[HN Gopher] 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak
___________________________________________________________________
4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak
Author : LookAtThatBacon
Score : 385 points
Date : 2025-04-15 11:30 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (knowyourmeme.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (knowyourmeme.com)
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| 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)
| GaggiX wrote:
| 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).
| LightBug1 wrote:
| I'm not up to speed - but isn't that a free-speech absolutist
| site?
| jsheard wrote:
| Mostly, but the few restrictions they do have led to even
| absolutist-er spinoffs like 8chan being founded.
| GaggiX wrote:
| 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).
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| 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.
| sznio wrote:
| depends on the board you're browsing, if you're discussing
| gardening you won't have issues with the far-right
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| 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.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| Isn't it a running joke that the Jannies don't get paid?
| aloha2436 wrote:
| I'm reliably informed they do it for free.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > 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.
| pc86 wrote:
| 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.
| gnarlynarwhal42 wrote:
| 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
| robobro wrote:
| 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 :(
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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?
| morkalork wrote:
| 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
| brookst wrote:
| They certainly don't get to claim any kind of moral high
| ground, but as a bystander I can feel empathy for someone
| hit by a drunk driver, even if the victim had driven
| drunk before in the past.
|
| Any increase in human suffering is unfortunate,
| regardless of one's take on just desserts or karma or
| whatever.
| soVeryTired wrote:
| I'd say it's more like a high-profile NRA member getting
| shot. Unfortunate but it's hard to miss the irony.
| robobro wrote:
| 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
| a0123 wrote:
| 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.
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| the serious crime of... deleting egregious posts from a
| website
| weard_beard wrote:
| 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.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| "The culture" of 4chan varies from board to board and even
| thread to thread.
| y-curious wrote:
| 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.
| theossuary wrote:
| "Wow, you'd group people by their actions and beliefs but
| not by immutable characteristics they were born with?!"
| /s
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| One of those is something people are born into without
| choice. The other is chosen because of their tastes.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| Yes.
|
| People can _leave_ the platform. They can 't leave their
| race.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think we can lament the old internet and still care nothing
| for 4chan.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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)
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| ArinaS wrote:
| I think anything before Frutiger Aero became popular (and
| it didn't in 2003) can be considered "early" Internet.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| rob wrote:
| You're trying to argue that 2003 isn't the early
| Internet. Seems like you're trying to have your
| "Ackchyually..." moment right now because you didn't know
| 4chan existed.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| No, I'm saying the Internet was already in mass adoption
| for the preceding decade. Talk to old timers and they'll
| reminisce that the early days of the internet were great
| until Eternal September in 93. Others will reminisce
| about the days of BBS. I'm saying "early internet" is a
| relative term that has more to do with the person
| interpreting than any objective definition.
| hollerith wrote:
| I put the start of the _mainstreaming_ of the internet in
| July 1993, the month a cartoon was published in the New
| Yorker captioned, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're
| a dog": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_no
| body_knows_...
|
| Before then, it was quite unusual to see coverage of the
| internet by the mainstream press (and what coverage I saw
| took a theoretical or "far" view, i.e., as part of a
| discussion of governmental policy). After then, coverage
| exploded.
|
| This is an American perspective: the timing was probably
| different in other countries.
| acheron wrote:
| 2003 was _after the dot com boom and crash_. There is no
| possible definition of "early Internet" that can include
| 2003.
| tsumnia wrote:
| It's clearly when AOL started offering a monthly
| subscription for unlimited Internet usage.
| klodolph wrote:
| Frutiger Aero didn't exist before 2017.
| ArinaS wrote:
| It did since at least 2004[1].
|
| [1] - https://yenimedya.aydin.edu.tr/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/10/3....
| klodolph wrote:
| That's dated 2023... am I missing something? The
| aesthetic did not exist in 2004. It was created in the
| late 2010s by juxtaposing materials from the early 2000s.
| This created a _new_ style from old materials. The same
| way you might combine art deco motifs in new ways in the
| 1980s, inventing "art deco revival".
| ArinaS wrote:
| > " _The aesthetic did not exist in 2004_ "
|
| Well, this research states that " _Between 2004 and 2013,
| Frutiger Aero was influential in advertising, media,
| stock images, cinema, gaming, and spatial design_ ".
| That's page 4.
| klodolph wrote:
| There's no justification given or source cited. You can't
| just dig up a paper somebody wrote that agrees with you--
| you have to actually read the paper to understand what it
| says and what support it gives to that position.
|
| I see NO support for this position. No reasoning, no
| primary sources, no secondary sources, not even the
| personal experiences of the author.
|
| I have not seen any evidence that Frutiger Aero existed
| before 2017, and 2017 seems like the most likely creation
| date to me. That's when it was created, by combining
| materials from the 2000s in new ways. Call it
| "bricolage", perhaps.
|
| Addenda: if you scroll through Google Image search
| results for Frutiger Aero, you'll see what looks to me
| like an obvious _lack_ of actual materials from the
| 2000s. I see a screenshot of Windows XP, a screenshot of
| the Nintendo Wii home screen. Maybe a few other random
| screenshots of apps or web sites. As far as I can tell,
| Frutiger Aero was invented by taking these few materials
| and extrapolating a whole aesthetic movements out of it.
