geriatric-janny

In its earliest years /b/ started prank calling the radio show of nazi Hal Turner, then messed with Stomfront as the conflict widened. There was little activist component to this. They just thought it was funny to rile up people who took themselves very seriously.

I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation. 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting word filters that I can't repeat here without my post getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of hate.

I think very little has changed in twenty years really. Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now, when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant contrarianism.

If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call your son gay until he grows out of it.

I lied about my age and was given janitor access in the mid 2000s. There was a special /j/ board to coordinate on, but it broke relatively early, and you mostly had to hang out in the #janiteam channel on Rizon. I think almost everybody else was underage as well. There was a minimal web overlay that let you delete/escalate posts. You couldn't see people's IPs, but you could see how many outstanding ban requests they had. These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.

We were all offered the chance to become mods in 2010, but moot wanted to see our faces on a Skype call. I thought that was a step too far and just gradually stopped caring after that. Seems like I made the right choice.

On the whole it was barely held together technically and organisationally, mostly run by moot's personal friends, and fun all around. Things were far less serious then.

And the checks arrived on time every month: $0.00

My official association with 4chan ended in 2010, but I still recognise a good third of those names and would wager the leak is legit.

RIP /prog/. One of the most brilliantly idiotic communities to grace the web.

Journalists do this all the time now. They coordinate reporting to manufacture controversy that will hopefully shame advertisers into censoring opinions they find disagreeable.

Most of the time it's a massive cope pulled out of their asses in lieu of any real solution to a societal problem. They've accepted the fact that Americans will not stop mowing each other down with military grade weaponry and have redirected their impotent rage towards cheeky memes instead. I'm sure some French motherfucker has written reams on this sort of phenomenon.

I dunno if it will work on 4chan though. It has always run on an absolute shoestring budget and is not beholden to any demands to grow.

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.

Yeah nah. I think all that radicalisation is more easily explained by America being a terrible country full of miserable people. I thought (re)creating /pol/ was a bad move at the time, but it's very out of touch to blame some naughty anime website for the mess your country is in.

Throwaway. Was involved with 4chan in the 00s. Not ashamed of it, but not proud enough to associate it with my name.

People totally forget about 4chan's textboards, which ran on Shiichan. They're closed now, but even when they were around, nobody would visit them save a couple dozen absolutely insane posters. The militant commitment to stupidity there eclipsed that of its imageboard counterparts. True treasures. None of the even smaller offshoots ever recaptured that flame.

I was still in secondary school when I lied about my age and became a janitor. moot himself was still underage at the time too. I think everybody had access to the admin panel for the text boards, but the interface was so bad, nobody bothered moderating them, even for cool free ringtones spambots.

I haven't bothered with 4chan for a decade now, but it definitely tickles me to see something so purely moronic now so heavily politicised and even feared.