Live by the sword, die by the sword I would say. You don't get to enjoy raising leopards and also get to be surprised when you become lunch one day
They certainly don’t get to claim any kind of moral high ground, but as a bystander I can feel empathy for someone hit by a drunk driver, even if the victim had driven drunk before in the past. Any increase in human suffering is unfortunate, regardless of one’s take on just desserts or karma or whatever.
I’d say it’s more like a high-profile NRA member getting shot. Unfortunate but it’s hard to miss the irony.
4chan was founded in 2003. I think reasonable people probably disagree on what constitutes the “early” internet and this is where the argument is. Google had been around for 5 years by this point and I (and I suspect many others) remained blissfully unaware of 4chan for a long time after 2003.
Regardless of date bracketing, I can miss 80's punk and not miss slam dancing. Maybe someone can list some positive internet culture we got from 4chan that I am overlooking.
4chan is widely known for /b/ but it had and has much more than /b. /b was always known for its murk.
Each chan sub category tended to their own niche community and rivalry was little.
/f/ in its hayday was a wonderful creative group for Flash animations and with existent of NewGrounds made the internet fun. It's how I learnt flash and how YTMND came to be.
Is it considered part of it? From my understanding, the culture has changed significantly and post get auto deleted eventually, so it’s not a good archive either. The only thing old about it is it’s web design
the mechanics are old there's no other online community i know of that still allows fully anonymous posting the culture changed, but the "environment" causing the culture there to be the way it is still same as the original. the bump/delete mechanics work well to promote the most controversial, most engaging content, without any advanced statistics or ML. despite being a shitty place, i don't feel advertised to, spie…
> there's no other online community i know of that still allows fully anonymous posting
Jannies had it coming tbh. They were certainly tightening the rope when it came to free speech in the last few years
Always curious to know what kind of speech this kind of complaint refers to.
It's not what you think.
Let me give you an example. /k/ is the weapons/military forum, and it's unironically run by US government authorities. Vulgar racial slurs are wholly permitted -- but if you question certain aspects of US military or foreign policy, or suggest that Russia/China/etc. aren't houses of cards that will topple the moment the US wills it, your comment will probably be deleted and you'll be hit with a 3-day ban.
Hosting a copy of phpMyAdmin behind basic HTTP authentication in 2025 really is asking for it.
Can you please elaborate how it is "asking for it" if we assume the basic auth password is reasonably complex and kept as safe as, say, the SSH login credentials of the same server?
Is it considered part of it? From my understanding, the culture has changed significantly and post get auto deleted eventually, so it’s not a good archive either. The only thing old about it is it’s web design
the mechanics are old there's no other online community i know of that still allows fully anonymous posting the culture changed, but the "environment" causing the culture there to be the way it is still same as the original. the bump/delete mechanics work well to promote the most controversial, most engaging content, without any advanced statistics or ML. despite being a shitty place, i don't feel advertised to, spie…
Posting on 4chan just kept becoming increasingly user hostile, especially for casual users, you had to be really determined to post something: posts started requiring 24 hour email verification, and after that you had to wait ~10 minutes before being allowed to post, and finally you had to complete a nearly impossible captcha which could lock you out from posting for an undetermined amount of time just for failing. It became apparent that the owners were pushing the gold pass pretty damn hard, and it's advertised on literally every board page.
If you lamented the disappearance of the "old internet", well, this was a part of it, and now it may be gone too. The title is also a fair bit understated. They're leaking the moderators home addresses and work contact info (for admins, who are(were?) paid moderators)
We've heard it time and time again that 4chan is the so called "last bastion of free speech on the internet" when this so called free speech is just being unapologetically racist and antisemitic. I hope its gone for good.
What kind of official association could one have with 4chan? 4chan was formative for my early connection to the internet, and I'm really curious what the organization behind it looked like. Was it professionally driven, or just some random guy mailing checks? stuff like that.
I lied about my age and was given janitor access in the mid 2000s. There was a special /j/ board to coordinate on, but it broke relatively early, and you mostly had to hang out in the #janiteam channel on Rizon. I think almost everybody else was underage as well. There was a minimal web overlay that let you delete/escalate posts. You couldn't see people's IPs, but you could see how many outstanding ban requests they…
Sounds about like what I would have expected as a (also underage) user at the time. The suspicion was always that most of the memorable joke chains were probably just one guy self-replying (I always suspected that was the case for the hunter2 meme specifically). It didn't really matter, it was funny anyway.
Thanks for taking the time to reply, and thanks for the fun back then :)