| I see a lot of artwork dated from the 2020s labeled as
| Frutiger Aero--that's the true nexus of the aesthetic,
| Gen Z adults recreating a half-remembered image from
| their childhoods. Which is fine. It's just not from 2004.
| Like how Vaporwave is not actually from the 1990s or
| 1980s, Vaporwave is from the mid-2010s. I love Vaporwave,
| but I know that it's not from the past; it's a modern
| remix of elements from the past.
| rob wrote:
| You're trying way too hard, dude - it's been around
| before 2017.
| klodolph wrote:
| "Trying way too hard" means "I don't have anything
| material to add to the discussion, I just want to mock
| you for even caring about this."
|
| Jeezus. Don't write comments like that. It's
| inappropriate.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Regardless of date bracketing, I can miss 80's punk and
| not miss slam dancing.
|
| Maybe someone can list some positive internet culture we
| got from 4chan that I am overlooking.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 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.
| throw10920 wrote:
| GP is committing a variant of Chesterton's Fence where
| they're actually proud of their ignorance of the fence.
|
| Thank you for enlightening those of us who actually care
| to know.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| /g/ has a daily programming thread. I remember the
| SerenityOS developer used to post webm demos there. I
| remember seeing plenty of cool stuff.
|
| Someone on /vr/ once started a thread about SNES homebrew
| and actually made a /vr/ themed one. I wonder what
| happened to that guy.
| vermilingua wrote:
| /dpt/ was where i did a good deal of my learning during
| university, and the constant /g/entoo posting taught me
| _far_ more about Linux than I would have learned on my
| own or through uni.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| /g/entoomen taught me a lot about Linux too. The desktop
| and home server threads also have a lot of gold, people
| put a lot of effort into their systems. There are even
| Lisp generals. I remember people attempting the advent of
| code together and posting progress. There was one person
| who used _a lot of_ Unicode in the source code.
|
| Just yesterday I saw a rather interesting discussion
| about WD HDD internals and possible ways to figure out
| whether they are SMR drives. Shame this hack cut it
| short.
|
| /tg/ had some seriously good chess players.
|
| There's a board for everything. People see 4chan and
| think everything is /pol/. If anything, it's /a/. People
| have been arguing over which waifu is best girl for 20
| years. _20 years._
| subjectsigma wrote:
| If you go look at Andreas' old videos from 5-6 years ago
| you can see early versions of Serenity had some sort of
| shortcut or app specifically for 4chan, with the clover
| icon and everything.
|
| There's actually a number of projects that started this
| way though I don't know of any that grew up to be as
| charming and interesting as Serenity OS. Katawa Shoujo is
| one, though I could definitely see people complaining
| about the games content. The Tox encrypted messenger is
| one but I'm not sure that ever went anywhere.
|
| I think most of them, like Andreas, dropped the
| association with 4chan pretty soon after the project
| started to gain real traction.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I remember seeing maybe two other operating system
| projects on /g/dpt/, they didn't reach significant
| maturity but managed to animate some graphics on the
| screen. I remember seeing a bullet hell game engine
| written in lisp, I think it was called gnumako or
| something along those lines.
|
| This was around 10 years ago...
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| That reminds me of this classic animation: 4chan city
| [0]. Which is based on a 2ch animation Nightmare City
| [1].
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar4WzQ7KHak
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjdi7a6L_78
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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?
| danaris wrote:
| There's a big difference between "upbeat music" and
| "positive culture".
|
| "Positive" in this sense isn't being used to mean
| "optimistic" or "happy". It's being used to mean "healthy
| for the world at large".
|
| Regardless of whether any of us agree that 4chan was a
| net-negative, it should be very clear that "music that
| doesn't have an upbeat sound or themes" is not inherently
| unhealthy, but "subcultures that are unhealthy for the
| world at large" _definitionally_ are.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| https://www.4chan.org/
|
| You're dismissing the entire site for a handful of
| events? How is 4chan unhealthy for the world, at large?
| It was and is a counterculture for discussing life as
| seen by its members.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| They definitely have a PR issue then. Because of the
| _handful of events_ , I've never been interested in
| hanging out there.
|
| From some of the comments though, there might have been
| nice boards I would have enjoyed.
|
| HN works for me though. (I can only spread myself so
| thin.)
| jrflowers wrote:
| > How is 4chan unhealthy for the world, at large?
|
| If you're interested in research, the _summary_ of
| controversies and harassment incidents that were worthy
| of the 4chan Wikipedia page(1) is over 2,000 words long
| and links to seven other separate Wikipedia entries, and
| may be a good start.
|
| Also it is very funny that this thread seems to be
| multiple different posters here insisting that the user
| JKCalhoun is wrong for not being a fan of 4chan and that
| personal opinion is somehow ahistorical and in need of
| correction. Like the goal here is to make that person
| post "You guys are right I actually like that website
| now" ?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan
| kelipso wrote:
| I think the responses would've been different if he had
| made a personal statement rather than a general
| statement.
| jrflowers wrote:
| What post was that?
