How the Internet Left 4chan Behind | The anonymous forum thrived when edgelord content wasn’t acceptable on more mainstream social media. Today, it can be found most anywhere.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-the-internet-left-4chan-behind
29 Comments
Checked back after 10 years to the board I used, and it’s just porn now.. Plus you have to wait 10 mins before you can post and need to sign up with an email LOL
The internet didn’t leave 4chan. 4chan leaked out and overtook the internet.
The base awfulness just spread across the internet, made worse by covid. Sociologists will have years of work to breakdown studies from that time and the society we live in now.
Back in the day people would say the most awful things with the blanket of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Now they’ll do it with their full name attached and blame the other person for taking it personally. Once people saw the world as their grievance punching bag they stopped accepting the societal social contract.
Part of the enshitification process is to make people shittier too….and it’s working. We’re mainstreaming/normalizing toxicity, and our society and politics are showing the effects of that.
Yea i remember browsing b and x back in like the 2010 to 2012 era, it felt like you’d always see something interesting that you couldn’t see anywhere else. Nowadays if you go to b literally 80% or more of the threads are just boring porn or gooner threads. The rest are of no substance. Maybe it was like that back then too and I just don’t remember but I really feel like there was way less porn back then and more interesting stuff.
4chan is a place where a neonazi can say whatever the fuck he wants and you can say whatever the fuck you want to that neonazi.
facebook is a place where your dad goes to connect with family and becomes more and more bigoted until he can watch elon musk sig heil and still defend everything he says or does and if anybody says anything to him they are likely to get censored, especially at the point of providing links in an essay. facebook censors hate when you cite sources.
so in my opinion, 4chan is a better ideological place than facebook and i mean that with no hyperbole.
Still plenty of wannabe degenerates hanging out over there
I use 4chan daily. I use /vg/ as it’s much better for discussion on games then Reddit. On here everyone complains and it’s so annoying. On 4chan it’s more focused.
This article is old
What kept 4chan OK was the anonymity. You couldn’t get famous, you couldn’t get clout, you couldn’t *monetise* it. Now you just say the n-word to a child and get donated half a million dollars.
4 chan in 2005 was the pilot program for life in 2025
I say this all the time
Engagement algorithms mimic forum bump engagement. Trolls post rage bait, people feed them, rage bait gets fed to more people by the algo, repeat ad nauseam.
Before, when we had control of our content feeds, shit takes were put down properly by the few people in their circles that saw them. So 4chan was the refuge where that shit take can get claps from other chuds and trolls, while getting bumped over and over by the triggered.
X is pretty damn close now a days. More than other sites.
Yeah and kiwifarms is left behind, too.
*eyeroll*
Author is an idiot. The internet is more sanitized and over modded than ever
Edgelord content thrives? People are self censoring, so I don’t think that’s necessarily true…
People left once it leaked they were tracking and fingerprinting worse than Facebook.
At the root of all the memes on the Internet are other memes. It’s kind of how artwork evolved with people digesting the artwork before them and improving on it somehow.
That’s what happened with 4chan. 4chan is the bedrock on which almost all memes, even to this day, are built on. So much of our current culture as a society is based on 4chan that it’s actually kind of scary having been on the ground floor when it started.
I can be scrolling on Instagram or any other social media and almost every other post is something that people think is “cool,” but started off as a joke on 4chan.
It was that powerful.
4chan was fun as fuck but it low-key ruined my life.
Hello /b/ros
people who don’t use 4chan complaining about other people who don’t use 4chan while 4chan users talk about video games on blue boards
As someone who was alive from the dial-up era to broadband and now, the rest of the internet is what 4chan used to be, and now main boards 4chan is basically just intelligence agency psy-op campaigns, slide threads, and bots.
I stopped going there after QAnon disappeared. Not because QAnon was there (that was 8Chan/8kun), but because there was so much similar unhinged posting about Donald Dump and his regime. You couldn’t take anything seriously but occasionally you would learn things: 4Chan was the place I learned the named Ronald Watkins, in regards to QAnon. It was believed that he knew or was helping the QAnon writer (which turned out to actually be the Watkins son and dad). But QAnon busting wasn’t the reason I stopped going there
I regularly went to 4Chan from like 2010 all the way to 2016, then sporadically from 2016 to 2022. The most vile and negative stuff on there was undeniably the CSAM. Sometimes it would randomly appear other times it would be in forums you could avoid. After a while, it just creeped into comments and you couldn’t feel right even browsing the forums. Sometimes it was edgy kids posting pictures as some kind of trolling thing, other times it was attempting disguise under “Art” or whatnot, then occasionally there would be outright abuse images. Like, I would not go to that site without TOR and a VPN anymore if I were specifically looking for a post or a forum like /vg or /pol. Browsing is just Russian Roulette, you might go for a while without seeing it and then BAM, some image in the comments that makes me gag and dry heave. It’s not worth the damage to my mental health to go to 4Chan anymore.
That site has turned into a government psyop.
I mean 4chan culture has literally shaped reddit culture. You can’t be wrong here. You will immediately be mocked or cursed out for being wrong. You’re ostracised if you don’t like x. Edgy content goes to the top. Group think echo chamber hivemind boards. Reddit is just 4chan but way worse. At least 4chan will never ban you for having a dissenting opinion.
The clowns in the back of the class, who wanted school life to be just as chaotic and foul as their home lives, managed to turn the entire town into shitpost central.
And at least a few of them are starting to wonder why everything sucks even more than when they started being awful people.
The really dangerous content is posted on X nowadays and reaches millions of people instead of the few thousand on 4chan. I am surprised that not even at least the EU has banned it, there seems to be no moderation whatsoever.
Most people have only ever visited or heard of /b/ and so base their entire opinion of 4chan from there. There are so many boards that have their own histories and traditions, generals that have been running for over a decade that people have no idea about. Also in regards to politics, you’ll never change someone’s mind through an online argument, but I see far more honest ideological arguments just in some random general on /vg/ than I ever have on Reddit.
It didn’t leave 4chan behind, the internet *became more like it*. There’s a difference.