He needs more recognition for this. And for all the vile hatred on 4Chan, I also know it is a big source of support for a lot of people otherwise left behind by the mainstream
Seriously, though, internet culture is more than just /b/. The Something Awful forums (where 4chan was born, after all), Fark and YTMND contributed a lot. More recently, sites like Reddit, Instagram, Vine and Twitter have become much more relevant than any 4chan board.
I've been on the Internet since the mid-90s and have purposefully avoided 4chan since I first heared of it.
At no point has it been difficult to avoid 4chan. I gather it has been very influential in the niche of image memes and I vaguely remember something about teenagers calling everybody a "fag" a few years back, but otherwise I couldn't say what the influence has been.
meow? snuh? McQ sigs? borkborkbork? yEnc sucks!
None of these had much lasting impact. There's a bunch of stuff from 4chan that you have heard of, even if you don't know it came from 4chan.
You must be a bit old ;-)
Would you mind explaining this? I have read that moot was originally an SA user and posted on there to announce when he first launched 4chan. Is there any connection beyond that?
In 2000 or so, SA was set up as a sea of quality in an internet whose users really weren't ready to be good forum posters. (Like: children, racists, perverts, really angry teenagers, people with signatures of anime characters holding huge swords, furries) The anime forum was opened because nobody else wanted to read the threads, but they mostly left it alone.
As the years went on quality went down as the user base got too large, so the admins started effectively a left-wing death squad called Helldump dedicated to finding reasons to ban everyone. It was pretty puritanical in the American sense, so nearly all the long time anime posters got banned for being "probably a pedophile". One person I knew was banned for a slightly too sexy image posted 10 years before and had since become the pilot of Marine One. It's a little surprising they were never sued for libel.
SA inspired the rarely-used "user was banned for this post" label, but mostly showed the importance of not having a post history.
I don't have logs from when it was first started but here's a fun quote from a few weeks after: [2003-10-14 02:51] <rizzou> hey moot - there's this cool website at http://www.4chan.net/ you should check it out. it's really looking like the next big thing, you know?
A few days later 4chan started killing the shared server it was hosted on by fellow SA forums member nem (I remember seeing load averages of like 80000), and had to find its own home.
That’s an… uh… bold claim.
I'm not saying that 4chan is the be all end all- Something Awful can probably be said to be even more influential as a whole- but I think 4chan was the very first example of the modern anonymous internet watering hole that spawned international media attention and completely changed how information was disseminated across the world.
The internet has been around for about as long as it's been sensible to describe an online culture. While in the early days (e.g. 70's, 80's) the internet certainly wasn't the only network to be influencing culture (c.f. FidoNet) it was a primary source, particularly via university campuses.
I even get a dedication (to my handle) in one of the books (written by a booker prize nominated author) covering the early online culture in the UK.
There has been an online culture at least the 70's - and that is not counting precursor tech like telegraph and radio hams
Nice to get called "young man" though, it's been a while :)
[edited, after parent was]
Your very definition makes it impossible to deny you.
Either originated or was shared by. That covers everything. That's how memes work.
Everything made sometime after 2003.
In other words, most of the sharing was dependent on 4chan quickly picking it up and spreading it.
I love the idea that a site dedicated to explaining image macros is somehow a comprehensive repository of "internet culture." A ton of "internet culture" is not image-based because it originates from a time when downloading images was so slow and difficult that you'd only do it for content that was truly worth the effort, like pictures of Neptune taken by Voyager 2, or photos of naked ladies.
By the way, here's the only Usenet joke I remember:
* <- Perth
Some of the stuff is still around, and embedded so deeply it probably doesn't come to your mind just because it feels like part of the environment.
For example, do you ever use emoticons? :D That's a fundamental part of Internet culture that originates from long before it was practical to send images around as part of casual conversation.
Another example would be acronyms like LOL or ROFL. Some have died out, but LOL is still extremely common.
How about this one. Ever see people quote parts of other people's comments by leading them with a > character, then reply bit by bit? It's pretty common, and is enshrined in the markup support of sites like Reddit. That's ancient Usenet culture.
Heck, the very use of the word "trolling" as a way of describing someone who deliberately antagonizes people online is a piece of internet culture from that time. The originator may be forgotten, but nearly everyone knows what a "troll" is.
Long after all the current "memes" are forgotten, I wager people will still know what emoticons are or what LOL means. That's culture too.
Something Awful, Fark, et al were influential, but whatever they created remained confined to the internet.
What 4Chan has managed to create has permeated the mainstream.
My non-geeky friend sent me a Pepe yesterday. That is entirely 4Chan.
All 4Chan has managed to do is recycle the same level of inanity that permeated the Usenet and BBS spaces before it. You are "standing by" a rehash of a rehash of a rehash.
do you think it's healthy to stay in an echo chamber for long periods of time?
I also very much enjoyed his thoughts on privacy/anonymity and the multi-faceted nature of human personalities.
You can find some quotes here: http://observer.com/2011/10/4chans-moot-facebook-and-google-...
Those concepts are more important in my opinion, to the gestating human identity that we will all be part of via technological evolution.
He alone didn't influence the culture. He just created a place with very few rules and let people do their thing. It was the users of 4chan who created and spread that culture.