Opinions on 4chan and chan culture

Iommi Fan 420

Traveler
Joined
May 2, 2022
Messages
65
Reaction score
373
Awards
47
Website
www.fbi.gov
Either that, or some kind of sinister social engineering project.
I recognise that that's a bit of an out there opinion but honestly i've had that fleeting idea before and the points you raise are good.

There's an altchan board with the subtitle of "what the jannies don't want you to see" or something along those lines that has a bunch of leaked information showing some pretty dark shit that goes on within the mod team. Had a total blank and can't find it. Still looking, I'm pretty sure it's somewhat adjacent to this site.
 

LostintheCycle

Formerly His Holelineß
Joined
Apr 4, 2022
Messages
964
Reaction score
3,825
Awards
245
I'll consider the block, thanks for the advice.
If you want to really block it, do this instead of using a browser addon:

If you're on Windows go to folder C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
If you're on Mac or Linux, go to folder /etc/

Open up a text editor with admin privileges, that'll be either sudo nano in a terminal on Mac/Linux, or Notepad run as administrator, in Windows.

Copy paste the following into the document ...
127.0.0.1 4chan.org
127.0.0.1 4channel.org
127.0.0.1 www.4chan.org
127.0.0.1 www.4channel.org

... and save it.

Now 4chan will be completely inaccessible. I've tried this before for numerous things and it works pretty well, better than any website blocker I've ever used, and it's slightly harder to turn off.
Hope you found this helpful.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

Andy Kaufman

i know
Joined
Feb 19, 2022
Messages
1,184
Reaction score
4,781
Awards
209
Take a break from getting psyoped by big tech algorithms on twitter/boomerbook to get psyoped by discordfags on 4chan.
The site is too full of pornography to be anything but brain melting. Even on blue boards like /int/ it's softcore coomer bait non stop. Seeing this much casual porn mustn't be good for the brain.
/qa/ was my favourite board for a while. It was a 4chan board about posting soyjaks. It got invaded by a shitty discord (one of the mods even has a fucking shota image lmao) and psyoped hard with trans stuff. After months of non stop trans threads being pushed down our throat in lieu of harmless wojak shitposting the userbase raided /lgbt/ and the board has been taken down ever since. Was fucked to see a relatively small and pretty innocent board get annihilated by discord trannies. Soyjak.party is more or less the same thing as /qa/ and part of the agora's webring but it's just not the same.
/r9k/ even had a discord that literally blackmailed and groomed it's users in to becoming trannies. Shuaby a man known for being a robot who livestreamed his suicide was apparently a victim of it.
I really wish i was old enough to have witnessed proper early imageboard culture instead of being left with the husk that is post 2016 4chan and alt chans that are generally filled with their own problems.
Funnily enough the first board I posted on was actually wizchan, an irl friend of mine at the time who was also in to obscure shit found the website and our underage minds were blown.
Yeah /qa/ was wild, it's basically been a battleground for outside parties since just after moot held his first q&a there and hiro his first.

The soijack vs tranny thing went so far they eventually LOCKED the entire board. But did you know that /qa/ used to be invisible for quite some time? You could still access it when you entered the URL but it didn't show up on the board list. Boy I tell you some wiiieeeerd shit went down on hidden /qa/. It's too early in the morning for me, I'll reply properly to the thread later when I'm done being a good wagie.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

SolidStateSurvivor

This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy
Joined
Feb 15, 2022
Messages
1,127
Reaction score
5,429
Awards
248
Website
youtuube.neocities.org
I recognise that that's a bit of an out there opinion but honestly i've had that fleeting idea before and the points you raise are good.

There's an altchan board with the subtitle of "what the jannies don't want you to see" or something along those lines that has a bunch of leaked information showing some pretty dark shit that goes on within the mod team. Had a total blank and can't find it. Still looking, I'm pretty sure it's somewhat adjacent to this site.
Sounds interesting, link?
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

Deleted member 4436

Looking back on my previous post made me realize that it was worded poorly, so I'll ammend it here:

What I'm trying to say is that chan culture has reached equal points of both stagnation AND variation from its former self that both old and new users (such as myself) try to distance themself from it.

