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Comment by Mirioron | Hacker News Reader

I find it sad that a project with as much cultural influence as 4chan didn't make the owners sufficient money. It's sad, because the whole idea behind 4chan is that people can be unfiltered and say what they want to say. But sadly, this means that the site can't make much money, because advertisers aren't willing to risk advertising on the site.

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I don't really understand the romanticization of 4chan - it seems mostly like people yelling at each other, trying to be offensive/shocking, and memes. It's like if reddit was entirely its lowest quality content.

If anything it seems to support the idea that anonymous environments bring out the worst kind of discourse. I get the draw of a place where people can be unfiltered without having to worry about their reputation, but in practice it doesn't seem to create a great environment for any interesting discussion.

Most memes on Reddit originated on 4chan.

I feel like you just haven't spent much time there. Lots of interesting discussions are to be had on a vast number of topics. Much of Internet culture originated there as well.

I feel like 4chan has shown just how needed an anonymous forum is to experimentation and community.

It shows people want the worst kind of discourse. You might not like it but if such a sizable community does its a shame it can't live on its own.

Not everyone gets online to peruse HN or even learn anything at all and there isn't anything wrong with that.

Well no, it shows that people are willing to accept some worthless discourse; but that doesn’t mean it all is.

It’s the same as when you spend an hour trafing memes with your friends — its utterly worthless, but that doesn’t mean all of your conversation looks like that. But anyone else who wanders in blindly might only see the meme trading and think that’s all you do. In the context of 4chan, its just wandering into the wrong board (eg /b/), or the wrong thread, and thinking that was the only thing that happened round these parts. Like the whole hacker and gore thing came out of a single subcommunity, but became the public face of 4chan; but none of the other boards cared about it (although bots would randomly start getting through captcha and spam gore/loli porn, which most users simply hid or ignored. Some people praised the bots for keeping out the riffraff (those unwilling or unable to ignore things they dislike), but otherwise, they were far more an idea people had about 4chan and its users than the userbase actually did or supported

The romanticism comes from the fact that 4chan has been incredibly influential in internet history.

Chaos is a ladder, as they say in GOT, and some of the best content out there has come from 4chan.

The lack of identity and point system also brings out some of the most interesting conversation. I recommend checking out /mu or /lit (/b, /pol/, and /r9k are all containment boards). If you contrast the conversation on /mu and /lit with similar reddit boards (r/music - or even spin offs like r/hiphopheads - and r/books) you will find much more interesting and original content. I find the point system on reddit lends itself much closer to a 'hivemind' where everyone ends up conforming to the same opinion, which makes things boring

Same goes for HN. Even with throwaways, the point system serves as this “corrective” barometer, that you’re expected to notice, even care about, and supposed to strive toward.

But perhaps most pathetically, even the moderators are brainwashed by it, as if the positivity trends of some mob are the smartest ruler to obey.

So, what if I disagree with the mob, and what if I’m right?

Well, the eigenstate of schroedinger’s cat tells us that there’s some degree of probablity that excuses us from ever taking that bet, so you can eat this hellban and lap up the antikarma like it’s the secretions of your wildest fantasy.

Enjoy the vacuum of the echochamber. In space, no one can hear you scream.

Incredibly influential in internet history? We were doing all those things before reddit and 4chan.

Memes in the form they took on on 4chan definitely weren't a thing before.

The word meme itself was a sterile almost scientific term.

I'm not sure how old are you, but if you were around at the time this happened (early to mid 00s) and active on imageboards you would surely have noticed just how different the experience was.

My memory is the word being used quite often as any “contagious idea”. It started to became synonymous with “tired internet joke” in the late 90s with dancing baby, then cemented 2001 with the someone-set-us-up-the-bomb video.

Surely the memes of 4chan fame came directly from SA and related forums?

Let me pull up the front page of one of the "better" boards /lit/ right now and read literally the first post. It's for making fun of a woman's OKCupid profile. Here's a sampling of comments:

"She's a pleb with a mental illness."

"hello Jamal" (replying to someone who said they enjoy R&B)

"women are conformist by nature, is it really all that surprising?"

Let's move to post 2: "Describe hell to me"

"Imagine a place that is really really really really really really really really really really gay."