| kelipso wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43691576
| jrflowers wrote:
| This makes sense. This post that begins with "I think"
| wasn't a personal statement of opinion but rather an
| objective one becau
| danaris wrote:
| I'm not. I'm responding to the specific exchange between
| you and JKCalhoun. They implied that they didn't know of
| any positive culture from 4chan, and you took a sharp
| left turn by misusing "positive"--taking a different
| meaning of it and comparing that against death metal
| music, rather than engaging with the actual meaning of
| what JKCalhoun had said.
|
| I was simply helping to clarify the semantic issue at
| hand. I don't have enough personal knowledge of 4chan to
| pass judgement on it one way or another.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I guess then I'm showing my age. I was already beginning
| 40 years of age when 4chan became a thing.
| tanepiper wrote:
| 4chan: Because even Something Awful had some kind of
| flawed moral compass
| tonfreed wrote:
| So did 4chan, god help you if you abused a cat
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There are some things not even Doom music can fix.
| username332211 wrote:
| 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".
| arkh wrote:
| Yup, ytmnd predates it a couple year.
| rjbwork wrote:
| 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.
| xeromal wrote:
| 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.
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| 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.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| 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.
| desumeku wrote:
| 4chan culture itself is derived from polish, finnish and
| japanese imageboard culture and 4chan has always had a
| large international userbase.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| 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.
| leemailll wrote:
| early belongs to slashdot
| vitaflo wrote:
| Early belongs to Usenet.
| esseph wrote:
| 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.
| dmonitor wrote:
| That's crazy. The whole "dank memes" thing and terms like
| based, boomer, wojak, and soy are all from channer
| culture. 4chan managed to brand gen Z as the "zoomer"
| generation. Its cultural pervasiveness is impossibly
| deep.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 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.
| ArinaS wrote:
| > _" 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.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Vendors. Mobile phone providers, Television companies,
| News Corporations, Advertising companies.
|
| I am locked out from viewing reading groups unless I have
| a facebook account. I can't even read reviews on Amazon
| without a Amazon account.
|
| You do have the choice not to view, watch or use. And if
| you desire to create your own site for "social media" the
| uphill battle is so greatly regulated in their honour you
| can't due to not having the resources to do so.
|
| Have you read the new UK rule sheet for internet
| websites?
|
| How many sites do I visit where I get a Google popup
| asking if I want to sign in?
|
| Stack-overflow does this, Reddit does too.
| ArinaS wrote:
| > " _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.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| You mean an open-twitter clone that caters to a very
| niche set of individuals? A complex system to work with.
|
| I hate the whole gimmick of 150 character messages.
| That's not independent like the web was once.
|
| Discord makes you pay to upload videos, sounds and those
| were all existing on MSN, Yahoo, A!M for free.
|
| Everyone at my school knew of NewsGrounds, mySpace, BeBo,
| LiveJournal. Me and my friends had hosted ProBoards
| forums where we used to discuss stuff. You can't even do
| that according to the new Ofcom laws.
| ArinaS wrote:
| > " _You mean an open-twitter clone that caters to a very
| niche set of individuals?_ "
|
| It's not just one instance and not even one frontend
| existing for what can be described as "fediverse".
| Decentralization is the whole point.
|
| > " _a very niche set of individuals?_ "
|
| Everything depends on the instance you're using. Some of
| them, like mastodon.social, are very active, others are
| not.
|
| > " _I hate the whole gimmick of 150 character messages_
| "
|
| Find a better instance. On the one I use it's 2k
| characters limit.
|
| > " _That 's not independent web like it was._"
|
| Yes, because it's a whole new level of independence.
| NewGrounds, Myspace and everything you mentioned are
| centralized platforms, which is practically vendor lock-
| in, because you're dependent on just one vendor for
| everything you do on these platforms, while on fediverse,
| you aren't. Instances are completely (except for showing
| posts from one another) independent from each other -
| there's no central "authority" controlling all of them
| like there would be on a centralized platform. Thousands
| of them exist for every frontend imaginable, and you can
| create one yourself.
| awkwardpotato wrote:
| The American government is actively working to move its
| communication exclusively to Twitter.[0]
|
| [0] https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-
| administration-r...
| officeplant wrote:
| It's incredibly easy to just not use those websites. My
| throat remains surprisingly clear with no effort.
| Calinterman wrote:
| It actually isn't, have you ever tried attending any real
| life function? An account with Meta is almost a
| requirement to even get in the door.
| immibis wrote:
| 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).
| Calinterman wrote:
| 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.
| knowknow wrote:
| 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
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Posts always got auto deleted. Maybe you aren't familiar with
| how it worked.
| morkalork wrote:
| 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?
| robobro wrote:
| Yeah and if threads hit a certain reply count, they get
| bump locked.
| sznio wrote:
| 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
| Shank wrote:
| > there's no other online community i know of that still
| allows fully anonymous posting
|
| Doesn't 8chan/kun still exist?
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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.
| rasengan wrote:
| That's true. The captcha is impossible without the 4chan
| pass.
|
| soj.ooO [1] which is similar on the other hand doesn't
| have the captcha.
|
| [1] https://soj.ooO
| pc86 wrote:
| 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?
