don't modify it so it should be fine)
(incidentally I am now working on compiling this old GPL ghostscript to webassembly with file isolation... it works fine... but the compilation is kind of annoying)
> 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)?
> With the AGPL license being legal kryptonite I wonder if license compatibility drove the decision
Unlikely. There's a number of other strong indications that basic maintenance was being neglected, including shell transcripts showing that at least one server was running FreeBSD 10.1 (released in 2014, end-of-life in 2018), and PHP code using the mysql extension (which was deprecated in PHP 5.6 = 2014 and removed in PHP 7.0 = 2015).
It's probably not a coincidence that 4chan was sold to a new owner in 2015.
Not a lot of reputable advertisers want to associate themselves with 4chan I imagine.
4chan aren’t modifying the Ghostscript code, why would they care about the license?
uninformed or malicious FUD.
agpl is no different than gpl if you're distributing applications. if you host the functionality of the application with improvements then it's rightly so cryptonite and you deserve it.
I just relicensed a bunch of old code to AGPL, probably with little practical effect since it's old code: https://www.immibis.com/blog/relicensing
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.
Same or similar thing happened to Gitlab. it used some common parsing library that worked on images and perl scripts... you can see where this is going
> 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.
That's why it's a good idea to block connections of all protocols into address ranges where an attacker might be able to host a service. Even on internal networks, if you are a corporation.
But it gets better than tunneling over ICMP: DNS tunneling. Pretty much all systems can talk to a DNS resolver. If it resolves arbitrary host names, you can set up a DNS for a zone you control and requests will end up there. With tools like iodine (requires root and a binary on the target), you can tunnel your traffic conveniently (and slowly).
I love iodine. When you're at a "free" wifi hotspot that needs an account (yet another company to take the security of your data so seriously that they upload it to an open S3 bucket), or you're on mobile data and out of credit, or whatever, iodine usually always works because as you say DNS is almost always allowed.
It's only a dozen kbytes/sec or so, but this is more than good enough for RSS, email, IRC, HN, ...
>That's why it's a good idea to block connections of all protocols into address ranges where an attacker might be able to host a service.
It's not a terrible idea, but it's pretty far down the list if things to do. It will stop mass scanners, but probably not any targeted attack unless you try REALLY hard (and then you have a chance of breaking your own infrastructure by accident doing this).
They should start with updating their ghostscript sometime over the last 10 years. Then maybe think about separating some parts of their infrastructure.
I mean, wow, that's really 2012 tech, looks like new owner d invested completely nothing since acquiring 4chan.
> 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'.
Also "reverse tunnel" as a more general term, it can open any service not just those giving shell access. There have been similar hacks where the implanted tunnel have access to databases that weren't properly secured (anyone remember back when SQL Server defaulted to having a blank password for "sa" and many didn't change that thinking their firewall, which was really little more than a simple NAT setup, was sufficient protection?).
This is why there is the mantra "NAT is not a firewall": if something internal has no business making outgoing connections it should be blocked as well as incoming connections being difficult (also because there are various other NAT busting attacks too).
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/
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.
most likely "shell access" was confused with execution of "shellcode" which is a type of code, typically bytecode, that gets injected by the hacker and the server gets tricked into executing it. Once it's executed, it can do anything, leave new files, open ports, disable firewalls, change the admin password, etc
Shellcode is usually weirdly formed native machine code, typically written in a "return-oriented programming" style, that can be inserted with a buffer overflow and somehow jumped to. But usually not bytecode.
It was not - attacker ran an exploit that have him a remote shell access. No shellcode was involved (that's for binary exploits which is not what happened here)
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.
Thanks for the reply, that was just the level of explanation I was looking for. It wouldn't have even dawned on me to do it that way. I'm obviously not a security researcher.
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)
Assuming US jurisdiction this would pretty clearly be at least one, probably many CFAA violations which are criminal.
> Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files
Some boards used to allow PDF files to upload too.
Periodic reminder that a PDF is a turing-complete script that generates a document and should be treated as foreign code
If you disable JavaScript, it’s not. PDF removed loops etc from the PostScript it supports
Fascinating, that has been the attack vector in a couple of hackthebox like systems I've done over the last couple of years. The easier ones usually just require file name changes, the medium ones intercepting and mimetype change.
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
eh, there's a lot of neat pdfs on the papercraft and origami board
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
Source: https://www.soyjak.st/soy/thread/10615723.html#:~:text=What%...
Kiwifarms is also discussing, links to code and griefing - https://kiwifarms (NSFW/NSFL) .st/threads/soyjak-party-the-sharty.145349/page-1468#post-21102686
So the article blaming out of date PHP was off base?
Why would you say how you did it? Now they can't do it all over again when it comes back /s
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