As for those who do use it currently, I suspect that most of them do it for the following reasons:
-Habit
-Astroturfing
-To fit in with the identity of the "anonymous"/"based schizo" persona after the election

In any 3 of these cases, the current userbase has no desire to innovate or improve the state of the dying community.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Jessica3cho雪血⊜青意

ばかばかしい外人
Gold
Joined
Aug 11, 2021
Messages
1,331
Reaction score
3,243
Awards
236
Website
recanimepodcast.com
4chan sucks now. We get some good content occasionally, but most of it is fictional stories or some silly shitpost that blows up. The golden age of 4chan is gone and I would say that it has gone through the equivalent change of >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk, just in a different political direction.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

Iommi Fan 420

Traveler
Joined
May 2, 2022
Messages
65
Reaction score
373
Awards
47
Website
www.fbi.gov
The soijack vs tranny thing went so far they eventually LOCKED the entire board. But did you know that /qa/ used to be invisible for quite some time? You could still access it when you entered the URL but it didn't show up on the board list. Boy I tell you some wiiieeeerd shit went down on hidden /qa/. It's too early in the morning for me, I'll reply properly to the thread later when I'm done being a good wagie
Please do I'm keen to hear some /qa/ lore. I didn't get in to the board until it was firmly just the 'jak board.

Sounds interesting, link?
Found it. Obsessively scoured the webring but turns out i just had to look in my browser history.
 
I used to use 4chan a lot. I mostly frequented /x/, /v/ (mostly because I was active in the drawfag threads) and /r9k/ though a couple years ago I had an obsession with /pol/. I never really followed lesser known chans but I was active on Tinychan for a while. I've largely lost interest in 4chan after entering this forum.
Chan culture, specifically 4chan culture, is largely a mixed bag in my opinion. Every so often you may find a thread that genuinly interests you but most of the time it's either supposed to be as reactionary as possible or just porn. On /r9k/, I remember two furfags who liked to erp as pokemon in their own threads which I found interesting. I remember the many soyjaks posted regarding the religion and nobody thread flamewars on /x/. I remember this one time when a thread was posted on /pol/ about a guys back covered in holes due to the corona vaccine and the whole website went down for half an hour and I couldn't find the thread afterwards nor could I upload the image. Other than that, you had to dig for a while to find the good stuff most of the time.
 
Last edited:
Virtual Cafe Awards

Andy Kaufman

i know
Joined
Feb 19, 2022
Messages
1,184
Reaction score
4,781
Awards
209
Please do I'm keen to hear some /qa/ lore. I didn't get in to the board until it was firmly just the 'jak board.
Februray 2017. /qa/ was still a hidden board and largely dead aside from a few wierdos hanging out there. For some reason, a bunch of /jp/-Spinoffs decided to raid /qa/. I still don't know how they got past the captcha but they had SEVERAL spam bots, effectively taking that board hostage.
They could flag a thread as one of their own and then a bot would automatically bump it with some gibberish post before it would 404, effectively keeping it alive for weeks.
They also had a "flush" option where a bot would create hundreds of flood threads that would push all unwanted threads (so all those that weren't flagged by their bump bots) off the catalog. With this they basically hijacked the entire board and made it into their own, autistic /jp/ spinoff.
A few anons noticed this and spread the word but it was immediately deleted everywhere else if you mentioned it, I was just lucky enough to see a thread about this a few seconds before it was deleted again.
So then a resistance of 4chan locals formed. /qa/ had no jannies, so only mods had power there and the reason they just let a foreign party run rampant with spam bots is - to this day- unclear to me. I can only imagine they had the mods on their side. But the local resistance kept reporting, kept making threads on all other boards to rally more anons and even started counter raids on their shitty /jp/-spinoffs.
Some anon on /s4s/ also somehow knew how these spambots worked and then it turned into an all out spamwar full of intrigue, gaslighting, and more.
The board was basically unusable for normal people and only those who knew what the fuck was going on even stayed.
Then, after enough reporting and abusing the feedback form and harssig the mods on IRC, 4channers managed the staff to update to the newer captcha. The weeb autismos from their /jp/spinoffs lost, their bump bots became useless.
The fact that this turf war happened under the nose of everyone else still baffles me. If something like the /pol/ cabal could've been mobilised, that would've been fun. But I think social cohesion on 4chan was too low at that point. A united raid fight against invaders was just too much of old internet spirit and zoomers didn't care that THEIR website was being undermined by some /jp/spinoff trannies. Sure, they didn't really do anything outside of /qa/ but for me it was a matter of principle.
Anyway, they lost and went back to where they came from. The listing of /qa/ pushed back the last autists who really really anted their wierd /2Drandom/ utopia on 4chan for some reason.
Then the whole soijack spam followed but that's where I stopped lurking /qa/ and only heard tales of.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

