Technology

There used to be a dozen sites like 4chan. I don't know if any of them are still around, but I'm willing to bet that if 4chan doesn't come back there will be a new website that takes its place.

4chan is a pretty unique experience. Most of the internet is forming into echo chambers, where having a different opinion than the "correct" opinion for that community will get you downvoted or banned. My understanding with 4chan is that post popularity is determined by replies, and frequently controversial opinions/etc get the most replies. So posting stuff that most people will agree will result in a less popular thread than posting something controversial, offensive, or wrong.

I think this leads to a lot of the negative things you've heard about 4chan, but encouraging disagreements between its members keeps it from becoming a full echo chamber like a lot of social media. They still have some dominant community opinions, but those opinions can't really smother all the other opinions like on most sites.

To be clear, 4chan is a cesspool. But for all it's flaws it does offer something unique that's largely missing on other websites.

Why won't it be back in a week? There's nothing stopping it from coming back.

4chan in the past years was mostly known as a far right shithole. But I think 4chan had more than that, they also had more progressive hacktivism like Anonymous and they produced a lot of historical memes for the internet. I hope we can have some real historian work that highlights the good and the bad from it and not just its sad ending.

I remember when /b/ was good. But then that "moot" newbie came in, and ruined things forever.

...jokes aside I'm going to miss 4chan. Or at least the 4chan from the late 00s ~ early 10s, that I used periodically; it was already problematic, but as other users here said it was a unique experience.

See ya, space cowboys.

I really appreciate seeing an article written by someone who is actually familiar with the culture and history of the site.

Qanon and Actual Nazis were not 4chan norm back in the day. The alt right nazi hateful shit was posted but it was more like larping/shock value immature crap and nothing like what we see in the mainstream social/media today. Misogyny too. I'm not denying that there weren't people there who meant it but it was 99% shitposting. There's also the hacktivism, social activism, soooooooo many memes like as substantial as YouTube as establishing the humor culture of the internet. I find the site so fascinating and much more than some cesspool of evil it became.

It is weird it is gone. I suspect moot is not so interested in sticking his neck and wallet out to protect the freedom of speech for facscists trying to destroy democracy and that's why it's not back. I'm pretty sure 4chan has been down before for various reasons more substantial than hacking but it could be fabricated memory

I'm glad it's dead.

I love the idea of imageboards. I love "anonymous" posting as a default. I love ephemeral threads.

I thought generals were pretty good. Board culture was real. People would make nontrivial 4chan optimized original content for what I assume was love of art.

There was something special about 4chan that I don't think exists in forums, lemmy, tumblr, tiktok, or the other forms of social media we have now.

But the place was a shithole.

Split as it was by boards and threads, I could insulate myself from it to some extent but the culture on 4chan was getting worse year by year. The famous boards attracted the MAGA crowd and population had a large effect on what threads lived and died. I had so many threads hidden and yet I would still get a wave of revulsion looking at the catalog on my favorite board.

There are other imageboards. There are open source imageboard projects. Without 4chan's shadow, I hope that imageboards and imageboard culture develop in different directions.

Meh. Truth be told I'd rather however did this put the effort into getting rid of Kiwi Farms instead

Quite proud to say that I've never ventured into any of the #chans. They frighten the fuck outta me, frankly.

I miss the wallpaper board, and cooking board, and retro game board.

That's about it, tho.

When I first used 4chan, more specifically /b/ in like 2009 and it was wild. There were definitely a lot of horrible people, but it was far from the majority of the posts there; there was actual interesting content and interesting discussions at times.

Every time I've been to /b/ over the last 5-10 years has been nothing short of horrific.

The content of /b/ over the last however long would variably look like this:
Extremely racist thread
Thread of actual gore showing severally mutilated human beings or less frequently animals
Trans hate thread
Intimate pictures of people you know viewed as porn thread Another racist thread
Another trans hate thread
4 more similar pornographic threads
Another gore thread
Rinse & Repeat

Fuck 4chan and virtually everyone who's been active on /b/.

Maybe dumb question, but I didn't follow this too closely: Why don't they just update their software and install a backup?

There are terrorist on Facebook, there are real nazi on YouTube and Twitch, there are ideological extremist on Bluesky and X, and there are Reddit. I think calling 4chan a "toxic" place is too much. The majority isn't that bad

Archived Version