4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/april-2025-4chan-sharty-hack-and-janitor-email-leak

by LookAtThatBacon • 1 year ago

710 896 1 year ago

knowyourmeme.com

CamelCaseName• 1 year ago

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)

GaggiX2• 1 year ago

Do you think that 4chan is going to disappear forever for this? Just wait a bit and it will be back.

Also where did you see that they are leaking home addresses and work contact info? I think they just leaked the emails (I don't understand why home addresses and work contact info should be present in the 4chan database, everyone moderating the site for free).

LightBug12• 1 year ago

I'm not up to speed - but isn't that a free-speech absolutist site?

pelagicAustral2• 1 year ago

Isn't it a running joke that the Jannies don't get paid?

aloha2436• 1 year ago

I'm reliably informed they do it for free.

throw_m239339• 1 year ago

Isn't it a running joke that the Jannies don't get paid?

You're think about reddit and why it is the way it is from an editorial perspective and what kind of people have the time to mods 100+ subs for free...

But that ceased to be true long ago. While some of the supermods aren't paid by reddit directly, they might be paid by other orgs to mod and influence reddit, corporate or 'grass root'...

Some others simply hijack subs to sell their own products.

robobro3• 1 year ago

The initial leaker is most likely not the same parties as the ones tying email addresses and usernames to people's "real identities", if you look at the thread where the leak was announced.

Say what you will about 4chan but I am concerned for the team managing it - them and their close ones are certainly going to be exposed to a whole lot of viciousness soon :(

pjc506• 1 year ago

them and their close ones are certainly going to be exposed to a whole lot of viciousness soon

Isn't viciousness the notorious bread and butter of 4chan?

a0123• 1 year ago

Damn, the culture they have bred and actively maintained is now going to be turned against them?

It might end up making them more sympathetic people on the long term. They might realise the seriousness of what they have done to others.

JKCalhoun4• 1 year ago

I think we can lament the old internet and still care nothing for 4chan.

idiotsecant2• 1 year ago

Like it or not, 4chan was a major hub of Internet culture. Especially early on some of the best stuff on the internet happened on 4chan (and a good chunk of the worst, of course)

doublerabbit5• 1 year ago

Why? I am not pleased with the government forced pills such as TikTok, Twitter and other such shite shoved down my throat.

You may enjoy the walled garden, I for one don't. Such sites gave you a hole to get away from the dystopian view that these gardens hold.

They gave independence away from forced control.

mhh__• 1 year ago

You can but I think it would make you quite dull

seasluggy• 1 year ago

They in fact, do it for free.

knowknow• 1 year ago

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

ltbarcly32• 1 year ago

Posts always got auto deleted. Maybe you aren't familiar with how it worked.

sznio2• 1 year ago

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, spied or in any way abused _by the software itself_ while browsing it

nemomarx2• 1 year ago

every board had it's own independent archiving service after a while, so board culture ended up stickier than the original design. there's some interesting stuff in there

fny• 1 year ago

Where do you see info about personal info?

I would presume Anon would which to remain anon.

mattlondon3• 1 year ago

I'd hardly call it the "old internet". It is very niche, and has not been around that long really - like what 2003 or something? Nothing compared to e.g. Geocities which was early-mid 90s IIRC which I'd argue had more relevance to people than 4chan.

davedx• 1 year ago

Geocities was going strong in the late 90's too! My first homepage was hosted there on Tokyo Towers.

MagicMoonlight• 1 year ago

22 years is old. Nobody knows what geocities is, it has no relevance. It’s like talking about brands of telegraph wire.

dfxm122• 1 year ago

"Old Internet" doesn't have a very defined meaning, but I think it has more to do with design and functionality than a hard date. While I don't think relevance matters, 4chan is much more relevant than you think. Having a niche is part of the old Internet. Websites used to be niche, but deep, instead of websites like Wikipedia, which are broad and shallow (compare the Castlevania dungeon [0] to the Wikipedia article for Castlevania, for example). Then compare 4chan's limited number of boards with reddit's endless subs. 4chan's design is early web 2.0, doesn't require you create an account, allows (pseudo) anonymous posting, content is mostly unfiltered, unmonetized, free & thought of as ephemeral, etc.

0 - https://castlevaniadungeon.net/dungeon.html

Andrex• 1 year ago

Web 2.0 and before is now considered the old internet.

johnnyjeans8• 1 year ago

It is not very niche at all. 4chan served a gigantic volume of traffic.

