5 ms·
Up until last month, the earliest known post/repost of the Backrooms image was an archived 4chan post from 2018, but it was believed to have been taken in 2012
by beastoftheweast 2y ago
Up until last month, the earliest known post/repost of the Backrooms image was an archived 4chan post from 2018, but it was believed to have been taken in 2012 or earlier based on the filename. So people have been looking for earlier posts/reposts of the image for years in an effort to uncover its origin.
During the recent successful search, the searchers trawled 4chan archives for early-2010s posts with similar image metadata to the 2018 Backrooms image copy. These archives were missing the original image files and thumbnails, but still retained some image metadata that could be filtered on (dimensions, image file md5s etc.) One of the searchers came up with a list of posts which might have originally included the image file, based on image metadata and context. Another searcher plugged the image md5 of one of these candidate posts (an April 2011 post recently added to an archive) into other archives, and hit on a post with a thumbnail matching the original Backrooms image from March 2011. At this point they'd finally found an earlier copy of the image, after years of searching.
Soon after, one of the searchers plugged the filename of the March 2011 post into Twitter's search, and came up with a post from 2019 which included the physical address and a link to the image source (this Twitter user had already found the source before the search had really begun, but it had gone unremarked upon at the time). The website had been replaced with blogspam in the interim. A searcher plugged this domain into waybackmachine and found a page with the image and a full explanation (it was taken during the renovation of a commercial property in Wisconsin).
Post from one of the searchers here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/backrooms/comments/1d3pkif/how_the_backrooms_were_actually_found_a_timeline/ https://www.reddit.com/r/backrooms/comments/1d3pkif/how_the_...
- temporarely 2y agothis poor guy keeps getting ignored. here is the tweet https://x.com/rkfg_me/status/1130028610700664832 https://x.com/rkfg_me/status/1130028610700664832
- account42 2y agoShould have posted that info in a sane location where people discuss these things instead of tweeting it into the void hoping that someone was looking.
- Thorentis 2y agoWait so, the Internet Archive was not involved at all in finding the original, but since the image exists in the archive, IA have written a blog post claiming to be crucial to its discovery? Seems like taking credit for something they didn't do to be honest. They didn't even mention the Tweet in the blog post which was essential to finding the image, which makes me think they want that part overlooked.
- msephton 2y agoI think it's part of the recent trend to not mention Twitter/X because of its owner.
- celdon25 2y agoAny evidence for this or just mentioning it because you can?
- salad-tycoon 2y agodang changed a twitter link to non a twitter one in the past month or so because paraphrasing the twitter one may not work, let’s not prefer twitter, blah blah [nb original link worked fine]. Sorry I didn’t archive this but should be in the history. That said I know many here have an involuntary eye spasm episode with Elon being mentioned but not sure IA does so not sure I agree with the original accusation.
- chuckadams 2y agoI try to not mention Xitter because I just want it to go away. It was terrible as a conversation format before, and it's completely unusable now. Oh yeah, the owner is a raging douchecanoe too. But mostly it's just broken.
- celdon25 2y agoThat wasn’t the context of the question. We are well aware that there are randos out there who don’t like Elon. I was asking why the GP felt the need to share the assumption of the author’s reasons for not mentioning the source, despite having no evidence. You’ve managed to lower the bar even further in the conversation, however.
- lobochrome 2y ago[flagged]
- jpsouth 2y agoThere is no grass to touch in the back rooms. Jokes aside, what’s wrong with having an interest in a (seemingly very) niche subject that doesn’t harm anyone and is a pretty cool investigation task?