When the protests against scientology happened. Long before it was sold. Long before MAGA or the politics board were even a concept. It didn’t die immediately from them, but it was the start of a measurable drop in discussion quality that never stopped.
The “protests” devolved into some of the cringiest irl meetups of online communities I have ever come across (yes, worse than dashcon), and it caused so much media attention that it accelerated the “eternal september” problem the site always had exponentially.
Motherfuckers forgot the golden rule about “hiding your power level”, which at the time at least meant doing your best to appear relatively normal in public and went full “I’m a horribly socially maladjusted mess with bad hygiene who can only communicate via tired memes, look at me! Look at me! I know memes! Haha longcat is long am I right?”.
A lot of people remember the cringe of reddit’s “When does the narwhal bacon?” forced meme attempt at the world’s most embarassing “secret pass phrase” bullshit. The scientology “protests” were significant orders of magnitude more cringe.
4chan was never a secret club, but the sheer agressiveness of non-tolerance towards obviously new posters helped to maintain a very low bar of “quality”. I’d argue that’s needed to maintain any semblance of a community on an entirely anonymous image board that has minimal moderation. Shitty threads would get saged relentlessly, eating up the maximum comments a thread could have and drowning out any discussion in the shitty thread, all without bumping it back up to the top. Hit the reply limit and the thread slides off the bottom, gone forever.
“Lurk moar, faggot” was the phrase of the time. Stop posting until you figure out how things work around here.
But as more and more people unfamiliar with what shitty community existed came in, there hit a point where they outnumbered the old guard, and the already low quality of discussion tanked.
/b/ used to have discussion threads about all sorts of shit. Actual thought provoking stuff now and then. Funny stories. Occasionally legitimately good OC. It was the breeding ground for most of the memes and meme formats that spread to the internet at large. Mudkipz, rickrolling, EFG (the progenitor of trollface and rage comics), lolcats, advice animals. All /b/.
Now it is almost entirely people sharing photos of women they know that they’ve downloaded off the ladies’ social media accounts to jerk off to. Previously they would have been chased off to the dedicated porn (or softcore) boards using fire, pitchforks, and spam of the most digusting images the internet had until the posters got the message. Or at the very least they would have been bullied into a single thread at a time instead of taking over almost every thread on the board.
Instead it has all devolved to the absolute lowest common denominator.
/b/ (and by extension 4chan as a whole) has always been a cesspit. I’m not trying to deny that. There’s screenshots out there of it back when the post count hadn’t breached 1000 that show that it was shit even in the very very beginning. Back when it was almost exclusively m00t, W.T. Snacks, and their friends from Something Awful. That said, it used to be engaging to scroll through because you could stumble upon some legitimately good discussion. It hasn’t been worth even trying to look for good discussion on /b/ for well over a decade.
The retro videogames board was a brief shining return to quality for a few years after it was created, even managed to find, back up, and translate some things that had been lost media. The DooM threads used to be the place to be for new DooM wads. Even that board’s pretty shit now too.
I used to frequent the /tg/ board, it had people making homebrew conceptual RPGs - the kind of stuff that the indie RPG scene pretends to have invented. Sorry to see the site go, but it was inevitable.
Not invaded. The existing 4chan user-base inspired, and was targeted with, fascist propaganda starting with gamergate!
It was literally ground zero for fascist PsyOps. Steve Bannon even considered it an inspiration, and a pivotal moment, in the creation of his fascist propaganda machine.
Poole knew he had a contentious base of users. I remember in 2013 or 2014, 4chan users posted photographic evidence his gf was cheating on him, and I think it broke him. I dont blame him for selling the site, but 18 months later… I wonder if Moot knew he was holding back the end of the world.
Around then for me. Hiroyuki allowed /pol/ to happen when moot tried it and ditched it quickly. Too many people started thinking their farts didn’t stink. I went there for anime discussions when every other popular site was a hugbox.
When do you consider it died? 2015 when Poole sold it?
When the protests against scientology happened. Long before it was sold. Long before MAGA or the politics board were even a concept. It didn’t die immediately from them, but it was the start of a measurable drop in discussion quality that never stopped.
The “protests” devolved into some of the cringiest irl meetups of online communities I have ever come across (yes, worse than dashcon), and it caused so much media attention that it accelerated the “eternal september” problem the site always had exponentially.