PhunkyPhil• 1 year ago

Side note: When you google "Geocities" the results are in comic sans

imzadi• 1 year ago

I grew up on IRC, had sites on Geocities and Angelfire. That was the old internet people miss, not 4chan.

happytoexplain• 1 year ago

Was part of it. As somebody who has been trapped there since 2004, I'd say it evolved into a part of the normal internet between 2010 and 2016 (i.e. it had already fully transformed before Trump's first term), where "normal internet" means being infested with uncle-on-Facebook-tier political posts, "jokes" where the punchline is "I hate my political enemies", etc. Creative irreverence was replaced with regular childishness.

Mostly because, as more people came online, they mistook offensive humor for conservatism; and thought "counter-culture" meant "being opposed to the political party currently in power", rather than "being opposed to political parties".

pjc506• 1 year ago

mistook offensive humor for conservatism

Something happened in the post-2010 times along with the Tea Party, and offensive humor - especially overt racism - became a mainstream part of conservativism, all the way to the White House.

"jokes" where the punchline is "I hate my political enemies"

Hence the laughter in the White House at refusing to follow the court order to return their political enemies from the overseas prison.

4chan may have died, but Trump is more the first 4chan President than Howard Dean was the first "internet candidate", and especially Musk the Twitter Presidential Vizir is the heir to this culture.

johnnyjeans8• 1 year ago

Incredibly spot-on and well-put.

h2zizzle6• 1 year ago

Considering that the people posting this "creative irreverence" were the same guys calling you a "stupid f*gg*t n*gger piece of sh*t" on Halo 2/3 and CS when they got noscoped from across the map or whatever, "It's just a joke" has always been somewhat suspect. It would be wrong to say that there was no element of tongue-in-cheek-iness and hyperbole, of course. It just wasn't completely innocent, broadly speaking.

Of course, in a post-Bioshock Infinite world, there's really no excuse for not grokking how time and distance from the origins of a cultural behavior pattern can warp even well-meaning notions that aren't regularly re-examined and tuned to align the intention with the zeitgeist. If the Sarah Silverman-esque posters ever looked up and realized, "Oh, they don't know it's a joke, they're ACTUALLY Nazis," it was too late to shift things back. (Unless you were in a Boondocks thread on /co/, in which case correction was freely forthcoming.)

Probably didn't help that at least one mod wanted 4chan to become more racist, on purpose.

LeafItAlone2• 1 year ago

Creative irreverence was replaced with regular childishness.

I’d suggest taking off those glasses as they are a bit too rose-tinted. I was there, just like you, and the humor was way more “childishness” than “creative irreverence” well before 2010.

DrillShopper5• 1 year ago

4chan is not "old internet". Not even close. It's predated by a bunch of forums (including 2channel) on the Internet, some anonymous.

snvzz6• 1 year ago

As far as image boards go, 4chan is the first successful (and longest surviving) English-speaking 2chan clone.

2chan is a japanese site.

p3rls• 1 year ago

It's not so much that we lament the old internet, we lament that the new internet cannot be built because incumbents like google have distorted the playing field with shitty algorithmic SEO practices-- which really has nothing to do with 4chan at all.

dimal• 1 year ago

But really, 4chan-style bullshit took over the rest of the internet. At least in the old internet, it was self contained there. If someone spouted nonsense they read on 4chan, you could easily dismiss them as a crank. Now everyone is posting and reposting bullshit on a multitude of microblogging shitsites.

protocolture3• 1 year ago

I honestly and sincerely miss the project chanology days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology

cbg02• 1 year ago

Hosting a copy of phpMyAdmin behind basic HTTP authentication in 2025 really is asking for it.

jsheard3• 1 year ago

I was kinda surprised to see that phpMyAdmin is still maintained, albeit only barely. The last release was in January but before that it hadn't been touched for over two years.

pelagicAustral2• 1 year ago

This stuff is still packaged with cPanel, which is probably the most common way to manage web servers on the internet.

whalesalad• 1 year ago

A tale as old as time

TonyTrapp5• 1 year ago

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?

cbg02• 1 year ago

You shouldn't be logging in to a server via SSH using a user+password combo, instead use a public/private key combo which is considerably more complex and can't effectively be bruteforced like a user+password.

