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Comment by planktonite | Hacker News Reader

It’s very interesting that the founder of 4chan ended up being super liberal leaning.

I remember when I first visited 4chan sometime in 2006. It was totally unlike anything I had seen before. I remember feeling as though I had found an entirely new universe to explore and exist in. Back then, when you refreshed b, no matter how frequently, there was essentially no recycling of threads. The volume back then was so high that browsing b was like swimming in a vibrant ocean of the future — a relentless torrent of human thought and memes. Back then, memes were exclusive to 4chan. Nobody knew what a meme was and you could only find them on 4chan. I remember when memes starting appearing on clothing and mainstream places it felt very weird. B is now a shell of what it used to be. In life, every once in a while you get to experience something like early b. I hope I get to do it one more time before I die.

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>It’s very interesting that the founder of 4chan ended up being super liberal leaning.

I dunno, a lot of 4chan’s image as right leaning is just a product of the time. The left has the cultural prominence to be uptight hall monitors of society, so the anything goes platform will attract and outwardly appear right.

When I was much younger the left were the cool rebels to the right’s status quo. If the timeline was slightly different 4chan could have just as easily been a lefty hangout with a conservative founder.

> Back then, memes were exclusive to 4chan.

naaaah

fark and somethingawful had them in, idk, 2002 or so.

Not the same at all.

No, exactly the same. Somethingawful goons were a very large portion of the early population of 4chan.

I’ve seen very similar viral images on Starcraft forums in the late 90s.

I mean, even ytmnd predates 4chan. Maybe things like that were tame in terms of content, but the memes were still there. Memes been around since the web busted out of cern.

A person of a certain age might think 4chan is the beginning sure, but SA was basically where 4chan came from. At least how I remember. Again, less extreme maybe.

Not that my memories of those days is that great, I guess.

Back in my day, we called them image macros.

I find it fascinating how the word meme came to be so specific and yet so vague. Now you have 'memes' as in image macros, 'memes' as in 'funny images,' sometimes 'memes' as in snowclones, 'memeing' as essentially a synonym of 'shitposting,' and occasionally, 'memes' in the traditional sense (pretty much a general term for things that spread virally.)

On 4chan, it started with image macros, reaction images/gifs, demotivational posters, etc. and at some point, all of those just became what 'meme' has come to mean, and if you say the word meme without context people just assume image macros, a la meme generators.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with this, since all of those things do indeed tend to be memetic, but it made so much more sense early on than it does now.

> 'memes' in the traditional sense (pretty much a general term for things that spread virally.)

The original meaning:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

The word meme was “coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)[11][16] as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. Examples of memes given in the book included melodies, catchphrases, fashion, and the technology of building arches.[17]”

Actually, the word "meme" was used in a small fraction of academia before Dawkins popularised it, in a meaning similar, but not quite the same, as Dawkins' meme. I'm positive I've read a paper from some Dutch university about that. [Citation needed]

I couldn't help but dig a bit, and I managed turn up a couple of papers [1] [2] that suggests that the pre-Dawkins meme was variously called "mneme" (which spelling is closer to the Greek root of the word), and completely different things. The Dutch connection seems to be the Leiden school of linguistics [3].

[1] https://semioticon.com/virtuals/imitation/van_driem_paper.pd...

[2] https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/42774/b...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Leiden_school

Edit: Formatting and typo

I think it's a little bit of a generational thing.

I was aging out of SA before 4chan even really got going (not maturing out, since I'm not that mature; just being done with college, moving on to professional school; not spending as much time on forums/etc). I never spent any real time looking at 4chan.

I of course know what image memes are, but if you just said meme to me with no context then I still think of it as the Dawkins 'Selfish Gene' idea.

There was a miniature Eternal September moment in 2010-2011 when image macros hit mainstream sites like Facebook. Months of "haha look at this funny meme! It's called a 'bad luck Brian'!" used out of context.

It pushed thr chans/SA deeper and darker. Honestly I'm surprised it isn't more recognized as an inflection point.

I'd put the first couple of weeks of pokemon go in that category.

Oh god. The second weekend after it launched I had to go to the local mall. That was the most infuriating walking experience of my life. Nobody was looking where they were going and would stop randomly.

Looking back, it was pretty cool how that went down - but entirely pissed me off at the time.

I would classify Pokemon Go as a fad that was just big enough to get the media’s attention, something more like fidget spinners or Furbies. 4chan was a long-running part of the internet that would never have been mentioned on the evening news. It was somewhere between being taboo and under quarantine.

