4chan Turns 20
4chan.org
4chan.org
No, you'd have to go back further than that.
By the time 4chan came about, the web was starting to crystalize into platforms, and standard tools and databases had been developed. Design and UX was starting to be important.
At the time of launch, I distinctly remember that my classmates thought 4chan was weird for taking after "primitive" Japanese image boards. (Craigslist, too, was considered dated.)
The early "duct tape" days were the era of EzBoard (1996; before phpBB, vBulletin, and Invision), Flash (1993), Geocities (1994), Angelfire (1996), Lycos (1994), Dogpile (1996), ICQ (1996), early AOL Instant Messenger (1997; before Trillian, Gaim, Libpurple), lots of little IRC clients... lots of CGI, Perl, and C all slapped together. That's when flat file databases were a norm, not an exception.
4chan came around the same time as Digg and Reddit, and in response to some of the platformization that was already starting to happen (Xanga, LiveJournal, and Blogger in ~1999). The machinery and practice of modern web engineering was already falling into place.
Not much has changed, the whole contraption still is, to a frightening extent.
i was there...
It was such a good product.
- Automatic1111's work on stable diffusion, and comfyui
- Leaking llamav1 torrent on 4chan leads to explosion of local models
- GPT4all by old 4chan user/troller Gpt4Chan
- Various uncensored LLMmodels
- Exllama born because a 4chan guy believes he can do faster inference than llamacpp
4chan guys goal of AI is very different from normies .. they are building an AI Waifu and to replace human wives ..
They make some amazing things
So, ok, those guys are monsters, no way around that, but seeing them talk in other contexts, they're also profoundly sad. Trying to name the feeling I'm having, and I think it's pity. I feel pretty much the same about Q people[1]. What the hell happened to you to make your brain this way?
[1] When they're not Congressmen/women/people.
I heard about qanon in news about Trump before I saw it on 4chan
Not to the exclusion of other peoples, you can find plenty of gleeful posts about the brutal deaths of Russians and Chinese, or just simply mocking their societies/industries, at any given time on at least three boards, off the top of my head.
It's a glowie/shill cesspool, not at all authentic.
I found some great friends from 4chan -> IRC channels, we all fell away eventually, but it was a good 15 years of my life.
Now I couldn't even imagine taking to these people. I don't think it's just because I'm older, either.
And I'm only taking about gee
There is literally dedicated anti-Russian thread (/uhg/) on /pol/ and also plenty of anti-Chinese sentiment all over the board, I don't think day can pass without someone making fun of Changs and Zhangs.
Otherwise it's more balanced. /pol/ has both /uhg/ (Ukrainian Happening General; mostly pro Ukraine) and /chug/ (Comfy Happening in Ukraine General; pro Russian). /chug/ as its name implies is more comfy and has anime girls. /uhg/ is quite nasty and mostly posts gore of Russian soldiers.
https://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/442998412
(NSFW obviously)
You can post memes about beheading Chinese people on 4chan and no one will bat an eye.
But 4chan is a piece of history, a piece of the old web from its roots and it’s still going. I don’t use the site myself but I also haven’t heard that they have made any changes to the rules.
You have something to say, whatever that may be, we have a board for you to come and say it. That’s amazing.
Happy Birthday and hope they can go for 20 more years.
That was more 8chan before the NZ mass murder, since anyone could make a board and mod it the way they liked. 4chan is known for having biased jannies who will delete content that goes against their personal agendas. If you report outright racism outside of /pol/ or /b/ it usually gets deleted too.
And a lot of interesting niche threads like the alternative os and alternative isa generals.
Post pic, some text, others do the same, or reply to your post.
That's it. Do 1 thing & do it well (Unix philosophy :-). Reminds me of when Google's UI was praised for being "enter search term here" box on otherwise empty page.
I think there will always be room for sites (or apps) like that. Now, as for how to pay hosting bills etc... ??
https://challenges.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/challenge-platform/h/g/flow/ov1/#[snip]Ideally, a self-hostable instance with an exposed API would be preferred, but the captcha for such an instance would be reverse engineered & subsequently broken, rendering it worthless.
What if Richard Nixon was a good guy, or at least no worse than any other president, but he stepped on the wrong toes, and the deep state took care of him?
[1] like the recent Rotterdam shooter
https://nltimes.nl/2023/09/29/rotterdam-shootings-suspect-ex...
what do you mean by that?
how is it any different on HN?
sure, voting does affect how and what people write, but it doesn't affect the fact that it is practically not possible to establish an identity on 4chan, and that it is still difficult on hackernews, because names of posters do not stand out, and in my own experience it very often escapes my notice if i am responding to the same person as before or to a different one.
i also can not see if a message has been upvoted or what the posters reputation is (unless i go look up the karma points, and count the number of messages and links they posted) so i can't seek out or avoid people or messages based on that. whereas in other forums that information is readily visible with each post, which in turn affects who and what i pay attention to.
on hackernews this results in me focusing on each message by itself just like i would on 4chan, and it is independent of the voting that goes on here. btw, i also read dead messages, which means i even ignore the downvotes and make my own judgement of the message, which further reduces the effect of voting, at least for my person.
another interesting point is that when i first joined hackernews i used to close all my messages with a greeting like a signature, which was not welcome and shows that standing out, which is something that would help establish an identity, is not desired here.
sure there are, but unless you know who they are and what their HN account names are and pay close attention to that name on each message then you won't notice them. and, those people are not famous for their writing on HN.
as far as i remember, reddit used to show awards next to the nickname on each message, so you could easily see who the high quality posters were. this appears to be no longer the case. they still have an avatar though, which can make particular users easy to recognize. neither HN nor 4chan have that.
Off by one.
When people notice that their post IDs start approaching a large whole number, a bunch of people might try to get ("GET") the post with ID, say, 2000000 by timing it
It's not really a marker of anything, just a semi-random event that people have fun with. It's sort of... tolerated, as long as it's infrequent and doesn't cause too much noise
I don't mean this in the "haha isn't it cute I spend so much time on Reddit" way, I mean this in the "I have not chased as many goals or passions as I could've because I was numbing myself with easily-available, low-effort content" way.
See you space cowboy
Oh and Jannies do it for free !
/mu/, /lit/ and /fit/ I still visit occasionally. They have good recommendations.
/b/ was reserved for home, obviously.
I do miss 4chan from back then, but it's also perhaps the best example of how doing something "ironically" for long enough can turn it into your actual belief/personality.
(not saying that's bad. YMMV)