Most web servers don't really come with any built in defense against brute force attempts vs Basic Auth gates, so unless you've set something up to protect it, someone with enough time will eventually get in.

ceejayoz5• 1 year ago

I haven’t used it for many years now, but phpMyAdmin was long a source of compromises. Lots of security holes.

udev4096• 1 year ago

A password is just plain text, which apart from being bruteforced, can easily be phished. There are so many things wrong with using a password even if it's fairly complex. Instead, stick to passkeys and SSH keys

lossolo2• 1 year ago

Sure, if you slap Basic Auth with "admin:admin" on phpMyAdmin in 2025, you're asking for it. But a Basic Auth password with 256 bits of entropy is just as resistant to brute force as AES-256 (assuming the implementation is sound and TLS is used). It's not the protocol that's insecure, it's usually how it's deployed.

andruby• 1 year ago

Only if it's only accessible via proper TLS (otherwise it's easy to read the user/pass with MITM as basic auth doesn't encrypt the user/pass).

If there is no throttling/rate-limiting/banning then this setup allows for a lot of attempts, wether brute-force or dictionary.

ndiddy• 1 year ago

The hacker posted a screenshot of the shell on the 4chan server. It was running FreeBSD 10.1, which came out in 2014 and stopped getting patches in 2016. It seems like there was basically nobody doing maintenance after moot sold the site. I wonder how long it'll take for them to get the site back up if they don't have anyone who can do server administration.

trallnag2• 1 year ago

Jannies had it coming tbh. They were certainly tightening the rope when it came to free speech in the last few years

pjc506• 1 year ago

Always curious to know what kind of speech this kind of complaint refers to.

krige2• 1 year ago

Free. In practice whatever a given janny doesn't like gets the boot. The moderation can get REALLY schizophrenic depending on time zone, and there are persistent rumors that certain boards are controlled by groups of interest (notably the cesspool known as /pol/ is very astroturfed).

A_D_E_P_T2• 1 year ago

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.

kcatskcolbdi• 1 year ago

Are you genuinely curious, or do you already know this kind of complaint refers to offensive, racist, hateful speech (otherwise known as the type of speech that requires protection, since civil speech that agrees with the popular worldviews does not need protecting)?

Whoppertime3• 1 year ago

If you post "What are your favorite snacks at the movie theater?" you can get a 3 day ban from /ck/ which is too short to appeal. I posted a thread on the Television and Movie board asking what people thought of Matt Walsh's movie What is a Woman and got a 3 day ban which was too short to appeal for posting off topic

snvzz6• 1 year ago

Blaming the victims is not cool.

Particularly, when these are good people who put a lot of effort into keeping 4chan a pleasant community, by e.g. removing hate speech and CSAM, as well as banning offenders.

trallnag2• 1 year ago

My comment wasn't completely serious and should be taken with a grain of salt. But for example there is / was a German janitor or moderator that that treated the German general on /int/ as his personal safe space

mardifoufs• 1 year ago

4chan janitors aren't victims of anything no matter what happens to them.

shadowgovt3• 1 year ago

It's a web forum, not a Superfund site.

Instead of burning personal time and energy on trying to clean up 4chan, a person can always just... Not.

Let it burn and sink into the swamp. Stop making that DNS query.

geriatric-janny3• 1 year ago

My official association with 4chan ended in 2010, but I still recognise a good third of those names and would wager the leak is legit.

delusional2• 1 year ago

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.

no_time2• 1 year ago

Well... A full dump of the board exclusive to moderators and janitors was leaked too so now you could take a look yourself.

geriatric-janny3• 1 year ago

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 had. These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.

We were all offered the chance to become mods in 2010, but moot wanted to see our faces on a Skype call. I thought that was a step too far and just gradually stopped caring after that. Seems like I made the right choice.

On the whole it was barely held together technically and organisationally, mostly run by moot's personal friends, and fun all around. Things were far less serious then.

And the checks arrived on time every month: $0.00

lurk219• 1 year ago

He was a janitor. On the internet. He did it for free.

blitzar• 1 year ago

Username checks out.

Blikkentrekker8• 1 year ago

So you were able to find the leak? Because I see reports that it was hacked repeated as fact everywhere on Daily Mail-tier reliable news websites and Reddit posts, but they are all based on “rumors on social media go about that there was a leak” but I've not been able to find the actual leak searching for it. Obviously not many people want to link it but it's also weird that so many people claim to have so easily been able to find it when I cannot.