consonant

Traveler
Joined
Dec 24, 2021
Messages
140
Reaction score
317
Awards
55
I'm 27, I first visited 4chan when I was 15 or 16 in 2009 or so. I saw rage comics online and litrally just googled my way back to their origin and found /b/,
It was a unique feel. I have very vivid memories from my first few weeks on /b/. Everything was new, I only knew old bulletin board style forums before that. The interface was wierd, everything was super hectic and language was cryptic. I felt like an explorer discovering a hidden tribe, deep in the jungle with their own language and customs, I was genuinly intrigued what all of this meant.
Rolling quads to defeat ULTRA GIGA NIGGA? Wtf was a baaww thread? Why is everyone afraid of a shovel dog? Why was everyone taken out by candlejack? What's a roody poo and what's a candy ass? Why are we watching a webcam stream of a card stand in New York City and what was "oh-pee" (whoever that was) going to "deliver" there?
It was like a sensory overload and I felt like I just discovered a paralell dimension, far, faaar away from my rural German small town life, where the internet was still seen with scepsis by most.
In the following weeks I took a deep dive, just absorbing everything I could. I just had a lot of fun figuring stuff out. What seemed like an unsolvable mystery at first could be cracked by just lurking enough. The old vs. newfag dichotomy was extremely intense and rigid back then and people actually cared about not sounding like an utter newfag and I remember being actually nervous before making my first post ever. Oh the thrill! The edge and feel of it being "secret" and "forbidden" played a big role.
My sense for discovery dragged me deeper though. It didn't take long for me to find out that 4chan was just the biggest of the imageboards and that there's dozens if not hundreds of smaller ones. Some were just 4chan offshoots like 4chon.net, 7chan or 420chan but there were the many many national equivalents. sosach, Yliauta, karachan, dejimachan, britfa.gs, krautchan, brchan etc. etc. I visited them all and there, to my surprise and utter delight I had the same experience of early 4chan /b/ again: Completely different meme culture and lingo, their own insiders which took weeks if not months to finally uncover. I was basically high on internet culture and finding/learning about these secluded, underground communities filled me with happiness for some reason, it was my way to explore the world and feel like going on an adventure. being able to easily switch my demeanor to hide among the locals after just a few hours of lurking helped in my exploration.

I quickly ditched 4chan as my "homeboard" and went over to KC, the German equivalent. When 4chan scoffed at redditors being the uneducated, lowly outsiders and newfags, 4channers were seen as exactly that on these "deeper" boards. If you arrived there with 4chan lingo and habits, you'd immediately be outed as a filthy, childish 4channer who needs to go back ASAP. And thus my sense of conquering was triggered again. KC became the place of my fondest of memories of imageboard culture (between 2009 and ~2014). /b/ is really hard to explain because it really was strictly German only and the humour and community was a lightning in a bottle. /int/ was even better. A cultural juggernaut, considering gigantic sites like 4chan, >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk and today twitter are shaping most memes but the little international wing of the German 4chan copy birthed many a meme including wojak, countryballs, apu, spurdo, gondola and more. To this day some of these memes float around everywhere on the net and most don't even know what KC/int/ was.
Granted, Yliauta had a hand in many of these but the relationship between Yliauta and KC is another one of those deeply obscure bits of lore from the time back then. I couldn't really describe the dynamic between the two, you just needed to be there at the time.
I could tell many a stories about my adventures. Legendary threads people saved screenshots from for years to come, board raids and special events by the admins/staff, stuff like this.
But also just the every day 24/7 lurking was fun, there'd always be a surprise, a laugh, an insightful post. /int/ really brought people from all places of the world and all slices of life together. I kid you not that I got genuinely good life advice as a teenager there from some 30yo dudes that just shared their life stories and talked to us yunngins.

Then, slowly, change happened. As 4chan got more and more attention, the newfags trickled down to the deeper level of imageboards and they slowly but surely lost their own identity. By 2015, it didn't matter which altchan you vistited, the sheer mass of newcomers almost completely eroded the local cultures and everything read and felt like 4chan. 4chan coining the word cancer for people spreading the word about the place and drawing in too many newfags that diluted the culture was exactly that for the smaller boards. A giant tumor that smothered the identity of alternative imageboards. 4chan was the cancer.
By 2016 with the presidential election in the USA, the final nail was hammered into the coffin. 4chan was overrun by newfags, more than ever before and this wave hit the altchans as well. I can' speak for all of them but KC was basically culturally devastated. 4chan above all. The general tone shifted, too. Politics suddenly became a huge talking point everywhere and now there was no coherent community anymore but just the same fractured americanised politcal lense on the topic like everywhere else in the web. "Shills" were now suspected around every corner and after the election everyone suddenly was a /pol/tard. While I would consider the election and Trump's campaign a gigantic highlight of chan culture because - let's be real - all the memes were big fun and the atmosphere, mood, yes even aura on the day Trump won was magical. It was the last time we did something "FOR THE LULZ!"

