• @tetris11@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    It contained some of the best and the worst of the internet, but its legacy is cemented with its greentexts which explores the sometimes dark and depraved aspects of us all without flinching away from it.

    I believe the website has done more good than harm, but acknowledge that the harm it has inflicted has been targeted and substantial.

    • @SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      163 months ago

      Well, the harm that it did is possibly being one of the catalysts for the modern alt-right movement which directly lead to fascist america so…

      Sure, it wasn’t the only thing, but it sure as hell was a bug part of it (especially during gamergate)

      • @tetris11@lemmy.ml
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        123 months ago

        I’d argue that they were co-opted, rather than spawned it. 4chan was an edgy place pre-2016 sure, but the users there were only half into their conspiracy bullshit. The Q stuff came out of seemingly nowhere and instead of being shot down as the usual bullshit, somehow it was being elevated and promoted. That smells like outside interference to me, but I have no data to back it other than my own bullshit theory…

        • _donnadie_
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          43 months ago

          I think similarly. And 4chan wasn’t the only website affected, it happened to reddit and to pretty much all social networks. It was very drastic, like somebody flipped a switch on the internet that year. You could tell astroturfing was way more intense than usual.

          I’m not sure if I got used to it, but it feels a little bit more mellow nowadays, with flare-ups in key political moments, but 2016 was a 365 day effort.

          • @tetris11@lemmy.ml
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            33 months ago

            It happened here too last US election. I had no idea what was real, and then suddenly - poof - the vocal accounts all quieted down.

        • @PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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          33 months ago

          It was the r/the_donald exodus and I will fucking die on this hill. I was there. I saw it.

          Reddit banned that sub and many of these boomers migrated to /pol/. Trump posting turned from being ironic to legit. You could spot the ever increasing facebook boomer memes and that was also the point where Twitter screenshot posting became the staple of the board. By being pretending to be retarded, /pol/ attracted and amplified actual retards who took over. 2016 is when that board should have been nuked but no one wanted to release the sewage onto other places.

      • @ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        33 months ago

        Somedays I wonder if that was driven by actual rightwing sentiment, or by a desire to just destroy and hack everything. Go back to the days of gaming American Idol to push Sanjaya, or the gags of gaming other polls to like, send Bieber to North Korea or Pitbull to Alaska etc.

        Like, they realized they could do a lot, and just keep finding ways to go even further.

        I look at what TFG is doing nowadays and honestly if it wasn’t a system I depend on to live, it would be easy to mistake him for some kind of grey hat hacker exploiting every single hole he can find in said system in the worst possible way in order to compel people to close them.

        I will say this, too… 4chan’s opintel is completely amazing. The way they were able to track Shia Lebouf’s HWNDU by doing things like… correlating airplane noises with flight patterns is like… beyond next level.

  • @ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    643 months ago

    Hot take, but I dare say 4chan was the source of as much of what’s good in internet culture as it was for much of what’s the worst in internet culture.

    Rickroll, Caturday, the modern meme format, reaction gifs, “TLDR”, Anonymous (well, the good versions of it), spoderman, Rule 34, trollface, rageface, quite a bit of pet abuse justice, … they may have even successfully set back AI chatbots nearly a full decade with their gaming of Microsoft’s Tay chatbot… quite a lot of modern Internet slang such as win, fail, an hero, based, copypasta, creepypasta, “god tier”, lulz, moar, sauce…

    The thing about anarchy is that it brings out both the best and the worst.

      • @PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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        113 months ago

        You think wrong. 4chan’s impact on internet culture late 2000s and the entire 2010s can’t be overstated. And that includes getting Trump elected twice.

        • JackbyDev
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          53 months ago

          I’m extremely skeptical of the first use of “TLDR” coming from 4chan specifically.

          • @PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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            13 months ago

            Yeah not absolutely every meme/slang listed might be originated on 4Chan. TLDR seems to have originated or at least popularized by the SomethingAwful forums, which together with ebaumsworld could be considered the parents of 4Chan (with cross-pollination by Newgrounds?). But 4Chan was the crossroads of all these memes coming together, germinating and spreading to every other site shortly after.