More like the strange uncle nobody dared to talk about...

And Pokemon Go seems to be still going strong, unlike spinners or furbies.

I would disagree. 4chan was the nucleation point from which our modern lives sprung. It was the start of a very fundamental shift in the way people live. 4chan was the place where regular people and high bandwidth internet became married, and where the consequences of that union first materialized. I remember people would find online obituaries and organize raids on the family of the deceased, in one instance tormenting the parents of a deceased child with prank phone calls. People would live stream their suicides and other people would watch them and actually egg them on in the chat. The consequences of total anonyminity was a completely new concept back then, completely new territory. It’s something we have become accustomed to now. Meme culture was totally new, seemingly silly but underpinned by a fundamental arbitrage in communication that proved to be very important. You were not only experiencing these new things, but experiencing them as a part of a relatively small and exclusive group of people. 4chan was a microcosm of the future, and that is what made 4chan so amazingly potent. Pokémon go doesn’t even hold a candle to that in my view.

Something Awful did all of that before 4chan did (well, sans the suicide livestream). 4chan was to SA what Reddit and Imgur are to 4chan.

Came in here to give a shoutout to SA and the goon squad. Also Offtopic housed a lot of creativity in the early days.

After all, that’s how I co-created the 2g1c website.

Shout out to Offtopic. Plenty of original memes came out of that community.

Yea I agree. I included “high bandwidth” very deliberately. Could you give an account of what went on at SA?

Not quite; reddit and Imgur are normie-4chan. 4chan was definitely not normie-SA, it attracted the sleaziest of SA from the start; it was more an anonymous refugee camp.

It's not really about normie or not, but amplification (through number of users) and ease of access. Not just as a reader, but also as a contributor.

SA had a paywall. It had an elitist community that was unwelcoming towards new users, with strict etiquettes shaped by moderators and users alike, and users that were predisposed to forming cliques, along with strictly enforced rules that made it easy to get banned and forced to pay money. One ban was enough for most people to not return, even if they were able to pay. All of these combined to form a significant barrier for new users.

4chan dealt with all of these issues. It was free. It was anonymous, so no one could tell if you were a new user or not, and cliques weren't an issue. There was almost no moderation outside of illegal stuff. The SA community was also very anti-anime, which meant you weren't welcome to be a weeb anywhere other than the dedicated subforum (ADTRW).

So then 4chan gets huge. It's overwhelming for the average person. There's just too much content to sift through. Some of that content is too shocking for the average person. Posting/contributing can be harder for some people who don't want to risk being insulted when they think they are following the informal rules.

Early-mid Reddit ends up being a sort of middle-ground between SA and 4chan. It's free. It's somewhat moderated. It's curated by users through the upvote/downvote system. You need to register an account to post, but you can make new accounts whenever you want (old Reddit didn't require an e-mail), so you can basically be anonymous if you want to. You can further curate and filter content with subreddits. The shocking content is still there for those who want it.

Then Imgur ends up becoming Reddit for people who primarily use mobile devices and don't like Reddit's UI. But the communities exist alongside each other.

A bunch of old SA posters go to Twitter, because it turns out the average Western internet user finds SA posting and humor funny, and the biggest motivation for FYAD shitposting was always attention and building up your "brand". They inadvertently start what becomes known as "weird twitter". SA-style shitposting has now become the standard posting style for people who "get" Twitter.

Between Reddit, Twitter, and Imgur, there's now enough ease of access for your average internet-savvy person to be exposed to a unified Western internet culture, with the flow being 4chan -> Reddit/Imgur -> Twitter, and then Twitter leading to exposure through media like TV, online "journalism", etc..

Your comment hit me like a brick to face. Nostalgia panic. Your writing style is great, btw.

> I remember people would find online obituaries and organize raids on the family of the deceased, in one instance tormenting the parents of a deceased child with prank phone calls. People would live stream their suicides and other people would watch them and actually egg them on in the chat

It must have been extraordinary to watch sociopathy being mainstreamed in real time. And surprising that the hammer has not yet been brought down on its origin.

You mean when that massive corporation slapped that massive international brand skin on that already extremely successful mobile game that they then furiously spent tens of millions marketing and press releasing months before release and months after?

That's more in the line of waiting in line for days for Return of the Jedi to come out than the early days of 4chan.

It's pretty obvious he's liberal, if you understand the word in its original meaning and not the current mainstream distortion (== leftist)

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