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > 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.
| nemomarx wrote:
| 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
| fny wrote:
| Where do you see info about personal info?
|
| I would presume Anon would which to remain anon.
| mattlondon wrote:
| 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.
| davedx wrote:
| Geocities was going strong in the late 90's too! My first
| homepage was hosted there on Tokyo Towers.
| MagicMoonlight wrote:
| 22 years is old. Nobody knows what geocities is, it has no
| relevance. It's like talking about brands of telegraph wire.
| crtasm wrote:
| 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.
| karn97 wrote:
| Hypnospace outlaw and neocities, both even less known lol
| crtasm wrote:
| What are the most popular games on Steam that focus on
| interacting with a 4chan-like website?
| sickofparadox wrote:
| There are none because people can just go on 4chan and
| post.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| "Old Internet" doesn't have a very defined meaning, but I
| think it has more to do with design and functionality than a
| hard date. While I don't think relevance matters, 4chan is
| much more relevant than you think. Having a niche is part of
| the old Internet. Websites used to be niche, but deep,
| instead of websites like Wikipedia, which are broad and
| shallow (compare the Castlevania dungeon [0] to the Wikipedia
| article for Castlevania, for example). Then compare 4chan's
| limited number of boards with reddit's endless subs. 4chan's
| design is early web 2.0, doesn't require you create an
| account, allows (pseudo) anonymous posting, content is mostly
| unfiltered, unmonetized, free & thought of as ephemeral, etc.
|
| 0 - https://castlevaniadungeon.net/dungeon.html
| mattlondon wrote:
| > 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)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| The point wasn't about if 4chan is unique.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Exactly.
| gilbetron wrote:
| "Pre Dot Com Bust" is a pretty good definition for "Old
| Internet".
| Klonoar wrote:
| 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".
| Andrex wrote:
| Web 2.0 and before is now considered the old internet.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| It is not very niche at all. 4chan served a gigantic volume
| of traffic.
| PhunkyPhil wrote:
| Side note: When you google "Geocities" the results are in
| comic sans
| imzadi wrote:
| I grew up on IRC, had sites on Geocities and Angelfire. That
| was the old internet people miss, not 4chan.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| _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".
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 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.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| Incredibly spot-on and well-put.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| 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.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| 4chan is not "old internet". Not even close. It's predated by a
| bunch of forums (including 2channel) on the Internet, some
| anonymous.
| p3rls wrote:
| 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.
| cbg0 wrote:
| Hosting a copy of phpMyAdmin behind basic HTTP authentication in
| 2025 really is asking for it.
| jsheard wrote:
| 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.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| This stuff is still packaged with cPanel, which is probably
| the most common way to manage web servers on the internet.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| technion wrote:
| Nearly every website developer servicing small business
| builds a WordPress site and sets it up on a hosting
| company's cPanel install with phpmyadmin running by
| default.
| jsheard wrote:
| I guess those installs are the ones the Wordpress vuln
| scanners are looking for when they spam my server with
| /wp-admin/ requests.
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| Do you have figures for that?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| 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.
| whalesalad wrote:
| A tale as old as time
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| 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?
| cbg0 wrote:
| 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.
| lossolo wrote:
| > 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.
| ArinaS wrote:
| > " _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.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| But you only need one weak password to get in
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| But you only need one password to protect your HTTP auth
| phpMyAdmin so just make it 30 characters.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| 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
| pjc50 wrote:
| The preferred solution would be something like a Yubikey.
| However:
|
| > just go to any old computer and ssh into my server
|
| You've typed your password into a computer you don't
| control. Now it's gone. Same for plugging in the USB
| stick. The Yubikey approach mitigates that.
|
| Assuming you want to do this, the best practice you can
| achieve is just making the password long.
| theossuary wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I haven't used it for many years now, but phpMyAdmin was long
| a source of compromises. Lots of security holes.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Until there's a bug that lets you bypass it.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure, but phpMyAdmin has a _long_ history of major
| security holes. It 's existence on a server tends to be a
| red flag.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Again, the premise was that phpMyAdmin is secured behind
| basic auth. It doesn't matter how secure or insecure
| phpMyAdmin is, it only matters how secure whatever
| webserver is that it is served through. phpMyAdmin code
| isn't even touched before the basic auth login was
| successful. Only after that, it becomes relevant, in that
| you either find a hole in phpMyAdmin itself, or you have
| to break another (hopefully strong) password for the
| MySQL login itself.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's not using the webserver's basic auth, it's using
| their own implementation (https://github.com/phpmyadmin/p
| hpmyadmin/blob/297c1e174b93a9..., via PHP's:
| https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php).
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| You can easily put phpMyAdmin _behind_ basic auth as an
| additional security layer, completely bypassing any PHP
| execution and letting the web server completely handle
| the authentication. It 's exactly what I have done
| multiple times in the past. Arguably phpMyAdmin's direct
| integration is a less secure way of doing it, but do we
| even know if it's the basic auth itself that was
| bypassed, or was it just the case of a weak password?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Sure, and I can put the VX gas vials in a safe in my
| basement, but I'd rather not have them anywhere near me
| _at all_.
| udev4096 wrote:
| 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
| lossolo wrote:
| 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.
| andruby wrote:
| 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.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| 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.
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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.
| trallnag wrote:
| Jannies had it coming tbh. They were certainly tightening the
| rope when it came to free speech in the last few years
| pjc50 wrote:
| Always curious to know what kind of speech this kind of
| complaint refers to.
| krige wrote:
| 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).
