> Back when the Internet was quite literally held together with duct tape
No, you'd have to go back further than that.
By the time 4chan came about, the web was starting to crystalize into platforms, and standard tools and databases had been developed. Design and UX was starting to be important.
At the time of launch, I distinctly remember that my classmates thought 4chan was weird for taking after "primitive" Japanese image boards. (Craigslist, too, was considered dated.)
The early "duct tape" days were the era of EzBoard (1996; before phpBB, vBulletin, and Invision), Flash (1993), Geocities (1994), Angelfire (1996), Lycos (1994), Dogpile (1996), ICQ (1996), early AOL Instant Messenger (1997; before Trillian, Gaim, Libpurple), lots of little IRC clients... lots of CGI, Perl, and C all slapped together. That's when flat file databases were a norm, not an exception.
4chan came around the same time as Digg and Reddit, and in response to some of the platformization that was already starting to happen (Xanga, LiveJournal, and Blogger in ~1999). The machinery and practice of modern web engineering was already falling into place.
I can't find it right now, but there is a well-known photograph of the servers hosting `ibm.com` in, I think, 1997. It's basically a bunch of tower PCs stacked haphazardly sideways on each other.
You probably won't understand if after half a decade you haven't bothered to look into it yourself, but /g/ is as close to /pol/ as Steve Jobs was to planning the Oklahoma City bombing.
It is not by /g/ , those lunatics are on /pol/ , totally different community even tho same site.
it is like comparing /r/the_donalds/ vs /r/cats/ on reddit.
Q had moved off the 4chan platform really early, in fact I'm not sure it was ever really on 4chan, but rather 8chan and then 8kun, with some stops in between on a smorgasboard of dubious chans. I remember watching the first Qdrops come in, which I thought was an elaborate troll or maybe some kind of ARG. The New Zealand guy who posted and livestreamed his mosque genocide generally put the stake through the heart of 8, although there were lots of other stake candidates at the time, all sorts of people streaming details of their murders/attempted murders.
So, ok, those guys are monsters, no way around that, but seeing them talk in other contexts, they're also profoundly sad. Trying to name the feeling I'm having, and I think it's pity. I feel pretty much the same about Q people[1]. What the hell happened to you to make your brain this way?
In these families who is the one cutting off contact? The qanoner? Its a pretty small movement that really only a few people online and in the media seem obsessed with. I haven't met anyone who has ever mentioned it in person.
It's so sad that nation level agents have infiltrated the moderator team and are now pushing divisive anti western ideas and also grooming fifth columnists to create havoc in the western world. Most of the boards I frequented in the past outright ban you for saying anything remotely against russia and china but promote all sorts of demoralization threads regarding the west.
I guess someone has to pay the server costs but with a huge detriment towards the authenticity and culture that characterized old 4chan
I'm sure there are always some people looking into 4chan as a place to spread an agenda due to the ease of posting, no need for an account, popularity, etc. However, banning for "anything remotely against russia and china" is a silly exaggeration. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, my best guess is that you posted on some of the boards with tighter moderation, and what you posted was simply off topic. Most boards still prune off-topic shitposting somewhat reliably.
Not to the exclusion of other peoples, you can find plenty of gleeful posts about the brutal deaths of Russians and Chinese, or just simply mocking their societies/industries, at any given time on at least three boards, off the top of my head.
As an example try writing anything that exposes the darker side of russian culture on /int/ during russian daytime hours. Of course the amerifat threads and the threads about how europe is losing relevance are allowed despite being news and thus for pol not int
There is literally dedicated anti-Russian thread (/uhg/) on /pol/ and also plenty of anti-Chinese sentiment all over the board, I don't think day can pass without someone making fun of Changs and Zhangs.
/k/ is full of pro-Ukraine glowies so maybe try that board first.
Otherwise it's more balanced. /pol/ has both /uhg/ (Ukrainian Happening General; mostly pro Ukraine) and /chug/ (Comfy Happening in Ukraine General; pro Russian).
/chug/ as its name implies is more comfy and has anime girls. /uhg/ is quite nasty and mostly posts gore of Russian soldiers.
In a way its hilarious that you're proving OPs point that state actors are influencing the board. It's also interesting that you're not denying that russia/china is influencing 4chan. You're just saying that america does it as well.
