I suspect TheJosh had something like that with the week where he visualized it with Sundays at both ends but lacked the self awareness to realize that this was not a universal representation.

That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms.

But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.

Could you give some examples? The more unexpected, the better.

Preferably with sources, because tracing word origin is difficult enough on its own.

I can’t keep up anymore.

I gradually lost interest when they started heavily pushing commercial sponsors. I get it; sites aren’t free to host, and moderator time isn’t free / unlimited, but it’s still sad.

it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.

You may enjoy the walled garden, I for one don't. Such sites gave you a hole to get away from the dystopian view that these gardens hold.

They gave independence away from forced control.

0 - https://castlevaniadungeon.net/dungeon.html

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.

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

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.

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.

Isn't viciousness the notorious bread and butter of 4chan?

I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it. What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?

We were all offered the chance to become mods in 2010, but moot wanted to see our faces on a Skype call. I thought that was a step too far and just gradually stopped caring after that. Seems like I made the right choice.

On the whole it was barely held together technically and organisationally, mostly run by moot's personal friends, and fun all around. Things were far less serious then.

And the checks arrived on time every month: $0.00

To your point:

It's more likely than not real, it contains configs for the entire site.

Most web servers don't really come with any built in defense against brute force attempts vs Basic Auth gates, so unless you've set something up to protect it, someone with enough time will eventually get in.

If there is no throttling/rate-limiting/banning then this setup allows for a lot of attempts, wether brute-force or dictionary.

The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.

The biggest good thing that came out of 4chan and 8chan to me is that it made me extremely weary to ever trust second-hand reports about some place and made me better at identifying reports that read like “This person dislikes this place, never visited it, and just reasons together what it's like.”. It also made me try Tumblr. I heard terrible things about it how it was filled with “social justice warriors” and stuff and unsurprisingly, when actually trying it it was nothing like that and just a fairly chill place where people mostly blog about fiction and pornography and share their thoughts. Even when ignoring the filter and logging out and going to what is trending, almost no content is political.

I remember when 8chan went down and all the news reports and forum posts basically said it was basically Stormfront but I was there at the time and it was nothing like that. People just posted cat memes, talked about fiction, talked about life and dating and stuff. One had to dig on very specific boards to find that kind of content.

People talk a lot about “places”, online or offline or even fiction that they clearly have no firsthand experience with, and just reason together about what it's like. They just “expect it to be like that” based on some image they create in their head, or some cherry picked examples they've seen and start to treat it like fact. It's especially weird when it's about something they clearly don't like, some kind of book or television series of which, despite clearly disliking it, they can supposedly tell you exactly what it's like... well, they've never seen it, they just reasoned it together in their head based on some things they read about it and their own expectations.

I frequent 4chan a lot; it's nothing like this description indeed. I don't frequent /pol/ because I found the discussions to be completely empty but I tried it and it was nothing like that. Even within 4chan I read all sorts of things about other boards that are just not true when actually visiting them. /pol/ isn't a far right echo chamber, /r9k/ isn't full of lonely incels, /lgbt/ isn't some social justice warrior hub despite what one might read about those places on other boards.

For example, many (particularly women) have consumed Candace Owens's content about the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni saga, just like many followed certain creators with the Amber Heard trial. Both of thse fall squarely on the alt-right pipeline.

So you may start folloing 9gag. Particularly if you're young, you may enjoy being "edgy" but a bunch of that is actually normalizing right-wing views. Even seeking validation on /b/ fits this.

/s

Let me give you an example. /k/ is the weapons/military forum, and it's unironically run by US government authorities. Vulgar racial slurs are wholly permitted -- but if you question certain aspects of US military or foreign policy, or suggest that Russia/China/etc. aren't houses of cards that will topple the moment the US wills it, your comment will probably be deleted and you'll be hit with a 3-day ban.