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Comment by curuinor | Hacker News Reader

Someone on twitter was talking about the Franz Ferdinand insane ripples of the man's decision to ban anime pornography on his site:

1. He bans it

2. One "moot" was then currently showing around his futaba channel clone "4chan" and not getting many bites

3. The pornography-obsessed people decide to abscond to 4chan en masse, determining the culture of /b/ and all that

4. This leads to the proliferation of fascism and other foolish ideology in /b/ and eventually to the quarantine zone, /pol/

5. Someone starts posting as "qanon"

6. A depressing number of people start believing in that crap

7. Many depressing things

e: looks like 4chan also has a banner for the occassion:

" RIP Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka

Our dad who disowned us"

which one would surmise would also describe moot. Who wouldn't disown 4chan if it was created from their actions?

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>Who wouldn't disown 4chan if it was created from their actions?

Coincidentally, the current owner of 4chan[0] happens to be the original owner of futaba channel (2ch), so the answer to that question is one Hiroyuki Nishimura. Also, I am sure that a significant portion of imageboard users feel satisfied by the chaos they have sown; they aren't disgusted by it, they really lust for it, and that is how they have always been.

[0] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2015/09/23/4chan-s...

Very interesting how according to 4chan critics the website sown chaos and ignorance when they do exactly that. hiroyuki was never associated in any way to Futaba Channel.

> Also, I am sure that a significant portion of imageboard users feel satisfied by the chaos they have sown; they aren't disgusted by it, they really lust for it, and that is how they have always been.

/b/tard here. Can confirm.

There was a lot of well-founded animosity towards SomethingAwful in the early days of 4chan. How could you respect anybody who paid money to talk to people online? It was so contrary to the spirit of the internet.

SA's brand of snarky balding catfather humour lives on in so many facets of culture, and they all suck hard. Most of Twitter and Reddit were colonised by it. Almost all garbage American comedy seems tinged by it too. Looking past the hysterical headlines about 4chan, SA may have ultimately been the bigger setback to online culture.

You mean neckbeard culture? What other types of online comedy were there, The Onion and Modern Humorist?

The unfunny "redditor" snark based humor comes from The Oatmeal or Joss Whedon or something. SA had epic bigpeeler story threads back in the day, but it wasn't really the same thing. You need upvotes to create the real high levels of cringe posting.

Interesting thing is, Qanon isn't even 4chan at its most activist, there was Anonymous and all of its ops:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(hacker_group)

And Qanon isn't even /pol/ at its most politically active, given how they rode the memetic wave into the 2016 elections.

While there might not be a direct material connection between 4chan and r/wallstreetbets, the latter's culture was certainly shaped by the same posting style as 4chan- so perhaps a good deal of meme stock activity in the past two year is also distantly descended from Lowtax's decisions.

QAnon isn't even really a 4chan meme, at least not for a while and not at the Jan. 6 peak of its fervor. The "official home" of QAnon has been 8chan/8kun for years, since shortly after the meme's first appearance [0]. Several jouranlists believe the 8chan owner and his son to be the main users of the QAnon account [1][2][3]. There's a contingent of regular QAnon posters on /pol/, but they're regularly mocked as mentally-ill "boomers" who need to "take their meds."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.nl/ron-watkins-the-man-widely-ru...

[3] https://mashable.com/article/q-identity-revealed-hbo-documen...

True, but would there be an 8chan if there wasn't a /pol/?

I forgot to mention that on the other end of the spectrum, a good amount of (extremely online) American leftist culture ("the Dirtbag Left") is also linked to Something Awful, the Chapo Trap House three were either from SA or from the Weird Twitter subculture descended from SA's FYAD subforum.

Certainly there wouldn't be an 8chan/8kun without 4chan /pol/. Simlpy pointing out that it's another newer branch on the SA family tree, one with its own distinct culture and character. As an object of study, I find it interesting as the embodiment of "stuff that's too much for /pol/" in the same way that /pol/ was "stuff that's too much for the rest of 4chan," and 4chan was "stuff that's too much for SA."