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| krige wrote:
| Their question was a gotcha attempt, and a misguided one
| at that, hence the answer specifically not playing along.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| kotaKat wrote:
| There's also a "janitortest" account in the leaked list
| @4chan.org so who knows if there was just a shared password
| flying around...
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| 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.
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| 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)?
| snvzz wrote:
| 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.
| trallnag wrote:
| 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
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 4chan janitors aren't victims of anything no matter what
| happens to them.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| geriatric-janny wrote:
| 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.
| delusional wrote:
| 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.
| no_time wrote:
| Well... A full dump of the board exclusive to moderators and
| janitors was leaked too so now you could take a look
| yourself.
| geriatric-janny wrote:
| 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
| delusional wrote:
| 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 :)
| petecooper wrote:
| >And the checks arrived on time every month: $0.00
|
| Unexpectedly poignant.
| dmonitor wrote:
| > 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.
| kelipso wrote:
| Milhouse is still not a meme.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| 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"
| blitzar wrote:
| Username checks out.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| 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.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| 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.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| 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.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| I left a clue in my original reply.
|
| I'm not spoonfeeding any harder than that.
|
| Lurk moar or GTFO
| azernik wrote:
| If you're looking for a link to the results of illegal
| hacking, then I humbly suggest that aboveboard news sites
| are not the place to look.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| 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.
| wickedsight wrote:
| 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.
| swarnie wrote:
| Aren't we 99% sure that was a Ron Watkins grift now?
| wickedsight wrote:
| 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.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Given the nature of the hackers and their immediate actions, it
| seems unlikely they would reveal that sort of information.
| Borgz wrote:
| 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.
| SirFatty wrote:
| Surprised that the admins have any personal details associated
| with their 4chan profile.
| OuterVale wrote:
| 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...
| dang wrote:
| (Posted link was originally https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comm
| ents/1jzkjlg/4chan_hacked.... We since changed it.)
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| 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
| tanjtanjtanj wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| That does seem to have more information, so I've changed the
| top url to that from https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1j
| zkjlg/4chan_hacked.... Thanks!
| swarnie wrote:
| One of the best websites on the internet. Hopefully not gone
| forever.
| rootsudo wrote:
| 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?
| masfuerte wrote:
| The man.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Sound right up the alley for a 4chan user
| t0lo wrote:
| 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
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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...
| VectorLock wrote:
| I would be 0% surprised to see Stephen Miller's information in
| this leak.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| 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.
| properpopper wrote:
| 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
| CodeCompost wrote:
| Well that's OK then.
|
| /s
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| 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.
| rescbr wrote:
| > 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.
| Philpax wrote:
| Hmm, I'm not sure all 15 year old boys do, though:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Buffalo_shooting
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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?
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| 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.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| 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.
| trealira wrote:
| It's not hard to find people with a racist /pol/er's
| opinions in real life, or on other social media like
| Instagram or Twitter. Maybe /pol/ in particular is/was
| filled with bots, I don't know, but such extreme racism
| is not as uncommon as you imply these days.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| 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.
| trealira wrote:
| Well, I believe you that there are lots of kids there
| that try to seem racist for 4chan cred, and I guess
| people would know not to post videos of themselves doing
| those illegal things.
|
| But I remember they had stuff like "n*gger chimpout"
| compilation threads, and whenever people talk about what
| they blame on Jews, they seem to be actually bitter and
| angry, so they do seem legitimately racist. I wouldn't be
| surprised if there was a lot of overlap with the people
| who do commit those acts of violence you're talking
| about, but even if not, I don't think you could say
| they're not real racists just because they don't post
| videos of themselves committing violent hate crimes. The
| board is just diluted by low-effort threads and bait by
| users of other boards.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _But I remember they had stuff like "n_gger chimpout"
| compilation threads*
|
| I guess that's why we don't really see quite eye-to-eye
| on this. I've seen all those threads and to me that's
| just kids being edgy because they know it triggers or
| activates people. Every group has it's trash and they are
| just singling out one specific groups shenanigans. The
| same behavior can be found of every breed of human and
| they would post it if it was edgy to do so. My breed has
| no shortage of dumb behavior but when it's posted people
| feel comfortable laughing at it thus it's not edgy or
| taboo enough.
|
| As a side note, most of the kids on 4chan are also here
| on HN. They talk about this site, its users and dang all
| the time. I'm sure they are not happy that I am pointing
| out they are just LARPing.
| trealira wrote:
| Compilation threads like those seem to me more like ways
| to make each other angrier and more racist. I think they
| legitimately just hate black people. Like, there's
| definitely some element of smug self-aware memey edginess
| about being racist, but there's also unironic vitriolic
| racism. But yeah, I guess we just disagree here on this.
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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.
| arandomusername wrote:
| How is this different from, for example, reddit? You may
| start following reddit, niche subreddits, but in reality
| it's normalizing left-wing views
| attemptone wrote:
| 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".
