late last night, 4chan was finally kill. According to random anons on twitter, it was a massive hack that exploited outdated (since 2016) BSD issues to dump the database and take down the site. Some interesting claims flying around are that most /pol/ posts originated from Israel, and many jannie accounts had .edu and .gov email addresses, and the code was a single 10000 line block of php spagetti code. Much more solid gold intel in there for sure.
The race is on to replace 4chan. The most valuable and prestigious social media platform on the internet gone overnight. Who will pick up the imageboard crown? We can probably do better than .gov jannies, massive continuous psyop campaigns, and outdated garbage insecure php code that no one has touched in 10 years. An opportunity for enterprising anons to build the old dream: an actually good imageboard. We have been humbly dipping our toes into the edge of this massive well of opportunity here at sofiechan dot com. What does it mean for us?
This thread is to discuss the implications of this most serious and gave of current affairs.
to be clear almost all stories about or on 4chan should be taken as artistic works of fiction and falsehood. only a fool would take anything posted by anons as fact. The stuff about Israel and .gov in particular is probably bullshit, and 4chan will surely be back tomorrow, but it is funny.
Still, 4chan is very conspicuously infested with psyops and badly motivated moderation, badly out of date, and generally in need of replacement. This is obviously the motivation for our project here.
Poor old dog finally put down. If you were a specific kind of zoomer like me, chances are 4chan played a very excised role in the development of your sensibilities. It was the fountainhead from which was poured many things which were not poured anywhere else. Now alot of those things were the height of anti-intellectual irreverence (Sneed) but unique things they were. Everything from my sense of humor to my political beliefs were, if not determined, at least colored by 4chan.
The cultural place of 4chan was actually very strange. You had a non-zero contingent of people unironically claiming it was a determining factor in the result of the 2016 US presidential election, that is despite its relatively small userbase. People make ominous reference to 4chan despite having never once browsed the site. 4chan memes are common currency. The "soyjak", a niche /fit/ meme used to troll vegetarians (and then by extension to make fun of a very noticeable kind of liberal), is now a universal symbol indicating "enemy". 4chan politics is a byword for internet politics, not just on the right but on the left aswell. Leftists of the transgender cyberpunk variety even try to gain cred by parroting the insane lie that "4chan was originally a left-leaning site until the stromweeny invasion (date unknown)". The motive is understandable, all discourses today are 4chan discourses. We talk about politics like /pol/. literature and philosophy like /lit/, and music like /mu/.
I still remember the day when I realized I hadn't been browsing the site for years. At one point refreshing the catalog was a second-nature activity to me, done almost impulsively. It was really the only sort of social media content I stomached or had the desire to stomach. But, I suppose, one day the content was just too bad. The meme is "/b/ was always shit. You just grew up". But I don't think that's the case anymore, the site is just genuinely trash. When was the last time there was a new meme from the site that "blew up"? Every post was a Twitter repost, so just use Twitter.
So I can't say I think too much was lost here. But, I suppose, now there is no longer a singular place for "edgy teens" to conglomerate. Everything is now divided and the internet is now given to the biggest personalities and influencers. So we have no more place for the anonymous youth. That is a state of affairs that would have highly upset a younger me, and it still touches my heart. Surely the "new online counter-culture" is waiting in the wings. Or maybe there are no anonymous youths, and I am the last withering member of my race.
>>2899 Yeah 4chan was foundational. I started browsing as an edgy teen back in 2009 and have been using it on and off since. Like you say, my politics, my sense of humor, my hobby interests all come from 4chan. I know powerful and wealthy people with similar chan roots. I never drifted away fully though my boards have changed. I dont enjoy /pol/ anymore, and have been on /a/ a lot more than i used to be. I was literally using it last night when it went down, refreshing like “what the hell is going on?”.
I think 4chan is underappreciated as a cultural powerhouse. Is it the anonymity, the irreverence, the memes, the shitposting? Who knows? And it wanted to be even more powerful than it was. Back in its youth it used to tear up the whole internet and real life with raids and such until all that got banned. Gamergate which is really a 4chan thing blew up into this political vibe shift. But 4chan isnt valued highly by official measures. Its a joke to call it the most prestigious and valuable social media platform but there’s something there too.
Im very curious: is “4chan but not mismanaged shit” a coherent concept? What can we learn from it about how to make something with that level of cultural power, but more able to pay the bills and not be total garbage half the time?