Motherfuckers forgot the golden rule about “hiding your power level”, which at the time at least meant doing your best to appear relatively normal in public and went full “I’m a horribly socially maladjusted mess with bad hygiene who can only communicate via tired memes, look at me! Look at me! I know memes! Haha longcat is long am I right?”.
A lot of people remember the cringe of reddit’s “When does the narwhal bacon?” forced meme attempt at the world’s most embarassing “secret pass phrase” bullshit. The scientology “protests” were significant orders of magnitude more cringe.
4chan was never a secret club, but the sheer agressiveness of non-tolerance towards obviously new posters helped to maintain a very low bar of “quality”. I’d argue that’s needed to maintain any semblance of a community on an entirely anonymous image board that has minimal moderation. Shitty threads would get saged relentlessly, eating up the maximum comments a thread could have and drowning out any discussion in the shitty thread, all without bumping it back up to the top. Hit the reply limit and the thread slides off the bottom, gone forever.
“Lurk moar, faggot” was the phrase of the time. Stop posting until you figure out how things work around here.
But as more and more people unfamiliar with what shitty community existed came in, there hit a point where they outnumbered the old guard, and the already low quality of discussion tanked.
/b/ used to have discussion threads about all sorts of shit. Actual thought provoking stuff now and then. Funny stories. Occasionally legitimately good OC. It was the breeding ground for most of the memes and meme formats that spread to the internet at large. Mudkipz, rickrolling, EFG (the progenitor of trollface and rage comics), lolcats, advice animals. All /b/.
Now it is almost entirely people sharing photos of women they know that they’ve downloaded off the ladies’ social media accounts to jerk off to. Previously they would have been chased off to the dedicated porn (or softcore) boards using fire, pitchforks, and spam of the most digusting images the internet had until the posters got the message. Or at the very least they would have been bullied into a single thread at a time instead of taking over almost every thread on the board.
Instead it has all devolved to the absolute lowest common denominator.
/b/ (and by extension 4chan as a whole) has always been a cesspit. I’m not trying to deny that. There’s screenshots out there of it back when the post count hadn’t breached 1000 that show that it was shit even in the very very beginning. Back when it was almost exclusively m00t, W.T. Snacks, and their friends from Something Awful. That said, it used to be engaging to scroll through because you could stumble upon some legitimately good discussion. It hasn’t been worth even trying to look for good discussion on /b/ for well over a decade.
The retro videogames board was a brief shining return to quality for a few years after it was created, even managed to find, back up, and translate some things that had been lost media. The DooM threads used to be the place to be for new DooM wads. Even that board’s pretty shit now too.
How could anything be better than Doomworld for new wads? That’s wild.
I used to frequent the /tg/ board, it had people making homebrew conceptual RPGs - the kind of stuff that the indie RPG scene pretends to have invented. Sorry to see the site go, but it was inevitable.
2016 when MAGApedes inavded the site.
Not invaded. The existing 4chan user-base inspired, and was targeted with, fascist propaganda starting with gamergate!
It was literally ground zero for fascist PsyOps. Steve Bannon even considered it an inspiration, and a pivotal moment, in the creation of his fascist propaganda machine.
But 4chan banned Gamergate posts. That’s one of the reasons why 8chan was made.
Debatable, there was a influx of new users around that time with reprehensible views. I used 4Chan as it was happening.
Yeah, I deleted a paragraph re chicken & egg scenario whether or not it started on 4chan.
It could have very well been a targeted PsyOp by Russia/fascists from the get-go, potentially starting years before gamergate.
The same year Twitter died then.
I wonder about this sometimes.
Poole knew he had a contentious base of users. I remember in 2013 or 2014, 4chan users posted photographic evidence his gf was cheating on him, and I think it broke him. I dont blame him for selling the site, but 18 months later… I wonder if Moot knew he was holding back the end of the world.
I wonder if Poole has done any interesting interviews on the intersection of 4chan and the modern fascist propaganda machine it bred.
Around then for me. Hiroyuki allowed /pol/ to happen when moot tried it and ditched it quickly. Too many people started thinking their farts didn’t stink. I went there for anime discussions when every other popular site was a hugbox.