"dying to meet Hitler"

"A fat girl sits on your face and farts on you for the rest of eternity"

Is this the place we should be romanticizing? This was all within about 90 seconds of opening the site. I spent a lot of time on 4chan when I was younger, specifically /mu/ and /lit/ and I think it was really bad for me and my mental health at the time. These communities are extremely toxic, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and more than anything, downright cruel.

You have to take the good with the bad in the case of 4chan. Consider that any thread can be bumped to the front page with a reply, and consider that when a new thread is created, one is pushed off page 10 and then disappeared/archived. 90 seconds after first opening 4chan or any similar imageboard do not tell you anything. Yes, if you randomly go on the front page of any board, it is not exactly weird to see low quality threads that were either just recently made or have been freshly bumped. And you do not know why the thread was bumped without going into it. It may have been a poster who came in to complain, or to shitpost inside of it because it was a shit thread anyway. This is just part of imageboard culture unlike other sites which actively hide all the bad from you. Unless a thread explicitly breaks rules, is completely unrelated to the respective board, or is cancerous in its own right, it won't be deleted right away unless it has some backlash either by live feedback from anons or reports. On 4chan, you see all the bad that comes along with the good. Or no good at all sometimes. Depends on whoever's posting that day and how they feel. It's free(as in freedom) and pretty great usually.

I used to spend a lot of time on these boards, for years when I was younger. I know how it works, and I am familiar enough with 4chan to know that this language is common and normalized (calling people f-----s, n-----s, etc). /lit/ in particular I remember as being violently misogynistic (and a quick browse today confirms that). I'm familiar with the culture, the "irony" that justifies this kind of language, all of it. I was immersed in it for a long time, I "get" it. And it's not OK.

I think 4chan is an incredible, fascinating experiment, and I don't think all of it is trash or worthless, and it's true that not all boards are /b/. But it is undeniable that the overall culture is one of hostility, aggression, and cruelty, especially towards marginalized groups (not to mention the creepy sex stuff, which also pervades all boards). It's not a model for a healthy internet community by any means.

Edit: OP was edited, want to add a bit:

My overall assessment of 4chan is totally different: it is a cautionary tale of what free as in freedom on the internet actually looks like: a place where a few cynical teenage/early 20s white dudes may have a good time, while creating a culture totally devoid of empathy or inclusion for anyone else. A hotbed for lawlessness where violence and extreme ideologies fester and have real world consequences, the worst of the mid-2000s web.

I don't deny that 4chan is a cesspit, but like I said, you have to take the good with the bad. From my experience, as a person who is of a minority race, as long as you do not mention your race, literally no one cares. You're perfectly welcome to join in on the shitposting. Back then and still today, it has been race and sexuality related bigotries, but 4chan would be happy to insult you in any other fashion as well if given the opportunity. But since those words still have power given to them by those who choose to be offended by those words, they are still by far the best weapon of choice for 4chan users to rally behind. Do I endorse it? No, but I'm not against it either.

While I don't think 4chan is a model for a healthy internet community, I believe the internet is healthier if 4chan exists than if it did not. Some say it is the last bastion of free speech on the internet and I would agree. I can't name any other place I would go to see what I see on the chan.

> those who choose to be offended

This is simply not how the brain works. "Taking offense" comes out of a mix of low-level mental responses and emotions, bubbling up into the conscious mind from below, rather than being the outcome of a top-down rational thought process which one could "choose" to switch off.

The whole site reminds me of teenagers who are trying too hard to act rebellious. The problem is that it apparently has a large enough audience that some adults find that kind of behavior acceptable.

I disagree. Anonymous environments bring out the best kind of discourse with the occasional annoyances. There is a reason why most people agree that reddit's golden age was around the 2008-2012is period. Before all the censorship and propaganda. In my opinion, censored environments bring out the worst kind of discourse. Look at social media of today.

Just a reminder that during reddit's so-called "golden age", it was the largest hub for underage pornography on the internet.

That depends or your definition of pornography. AFAIK nothing on /r/jailbait was technically illegal.

>>That depends or your definition of pornography

Let’s not split hairs here. There is a reason we have a saying: “X is like porn; you know it when you see it.”