    • Biscuit
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      63 months ago

      For real. It’s an imageboard. Im surprised they don’t nuke it all monthly to start fresh everytime.

    • Fat Tony
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      23 months ago

      And when it does, it’ll be the biggest WE’RE SO BACK ever!

    • teft
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      93 months ago

      There is zero good on 4 chan. Never has been, never will be.

      • @KoalaUnknown@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        4chan, particularly Anonymous, has definitely done good before:

        • Project Chanology
        • Operation Payback
        • Arab Spring Support
        • Breach of HBGary Federal

        and more

      • @Trihilis@ani.social
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        63 months ago

        There were some okay boards like /a/ and /vg/. The rest was pure trash. I used to play warframe and world of tanks and /vg/ had a pretty decent thread (but that was like 10? Years ago) where you could find other players and discuss builds.

        /a/ was okay but as soon as reddit (which i stopped using too) had a decent anime community i left from that too since it was mostly shitposting.

        Unironically /g/ sometimes had some good threads for recommending used laptops.

        The past 5? years I barely visited it since every single board became a breeding ground for hate speech, trolling and shitposting. I checked time to time if things became better but nope. I decided it was better to just check reddit (and now lemmy) communities that highlighted the funny posts.

      • @PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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        13 months ago

        Yooo that’s like, your opinion man. I’ve often encountered some legit amazing stuff there. It really is the place where 80IQ and 120IQ people mingled, with the 120IQ people pretending to be retards and the 80IQ people pretending to be smart.

    • Fat Tony
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      3 months ago

      I once read on 4chan: “One cannot hope without suffering.” One of the realest shit I’ve ever read.

    • @stoly@lemmy.world
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      23 months ago

      I very much believe that there was a very short period when it first opened when it was all innocent. Then all the edge trolls took over.

      • The_Decryptor
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        53 months ago

        moot created the site in response to lowtax banning hentai on Something Awful, I’m not sure I’d call that “innocent”

  • Hikuro-93
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    333 months ago

    It definetly was the platform ever. Like, no doubt about it.

  • @MidsizedSedan@lemmy.world
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    303 months ago

    There was already an empty space when liveleak went under. If 4chan is gone for good, then theres nothing exciting on the internet left. Everything PG and corporate.

    • @markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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      343 months ago

      Yeah I legit think this is a bad thing. 4chan was bad for society but IMO it’s less so than mainstream social media. To get radicalized on 4chan you have to wade through some truly despicable shit right off the bat, where there is this friendly veneer on mainstream Internet that makes it seem safer and less horrifying even though the same underlying filth of human nature powers it all. If you encounter far right ideology on 4chan, it’s stripped of all of the edifices of respectability and it’s clear that what it is is raw unfiltered hatred. If you encounter it on Tik Tok it’s just another political viewpoint because they’re not allowed to show their true colors.

      • @PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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        53 months ago

        I don’t know. It’s better here than Reddit which is why I drop by. But I think jannies here get ban happy when I break out the N word to basically say hi or close every statement with a request that the person I’m responding to may please kill themselves. Not the same.

  • It had some of the absolute greatest and the most depraved the internet had to offer. In my opinion Pepe is the greatest representation of 4chan, it can both easily be used for wholesome purposes or it can be extremely racist. It certainly left the greatest impact on the internet out of any website which is kinda funny because they were never relatively large. Now theres a 4chan shaped hole in the internet, and I hope its not filled by them flocking here.

    • @vxx@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      When was the last time 4chan has used its strenghts for good, or was wholesome in any way?

      It got to be a decade

  • @stinky@redlemmy.com
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    163 months ago

    Why on earth wouldn’t you use the correct meme for that last panel? “4chan was never good”

  • slingstone
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    153 months ago

    So you’re saying Tumblr actually won all these years later?

  • @KulunkelBoom@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Is 4-chan gone? gasp!?! goddammit. Don’t ‘they’ realize how many assholes and degenerates this will dump on the internet? Myself included?

    • @Clbull@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Hacked by a rival image board, all its moderators, janitors and premier users who made accounts have been doxxed.

      The new owners who bought it from Moot in 2016 legitimately never updated the backend… The server was still running on a nine year old version of FreeBSD and PHP.