Finally, I was there and using it when the website went down and this did not resemble an actual hack but technical issues. First there were a couple of hours where the website was up but no posts went through for anyone except occasionally when a new threat was bumped, mirroring the normal pattern of downtime issues that sometimes occur and then it just went down completely. This doesn't really resemble how a hack plays out but looks more like technical issues to me.

Even now, going to the front page, it loads for me, except very slowly and incompletely. This does not resemble a hack but technical issues.

DaSHacka4• 1 year ago

I would've taken you less time to find the 'sinister' content yourself than leave this sprawling reply

To your point:

It's more likely than not real, it contains configs for the entire site.

huehehue• 1 year ago

My association was a bit later, mid to late 2010s. I recognize some of the names as well, including one of the top folks that probably onboarded both of us.

That said, my info is not on the list, I assume it was deleted when I left.

sertraline• 1 year ago

he does it for free

wickedsight2• 1 year ago

This makes me wonder whether there's anything in there that can point to the identity of the original QAnon. That would be a pretty interesting outcome.

swarnie4• 1 year ago

Aren't we 99% sure that was a Ron Watkins grift now?

wickedsight2• 1 year ago

That's why I wrote 'the original'. It's very possible Watkins took control after Q moved from 4Chan to 8Chan from what I've read. I'm far from fully up-to-date on this saga though.

ribosometronome• 1 year ago

Given the nature of the hackers and their immediate actions, it seems unlikely they would reveal that sort of information.

Borgz• 1 year ago

4chan doesn't store threads for very long, hence the plethora of third-party archive sites. I doubt they are still storing any useful data from back then.

SirFatty• 1 year ago

Surprised that the admins have any personal details associated with their 4chan profile.

OuterVale• 1 year ago

Posted link is a tad vulgar and scarce on information. A bit of a collection forming on The Sun's live blog post:

Thousands of 4Chan users report issues accessing controversial website - https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/34472708/4chan-down-updates-co...

dang2• 1 year ago

(Posted link was originally https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1jzkjlg/4chan_hacked.... We since changed it.)

anigbrowl6• 1 year ago

Why would you use the Sun as a source for anything

TheAceOfHearts3• 1 year ago

There's a KnowYourMeme [0] post with additional details and context. Most interesting to me is finding out that there' s a word filer / transformer, so SMH becomes BAKA and TBH becomes DESU, as two examples.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/april-2025-4chan-hack

tanjtanjtanj• 1 year ago

Yep, it’s been that way for 20+ years!

The term “weeaboo” as a term for western anime fans only came about because it was what the word “wapanese” filtered to. It was originally a nonsense work made up in a Perry Bible Fellowship comic.

dang2• 1 year ago

That does seem to have more information, so I've changed the top url to that from https://old.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/1jzkjlg/4chan_hacked.... Thanks!

FMecha5• 1 year ago

From what I heard, it was because they were tired of people posting "tbh fam". This does result in people instead posting "tbdesu" in being aware of the filter.

A note that the filter for "doublechan" was never updated to include its current name, nor the place where this current attack originated was ever filtered, afaik.

swarnie4• 1 year ago

One of the best websites on the internet. Hopefully not gone forever.

rootsudo• 1 year ago

Wow doxing the Jannies!

I mean, wow, they’re doxing people that helped keep a legacy internet place alive and compliant with the law.

Who would do that?

masfuerte• 1 year ago

The man.

joseda-hg2• 1 year ago

Sound right up the alley for a 4chan user

t0lo• 1 year ago

Whoever's trying their hardest to shut down the rest of the free internet as well. I do think these actions we've seen in the last 5 years are co-ordinated. Will post sources soon

Loughla5• 1 year ago

Please post sources. And what other sites are you talking about?

Alifatisk• 1 year ago

Will post sources soon

When?

jmyeet2• 1 year ago

4chan will be studied for years for its role in alt-right radicalization as well as being a baroemeter for young male discontent.

For example, QAnon started on 4chan (I believe as a joke?) [1]. Nowadays a lot of 4chan users and traffic have since migrated to Twitter for pretty obvious reasons. Pseudo-intellectual racism has a lot of roots in 4chan (eg the popularity of Julius Evola [2]) that's deeply tied to "trad" content, Andrew Tate fandom, the manosphere and "self-improvement" [3].

Things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club originated on 4chan and it's full of racist memes [4]. A lot of racist and antisemitic memes originated on 4chan.

Worst of all, it seems like Elon Musk is motivated by a deep desire to be liked by 4chan [5].