Different people know it when they see different things. Not too long ago showing ankles was considered basically porn.

That saying goes back to supreme court justice Potter Stewart and it's something a lot of people would disagree with as it posits a fake universal standard for things like offensiveness and obscenity.

Underage "softcore" pornography. It's still reprehensible and indefensible, and it was one of the largest nsfw subs at the time.

So would that title now go to Instagram or which site currently has the largest collection of underage girls in bikinis? How about TikTok or Youtube?

I honestly cannot continue a conversation where I have to defend the position that a subreddit devoted to sharing sexualized pictures of children is fucked up. This should be obvious and beyond debate.

I'm not arguing that sexualizing minors is good, I'm just saying that there is a massive difference between the sexual exploitation that goes into the production of actual child pornography and the posting of girls in bikinis. I hope you agree that the harm done isn't even on the same level. Using the same language for both is just not right.

> Anonymous environments bring out the best kind of discourse with the occasional annoyances.

So if I wanted to see this on 4chan, which board would you recommend I visit?

I think you're just noticing the more egregious examples which garner a lot of attention. Quite a lot of original content that didn't have any other common place used to originate on 4chan. Eventually a lot of it shifted to Reddit as Reddit came into being and gained in popularity, but there's a reason that some content (such as very short science fiction stories, or humorous explanations of DND sessions in "greentext") is archived in the form of screen capture images, and that's because one of the few places you could find this with a wide audience was on 4chan.

I've only ever been on 4chan a handful of times, and yes, the boards that people expect to be a clusterfuck are indeed a clusterfuck, but if you pay attention it's hard to discount the influence 4chan had on internet culture in benign ways as well.

People are so enamoured by 4chan precisely because it isn't like reddit. Reddit, Facebook or any social media platform that rewards users with up votes, karma, reputation, likes or whatever creates a system in which people want to please others and develop reputations they have to uphold. 4chan is free from those chains and people are able to freely throw ideas into the mix. This is why 4chan has been so instrumental in coming up thousands of memes that define internet culture today. Reddit, Facebook and others are usually consumers of those memes rather than generators.

I know this is a massive generalization, but that's been my impression being on digg, reddit, Twitter and 4chan for 10 years now.

The problem is that a lot of the original 4chan users either moved on or just grew up and at the same time 4chan got over taken by alt-light type folks. I still think the basic idea of 4chan has a lot to offer that maybe could be replicated on an other platform, with a fresh set of people.

Funny images and phrases, yes.

Anything more substantive than that... quite rarely.

Pretty sure there was a math proof posted on 4chan originally.

There was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292061

Yep - someone posted an original proof of the lower bound for the Haruhi problem http://mathsci.wikia.com/wiki/The_Haruhi_Problem

I wouldn't say never.

Sleep sort came out of 4chan.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151231221001/http://bl0ckeduse...

> If you slept exp(n) instead of n it could easily include negative integers too!

Hilarious!

Hillary Clinton showed 4chan Pepe memes during her campaign. The Vice President is protected by soldiers who wear a Qanon-patch. Pizzagate and Podesta's hacked emails play a large role in the Russia investigation.

Lol what. Qanon patch?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

LMGTFY

>The account has falsely accused...The conspiracy theory..., has been widely characterized as "baseless",[11][12][13] "unhinged"[14] and "evidence-free".[15] Its proponents have been called "a deranged conspiracy cult"[16] and "some of the Internet's most outré Trump fans".[17]

I have no idea what this is and im sure its ridiculous. But wtf happened to wikipedias neutral tone and point of view style? Ive read articles about all sorts of ridiculous conspiracy theories, cults, political parties, etc, and never seen this kind of language. Using quotes like this isnt an excuse.

It really is lizardpeople-style crazy. It is halfway between a troll and a Russian PSYOP. That language really does it justice.

At one point, 4chan was the source of a lot of internet culture and memes, but that ship has firmly sailed.

Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and even Facebook are now massive generators of original content and memes.

The alt-lite type folk were always on 4chan. Just only "recently" has the political atmosphere shifted in such a way that we have a word to describe that sort of ideology and behavior.