The influence of CTH on contemporary American politics is similar in scope to that of a fly farting into a hurricane. A few people around the fringe breathe it, a portion of the left is sympathetic to it, but it has not managed to perform an insane coup on one of the two mainstream political parties, or have its ideas overtake an entire category of mass media (AM radio).

The democratic machine is proving rather resistant to those forms of attacks.

I wonder how much of the Bernie Sanders phenomenon was bolstered by Chapo and extremely online figures inspired by Chapo. Obviously, that's not to say that the Squad nor the post-2016 DSA surge owe anything to them, but they likely contributed towards the popularizing of the left to a certain younger extremely online audience.

> but it has not managed to perform an insane coup on one of the two mainstream political parties

That's also overstating 4chan's influence in the 2016 election.

> overtake an entire category of mass media

Well, podcasts are pretty big now.

I'm not talking about 2016, I'm talking about the crazy shit that has happened since then - most specifically in the tail end of 2020, where instead of dropping Trump like the bad acid trip that he was, much of the Republican party doubled down on qanonsense.

As for Sanders, he didn't win, he hasn't taken over half the Democratic party, and the people in charge aren't even paying lip service to his platform.

Without getting too off-topic, I’d argue that the GOP has always been more flexible towards embracing ideological extremism than the Democratic Party has, and this trend has existed since Barry Goldwater at least.

But back to SA culture and its innumerable offshoots and bastards: even if Chapo has comparatively less actual political influence than say Q did (someone posting on a 4chan offshoot), the dirtbag left subculture the podcast spawned is still of internet historical value, in the same way Anonynous (a 4chan hacker collective) is historically significant despite Anon having been dismantled by the security state since the mid-2010s.

Oh, and on that note- perhaps that means 4chan had some influence on the Occupy movement, not as a prime mover but certainly one of the groups participating in it. And while Occupy is long gone, it had its important moment, once.

On the flipside, later on 4chan was one of the major staging grounds for Gamergate.

At some point 4chan’s actions are its members’ own with no connection to SA, but without SA, there would be no 4chan, and the people who acted within it would’ve been redistributed elsewhere.

The hand of Lowtax moves through history like a dumb idiot god, but it does move.

> Anon having been dismantled by the security state since the mid-2010s.

I thought they just grew up. Any records they were really dismantled?

Seems like it

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anonymous-arrests-fbi_n_37809...

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/07/members_of_an...

Not just left and right, but establishment, too. Eliot Higgins was an SA mod, who got into analysing images out of the Arab spring uprisings after learning that some of his fellow goons had gone there to volunteer for one side or another. He got picked up by the US/UK FP/MIL/INT establishment after his excellent documentation of modified volcano rockets in the Syrian civil war.

I think that wasn't just for his journalism though, but from worry that he might become another headache like Wikileaks, should be start focusing on other conflicts. They groomed him to be a bulwark against less friendly OSINT journalism.

Also a moderator was Vilerat who died in the Benghazi attacks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Smith_(diplomat)

He was mostly in D&D IIRC

I believe crypto came out of the pink sheets / Stocktwits culture, which after the crash in 2017 went back into stocks and rose WSB and meme stocks. It was like stocks -> crypto -> back to stocks in the influence cycle.

> the man's decision to ban anime pornography on his site

For posterity, here's that thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=42...

> One "moot" was then currently showing around his futaba channel clone "4chan"

And this one: https://forums.somethingawful.com//showthread.php?threadid=7...

- porn wasn't the defining feature of /b/

- qanon thing originated on another chan and it didn't have a cult following on /pol/, where people generally lost interest in trump pretty early into his presidency and largely denounced him by the end of it, although for very different reasons than everyone else

If it helps, this timeline is almost entirely wrong. (At best maybe half wrong?)

qanon doesn't exist in a vacuum, the times are weird on many fronts, it crossbreeds outside of SA/4chan

Was beautiful until you started going off the rails in #3.

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