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| 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.
| WindowsDev wrote:
| Is the source code which leaked everything one would need to host
| their own copy of the site?
| technion wrote:
| There are tonnes of open source clones on github, source code
| to run the site is nothing special. You still need users.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| Might I add, 4chan's implementation isn't even particularly
| good one
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| 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.
| kaiokendev wrote:
| The site has an API for reading posts [0]. It works (worked?)
| quite well. For making posts, you'd need to write your own
| functionality that forwards the CAPTCHA and post timers.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/4chan/4chan-API
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| 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!
| desumeku wrote:
| All content that violates the law of the United States is
| banned on 4chan. I don't know where you got that idea.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I remember 8chan had literally one rule: don't violate US
| law.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| oh i guess in that case it is legal everywhere then cool
| cool cool kthxbye
| jml7c5 wrote:
| >a copy of the existing 4chan content
|
| 4chan's content is ephemeral. Most of it is gone every few
| days.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| 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.
| no_time wrote:
| 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.
| ttw44 wrote:
| 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.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Halfchan's likely been around longer than you have and will
| just as likely remain around long after you're gone
| ttw44 wrote:
| 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!
| y-curious wrote:
| I, too, prefer to see my vulgar memes served by an AI algorithm
| alongside ads. Sooooo much better!
|
| /s
| kittikitti wrote:
| 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.
| ttw44 wrote:
| 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.
| soon_to_be wrote:
| 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.
| yapyap wrote:
| Hacker named 4chan hacks 4chan
| Red_Tarsius wrote:
| 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.
| MattDemers wrote:
| 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."
| thih9 wrote:
| > 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.
| boyesm wrote:
| Moot lists some examples in this video:
|
| https://youtu.be/a_1UEAGCo30?si=JMVO5ox3K2AhxrMY&t=97
| dmonitor wrote:
| Wiktionary has a surprisingly robust list
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_4chan_slang
| thih9 wrote:
| Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
|
| > fren later came to prominence on sites such as 4chan
| and the subreddit /r/frenworld as a dog whistle used by
| far-right white nationalists and fascists to refer to
| each other
|
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fren
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Why does that matter?
| immibis wrote:
| because if you're trying to say a site was a positive
| influence, because it created a number of Nazi slurs and
| dog whistles... complete the sentence yourself
| anigbrowl wrote:
| So you can have a clue who you're talking to.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Don't forget the slurs. They have some unique slurs in there
| that have backstories too.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I thought culture was a "solved problem" now that we have AI.
|
| I can't keep up anymore.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| 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.
| hotfist wrote:
| 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.
| packetlost wrote:
| 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.
| el_cujo wrote:
| 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
| nemomarx wrote:
| 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?
| sgarland wrote:
| 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.
| torginus wrote:
| 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.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| 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.
| sgarland wrote:
| > bodybuilding.com
|
| Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had
| online [0]. It's so good, the Wikipedia entry [1] has a section
| devoted to it.
|
| [0]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bod...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding.com
| sensanaty wrote:
| My personal favorite rendition of this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqylqmDl0Mw (Mega64 - Flame
| War Theater - "Full Body Workout Every Other Day?")
| sgarland wrote:
| This is amazing, thank you.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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.
| valiant55 wrote:
| Is cereal soup?
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Objection.
| cwmma wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| As the quip goes, there are two hard problems in computer
| science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one
| errors.
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| That's three though.
| recursive wrote:
| That's the neat part.
| fetzu wrote:
| Not if you start counting at zero!
| TZubiri wrote:
| 0,1,2,3
|
| That's 5
| Izkata wrote:
| 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.
| arvindhmani wrote:
| I wanted to keep going but pages 3 onwards don't seem to
| be archived. Argh, back to work I guess
| krackers wrote:
| >days as durations rather than points
|
| Isn't thinking of day X as the range [midnight of X, X+1
| midnight) isomoprhic to associating it with a point for
| X, at least for purposes of considering coverage (e.g.
| both approaches work to show that there are 7 days that
| cover a week).
| Izkata wrote:
| Yes, see the end of my comment:
|
| > I think TheJosh mixed things up when trying to explain
| it (durations vs inclusive/exclusive)
| helaoban wrote:
| 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...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I never saw this before. Thank you to share. Truly, this is
| peak Interwebs.
| butterlettuce wrote:
| If a woman ever asks what men's locker room talk is like,
| just show them that post. We really are a simple bunch.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I'm always confused when shitty men insist that saying
| outright misogynist things and even rape jokes is "just
| locker room talk", like, nope, no, our locker rooms in high
| school did NOT have those happen. That kind of womanizer
| talk would out you as immensely insecure and a braggadocios
| loser.
|
| Lots of dick helicopters though.
| justinator wrote:
| That IS dumb -- everyone knows there are 8 days in a week.
| Sunday to Sunday -- you can count it on your hands!
| ren_engineer wrote:
| 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
| adamrezich wrote:
| > 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?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Because if you ask an economist you'll get two answers,
| neither of which will be helpful.
| wolrah wrote:
| > 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
| artursapek wrote:
| I love this thread so much
| flmontpetit wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| /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.
| flmontpetit wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| 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.
| _345 wrote:
| 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
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Aka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only)
|
| Social network culture is a multipart problem:
| 1. You need quality posters 2. You need to provide
| value to those posters 3. You need to remove low-
| quality posts attracted by site growth
|
| Any system that creates the above will be successful.