That is absolutely false. Shit tons of political memes and conspiracy theories picked up by the likes of Breitbart, Alex Jones, etc still originate there

I didn't say their meme output dropped to zero. I said that other websites are the dominant force for generating the memes we see today.

I agree with you that 4chan isn't the meme generator place it used to be. But I would say that the memes produced on reddit, Twitter or Facebook are different qualitatively. They have much broader appeal usually (normie) than 4chan. But yea..4chan is not the cool subversive place it used to be any more. People make a huge difference... Platforms are not enough on their own. And the people have moved on

But you can look at the memes that we have today, 'image macros' and their origins from things that started in places like 4chan.

I don't mind principles or rules but I don't like what most websites have in place.

4chan was completely unpredictable and unorganized; no tension was trying to make something out of it except for the people there. Something there made me like that. I never really used it except for a few readings once a year.. and I always like this raw side. Somehow.. it's so raw it feels honest and trustable.

>The problem is that a lot of the original 4chan users either moved on or just grew up and at the same time 4chan got over taken by alt-light type folks.

This is relatable. I was a pretty notable figure on /mu/ for a few years, and my tripfriends WERE my social circle when high school couldn't do that for me. Then I went to college and realized how much toxicity it had instilled in me, and moved on.

It's interesting to reflect on that bit of my teenage years!

>I was a pretty notable figure on /mu/

Only Biotroll and CLT get to claim this status :P

I find it weird how many people are ok with 4chan but freak out about Gab.

Not enough porn.

It's a disgusting place full of pretty much the worse the internet has to offer, but it was for a while a haven for people who simply weren't accepted by any other social group in the world, to no "fault" of their own. Be it a shitty situation at home (tons of foster kids on there in the old days), broke ass young adults, suicidally depressed, autistic, whatever, whoever just could not fit in, they had humans they could interact with, which is demonstrably imperative to human health.

Bad actors would do bad shit there due to the very nature of the site. Probably, the misfits could have found some other, healthier, place to congregate. But they didn't, and so 4chan was important, to many people.

It's a shame it got weaponized by bad actors. There was once a day when such attempts would be met with "4chan is not your personal army." Unfortunately, the bad actors got smart enough to figure out how to turn them into an army anyway.

Beyond that, I believe it's important for social / cultural / political structures I disagree with to exist in small "gardens," left to their own devices - both as a living example of "yup, x or y doesn't work, go to 4chan to see what it results in," but also because sometimes it does work, and it's important to keep those traditions alive.

4chan boards are fine. there’s nothing wrong with the free expression of ideas. you can respond back to any incorrect idea all you want.

You can certainly post thoughtful comments, but they will invariably be shouted down by shitposts and outright abuse. It's not worth it, because the 4chan hivemind doesn't want it. The boards are too hectic and posting moves too fast.

I really can't get behind the idea that it's a disgusting place, even now. There are some parts that I was hesitant to use because it would drag me into arguments with right-wingers, but there were many other parts that were just really, really good. The kind of discussion that prevailed was often insightful (if usually short). On /mu/ and /lit/, the kind of people you don't want to be engaging with usually keep to their own threads, because they know their input is worthless in better threads. It is possible for me to have a good discussion about Marx (for instance) on /lit/ with minimal interference. This is an amazing feat considering how 4chan doesn't have the "walling" features that subreddits provide. That's often a bad thing but it's sometimes a good thing too.

It doesn't have to always be disgusting, to be a disgusting place.

The unabashed use of racial and LGBT slurs is disgusting. So is the gore raids, the frequent suggestions to self harm (regardless of the presence of "white Knights"), general misogyny, frequent jailbait content (moreso in the old days), shit like that.

Not everything there is disgusting. Not everyone is disgusting. But, compared to, say, imgur or something, you are far more likely to come out of 4chan with a terrible taste in your mouth I would say.

You are also able to come out of it with a different perspective you'd never otherwise gain due to up and down voting being missing.

A merit of 4chan is that you get exposed to content you don't like.

Yep. It's incredible how you can have a reasonably intelligent discussion in 4chan, while in reddit and similar vote based sites, once the mob comes to visit the site, they take over and no one can have a good discussion anymore.

Judge much?

Care to elaborate? I was as much a member of the community as anyone else, I believe I'm allowed an opinion on it.

