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4chan Turns 20
- SleepilyLimping 3y agoAs much as I am thankful for the site for a lot of things, it fostered my "there will always be new content on every refresh" problem, which has stolen so much productivity from me. I don't mean this in the "haha isn't it cute I spend so much time on Reddit" way, I mean this in the "I have not chased as many goals or passions as I could've because I was numbing myself with easily-available, low-effort content" way.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoDon't click the link.
- Shugarl 3y agoWhy ?
- smegsicle 3y agounfiltered memes! you could see something illegal! or worse, racist!
- RetroTechie 3y agoWell whatever, you can't unsee. So your brain will be forever changed. (not saying that's bad. YMMV)
- lionkor 3y agoor worse, funny!
- 29athrowaway 3y agoBecause some links are better left unclicked.
- em-bee 3y agoif you want to know what to expect, try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan
- Boogie_Man 3y agoLet us take a moment to reflect on the greatest sysadmin who ever was, Christopher Poole https://files.catbox.moe/9uyduv.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/9uyduv.jpg
- rollcat 3y agoBack when the Internet was quite literally held together with duct tape
- TMWNN 3y agoI can't find it right now, but there is a well-known photograph of the servers hosting `ibm.com` in, I think, 1997. It's basically a bunch of tower PCs stacked haphazardly sideways on each other.
- em-bee 3y agothat was 10 years earlier i was there...
- theideaofcoffee 3y ago... when ... was Not much has changed, the whole contraption still is, to a frightening extent.
- echelon 3y ago> Back when the Internet was quite literally held together with duct tape No, you'd have to go back further than that. By the time 4chan came about, the web was starting to crystalize into platforms, and standard tools and databases had been developed. Design and UX was starting to be important. At the time of launch, I distinctly remember that my classmates thought 4chan was weird for taking after "primitive" Japanese image boards. (Craigslist, too, was considered dated.) The early "duct tape" days were the era of EzBoard (1996; before phpBB, vBulletin, and Invision), Flash (1993), Geocities (1994), Angelfire (1996), Lycos (1994), Dogpile (1996), ICQ (1996), early AOL Instant Messenger (1997; before Trillian, Gaim, Libpurple), lots of little IRC clients... lots of CGI, Perl, and C all slapped together. That's when flat file databases were a norm, not an exception. 4chan came around the same time as Digg and Reddit, and in response to some of the platformization that was already starting to happen (Xanga, LiveJournal, and Blogger in ~1999). The machinery and practice of modern web engineering was already falling into place.
- Shugarl 3y agoWho's the bunny character?
- happytoexplain 3y agoHiro, the owner who succeeded Moot.
- sliechty 3y agoHappy Birthday 4chan
- wly_cdgr 3y agoHappy Birthday to one of the few still-good sites on the open internet
- Dwedit 3y agoAh yes, the site that makes you "anonymous" when you post, yet requires you to send your Google cookies to Google servers before the recaptcha loads.
- coumbaya 3y agoI mean they offer a way around that. I'm not sure the point is to spy on you, it's just the easiest way to avoid spam I guess ?
- ta8903 3y ago4chan hasn't been using google captcha for 2 years.
- LinuxBender 3y agoIt's CloudFlare now, to get the captcha. https://challenges.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/challenge-platform/h/g/flow/ov1/#[snip]
- x-complexity 3y agoIt's marginally better... but not by much. If privacy is that much of a concern, then it's feasible to roll out your own version of JS challenges, delay functions, & captchas, but that's additional complexity that could otherwise be farmed out to Cloudflare themselves or another provider. Ideally, a self-hostable instance with an exposed API would be preferred, but the captcha for such an instance would be reverse engineered & subsequently broken, rendering it worthless.
- hellojesus 3y ago4chan bans VPN ip ranges, so it's definitely not an anonymous site or even trying to be beyond connecting front end posts back to users as non corps/gov.
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoCute and charming. Appreciate the work the mods and hiroshimoot do. Oh and Jannies do it for free !
