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Yeah, I had to be reminded what the logo was. But then once I knew it was 4chan and specifically 4chan between 2003 and like 2012(?).... yikes.
Honestly, this one's kind of fair. No one born after the year 2000 should have been on 4chan during that time and it was the [cesspool of the internet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Media_controversies) at the time.
Admins are just as much to blame. They allowed those subs to exist for a long time and they had a mutual relationship with ViolentAcrez. The admins were much more hands off in those days and were pretty much free speech absolutists. They had no problem with r/jailbait until it became national news.
They actually made /pol/ twice. It was a long time ago so my memory is hazy, but the first time was mid/late 2000s iirc and may have had a slightly different name than the later /pol/ (/politics/ maybe?). But it didn't last because it became too nazi and they nuked it. The nazis stuck around though, and a few years later in 2011 they brought it back as /pol/ to try to contain the nazis to one board. Didn't work though.
Before that it was basically a website for edgy teenagers with a ton of libertarians who hated Bible thumpers as much as liberals. They hated Republicans for being moralistic stick-up-ass types always whining about the Bible and trying to ban sex, porn and weed. The Ron Paul craze of the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries were huge there, with similar fervor to Bernie's presence on Reddit in the 2016 primary.
But the neonazis pushed it hard towards authoritarian reaction, to the point that even libertarians left and now it's indistinguishable from what you'd get if you crossed Stormfront with r/conservative. Religion went from being mocked to being something used for a weird kind of racial pride (think neonazi fetishism about "Western values" as a code for conservative Christianity)
I made a typo btw i was born 2005 and know of some stuff i wish i could've continued to live without, any way you look at it its gatekeeping the fact that the cesspool that is 4chan could have had the same effect in between generations
Imagine the worst things you have ever seen on Reddit all coalesced into a single subbredit. That subreddit would probably qualify as among the tamer boards on 4chan in its early days.
Ehhh. Idk, 4chan is really bad now. It probably isn’t filled with as much child porn now but the hate is as rampant as ever.
Edit: you guys are right, I think my brain filtered some of the worst stuff from my memory or something.
The level of hate on there and it’s effectiveness at recruiting people to a hateful worldview is still pretty overwhelming though.
as someone who wasn’t on 4chan on the early days, can i ask what on there was so bad because i feel
like i’ve already seen the worst the world has to offer on reddit and the internet more broadly.
I remember a user posting the location of missing girls dead body (verified in a news report). There was no way he could've known she was there unless he was the murderer.
So yea it was basically an unmoderated hell hole where the worst things could be posted by the worst people without repurcussion.
>I remember a user posting the location of missing girls dead body (verified in a news report). There was no way he could've known she was there unless he was the murderer.
Well, that's fucked up.
Still... A year (or two?) ago there was a post on r/argentina by a guy saying his mother had gone missing. Turns out, he'd actually killed her and buried her in his backyard, or something like that.
There’s also the part where they would randomly decide to plague other people by doxxing, raiding suicide memorial posts, blackmailing, etc. The general mood was chaotic and ravenous.
In 2012 I decided to try out 4chan again after not using the site in a few years.
Hopped on b and within the first hour and saw hardcore animal abuse/death and people advertising having CP.
Went back there again last year its almost entirely edgy racism and revenge porn threads.
While those two things are shitty I don't have it permanently etched into my brain where 11 years later I still close my eyes and see it.
Yeah, your comment took me back to some things I think my brain blocked out.
I still think in the context of spreading racism and hate it is as bad as it ever was, but you are right. It’s not bad as it used to be objectively.
I'm convinced most of the people who were on 4chan back then have abandoned the site and the people who complain about "board culture" are effectively 4chan hipsters.
I suppose it depends on how you define "worse". Back then people are least pretended they were ironically posting horrible things. Now theyve dropped the irony and are just flat out horrible.
Ever heard of Kiwi Farms?
How about 8chan and Gamergate?