|
| The rub is that the humans behind (1) are free agents,
| with little incentive to stick to the site once (2)
| fails.
|
| Hence rapid Digg-style collapses from site owners who
| don't realize how tenuous their community quality is.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >Aka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only)
|
| Similarly, I've heard it said that Usenet should never
| have allowed non-.edu posts.
| codexon wrote:
| 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.
| immibis wrote:
| Is there any evidence that most of Reddit is actually
| real people (paid shills and bots don't count)?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| _--__--__ wrote:
| Autoadmit is a message board that required .edu to
| register and ended up with a pretty similar culture
| (though with an older userbase given the initial focus on
| law school admissions)
| lesostep wrote:
| 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.
| kelipso wrote:
| 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.
| zppln wrote:
| 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.
| kelipso wrote:
| 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.
| arkh wrote:
| Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays (at
| least in Western societies). Counter-culture is not always a
| good thing.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| There is no counter-culture anymore, not really. Society is
| virtually balkanized.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I think it's difficult to label "majority" culture when
| most things are split 50/50.
|
| Counter-culture feels like it requires at least an 80/20
| or so.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| kelipso wrote:
| Memoryholing the four years of the Biden administration.
| krapp wrote:
| No, not really. The "groomer" panic took place during the
| Biden years, with plenty of states passing anti-trans
| legislation and banning pro-trans books from libraries.
| The Biden administration did not reverse the widespread
| cultural hatred, discrimination and violence against
| trans people in the US in any meaningful sense. And it's
| honestly weird that you would think it even could have,
| given where we are now politically.
| kelipso wrote:
| It's two different cultures, one of which is more
| dominant, or was during the Biden years. As always, only
| the dominant culture matters culturally.
| krapp wrote:
| The premise that during the Biden years transgender
| culture was the dominant culture in America is just
| plainly ridiculous, as is the implication that only
| transgender identity mattered, culturally, during those
| years. Again, these were the years when transphobia began
| to mainstream and become codified into legislation and
| "antiwoke" and "anti-DEI" culture. It was never dominant,
| it _only just started_ to become visible enough to really
| piss people off (similar to gay culture in the 1980s.)
| kelipso wrote:
| Not transgender culture but elite coastal liberal
| culture.
| Calinterman wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > 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.
| desumeku wrote:
| 4chan is more moderated than you'd imagine.
| jtvjan wrote:
| 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...
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| > it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished,
| it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the
| site as a whole.
|
| Considering the site has been around for over 20 years
| and people still call out and flame racism, I think this
| is an uncharitable and unfounded cynicism. I'm not sure
| declarative claims of 3rd order effects in a system so
| chaotic are capable of being accurate.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| fooList wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Eh, they came in very late on that one and only on the
| absolute worst examples. It's still very prevalent.
| lwidvrizokdhai wrote:
| /mpl/ still exists. Well, still existed until now.
| wordsinaline wrote:
| 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.
| moonlet wrote:
| /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!
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Funny you point to /pol/ and forget about /b/, that was the
| meat of 4chan in the late 2000's
| eqvinox wrote:
| 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/?
| ArinaS wrote:
| It is - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=/pol/&oldi
| d=12855....
| _345 wrote:
| 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
| eqvinox wrote:
| Good to know. My opinion of 4chan was formed 2010-ish, I
| guess I should, er, update it.
| api wrote:
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >users don't actually hold these opinions, they just will
| represent whatever is the edgiest opinion at any given
| time.
|
| I left in 2012ish, never really did /pol/, if it even
| existed then, but that 100% squares with my experience of
| the site.
| paradox460 wrote:
| /po/ is paper craft and origami
| fastglass wrote:
| 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.
| Calinterman wrote:
| 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.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| 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.
| lastcobbo wrote:
| That's a silly thing to think about any site on the
| internet. Have you vetted every person on any site you
| post on? Or even this thread? If not, how do you expect a
| moderator to do that? This isn't a pub, it's a site used
| by tens of thousands of people.
| helle253 wrote:
| /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.
| throwaway795737 wrote:
| 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.
| swarnie wrote:
| 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.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| 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.
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| /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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I remember one user who made a really fun arcade flight
| simulator.
| diath wrote:
| 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.
| Calinterman wrote:
| 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.
| swarnie wrote:
| 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.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _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._
| Hamuko wrote:
| Do people also treat Reddit the same way?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| 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.
| codexon wrote:
| > 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
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Why do they allow so much interracial porn spam, and how does
| that fit into your view of the mods being alt-right racists?
| sanswork wrote:
| 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.
| codexon wrote:
| 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.
| kypro wrote:
| 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.
