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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. Th
by CamelCaseName 1y ago
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)
- robobro 1y agoThe 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 1y ago> 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 1y agoLive 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 1y agoThey 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 1y agoI’d say it’s more like a high-profile NRA member getting shot. Unfortunate but it’s hard to miss the irony.
- brookst 1y agoThat’s fair, similar point. Reasonable people can both appreciate the irony and feel bad for the victim. Few people IRL have the sociopathic “they had it coming so I just want to watch them bleed out” attitude that we see so much of online.
- robobro 1y agoMost 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 1y agoDamn, 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 1y agothe serious crime of... deleting egregious posts from a website
- weard_beard 1y agoWhile 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 1y ago"The culture" of 4chan varies from board to board and even thread to thread.
- y-curious 1y agoYou 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 1y ago"Wow, you'd group people by their actions and beliefs but not by immutable characteristics they were born with?!" /s
- 52-6F-62 1y agoOne of those is something people are born into without choice. The other is chosen because of their tastes.
- DrillShopper 1y agoYes. People can leave the platform. They can't leave their race.
- GaggiX 1y agoDo 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 1y agoI'm not up to speed - but isn't that a free-speech absolutist site?
- sznio 1y agodepends on the board you're browsing, if you're discussing gardening you won't have issues with the far-right
- jsheard 1y agoMostly, but the few restrictions they do have led to even absolutist-er spinoffs like 8chan being founded.
- GaggiX 1y agoEvery 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 1y agoNo, 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.
- pelagicAustral 1y agoIsn't it a running joke that the Jannies don't get paid?
- aloha2436 1y agoI'm reliably informed they do it for free.
- throw_m239339 1y ago> 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.
- gnarlynarwhal42 1y agoGo 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
- pc86 1y agoWhat 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 1y ago> Actual 4chan mods are paid. As far back as I can remember they were also volunteers. When did hiro start paying people?
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI think we can lament the old internet and still care nothing for 4chan.
- idiotsecant 1y agoLike 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 1y ago4chan 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 1y agoI think anything before Frutiger Aero became popular (and it didn't in 2003) can be considered "early" Internet.
- vlovich123 1y agoI 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 1y agoYou'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.
- thrance 1y ago[flagged]
- ltbarcly3 1y agoAs bad as Trump is, most of the opposition to him is just tribalism. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, about 10% of people are always cruel, 10% are always kind, and 80% are in play. From your comment I think you would fit right in on 4chan since you seem to advocate anonymously destroying people that you don't know, without any process, if you vaguely (without really knowing anything about it or bothering to check) think they have crossed you in some way.
- DobarDabar 1y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 1y agoHate makes odd bedfellows at times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
- thrance 1y agoDo you think they voted for Kamala? One more contradiction won't make a difference to nazis... Also Hitler was a Zionist too [1]. Israel's goal of housing every Jews on Earth somehow aligns with antisemites of the world wanting to get rid of them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement?wprov=sfla1
- ltbarcly3 1y agoI think humanity is really amazing. If someone is anti-Nazi, and also anti-Israel, they manage to find a way to believe that Jews are Nazis. There's no level of cognitive dissonance that could slow you down, is there? The Nazis were NOT in favor of a Jewish state. They wanted to be able to say they tried this, they tried that, so it's not their fault they had to do a holocaust. They wanted justification. You don't actually advocate in favor of a group while simultaneously building camps to murder them. Although, I suspect you probably have some 'opinions' regarding the details of the holocaust.
- knowknow 1y agoIs 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 1y agoPosts always got auto deleted. Maybe you aren't familiar with how it worked.
- sznio 1y agothe 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 1y ago> there's no other online community i know of that still allows fully anonymous posting Doesn't 8chan/kun still exist?
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoPosting 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.
- fny 1y agoWhere do you see info about personal info? I would presume Anon would which to remain anon.
- a0123 1y ago[flagged]
- mattlondon 1y agoI'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.
- emptyfile 1y ago[dead]
- davedx 1y agoGeocities was going strong in the late 90's too! My first homepage was hosted there on Tokyo Towers.
- MagicMoonlight 1y ago22 years is old. Nobody knows what geocities is, it has no relevance. It’s like talking about brands of telegraph wire.
- crtasm 1y agoGeocities 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 1y agoHypnospace outlaw and neocities, both even less known lol
- crtasm 1y agoWhat are the most popular games on Steam that focus on interacting with a 4chan-like website?
- sickofparadox 1y ago
- blacktits69 1y ago[dead]
- imzadi 1y agoI grew up on IRC, had sites on Geocities and Angelfire. That was the old internet people miss, not 4chan.
- happytoexplain 1y agoWas 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 1y ago> 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 1y agoIncredibly spot-on and well-put.
- h2zizzle 1y agoConsidering that the people posting this "creative irreverence" were the same guys calling you a "stupid f*gg*t n*gger piece of sh*t" on Halo 2/3 and CS when they got noscoped from across the map or whatever, "It's just a joke" has always been somewhat suspect. It would be wrong to say that there was no element of tongue-in-cheek-iness and hyperbole, of course. It just wasn't completely innocent, broadly speaking. Of course, in a post-Bioshock Infinite world, there's really no excuse for not grokking how time and distance from the origins of a cultural behavior pattern can warp even well-meaning notions that aren't regularly re-examined and tuned to align the intention with the zeitgeist. If the Sarah Silverman-esque posters ever looked up and realized, "Oh, they don't know it's a joke, they're ACTUALLY Nazis," it was too late to shift things back. (Unless you were in a Boondocks thread on /co/, in which case correction was freely forthcoming.) Probably didn't help that at least one mod wanted 4chan to become more racist, on purpose.
- DrillShopper 1y ago4chan is not "old internet". Not even close. It's predated by a bunch of forums (including 2channel) on the Internet, some anonymous.
- snvzz 1y agoAs far as image boards go, 4chan is the first successful (and longest surviving) English-speaking 2chan clone. 2chan is a japanese site.
- p3rls 1y agoIt'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 1y agoBut 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 1y agoI honestly and sincerely miss the project chanology days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology