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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   31685 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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All 4Chan boards have been down since Monday evening in an apparent cyberattack. Rumors circulating the 4Chan refugee community in the Down Detector comments section indicate that the site was penetrated by hackers approximately one month ago. The damage inflicted was extreme. Statements by 4Chan’s (strictly unpaid) janitorial staff indicate the site could be down for weeks. Hope is rapidly dimming that the site will be back at all.

There are a number of both ideological and state actors that could be responsible for the attack: the Israeli Mossad, the Ukrainian SBU, the American Central Intelligence Agency, any number of Democratic Party functionaries. But at this time the provenance of the attack is unknown, and no one has taken credit.

What is also unknown is the political ramifications of the Id and meme generator of the internet being abruptly taken offline. Almost all memes on the internet originate from 4Chan and without it, the wellspring of internet creativity and culture will die with it.

Also unknown is what the effect will be of hundred of thousands of Chan refugees migrating across the internet. 4Chan is well known as a containment unit and gulag for the most dangerous ideological elements on the internet. The level of weaponized autism that stands to escape can only be equated to a earth shaking digital Chernobyl.

The final unknown and most troubling question is whether coffee is in fact good for you.

I wonder if 4chan getting hit by the bus will enable some innovation in the anonymous posting space (like how Futaba Channel/4chan's direct Japanese template first flowered as a replacement when 2ch/its text-only predecessor went down), or the whole concept was just waiting for its overdue demise. Any interesting alternatives to watch?

This is why there should be an open source maintained posting space. Private posting boards and social media never need to innovate since they have a significant moat due to network effects and thus face little competition.

We had the perfect fora in Usenet, and then everyone decided to just give up and hand over the keys of discourse to silicon valley and the US government under the guise of a marginal usability improvement.

Well, there is 8chan/8kun, which was founded over a decade ago by a guy who thought 4chan was over-jannied

Right, I'm reasonably familiar with them but wasn't terribly impressed. They only really brought the "anyone can make a board" thing as an innovation, nothing about the posting system itself apart from some QoL improvements that had accumulated on altchans over the years. Compare to how 2ch->Futaba involved the addition of images.

They were hacked by a Soyteen from Soyjack.party, as @Eupraxia said, not a state actor. The hacker restored the /qa/ board, which is where their site culture originated from and whose deletion caused them to move. This KF thread has a good overview on what their site culture is about. It is... weird, so be warned, but very funny if you enjoy schizo humor. They're well-known for raids of other imageboards, so this type of hack is only unusual for its scope.

This rDrama thread has more information on the hack and here's showing the hacker posting about how they did it.

I'm always amazed at how Ongezellig pops up everywhere, even though it's a minor canceled series with only 2m YouTube views.

There are a number of both ideological and state actors that could be responsible for the attack: the Israeli Mossad, the Ukrainian SBU, the American Central Intelligence Agency, any number of Democratic Party functionaries. But at this time the provenance of the attack is unknown, and no one has taken credit.

From what I understand, the hack that took down 4chan (a 10 year old security vulnerability in what files they allowed people to upload) was way too stupid to have been a state actor. By which I mean, it would have been effortless for a state actor to have taken 4chan down at any point. There is no reason for them to do it now. So instead I'm more willing to chalk it up to random belligerence.

If details of what the hack revealed are remotely true, it seems like 4chan was co opted by state actors anyways. Lots of moderation and bans nipping at the edges of "noticing". Lots of .gov and .edu addresses on record. There is a sense that there were forces trying to sheep herd 4chan gently closer to The Message.

Adding on to @grognard’s comment below, I recall hearing that the misconception of jannies having .gov emails came from a mocking tweet saying that a number of them had signed up with their “gov names [as in real names] and .edu emails”, which was misunderstood as “.gov and .edu emails”. Then, as the internet is wont to do, this more salacious rumor spread faster than the truth.

No. There are no .gov addresses. There are a few .edu, but not from any particularly connected institution AFAICT. I can DM you the dump list, but it is publicly available. Most addresses are Gmail and even Outlook, with a smattering of ProtonMail.

There are a number of both ideological and state actors that could be responsible for the attack: the Israeli Mossad, the Ukrainian SBU, the American Central Intelligence Agency, any number of Democratic Party functionaries. But at this time the provenance of the attack is unknown, and no one has taken credit.

Or it could be space aliens from beyond the stars which have a Petabit quantum computer. Or the Elders of Zion.

Or it could be that 4chan was just coded sloppily or that they had bad opsec and got owned by some script kiddie who was annoyed with some /b/ meme.

It is extremely common for states to launder cyberattacks through non-state actors. Most of the cyberattacks you see attributed in the news to China or North Korea or the Russian GRU are actually committed by affiliated hacker collectives, not the countries or intelligence units themselves.

Spooks? I find that ridiculous as I left 4chan around '16 after it became clear the site was overrun by various fucked up bots.

But at this time the provenance of the attack is unknown, and no one has taken credit.

…it was the Sharty(semi-NSFW). For those unaware, Soyjack.party (aka. “the Sharty”) is a splinter board from 4chan that broke off around 2020. Since then, its users have gained notoriety for their esoteric, soyjack-based culture and the raiding/doxxing attempts they frequently make against their enemies. This isn’t silencing, it’s fratricide.

/vt/ being down right as Gura retires is a tragedy, but in general the site seems to have been in serious decline for years now. Didn't they get rid of the "unique ips" counter in threads because it showed there were usually only a few people posting?

Previous times there's been a 4chan issue people flooded into refugee/bunker boards, but either I'm out of touch with the altchan scene or there just aren't enough people to notice now.

in general the site seems to have been in serious decline for years now

Kind of sad to see people keep repeating this.

For many hobbies and interests, 4chan is THE biggest public (i.e. not a discord) forum on the internet. Bigger and more active than whatever the corresponding subreddit is. For a lot of more niche video games, the most active community is the corresponding /vg/ thread. /ic/ is the biggest art/drawing forum on the internet. etc.

Didn't they get rid of the "unique ips" counter in threads because it showed there were usually only a few people posting?

Depends on the thread and how active the board is, but for a lot of long-running generals it wasn't uncommon to see 80-90 unique IPs.

Previous times there's been a 4chan issue people flooded into refugee/bunker boards, but either I'm out of touch with the altchan scene or there just aren't enough people to notice now.

A lot of communities are setting up at 8chan.moe.

Kind of sad to see people keep repeating this.

Because it's true. There are some niche topics for which you can't really find similar discussion elsewhere, and I like checking those threads, but I only need to do that once a week at most because of how slow they are.

But as a whole, in order to use the site you need not just an addon to filter like 90% of the threads on the board because they're general that offer no value, or a bait thread, and then once you find a thread you gotta filter another 30% to get rid of the inane shitposting that's easily filtered. Then you need to read the 60% of the other shitposting that you can't filter, and then you're left with something that actually has value.

The quality of almost all the boards is at an all time low. /n/ is almost dead, /g/ is complete trash. /v/ has been trash for a decade.

/lit/ is completely worthless. The only good general on that board was removed by the jannies. /sffg/ isn't quite as bad as the big subreddits for discussing fantasy/sci-fi. But the smaller ones like /r/rational are way, way better.

/vg/ has some good threads on niche topics. But here's the thing, if it's too niche, then it'll get kicked off the board by yet another gacha general. Which means even good threads still have to have some sort of shitposting to fill the dead air, which in turn just lowers the thread quality.

Would I prefer to have a good 4chan alternative with better site design and more attentive moderation over our current set up of having isolated Discords and subreddits and other sites instead of having one site for everything? Of course.

But at this stage of the internet, I don't see how you can grow a community for a site like that. 8chan was built on being for the kinds of people that were kicked off of 4chan, and in turn it means its quality will forever be low.

I still check the 4chan archives regularly because you can find a lot of useful info there, but the site itself is just not worth using for me.

Gamergate continues to be the Franz Ferdinand of Internet history. I hadn't actually noticed many people flooding in to 8chan because til my home boards are hidden by default

Gamergate continues to be the Franz Ferdinand of Internet history.

Yeah. I first discovered /r/shitredditsays around 2012, which was my first exposure to wokes as we know them today (there were precursors before then, but they didn’t quite have the final form they would come to have). But at that time you could still believe the “it’s just a few crazy college kids” meme. Gamergate in 2014 was when wokeism suddenly hit the mainstream and they showed that they had substantial cultural power (ok, maybe not mainstream mainstream, but at least mainstream in the sense that their influence was extending beyond their own curated spaces).

They keep repeating it because it's true.

tg has basically become a sterile shell taking over by various tranny jannies and/or Big Business shills(When you have 4chan of all places defending the female Custodian debacle in Warhammer threads of all places, you know things are fucked up), whereas k has turned into constant Ukraine spam where any bitching about that will have people calling you a zigger.

Now, that doesn't mean that other boards haven't taken up the slack - vt is as schizo as ever - but there's been a significant decline in alot of old boards with nothing to replace it.

It's a really big site. YMMV depending on what boards and threads you go to. As of Monday I had multiple threads across 4 different boards that I would check on a daily basis, and quite a few other boards I would check in on at least once a week.

After all this time it's remained my single favorite place on the internet and I'll be incredibly sad if it doesn't come back.

I would have agreed with you only 5 years ago. I used to browse /tg/ a lot, but the quality on there has steeply declined. Very few stories are posted there any more, and all discussion threads are derailed by posters spamming NoGames or accusing other posters of being Bumpfag. I can't speak to the other boards, but that one used to pump out so much iconic content and has been reduced to a shell of itself.

I used to treasure /tg/ as a creative outlet and source of inspiration. Putting a fresh idea on there got people riffing, shitting-on, and yes-and-ing it for days, in retrospect it was like an LLM with a quirky, rotten, beautiful soul instead of hollow obsequiousness. Made a setting with their help, my content is still on 2d4chan to this day. Ran a quest I never finished. I kept going back to poke the dead cat, hoping it will get up again, but it just posts empty engagement-farming threads.

I was in the middle of refining a short story that really only works in the context of /tg/'s board culture. My feedback on the first draft amounted to "This feels like 2012 again. What happened to us?"

Almost all memes on the internet originate from 4Chan and without it, the wellspring of internet creativity and culture will die with it.

This was true for the longest time, but is it still the case? My impression is that 4chan's influence has been declining the past few years.

You're correct. 4chan was a huge originator of memes back in the 2000s to the early 2010s. Then there was a burst with Trump's 2017 election. But since that, there really hasn't been that much creativity on the site. /pol/ feels like a Facebook group for Boomers at this point. Last time I checked /b/ was like 90% porn instead of say 30-40% it once was.

It's tough. I haven't been a 4chan regular since the 00's, and back then it was easy to think Digg or Reddit were coming up with memes. But if you were in the know, you knew they came from 4chan first. I haven't been to 4chan in ages, and the last few times I tried I found the UI too painful on the eyes. Which is funny because I don't think it's changed at all, but I guess my expectations of a site have. So that said, I could believe twitter is now the fountainhead of memes... but I could also believe they are all stolen from 4chan and I'm just an ignorant normie now.

As far as what I see in Twitter, it does seem that the "meme infrastructure" still seems to run on 4chan (based & cringe, wojak variations, greentext story structure), but newer things like "brainrot" and the like probably come from elsewhere.

Isn't the more specific explanation that memes come from smaller discords/other chats/forums and get forced and amplified on 4chan?

Well, the thing about 4chan when I was a regular user, was the churn. A meme would get posted, and everyone was falling over themselves to make it more potent. The cream would rise to the top, and then break out into the broader internet. It was an amazing incubator for incredibly potent memes. This was largely a product of the size of it's user base, it's anonymous posting, and it being an image board. There were no upvotes or downvotes, just people constantly reposting the best memes on a fast moving and low quality board.

This simply isn't possible anywhere else, either because of technical reasons (ui, account requirements, small user base) or policy reasons (moderation, 3rd party terms of service, etc). If 4chan lost it's place as the black beating heart of the internet, the closest successor seems to be twitter since effectively anonymous accounts just spam bullshit hoping to get picked up by the algorithm. In much the same way 4chan was fast moving and low quality with a huge user base, so is twitter. And the policy reasons twitter couldn't generate 4chan level memes have been removed.

4chan isn't fast moving any more either unless you're signed in (which defeats the entire purpose of being 'anonymous') and the site ultimately died in 2013 when moot picked the wrong side (Gamergate) for whatever reason.

The splinter sites are closer to Reddit where you can just splinter your own board if you don't like whatever moderation, which is a solution, but not necessarily a good one. 4chan's board structure was generally OK though it could have used some better indexing for general threads, which 4chan never evolved a solution to because it's ultimately permanently stuck in 2005 (and the splinter sites aren't better) and the network effect kept it alive.

4chan has survived exoduses before under similar conditions but, again, that was 12 years ago and things are different now.

when moot picked the wrong side (Gamergate) for whatever reason

Luggage Lad was tired of being a cuck and was hoping he could get some from the danger hair feminists in his social circle if he ruined his legacy for them.

Yeah, this feels like an exaggeration. Tumblr was always its own wellspring of memes (though, of course, it might be dying too) and nowadays, TikTok and the like have a lion's share.

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