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| 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
| codexon wrote:
| > 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.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| "you're typically missing the point."
|
| You too buddy
| ultimafan wrote:
| 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.
| timeinput wrote:
| 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.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Ragusea is an idiot, though and I arrived at that conclusion
| without any help from 4ch.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| /g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI, also where llama
| weights were first leaked
| torginus wrote:
| 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
| conradfr wrote:
| Should have had updated dependencies though.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| TZubiri wrote:
| "Redundant pair of LAMP stacks"
|
| Damn you got two of those? That's advanced magic
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Even /b/ was pretty good back in the day. Memes and inside
| jokes galore with almost no porn to be seen.
| brigandish wrote:
| 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.
| Philpax wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Controversies_and_harass...
| wewxjfq wrote:
| This still stings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373
| karn97 wrote:
| Even more true in 2025
| ozmodiar wrote:
| 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.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| > It actually used to be slightly left leaning or at least
| libertarian or anarchist, but over the years pol in
| particular has been known to be hard right wing.
|
| If your bar doesn't kick out nazis, your bar becomes the nazi
| hangout.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
| Whoppertime wrote:
| I don't know what CSAM is and after reading the rest of your
| post I don't want to Google it
| throwaway743 wrote:
| 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
| gherkinnn wrote:
| 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.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| 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'.
| lesbolasinc wrote:
| 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?
| mlsu wrote:
| 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.
| username332211 wrote:
| 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.
| lesbolasinc wrote:
| Let me make it clear because I don't want to come across
| as biased - Reddit, Facebook and platforms like it are
| 1000% worse and or just as bad, no contest from me on
| that part; the dialogue just skews a different way
| depending on the platform.
|
| To the first point though, I guess I just don't
| understand how such niche and useful discussion ended up
| on twitter and remains there out of all places. It seems
| strange to find someone pushing moon-landing-is-fake
| conspiracies on the same site nuanced discussion occurs
| on some hyperfocused topic
| username332211 wrote:
| 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).
| jayd16 wrote:
| 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.
| bananalychee wrote:
| 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.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| 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.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| 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.
| carabiner wrote:
| 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.
| underseacables wrote:
| 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.
| shipscode wrote:
| 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.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Isn't that the path that most platforms follow once they get
| mildly popular?
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| "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.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| Klonoar wrote:
| 4chan has always claimed to resist it, but 4chan was never
| immune to being shuffled a specific way.
| bboygravity wrote:
| So "not your personal army" == don't be a journalist?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| [delayed]
| foolfoolz wrote:
| 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
| cobson wrote:
| gem
| sensanaty wrote:
| no coal to be found here
| greazy wrote:
| 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.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _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...
| greazy wrote:
| 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.
| ashleyn wrote:
| 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).
| Klonoar wrote:
| moot hasn't been relevant for years.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| Hiroshimoot, then.
| omnivore wrote:
| Meh, good riddance. The old internet wasn't all good.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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.
| danso wrote:
| Any articles about the technical details of the hack?
| bitbasher wrote:
| 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.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| What was bad about the interview? Can you share any details?
| bitbasher wrote:
| The arrogance and better than thou attitude. He was like the
| male version of Ellen Degeneres.
| pizzadog wrote:
| Can you expand on this? I remember canv.as, it was a weird but
| interesting project but it seemed doomed from the outset.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| 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...
| lwidvrizokdhai wrote:
| Oh wow, that's genuinely cool.
| robtherobber wrote:
| Interesting to see HN user _astrange_ as the admin.
| lesbolasinc wrote:
| 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...
| fooList wrote:
| 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?
| lwidvrizokdhai wrote:
| 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.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Why are we speaking in the past tense here? Is it established
| that 4chan is going down?
| helle253 wrote:
| 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.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| /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.
| throwanem wrote:
| > 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.
| skifreevictim wrote:
| 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.
| on_the_train wrote:
| What a sad day. It's the best page on the net by a wide margin.
| Hope they'll recover
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| Loughla wrote:
| 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.
| lastcobbo wrote:
| And longcat, don't forget him
| duxup wrote:
| Good point.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| /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.
| partiallypro wrote:
| Honestly surprised this isn't getting more coverage, not just in
| the media but here.
| robotnikman wrote:
| 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.
| lastcobbo wrote:
| Bobby Tables can't keep getting away with this
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Bobby Ignore All Previous Instructions however...
| ranger_danger wrote:
| Why would you say how you did it? Now they can't do it all over
| again when it comes back /s
| 0x303 wrote:
| Got a source? Not doubting, just curious.
| robotnikman wrote:
| search through the thread on the site where that attack came
| from. ctrl+f postscript and you will find the post
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Here: https://i.ibb.co/9mWLp4m9/4chanhack.jpg
| loves_mangoes wrote:
| 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.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| 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.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| 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.
| Funes- wrote:
| 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.
| anonnon wrote:
| People talk about some "4chan to alt-right" pipeline, yet ignore
| the "excessive moderation/tone-policing to 4chan" pipeline, as
| in, a large % of 4channers (and probably KFers) only ever ended
| up there because the tone-policing on sites like HN and reddit is
| simply out of control.
|
| "Civility" is prized above truth, and irony isn't understood or
| much tolerated. Case in point, that post from the ex-Googler
| whining about his pinkslip the other day. A normie (extroverted,
| no autism), who worked for Google (evil), whose high-paying job
| was "developer relations" (?), and whose complete shock and
| indignation at his termination gives away that he's probably led
| a charmed life up to now where everything has always worked out--
| and, judging by HN's reaction, I'm supposed to be _sympathetic_
| to him? He also had a _full sleeve tattoo_ on one arm--enough to
| disqualify him from many forms of gainful employment in a saner
| era.
|
| Yet pointing any of this out is enough to net downvotes, flags,
| or even bans. Which is to say, I miss /g/.
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