The point is that 4chan will ban you for innocent things, if a moderator disagrees with you, funnily enough criticizing video game censorship and journalists is bannable as well. But does not ban for extreme racism and violent content like that. It's not a free speech site anymore and hasn't been for quite a few years now, basically.. it's just a racism site.
Why is that unlikely? Nobody else is paying moderators. Prigozhin made the Internet Research Agency which we know conducts influence operations, it would be amazing if China didn't have a similar group.
HN not loving this is not a surprise, 4chan is hardcore, but /g/ can be beared most of the time, it’s mostly Debian/Arch people there anyway.
But 4chan is a piece of history, a piece of the old web from its roots and it’s still going. I don’t use the site myself but I also haven’t heard that they have made any changes to the rules.
You have something to say, whatever that may be, we have a board for you to come and say it. That’s amazing.
Happy Birthday and hope they can go for 20 more years.
>You have something to say, whatever that may be, we have a board for you to come and say it. That’s amazing.
That was more 8chan before the NZ mass murder, since anyone could make a board and mod it the way they liked. 4chan is known for having biased jannies who will delete content that goes against their personal agendas. If you report outright racism outside of /pol/ or /b/ it usually gets deleted too.
4chan is such an interesting piece of internet history that's still living. Despite lots of parts of 4chan being terrible, I will say that the diy board has helped me figure out some clever solutions to around the home jobs.
A great thing about 4chan (and probably 1 reason users keep coming) is its simplicity:
Post pic, some text, others do the same, or reply to your post.
That's it. Do 1 thing & do it well (Unix philosophy :-). Reminds me of when Google's UI was praised for being "enter search term here" box on otherwise empty page.
I think there will always be room for sites (or apps) like that. Now, as for how to pay hosting bills etc... ??
I think, additionally, the reason why it’s still going, besides the simplicity, is the pseudo-anonymity, your post is just like any other post, what will really make it apart is the context (or the image per se), and I believe that’s the purist form of internet interactions, you get called out on your BS with no filters and without the fear of being “cancelled”, if you help someone, you are not looking for brownie points or to become an e-celeb, you are just genuinely trying to help, you fucked up one time and said something bad or wrong? no one will screenshot it and use it against you till hell freezes over, you did something amazing in a post? It will be circulating around and referred back to the board, not the person or the individual, so the concept is really great as long as it is not a mainstream site, else you will have all sort of shilling and spooks shenanigans that will ruin that experience.
It's marginally better... but not by much. If privacy is that much of a concern, then it's feasible to roll out your own version of JS challenges, delay functions, & captchas, but that's additional complexity that could otherwise be farmed out to Cloudflare themselves or another provider.
Ideally, a self-hostable instance with an exposed API would be preferred, but the captcha for such an instance would be reverse engineered & subsequently broken, rendering it worthless.
4chan bans VPN ip ranges, so it's definitely not an anonymous site or even trying to be beyond connecting front end posts back to users as non corps/gov.
I had some of the best and worst conversation on 4chan. When the only means of expressing yourself is by virtue of your ideas, it really breed an atmosphere you can't find anywhere else. It just a shame, you can really tell there is a lot of... intelligence activity on the site.. from many nations, lol
I only started visiting 4chan after Hacker news gave recommendation few years ago. I would say that in the past few years, since the 'intelligence activity' went up, it really started teaching the smart people on the Internet to identify that as quickly as possible.
To put it in terms of another old meme, Redditors never learned how to identify GameOfTrolls threads (because Reddit Admins banned it successfully as soon as possible), therefore, this still remains as an attack vector on Reddit.
On the other hand, being able to identify "slide threads", and "glowies", is an important skill every smart person needs to learn.
it's not like back in the golden days you're remembering fondly, intelligence activity and slide threads didn't happen, it's just that they were limited to newspaper articles and media events.
What if Richard Nixon was a good guy, or at least no worse than any other president, but he stepped on the wrong toes, and the deep state took care of him?
Russian state has used 4chan as an influence operation to seed social media since around 2008, supporting isolationist Republicans and extreme views that cause civil strife and weakening of a unified US. Internet Research Agency is the big one but Russia has done this since the war they had with Georgia.
