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It’s very interesting that the founder of 4chan ended up being super liberal leaning. I remember when I first visited 4chan sometime in 2006. It was totally un
by planktonite 8y ago
It’s very interesting that the founder of 4chan ended up being super liberal leaning.
I remember when I first visited 4chan sometime in 2006. It was totally unlike anything I had seen before. I remember feeling as though I had found an entirely new universe to explore and exist in. Back then, when you refreshed b, no matter how frequently, there was essentially no recycling of threads. The volume back then was so high that browsing b was like swimming in a vibrant ocean of the future — a relentless torrent of human thought and memes. Back then, memes were exclusive to 4chan. Nobody knew what a meme was and you could only find them on 4chan. I remember when memes starting appearing on clothing and mainstream places it felt very weird. B is now a shell of what it used to be. In life, every once in a while you get to experience something like early b. I hope I get to do it one more time before I die.
- echohack5 8y agoI'd put the first couple of weeks of pokemon go in that category.
- ctrl-j 8y agoOh god. The second weekend after it launched I had to go to the local mall. That was the most infuriating walking experience of my life. Nobody was looking where they were going and would stop randomly. Looking back, it was pretty cool how that went down - but entirely pissed me off at the time.
- porphyrogene 8y agoI would classify Pokemon Go as a fad that was just big enough to get the media’s attention, something more like fidget spinners or Furbies. 4chan was a long-running part of the internet that would never have been mentioned on the evening news. It was somewhere between being taboo and under quarantine.
- PurpleRamen 8y agoMore like the strange uncle nobody dared to talk about... And Pokemon Go seems to be still going strong, unlike spinners or furbies.
- planktonite 8y agoI would disagree. 4chan was the nucleation point from which our modern lives sprung. It was the start of a very fundamental shift in the way people live. 4chan was the place where regular people and high bandwidth internet became married, and where the consequences of that union first materialized. I remember people would find online obituaries and organize raids on the family of the deceased, in one instance tormenting the parents of a deceased child with prank phone calls. People would live stream their suicides and other people would watch them and actually egg them on in the chat. The consequences of total anonyminity was a completely new concept back then, completely new territory. It’s something we have become accustomed to now. Meme culture was totally new, seemingly silly but underpinned by a fundamental arbitrage in communication that proved to be very important. You were not only experiencing these new things, but experiencing them as a part of a relatively small and exclusive group of people. 4chan was a microcosm of the future, and that is what made 4chan so amazingly potent. Pokémon go doesn’t even hold a candle to that in my view.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- xenihn 8y agoSomething Awful did all of that before 4chan did (well, sans the suicide livestream). 4chan was to SA what Reddit and Imgur are to 4chan.
- fourstar 8y agoCame in here to give a shoutout to SA and the goon squad. Also Offtopic housed a lot of creativity in the early days. After all, that’s how I co-created the 2g1c website.
- Dramatize 8y agoShout out to Offtopic. Plenty of original memes came out of that community.
- planktonite 8y ago
- pessimizer 8y agoYou mean when that massive corporation slapped that massive international brand skin on that already extremely successful mobile game that they then furiously spent tens of millions marketing and press releasing months before release and months after? That's more in the line of waiting in line for days for Return of the Jedi to come out than the early days of 4chan.
- xenihn 8y agoBack in my day, we called them image macros.
- jchw 8y agoI find it fascinating how the word meme came to be so specific and yet so vague. Now you have 'memes' as in image macros, 'memes' as in 'funny images,' sometimes 'memes' as in snowclones, 'memeing' as essentially a synonym of 'shitposting,' and occasionally, 'memes' in the traditional sense (pretty much a general term for things that spread virally.) On 4chan, it started with image macros, reaction images/gifs, demotivational posters, etc. and at some point, all of those just became what 'meme' has come to mean, and if you say the word meme without context people just assume image macros, a la meme generators. I suppose there's nothing wrong with this, since all of those things do indeed tend to be memetic, but it made so much more sense early on than it does now.
- acqq 8y ago> 'memes' in the traditional sense (pretty much a general term for things that spread virally.) The original meaning: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme The word meme was “coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)[11][16] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.[17]”
- _0ffh 8y agoActually, the word "meme" was used in a small fraction of academia before Dawkins popularised it, in a meaning similar, but not quite the same, as Dawkins' meme. I'm positive I've read a paper from some Dutch university about that. [Citation needed]
- _0ffh 8y agoI couldn't help but dig a bit, and I managed turn up a couple of papers [1] [2] that suggests that the pre-Dawkins meme was variously called "mneme" (which spelling is closer to the Greek root of the word), and completely different things. The Dutch connection seems to be the Leiden school of linguistics [3]. [1] https://semioticon.com/virtuals/imitation/van_driem_paper.pdf https://semioticon.com/virtuals/imitation/van_driem_paper.pd... [2] https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/42774/bkj_ThesisFull.pdf?sequence=1 https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/42774/b... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leiden_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leiden_school Edit: Formatting and typo
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pnathan 8y ago> Back then, memes were exclusive to 4chan. naaaah fark and somethingawful had them in, idk, 2002 or so.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Kiro 8y agoNot the same at all.
- pessimizer 8y agoNo, exactly the same. Somethingawful goons were a very large portion of the early population of 4chan.
- thomasz 8y agoI’ve seen very similar viral images on Starcraft forums in the late 90s.
- checkyoursudo 8y agoI mean, even ytmnd predates 4chan. Maybe things like that were tame in terms of content, but the memes were still there. Memes been around since the web busted out of cern. A person of a certain age might think 4chan is the beginning sure, but SA was basically where 4chan came from. At least how I remember. Again, less extreme maybe. Not that my memories of those days is that great, I guess.
- ur-whale 8y agoIt's pretty obvious he's liberal, if you understand the word in its original meaning and not the current mainstream distortion (== leftist)
- finnthehuman 8y ago>It’s very interesting that the founder of 4chan ended up being super liberal leaning. I dunno, a lot of 4chan’s image as right leaning is just a product of the time. The left has the cultural prominence to be uptight hall monitors of society, so the anything goes platform will attract and outwardly appear right. When I was much younger the left were the cool rebels to the right’s status quo. If the timeline was slightly different 4chan could have just as easily been a lefty hangout with a conservative founder.