The ability to upload PDFs is expected to return soon, having been temporarily disabled in light of this breach. Our feeds deliver us content; we don’t have to hunt for it. We don’t have to sit in front of a computer refreshing a page to find out whether we’re getting a new cat meme or a new manifesto. The humanness of that era of the web, now that 4chan is gone, is likely never coming back. And we’ll eventually find out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude.
- That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom gutter culture unlike anything else on the web.
- It became a “virus” that “infected every facet” of life, from the “slang we use” to the politicians “we vote for”, he added.
- 4chan, founded in 2003, was originally built as an anonymous hub for internet communities.
- On 4chan you were no one, and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether.
- The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released its new tax brackets and rates for the upcoming tax filing year.
How the Internet Left 4chan Behind
“The free time that 4chan’s development team had available to dedicate to 4chan was insufficient to update our software and infrastructure fast enough, and our luck ran out.” Holderness calls 4chan the internet’s “Wild West” and says its demise this month felt appropriate in a way. The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now. Now may be your last chance to lock in today’s high CD rates. Here are some of the top travel credit cards available right now, whether you’re looking for everyday rewards or luxury benefits. Get rewarded on your everyday essentials, annual vacations, and everything in between with today’s top rewards credit cards.
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- 4chan’s meme content was the “funniest” thing my “14-year-old brain” had ever “laid eyes on”, said Wired’s Ryan Broderick.
- Users also pointed out that before it went down, users on 4chan were at the forefront of investigating the happenings in the El Salvador prisons.
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Is 4chan gone? What happened to the notorious message board
4chan’s “user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy,” Collins says. “Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter, then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official.” I had a front-row seat to the way those timid men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the internet. The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users knew how to speak. I traveled the world in the 2010s, tracing 4chan’s impact on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil as 4chan’s users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyberbullying.
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Then, screenshots claiming to reveal its inner workings began circulating across the internet’s back alleys, TechCrunch reported. The platform became known for its minimal moderation, raw tone, and viral influence on internet culture. While it played a role in meme creation and early internet activism, it also developed a reputation for hosting offensive, harmful, and sometimes extremist content.
“Suddenly, the friendly frog was being given Hitler moustaches and Trumpian combovers by fringe extremists,” said The Guardian, with users pairing the “reluctant mascot with racist, homophobic and antisemitic invective”. From mortgage rates to closing times, learn what to expect and how to protect yourself as a homeowner or buyer. Mortgage rates inched down this week, but they’ve stayed mostly stagnant over the past month.
Walk your group through what’s on your phone or laptop screen in real time with screensharing on video calls. Send detailed event messages in WhatsApp group chats that include the date, time, and venue. Ensure everyone in the group chat feels invited to the party, no matter what phone they use. For better or worse, 4chan documented a raw, unfiltered era of the internet. It captured the web before monetisation, influencer culture, and surveillance capitalism.
Over time, it became a well-known source of internet memes, trolling, and extreme political rhetoric. The site has also been connected to the early formation of Anonymous, the rise of the alt-right, and the spread of nonconsensual AI-generated content. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration. According to PC Gamer, the hacker may have had access to 4chan’s systems for over a year before launching the attack.
As such, while 4chan partially moved to new servers in the second half of last year, key functions were still being taken care of by its old hardware. They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that my phone number was for a GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads. I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game. My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time. There’s a “growing feeling” that 4chan will stay offline, said PC Gamer, and a lot of people feel “maybe” that’s not such a bad thing. A 4chan moderator said that work on restoring the site is underway, but a number of users “seem to have accepted that this really is very likely the end”.
It became a “virus” that “infected every facet” of life, from the “slang we use” to the politicians “we vote for”, he added. On November 17, 2018, it was announced that the site would be split into two, with the work-safe boards moved to a new domain, 4channel.org, while the NSFW boards would remain on the 4chan.org domain. In a rather dramatic turn that shocked little and yet stunned many, the notoriously lawless imageboard 4chan has reportedly been hacked. A long-dead board, /qa/, rose from the ashes, only to display a cryptic “U GOT HACKED” message.
Russian drones over Poland: Trump’s tepid reaction a wake-up call for Nato?
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4chan users were anonymous, threads weren’t permanent and would time out or “404” after a period of inactivity, and there were dozens of sub-boards you could post to. That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom gutter culture unlike anything else on the web. The dark end point of the techno-utopianism that built the internet. On 4chan you were no one, and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether.
Posters frequently swap social media handles or Discord servers despite 4chan’s usual emphasis on anonymity. 4chan’s two-week outage gave its development team time to patch up holes in its security, as well as start bringing on more volunteers. The blog states that 4chan’s team has since replaced the compromised server, as well as updated its software. The server status checker on 4chan’s blog indicated that full functionality has still not returned at time of writing, though posts on the imageboard largely appeared to be business as usual. 4chan was founded by Christopher “Moot” Poole when he was 15.
The last rites are being read for one of the internet’s most controversial forums after it was hacked, reportedly by a rival internet faction. Get an edge on the competition with draft, trade and research tools and much more. Available on all platforms for all season-long fantasy games—football, basketball, hockey, and baseball. A mortgage preapproval will give you a good idea of your home loan options, price range, and how much your monthly payment might be. The best time of year to buy a house depends on your situation.