Yes, it's full of "glowies." (We can thank Terry Davis of Temple OS fame for that term.) Occasionally, a nutcase who intends to do harm will have been found to hang out there[1], and the glowies don't want to be the last to find out if said nutcase posts their intentions in advance. Which is fair enough. That's their job, after all.
4chan loves the term "glowie" in part because its full expansion incorporates a racist slur, but its shortened form can be used in contexts like this, in which it seems merely irreverent rather than racist. Thanks, Terry. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/glowie
Also because typing "glow-in-the-dark CIA [neighbors]" all the time takes too long. I mean, /pol/ doesn't really shy away from using the odd slur. Just occasionally. Only in between the casual misogyny, gigachad fetishism, and soyface posting.
4chan enforces anonymity even across posts (at least on /b/) and with missing nesting, you can lose track of replies fast. So you're basically reading ideas only. Altough I do agree HN's post system is one of the most similar. HN has a more coherent culture and moderation, though.
i don't know what you are comparing. phpbb boards maybe, but i don't see how discord fits in here. anyways, the point was about identity. not about voting. that's entirely irrelevant.
If you don't see how up/down voting completely changes how forums work, how people post, the environment it creates, etc etc etc, then you don't really know anything about internet forums.
i didn't say that voting has no effect. i said that it is not relevant to the point we were discussing which is the establishing of a personal identity. the identity is dependent on the amount of anonymity provided by the forum.
sure, voting does affect how and what people write, but it doesn't affect the fact that it is practically not possible to establish an identity on 4chan, and that it is still difficult on hackernews, because names of posters do not stand out, and in my own experience it very often escapes my notice if i am responding to the same person as before or to a different one.
i also can not see if a message has been upvoted or what the posters reputation is (unless i go look up the karma points, and count the number of messages and links they posted) so i can't seek out or avoid people or messages based on that. whereas in other forums that information is readily visible with each post, which in turn affects who and what i pay attention to.
on hackernews this results in me focusing on each message by itself just like i would on 4chan, and it is independent of the voting that goes on here. btw, i also read dead messages, which means i even ignore the downvotes and make my own judgement of the message, which further reduces the effect of voting, at least for my person.
another interesting point is that when i first joined hackernews i used to close all my messages with a greeting like a signature, which was not welcome and shows that standing out, which is something that would help establish an identity, is not desired here.
Well ignoring the voting thing, which I do think is relevant, what you're describing is pretty much exactly reddit and not 4chan. Also there are a good number of famous/known personalities in HN. Also I'm pretty sure if you've been selected for the YC, you can see who else is in the YC club in HN, like your name gets highlighted or something. So the reality in HN is not at all how you describe.
Also there are a good number of famous/known personalities in HN
sure there are, but unless you know who they are and what their HN account names are and pay close attention to that name on each message then you won't notice them. and, those people are not famous for their writing on HN.
as far as i remember, reddit used to show awards next to the nickname on each message, so you could easily see who the high quality posters were. this appears to be no longer the case. they still have an avatar though, which can make particular users easy to recognize. neither HN nor 4chan have that.
in 4chan culture, the number of sequential digits at the end of the random number assigned to your post is a mark of... status? good luck? quality? I'm actually not sure, but it's a desired thing to have.
More backstory: The ID assigned to posts is a sequential incrementing number. So it is possible to "aim" for a nice round number by posting at the right time
When people notice that their post IDs start approaching a large whole number, a bunch of people might try to get ("GET") the post with ID, say, 2000000 by timing it
It's not really a marker of anything, just a semi-random event that people have fun with. It's sort of... tolerated, as long as it's infrequent and doesn't cause too much noise
As much as I am thankful for the site for a lot of things, it fostered my "there will always be new content on every refresh" problem, which has stolen so much productivity from me.
I don't mean this in the "haha isn't it cute I spend so much time on Reddit" way, I mean this in the "I have not chased as many goals or passions as I could've because I was numbing myself with easily-available, low-effort content" way.
I used to read blue boards during lulls on the sales floor at Circuit City, which is, I think, about the most "aughts" thing I've ever said.
/b/ was reserved for home, obviously.
I do miss 4chan from back then, but it's also perhaps the best example of how doing something "ironically" for long enough can turn it into your actual belief/personality.