So the point is that 4chan users (and admins) have a lot of real-world influence and that's kinda scary. It also makes them a target for this kind of hack. I suspect a lot of people will be exposed by this and in more than a few cases, you'll find ties to the current administration.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-...

[2] https://jacobin.com/2022/12/fascism-far-right-evola-bannon-b...

[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00732-x

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpH3O6mnZvw

[5] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/4/6/how-musk-ushered...

VectorLock• 1 year ago

I would be 0% surprised to see Stephen Miller's information in this leak.

howmayiannoyyou• 1 year ago

If you're looking for malign influence on 4chan - look outside the US. Anyone on /pol/ and /k/ after Oct 7th understands clearly who has been influencing if not controlling the site.

properpopper• 1 year ago

For users who aren't familiar with 4chan - this post describes only one board - /pol/, where you can find hateful posts about every race and religion. 4chan have 30+ boards in total

CodeCompost• 1 year ago

Well that's OK then.

wegfawefgawefg6• 1 year ago

To add context, every male in my high school went on that site. Pol was just a place crazy people posted. We used to laugh and read eachother dumb copypastas at lunch with gorgonzola cheese rhymes and bad puns.

The average 15yo boy have enough mental hygiene to know everything you read online is false. The website is not a nazi factory.

jmyeet2• 1 year ago

This is /pol/ focused, yes, but the other boards aren't separate worlds. It's all part of what many call the "alt-right pipeline" and it's subtle and insidious.

For example, many (particularly women) have consumed Candace Owens's content about the Blake Lively / Justin Baldoni saga, just like many followed certain creators with the Amber Heard trial. Both of thse fall squarely on the alt-right pipeline.

So you may start folloing 9gag. Particularly if you're young, you may enjoy being "edgy" but a bunch of that is actually normalizing right-wing views. Even seeking validation on /b/ fits this.

Blikkentrekker8• 1 year ago

It doesn't even describe /pol/. This is what 4chan thinks of /pol/ but when you actually go there there is a pluriformmity of opinions and it's indeed mostly just about current events.

The biggest good thing that came out of 4chan and 8chan to me is that it made me extremely weary to ever trust second-hand reports about some place and made me better at identifying reports that read like “This person dislikes this place, never visited it, and just reasons together what it's like.”. It also made me try Tumblr. I heard terrible things about it how it was filled with “social justice warriors” and stuff and unsurprisingly, when actually trying it it was nothing like that and just a fairly chill place where people mostly blog about fiction and pornography and share their thoughts. Even when ignoring the filter and logging out and going to what is trending, almost no content is political.

I remember when 8chan went down and all the news reports and forum posts basically said it was basically Stormfront but I was there at the time and it was nothing like that. People just posted cat memes, talked about fiction, talked about life and dating and stuff. One had to dig on very specific boards to find that kind of content.

People talk a lot about “places”, online or offline or even fiction that they clearly have no firsthand experience with, and just reason together about what it's like. They just “expect it to be like that” based on some image they create in their head, or some cherry picked examples they've seen and start to treat it like fact. It's especially weird when it's about something they clearly don't like, some kind of book or television series of which, despite clearly disliking it, they can supposedly tell you exactly what it's like... well, they've never seen it, they just reasoned it together in their head based on some things they read about it and their own expectations.

I frequent 4chan a lot; it's nothing like this description indeed. I don't frequent /pol/ because I found the discussions to be completely empty but I tried it and it was nothing like that. Even within 4chan I read all sorts of things about other boards that are just not true when actually visiting them. /pol/ isn't a far right echo chamber, /r9k/ isn't full of lonely incels, /lgbt/ isn't some social justice warrior hub despite what one might read about those places on other boards.

AgentME2• 1 year ago

Many people will downplay this, saying that the alt-righters on 4chan were only trolls, or were only a few people sockpuppeting to make it look like there were many, or that these people were already alt-right and that 4chan didn't actually influence anyone into it (and that 4chan's userbase merely cycled out to a set of new alt-right users), but I have to say that's all wrong. I was in several different online communities 2010-2018 of people who met through 4chan, and a startling number of people did actually adopt alt-right politics over this timeframe after I had first met them. I think people who downplay how common radicalization on 4chan was didn't have as clear of a picture as this experience gave me.

Ferret74462• 1 year ago

Yes, QAnon is a joke, as was the white power hand sign and microwave charging iPhones, among hundreds of others.