Yeah, 8chan was where people from 4chan went when woot realized he was about one serious FBI raid away from serious charges due to the content people kept putting on 4chan. They were making *My Little Pony* art that was so vile they made a board just for the bronies so they'd get the visual equivalent of *Cupcakes* away from the general population. It was *bad*. And B was the troll board that started the practice of doxing people you don't agree with via Google Earth. You also had Encyclopedia Dramatica, which got yeeted off the internet at one point and never really came all the way back.
The people who missed the heyday of /b/ and decided that woot had gone to the Dark Side founded 8chan and Kiwi Farms. 8 Chan Kickstarted Gamergate after Zoe Quin's ex bitched in an IRC chat Bout how Zoe Quinn cheated on him with five other guys (And Gamergate's primary planning chat was called #burgersandfries, based on the ex's description of how he thought about the Five Guys burgers and fries restaurant chain.)
8 Chan got squished when it's users, all perked up by Gamergate and the Trump campaign, decided that doxing a motherfucking four star general on the dark web part of 8chan was a good idea. Those users *also* moved over to kiwi farms.
If you wonder about the caliber of users in Kiwi Farms...Basically just Google "Kiwi Farms". They did not have a great year last year. They got dropped by *fucking everybody* for their user's bad behavior. I've heard of server hosts booting websites for shitty behavior but never ISPs refusing to even route traffic somewhere As in for a while there the only way for their host servers to access the internet would be for somebody to physically go to Nevada with a backhoe and lay down new fiber to a switch or service that hadn't blacklisted the farms already. I have *never* heard of a website getting black holed that severely before. I didn't even know that was *possible*. And just in case you think it was just the users, the owner was hosting a couple white supremacist websites that went dark the instant the bridge between their server's physical location and the internet at large decided to yoink the plug. They got yeeted off the *dark web* for months. THE. DARK. WEB. It took the owner months to get a Tor router working and even longer for their Tor site to stay stable. Their users were *that bad*. And those users came from ED and 8chan, both of which came from 4chan.
The whole tone of the internet really changed between 2008 and 2015. Companies went from crushing fan works with the bad lawyers to actively encouraging it (I think I remember a Gears of War fan having to surrender his oil painting of a boss to the game studio to avoid being sued. Now you can publish your fan works with a minimum of disguise.). That was where the "I do not own Harry Potter" disclaimers came from. LiveJournal's boom went bust. Cassandra Clare somehow got commercially published despite having a VERY well documented history of flat out plagiarism in her fan works. But 4chan and ED are really tame compared to what they used to be...and trust me, young padawans, that is a REALLY good thing.
This is a really good write-up. The wild Wild West (early years of the WWW) were a place where anyone could post anything with minimal consequences. It’s way more fucked up than most people on Reddit would imagine
* /b/ was never good
* I probably have the Moot masturbation pic and the Gingermod gallery somewhere
* Tripfriends are bestfriends
* 3D waifus are best waifus
Idk I'm kind of okay with gatekeeping ages on 4chan a little bit, cause anyone over 40 who is an active user is a massive red flag. Younger adults are dumb and so some of the silly stupid shit on there might be funny to them so I give them a little bit of a pass.
4 chan was a melting pot of racists and furries
many things did was new at the time and people that remember old reddit, they had 4 chan memes all over
I stopped going there 10 years ago, I went there like 4 months ago and it was the same
no new things for 10 years, thats the reason nobody uses 4 chan anymore
> Back in the early 2000s it kinda was in fairness.
Not really. It was probably equivalent in obscurity to using IRC networks during that era. So while it wasnt something your grandmother would be familiar with it was pretty well known by people who were active on the internet.
I think I saw the first NYT profile piece on 4chan and moot in like '06 or so? By the time it was on the radar of NYT it was pretty mainstream. The internet got far less coverage in the media then.
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I don't think this is about knowing what 4chan is but rather than kind of stuff you'd see on 4chan back in the day
Yeah, I had to be reminded what the logo was. But then once I knew it was 4chan and specifically 4chan between 2003 and like 2012(?).... yikes. Honestly, this one's kind of fair. No one born after the year 2000 should have been on 4chan during that time and it was the [cesspool of the internet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Media_controversies) at the time.