Then I kinda just grew up. Not only was I bored from what I saw every day on the chans but I just didn't have the time to mash F5 all day on 3-4 different boards anymore. I also became disenfranchised. By 2017 I felt like barely anyone even remembered the "good old days" (or what I considered them to be). If the statistics could be trusted, among 1000 anons, maybe 1 started lurking 2009 or before. All these people were essentially strangers to me who didn't appreciate the same things, didn't remember the same things, didn't want the same things and whose "good old days" were times were when I already started to miss my "good old days".
2018 KC went offline. Admin just didn't care anymore. It was replaced by Kohlchan, a very cheap copy made by people who came long after KC's glory days and couldn't even try to imitate the glory of KC because they weren't even there to witness it. Both /b/ and /Int/ today are entirely worthless.
4chan's /b/ at this point is also completely dead, reanimated as some eerie zombie. /b/ Wasn't the cultural hub of 4chan anymore. For me, 4chan/b/ was THE entryway to imageboard culture. Now it's just a place where horny idiots dump nudes of their ex gf.
Themed boards like /v/ and /tg/ are a story for another time but in short, they got hit by the same waves.

Today, I just check by now and then, mainly when something big happens like the Ukraine war or an election or something, just because imageboards were always very quick with everything so it just became habit. Especially back then it took the legacy media an hour to even report an event while you could already see unedited photos/videos of everyhting that happened on the imageborads.
Culutrally I feel 100% disconnected from the current, average chan user. They're like little children to me, I can't make sense of what they're saying but I also don't even care.
In 2009 I was the child and the "adults" were talking in too complicated words for me to understand and I wanted to be one of the cool grown ups and thus adapted and learned. Now, I just don't care what the kiddos are babbling about this time. I've seen it all, it's all just repeating cycles, even the memes just fill the same niches every time, they just get a differnt coat of paint.
There is also absolutetely 0 sense of community. It just has gotten way too big. What once was an "us outsiders and lowlifes vs. the world" is now "me vs. you"
It was cool while it lasted. Defintely a unique time that already today some people can't even imagine. Since barely any archives exist from back then if at all, it's also more or less completely lost and word of mouth like mine is the only way to even learn about most of this stuff.

My biggest regret is that I never kept a good and organised folder. In the last 13 years I lurked from several PCs, laptops and later phones and rarely even bothered to transfer my lurk folders so unfortunately there isn't one giant archive of memes and screenshots from the last 13 years of chan experience.

P.S.:
moot leaving 4chan also plays a role I forgot to mention. Admin/Staff involvement was a 4chan staple. 4chan/b/ had so many goofs and special events where moot or the mods decided to do something fun and you'd actually SEE moot and mods post now and then, I remember moot just casually replying to one of my posts one time.
4chan's staff today is like a black box. They have no face, no interaction, no community events, no public bans with funny ban messages anymore. You have this giant imageboard with huge cultural influence (that's waning btw) and you don't even know who runs it anymore. Hiro is like a ghost, the IRC is now hidden and /qa/... well. it's getting late.

Man this is kind of a depressing read and makes me sad that I missed out on a time where 4chan was actually fun. I feel like I felt this kind of shift in culture in my own internet spaces too.

I'm going to be honest, even though it means ousting myself, I have to admit that my only time spent on 4chan was lurking during 2020-2021.
I won't lie I'm this kind of newfag too. Thing is though I've known about 4chan for a long ass time but my mindset was always "don't go to 4chan, you'll become even more of a loser than you are now" lmao. I guess I thought it'd corrupt me and because I'm pretty young and would've been browsing 4chan at an even younger age so I don't think I was too wrong. I remember there were times me and my friends would decide to browse /b/ on rabb.it because "ooo scary internet place" and we'd just see porn and gore and shit so I wasn't really too inclined to visit it more.
But finally in 2020, during the pandemic I got into vtubers and I decided fuck it I've already reached the last rung of loserdom I might as well go on 4chan, so I started going on /vt/ (man I hate that board and having to mention it)