- hmmmcurious1 3y agoIt's so sad that nation level agents have infiltrated the moderator team and are now pushing divisive anti western ideas and also grooming fifth columnists to create havoc in the western world. Most of the boards I frequented in the past outright ban you for saying anything remotely against russia and china but promote all sorts of demoralization threads regarding the west. I guess someone has to pay the server costs but with a huge detriment towards the authenticity and culture that characterized old 4chan
- aragonite 3y agoYou mean you can no longer post threads like this? https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/442998412 https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/442998412 (NSFW obviously) You can post memes about beheading Chinese people on 4chan and no one will bat an eye.
- LightHugger 3y agoThe point is that 4chan will ban you for innocent things, if a moderator disagrees with you, funnily enough criticizing video game censorship and journalists is bannable as well. But does not ban for extreme racism and violent content like that. It's not a free speech site anymore and hasn't been for quite a few years now, basically.. it's just a racism site.
- happytoexplain 3y agoI'm sure there are always some people looking into 4chan as a place to spread an agenda due to the ease of posting, no need for an account, popularity, etc. However, banning for "anything remotely against russia and china" is a silly exaggeration. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, my best guess is that you posted on some of the boards with tighter moderation, and what you posted was simply off topic. Most boards still prune off-topic shitposting somewhat reliably. Not to the exclusion of other peoples, you can find plenty of gleeful posts about the brutal deaths of Russians and Chinese, or just simply mocking their societies/industries, at any given time on at least three boards, off the top of my head.
- tux3 3y ago>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37729001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37729001 Off by one.
- h2odragon 3y agosurely "over" is better?
- dmonitor 3y agoin 4chan culture, the number of sequential digits at the end of the random number assigned to your post is a mark of... status? good luck? quality? I'm actually not sure, but it's a desired thing to have.
- loves_mangoes 3y agoMore backstory: The ID assigned to posts is a sequential incrementing number. So it is possible to "aim" for a nice round number by posting at the right time When people notice that their post IDs start approaching a large whole number, a bunch of people might try to get ("GET") the post with ID, say, 2000000 by timing it It's not really a marker of anything, just a semi-random event that people have fun with. It's sort of... tolerated, as long as it's infrequent and doesn't cause too much noise
- jareklupinski 3y agoit's over 9000!
- jjice 3y ago4chan is such an interesting piece of internet history that's still living. Despite lots of parts of 4chan being terrible, I will say that the diy board has helped me figure out some clever solutions to around the home jobs.
- RetroTechie 3y agoA great thing about 4chan (and probably 1 reason users keep coming) is its simplicity: Post pic, some text, others do the same, or reply to your post. That's it. Do 1 thing & do it well (Unix philosophy :-). Reminds me of when Google's UI was praised for being "enter search term here" box on otherwise empty page. I think there will always be room for sites (or apps) like that. Now, as for how to pay hosting bills etc... ??
- tamimio 3y agoI think, additionally, the reason why it’s still going, besides the simplicity, is the pseudo-anonymity, your post is just like any other post, what will really make it apart is the context (or the image per se), and I believe that’s the purist form of internet interactions, you get called out on your BS with no filters and without the fear of being “cancelled”, if you help someone, you are not looking for brownie points or to become an e-celeb, you are just genuinely trying to help, you fucked up one time and said something bad or wrong? no one will screenshot it and use it against you till hell freezes over, you did something amazing in a post? It will be circulating around and referred back to the board, not the person or the individual, so the concept is really great as long as it is not a mainstream site, else you will have all sort of shilling and spooks shenanigans that will ruin that experience.
- kaiokendev 3y agoI had some of the best and worst conversation on 4chan. When the only means of expressing yourself is by virtue of your ideas, it really breed an atmosphere you can't find anywhere else. It just a shame, you can really tell there is a lot of... intelligence activity on the site.. from many nations, lol
- em-bee 3y agothe only means of expressing yourself is by virtue of your ideas what do you mean by that? how is it any different on HN?
- knallfrosch 3y ago4chan enforces anonymity even across posts (at least on /b/) and with missing nesting, you can lose track of replies fast. So you're basically reading ideas only. Altough I do agree HN's post system is one of the most similar. HN has a more coherent culture and moderation, though.