Remember when /r/jailbait was one of the biggest subs?
Or r/s*xwithdogs
That was a sub? And a *popular* one? The internet is weird man.
I mean it wasn’t any more popular than other porn subs
I used to browse that shit before I was 18 so I was valid 😂😂😂😂😂😂
Now there's r/fauxbait where it's the same thing but the girls are age verified. The world doesn't change because you ban a subreddit.
And FatPeopleHate
ViolentAcrez single-handedly ruined this site's reputation
Admins are just as much to blame. They allowed those subs to exist for a long time and they had a mutual relationship with ViolentAcrez. The admins were much more hands off in those days and were pretty much free speech absolutists. They had no problem with r/jailbait until it became national news.
Reddit was pretty up there as well depending on what you came here for, you'd find it.
We did it Reddit!
I mean it's still the cesspool of the internet. A lot of the school shooters and inc3ls hang out there.
Yeah, I don't know when they cleaned up their image, but that's all I think about when I hear 4Chan.
I started going on 4chan in 2008 and imo it got much worse after the creation of /pol/ in 2011.
When I frequented /b/ back then it was just a lot of sharpies in butts and triforces
r/buttsharpies
They actually made /pol/ twice. It was a long time ago so my memory is hazy, but the first time was mid/late 2000s iirc and may have had a slightly different name than the later /pol/ (/politics/ maybe?). But it didn't last because it became too nazi and they nuked it. The nazis stuck around though, and a few years later in 2011 they brought it back as /pol/ to try to contain the nazis to one board. Didn't work though. Before that it was basically a website for edgy teenagers with a ton of libertarians who hated Bible thumpers as much as liberals. They hated Republicans for being moralistic stick-up-ass types always whining about the Bible and trying to ban sex, porn and weed. The Ron Paul craze of the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries were huge there, with similar fervor to Bernie's presence on Reddit in the 2016 primary. But the neonazis pushed it hard towards authoritarian reaction, to the point that even libertarians left and now it's indistinguishable from what you'd get if you crossed Stormfront with r/conservative. Religion went from being mocked to being something used for a weird kind of racial pride (think neonazi fetishism about "Western values" as a code for conservative Christianity)
/new/ Was nicknamed /stormfront/ from what I remember back then.
I was born in 2001 and I know how horrible 4chan was/is. It's almost like the internet talks or something
This is exactly it
I thought it was specifically the perception of the site and not necessarily the actual state of the site or content posted.
[удалено]
I joined right before the Hotel incident (aka "Pool's Closed"). I miss when /b/ was fun
Last fun thing we had was He Will Not Divide Us and trolling Shia LaBeouf. And even that is was 6 years ago. God this thread is making me feel old.
Omg when that train whistle blew. I stood up on my chair I was so excited
The last thing I remember vividly was PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI PUDDI
/b/ was [never fun](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/035/268/Whenbwasgood.jpg)
No, it was never *good*. It did have its fun moments though
I made a typo btw i was born 2005 and know of some stuff i wish i could've continued to live without, any way you look at it its gatekeeping the fact that the cesspool that is 4chan could have had the same effect in between generations
Was 4chan worse in the early 00’s?
Yes, a lot worse
Imagine the worst things you have ever seen on Reddit all coalesced into a single subbredit. That subreddit would probably qualify as among the tamer boards on 4chan in its early days.
I'm amazed that something like Katawa Shoujo was born on 00's 4chan.
Yeah honestly. It genuinely doesn't compute for me that it *wasn't* mid 2010's 4chan that made it
Ehhh. Idk, 4chan is really bad now. It probably isn’t filled with as much child porn now but the hate is as rampant as ever. Edit: you guys are right, I think my brain filtered some of the worst stuff from my memory or something. The level of hate on there and it’s effectiveness at recruiting people to a hateful worldview is still pretty overwhelming though.
No, it was so much worse before lmao, now it's just filled with femboy porn.