Me being so new is why it makes me so sad to shit on 4chan though, there's no way that when you give people complete anonymity they're destined to just sperg out like twitter users, it just feels like something is missing.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

consonant

Traveler
Joined
Dec 24, 2021
Messages
140
Reaction score
317
Awards
55
I remember this one time when a thread was posted on /pol/ about a guys back covered in holes due to the corona vaccine and the whole website went down for half an hour and I couldn't find the thread afterwards nor could I upload the image.
what the fuck

This is the kind of shit that'll turn me into a schizo
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

consonant

Traveler
Joined
Dec 24, 2021
Messages
140
Reaction score
317
Awards
55
A fellow /vt/ reader. Who's your oshi?
Inukai Purin from Tsunderia
1655229483551.png

I think I've somewhat fallen out of love with vtubers, I used to watch the full streams of multiple but now I just watch hers. It could be because I've become too critical of vtubers because of how they are themselves, or the reputation of them for me has been ruined by /vt/, or just /vt/ itself, but I think I just don't have time for a bunch of streams anymore.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

shinobu

Jack of all trades
Joined
Dec 17, 2021
Messages
356
Reaction score
2,611
Awards
186
I think I've somewhat fallen out of love with vtubers, I used to watch the full streams of multiple but now I just watch hers. It could be because I've become too critical of vtubers because of how they are themselves, or the reputation of them for me has been ruined by /vt/, or just /vt/ itself, but I think I just don't have time for a bunch of streams anymore.
Well, if you ignore the parasocial aspect for a bit, then they're just like normal gameplay+commentary youtubers, so it makes sense not to spend too much time watching full streams. People on /vt/ make it look like a full time job with how obsessed they are.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

Andy Kaufman

i know
Joined
Feb 19, 2022
Messages
1,184
Reaction score
4,781
Awards
209
damn any old geezers remember when you had to type "noko" into the email field?
I just randomly remembered this little bit. And it took me forever to actually acknowledge the catalog. When I started lurking there was no catalog. You started at page one and the 15 threads that were last bumped were all you saw and you just spammed F5 on /b/ to see what would float to page one the next second.

And sage. Sage was core 4chan culture until the faggot mods decided to make it invisible and ban anons for saying they used it.
>it's just a downvote button
except it isn't. 50 sages mean shit when one anon bumps the thread again.

Sorry I'm getting agitated over decade old decisions but I'm still mad. Definitely one of the many puzzle pieces why it all went down the drain.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

Andy Kaufman

i know
Joined
Feb 19, 2022
Messages
1,184
Reaction score
4,781
Awards
209
nokosage hahahaha
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

Andy Kaufman

i know
Joined
Feb 19, 2022
Messages
1,184
Reaction score
4,781
Awards
209
my mindset was always "don't go to 4chan, you'll become even more of a loser than you are now" lmao. I guess I thought it'd corrupt me and because I'm pretty young and would've been browsing 4chan at an even younger age so I don't think I was too wrong
I was more sexually active during my edgy teen years when I lurked 24/7 than I am now..Idk how teenagers do it today but imageboards turned me into the ultimate hipster, especially where I lived. I found memes that took a year to finally jump over the pond and come to Germany (everything was a little slower back then), I found underground bands, movies and vidya through chans because most anons wanted to be different from "normalfags" so I had a very easy time getting with alternative/punk/emo girls because my chan knowledge apparently made me interesting and eccentric which just vibes with some types of girls. Sure if you're already a socially inept outsider, lurking imageboards might not help but I'd argue against them being necessarily a liability. I think today this "underground" and hipster advantage is kinda lost since 4chan itself isn't any of that anymore but back then it made me feel like a super edgy cultural avant garde pioneer who always was two steps ahead of the normies.
Sounds elitist and insufferable?
Yup that was 15yo Andy.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

№56

Self-Hating Bureaucrat
Gold
Joined
Mar 27, 2022
Messages
848
Reaction score
5,162
Awards
253
Website
no56.neocities.org
And sage. Sage was core 4chan culture until the faggot mods decided to make it invisible and ban anons for saying they used it.
>it's just a downvote button
except it isn't. 50 sages mean shit when one anon bumps the thread again.
Sage is a great feature. I wish more forums had a similar way to flag a post or reply as "unimportant." It's great for one-sentence replies that don't merit bumping the thread to the first page, or telling an idiot OP he's an idiot without giving his thread any unwarranted attention. I don't understand why "sagebombing" caught on when the whole point of sage is that it doesn't do anything. Saging a thread has the same effect as not posting anything at all.
 
Virtual Cafe Awards

Similar threads