- kelipso 3y agoAny forum with up and downvoting cannot be called most similar to 4chan lol. Discord is probably more similar, not to mention the usual phpbb boards.
- em-bee 3y agoi don't know what you are comparing. phpbb boards maybe, but i don't see how discord fits in here. anyways, the point was about identity. not about voting. that's entirely irrelevant.
- kelipso 3y agoIf you don't see how up/down voting completely changes how forums work, how people post, the environment it creates, etc etc etc, then you don't really know anything about internet forums.
- skilled 3y agoHN not loving this is not a surprise, 4chan is hardcore, but /g/ can be beared most of the time, it’s mostly Debian/Arch people there anyway. But 4chan is a piece of history, a piece of the old web from its roots and it’s still going. I don’t use the site myself but I also haven’t heard that they have made any changes to the rules. You have something to say, whatever that may be, we have a board for you to come and say it. That’s amazing. Happy Birthday and hope they can go for 20 more years.
- zolbrek 3y ago>You have something to say, whatever that may be, we have a board for you to come and say it. That’s amazing. That was more 8chan before the NZ mass murder, since anyone could make a board and mod it the way they liked. 4chan is known for having biased jannies who will delete content that goes against their personal agendas. If you report outright racism outside of /pol/ or /b/ it usually gets deleted too.
- snvzz 3y ago/g/ has a surprisingly high amount of Amiga users. And a lot of interesting niche threads like the alternative os and alternative isa generals.
- ionwake 3y agoI still remember making a thread on /b/ when bitcoin hit $100, with a pic of vegeta going super Saiyan. See you space cowboy
- fwungy 3y agoReddit: Dumb acting smart. 4chan: Smart acting dumb. HN: Smart acting smart.
- v3ss0n 3y agogreatest technological achievements done by 4chan community this year https://boards.4channel.org/g/ https://boards.4channel.org/g/ - Automatic1111's work on stable diffusion, and comfyui - Leaking llamav1 torrent on 4chan leads to explosion of local models - GPT4all by old 4chan user/troller Gpt4Chan - Various uncensored LLMmodels - Exllama born because a 4chan guy believes he can do faster inference than llamacpp 4chan guys goal of AI is very different from normies .. they are building an AI Waifu and to replace human wives ..
- 29athrowaway 3y agoThey also had a part in creating QAnon, a movement that caused a tremendous amount of harm including the January 6th insurrection.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoYou probably won't understand if after half a decade you haven't bothered to look into it yourself, but /g/ is as close to /pol/ as Steve Jobs was to planning the Oklahoma City bombing.
- drekipus 3y agoHasn't it been a known thing that "QAnon" was an FBI operation? I thought that was public I heard about qanon in news about Trump before I saw it on 4chan
- 29athrowaway 3y agoIt was not the glowies for sure.
- edgineer 3y agoI thought Ron Watkins admitted it was Jim Watkins
- MilStdJunkie 3y agoQ had moved off the 4chan platform really early, in fact I'm not sure it was ever really on 4chan, but rather 8chan and then 8kun, with some stops in between on a smorgasboard of dubious chans. I remember watching the first Qdrops come in, which I thought was an elaborate troll or maybe some kind of ARG. The New Zealand guy who posted and livestreamed his mosque genocide generally put the stake through the heart of 8, although there were lots of other stake candidates at the time, all sorts of people streaming details of their murders/attempted murders. So, ok, those guys are monsters, no way around that, but seeing them talk in other contexts, they're also profoundly sad. Trying to name the feeling I'm having, and I think it's pity. I feel pretty much the same about Q people[1]. What the hell happened to you to make your brain this way? [1] When they're not Congressmen/women/people.
- pallas_athena 3y ago/b/ was my gateway into 4chan. It was fun for a while, quickly got boring. /mu/, /lit/ and /fit/ I still visit occasionally. They have good recommendations.
- jwestbury 3y agoI used to read blue boards during lulls on the sales floor at Circuit City, which is, I think, about the most "aughts" thing I've ever said. /b/ was reserved for home, obviously. I do miss 4chan from back then, but it's also perhaps the best example of how doing something "ironically" for long enough can turn it into your actual belief/personality.