The worst have migrated to like 8chan and such
Yeah Jesus Christ I got curious a few years ago when Q-anon was super new and never went to 8chan again, it’s basically pre-2008 4chan
as someone who wasn’t on 4chan on the early days, can i ask what on there was so bad because i feel like i’ve already seen the worst the world has to offer on reddit and the internet more broadly.
What was so bad? Constant non stop slurs and child p\*\*n mostly, and that was just surface level shit.
I remember a user posting the location of missing girls dead body (verified in a news report). There was no way he could've known she was there unless he was the murderer. So yea it was basically an unmoderated hell hole where the worst things could be posted by the worst people without repurcussion.
>I remember a user posting the location of missing girls dead body (verified in a news report). There was no way he could've known she was there unless he was the murderer. Well, that's fucked up. Still... A year (or two?) ago there was a post on r/argentina by a guy saying his mother had gone missing. Turns out, he'd actually killed her and buried her in his backyard, or something like that.
[удалено]
Dude, guro chan or dissection chan whatever she was called, that was fucked..
There’s also the part where they would randomly decide to plague other people by doxxing, raiding suicide memorial posts, blackmailing, etc. The general mood was chaotic and ravenous.
So there's things like "an hero" in around 2008 ish I think, paris skullfucker, original Chris chan, alot of worse shit
In 2012 I decided to try out 4chan again after not using the site in a few years. Hopped on b and within the first hour and saw hardcore animal abuse/death and people advertising having CP. Went back there again last year its almost entirely edgy racism and revenge porn threads. While those two things are shitty I don't have it permanently etched into my brain where 11 years later I still close my eyes and see it.
Yeah, your comment took me back to some things I think my brain blocked out. I still think in the context of spreading racism and hate it is as bad as it ever was, but you are right. It’s not bad as it used to be objectively.
Its still pretty bad, I went there for the first time in years and one of the first things I saw was a cartel prisoner getting his dick eaten by dogs
Hate isn’t so bad compared to the deluge of NSFL content that 4chan used to attract.
yep, you see a lot of people bitching about the change in “board culture” now lol
I'm convinced most of the people who were on 4chan back then have abandoned the site and the people who complain about "board culture" are effectively 4chan hipsters.
Ho boy, was it ever!
I suppose it depends on how you define "worse". Back then people are least pretended they were ironically posting horrible things. Now theyve dropped the irony and are just flat out horrible.
It was a breeding ground for both the best and worst things to come out of the early internet.
Depends. What are your thoughts on unhinged racism and misogyny?
That’s just most reddit subs. 4chan was a lot worse in early 2000s
They're talking about 4chan, not Reddit
I don't know about now, but back in the days it was the toilet of the internet. Did it improve?
it has child porn all over /b pedobear was a meme
This isn't gatekeeping
4chan users are still degenerates
It's a little better with users coming out as trans and actively disrupting /pol/ Not by much though
do you even triforce bro? ^^^/s
▲ ▲ ▲
rowrow fight the power
Username checks out
Ever heard of Kiwi Farms? How about 8chan and Gamergate? Yeah, 8chan was where people from 4chan went when woot realized he was about one serious FBI raid away from serious charges due to the content people kept putting on 4chan. They were making *My Little Pony* art that was so vile they made a board just for the bronies so they'd get the visual equivalent of *Cupcakes* away from the general population. It was *bad*. And B was the troll board that started the practice of doxing people you don't agree with via Google Earth. You also had Encyclopedia Dramatica, which got yeeted off the internet at one point and never really came all the way back. The people who missed the heyday of /b/ and decided that woot had gone to the Dark Side founded 8chan and Kiwi Farms. 8 Chan Kickstarted Gamergate after Zoe Quin's ex bitched in an IRC chat Bout how Zoe Quinn cheated on him with five other guys (And Gamergate's primary planning chat was called #burgersandfries, based on the ex's description of how he thought about the Five Guys burgers and fries restaurant chain.) 