From the outside, looking in, people tend to mistake 4chan for /b/, (and more recently /pol/). It’s similar to if someone decided to write off reddit, just because of the content on /r/funny.

For one, I think /a/ - 4chan’s anime board is still the largest, English speaking, Japanese culture board out there. There have been animators, authors and directors on /a/, albeit answering questions in broken English. And /a/, unlike /b/, or /pol/, tends to not put up shock crap and humor. Many of the smaller boards are also like this (with the exception of probably /tv/ and more recently /fit/)

The format itself, when not overrun edgy teenagers, is like nothing else. Every post is given equal representation. It's designed to be ephemeral and there's tends to be a lot less community politics. I won't argue that the format lends itself to a bastion of quality - it's a lot of wading through waste to find something good. It's the double edge sword of not having a "karma" system. But when its good - it's good, and when it's weird it _weird_.

I think the problem with 4chan has had recently was moderation. moot made all the rules and was the final arbiter in all things 4chan. What that meant was only moot could really ban a discussion topic without it being overreach by mods. moot coming out and saying “naruto is allowed on /a/“ or “gamer gate doesn’t belong on /v/“ was the only real mediating force that could transform the community. If an anonymous mod did it, it would always be met with a meme mocking mods (“he does it for free”)

When moot was more active, defending everything you said with “free speech” wasn’t really a thing either. Mods could ban you whenever they wanted for mostly whatever they wanted and bans tended to be more public. This mod power had a special hidden power - it was harder to take over the community around some singular meme. Eventually a mod would ban because he was tired of seeing X, and that was the end of that (similar to what happened to gamer gate - even during gamer gate people of people complained that games journalism didn’t belong on 8 of the 10 threads on /v/)

I secretly wish for moot to come back and roll heads just to make things interesting. Currently I think a lot of threads get derailed because bait-politics gets injected into almost everything. Threads get derailed because of "someone who is tangentially related to the subject being discussed is a woman and/or minority and if you support X that means you hate America" type of posts. And I also just wish he'd pop by and tell us how he's doing. I hope he's happy now.

Outsiders to 4chan would probably also be surprised at the site-wide outpouring of genuine sadness, nostalgia and gratitude when moot announced that he was stepping down.

4chan was the punk rock of websites in an era of increasing corporatization of the internet. It was an incubator for internet culture before other websites took that mantle and ran with it (Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and even Facebook now fill a similar role).

That's exactly what it is / was. But like with startup investing, banging enough turds together eventually produces a few diamonds.

Youtube used to be like this - now it is advertiser driven. It's a net negative for humanity.

How is Youtube a net negative for humanity? It generates value, it teaches skills, it provides entertainment, it provides careers, and youtube kids is keeping an entire generation of parents sane.

I think the parent comment is calling Advertising a net negative for humanity.

> youtube kids is keeping an entire generation of parents sane.

Can we hold off on considering this a positive until we see how exactly this generation of kids that think Google is a benevolent babysitter/genie grow up?

Parents have been parenting for millennia without handing off their kids's attention to a glorified advertising network.

To address the advertising situation, moot's successor spun off all of the worksafe boards into 4channel.org last November, which now has AdSense ads. Note that "worksafe" only applies to images; you still would not want your boss to be reading the text, which is as just as (almost entirely) unfiltered as it was before the split.

The purpose of the project was to find the founder free porn.

It succeeded.

Not all people are seeking strictly financial rewards.

All rewards need not be financial. Poole will be remembered forever and has used - and can continue to use - his fame for various benefits.

He tried to leverage his notoriety in another startup but apparently that wasn't enough.

It’s actually a good thing. Advertisers demand “family friendly” crap.

4chan is perfect as is.

Many celebrities and writers for very famous shows without a doubt ape a lot of their material from 4chan/somethingawful.

A bold claim, I know, but definitely appears that way.

It makes enough money to remain.

Seriously though, would you buy something advertised on 4chan? Besides, your motivation for doing something you believe in shouldn't be financial. And if your motivation is financial, why do you care?

I find the assumption that things that make people happy should generate income to be weird.

I think if the goal had been to make money, it wouldn't have had any impact.

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