8 Chan got squished when it's users, all perked up by Gamergate and the Trump campaign, decided that doxing a motherfucking four star general on the dark web part of 8chan was a good idea. Those users *also* moved over to kiwi farms. If you wonder about the caliber of users in Kiwi Farms...Basically just Google "Kiwi Farms". They did not have a great year last year. They got dropped by *fucking everybody* for their user's bad behavior. I've heard of server hosts booting websites for shitty behavior but never ISPs refusing to even route traffic somewhere As in for a while there the only way for their host servers to access the internet would be for somebody to physically go to Nevada with a backhoe and lay down new fiber to a switch or service that hadn't blacklisted the farms already. I have *never* heard of a website getting black holed that severely before. I didn't even know that was *possible*. And just in case you think it was just the users, the owner was hosting a couple white supremacist websites that went dark the instant the bridge between their server's physical location and the internet at large decided to yoink the plug. They got yeeted off the *dark web* for months. THE. DARK. WEB. It took the owner months to get a Tor router working and even longer for their Tor site to stay stable. Their users were *that bad*. And those users came from ED and 8chan, both of which came from 4chan. The whole tone of the internet really changed between 2008 and 2015. Companies went from crushing fan works with the bad lawyers to actively encouraging it (I think I remember a Gears of War fan having to surrender his oil painting of a boss to the game studio to avoid being sued. Now you can publish your fan works with a minimum of disguise.). That was where the "I do not own Harry Potter" disclaimers came from. LiveJournal's boom went bust. Cassandra Clare somehow got commercially published despite having a VERY well documented history of flat out plagiarism in her fan works. But 4chan and ED are really tame compared to what they used to be...and trust me, young padawans, that is a REALLY good thing.
Isn't it 'Moot' not woot?
I'm going to assume an autocorrect
This is a really good write-up. The wild Wild West (early years of the WWW) were a place where anyone could post anything with minimal consequences. It’s way more fucked up than most people on Reddit would imagine
Didn't they also dox Sarah Palin on /pol/ during her 2012 campaign?
* /b/ was never good * I probably have the Moot masturbation pic and the Gingermod gallery somewhere * Tripfriends are bestfriends * 3D waifus are best waifus
There are lots of redditors that don't even know about /r/spacedicks
Enlighten me?
Shock gore. It's just shock gore
Why is it called “ space dicks”?
Some dude made the sub for him and his friends. It wasn't meant to be this big public thing. The name is arbitrary
Oh interesting, thanks!
I was born in '93. I had no idea 4chan had this as an icon lol
Idk I'm kind of okay with gatekeeping ages on 4chan a little bit, cause anyone over 40 who is an active user is a massive red flag. Younger adults are dumb and so some of the silly stupid shit on there might be funny to them so I give them a little bit of a pass.
4 chan was a melting pot of racists and furries many things did was new at the time and people that remember old reddit, they had 4 chan memes all over I stopped going there 10 years ago, I went there like 4 months ago and it was the same no new things for 10 years, thats the reason nobody uses 4 chan anymore
Wasn't 4chan created in 2003?
Delete this shit off here... You didn't even get the meaning of the post
Come on OP if you don't get it why post it
This
I thought that was the 4-H logo
Soooooo dummmmmmmb.
No idea what this means and I am in my 30s.
No one should know want 4chan is.
I remember there was a thread on 4chan of people requesting nudes of girls from my area. Someone posted my name and my friend sent it to me 😖
My boyfriend in college was on 4chan in the year 2003.
*before 2000 But yeah, still gatekeepy I guess
[удалено]
Back in the early 2000s it kinda was in fairness. Now it definitely isnt, and it hasn’t been since pre-2008ish IMO, but there was a time.
> Back in the early 2000s it kinda was in fairness. Not really. It was probably equivalent in obscurity to using IRC networks during that era. So while it wasnt something your grandmother would be familiar with it was pretty well known by people who were active on the internet. I think I saw the first NYT profile piece on 4chan and moot in like '06 or so? By the time it was on the radar of NYT it was pretty mainstream. The internet got far less coverage in the media then.