There is no "baby filter" on 4chan. You are solely responsible for believing and/or not being offended by anything. Well, that is true everywhere on the Web, but there is zero veneer of it on 4chan vs the partial safety bubbles you get on other sites.

WindowsDev• 1 year ago

Is the source code which leaked everything one would need to host their own copy of the site?

technion2• 1 year ago

There are tonnes of open source clones on github, source code to run the site is nothing special. You still need users.

joseda-hg2• 1 year ago

Might I add, 4chan's implementation isn't even particularly good one

kaiokendev• 1 year ago

The site has an API for reading posts [0]. It works (worked?) quite well. For making posts, you'd need to write your own functionality that forwards the CAPTCHA and post timers.

[0] https://github.com/4chan/4chan-API

PaulRobinson2• 1 year ago

No, you'll need servers and enough network capacity to handle the load, an understanding and supportive hosting provider, a law degree or enough money to pay somebody with one to keep you out of court/jail/prison, a network of degenerates to provide traffic and content and/or a copy of the existing 4chan content, a stomach of steel to deal with the content moderation duties, and a moral compass so warped you think hosting degrading and illegal content is "just liberalism and freedom of speech" and not something that needs a second thought by any right-minded person.

But sure, if you have all that and the source code, you're all set. Godspeed!

desumeku3• 1 year ago

All content that violates the law of the United States is banned on 4chan. I don't know where you got that idea.

jml7c5• 1 year ago

a copy of the existing 4chan content

4chan's content is ephemeral. Most of it is gone every few days.

winrid• 1 year ago

It sounds like everything was running on one server, fwiw.

no_time2• 1 year ago

Not the first time this has happened, and probably not the last. I hope they bounce back from this like they did before. It's a special place.

ttw446• 1 year ago

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.

blacktits69• 1 year ago

you think these are akin to endangered species? these are humans collectivizing and cloaking under maladaptive pretenses. you're advocating for empowering polio because it is life and deserves a chance.

DaSHacka4• 1 year ago

Halfchan's likely been around longer than you have and will just as likely remain around long after you're gone

ttw446• 1 year ago

That's fine, I don't really expect a 22 year old site with generational backup storage to actually go down forever. I'm 23, so I got them beat!

y-curious2• 1 year ago

I, too, prefer to see my vulgar memes served by an AI algorithm alongside ads. Sooooo much better!

kittikitti• 1 year ago

Yes, and everywhere else people have to worry about being deported for pointing out Israel's war crimes. At least no one needed to worry about that on 4Chan, but seeing an anonymous racist meme is even worse for people like you.

ttw446• 1 year ago

That is a completely separate problem, and it's dishonest making the comparison. Extremist right wing ideology and genocide is actively advocated on /pol/ as well as anti-Jewish rhetoric. Neo-nazism is not pointing out Israel's war crimes, and pointing out Israel's war crimes is not neo-nazism or anti-Jewish. /pol/ isn't antisemitic for Israel's genocide; they just hate Jewish people.

The Trump administration trying to deport people for doing so is also unjustified. People are freely criticizing Israel on other popular social media (notably TikTok and Instagram) without inciting a modern neo-nazi and right wing movement like what has happened on 4chan in the past 10 years.

soon_to_be• 1 year ago

4chan being gone for good would've been a bad thing regardless of your views. All those people who used to come there and just talk wouldn't just cease to exist nor stop feeling the way they feel. At the very least, it's the devil you know.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 1 year ago

Yep, there is a reason the site was operational as long as it was.

ttw446• 1 year ago

Obviously those people will continue to think and exist the way they are. But we can't assume things will slowly start getting better if we continually allow increasingly racist "discourse" and misinformation in our society.

snvzz6• 1 year ago

unapologetically racist and antisemitic.

Anyone who's actually familiar with 4chan knows that posts containing any of that are cracked on hard, both by other users (replies calling it out) and janitors (delete+ban).

creatonez2• 1 year ago

Is this actually true? So they just get around it with countless dogwhistles that mean the exact same thing?

Every single page is filled to the brim with racism, that is evident to anyone who has visited the site.

monadgonad2• 1 year ago

I'm not sure how you've come to that impression. The boards I used to frequent are hobbyist ones, not political, yet they have people calling each other the n-word all the time. On /fit/ anything done by a large corporation or as a moneymaking scheme is talked about as if it's a Jewish conspiracy, to the point where they call highly-processed food "goyslop". /g/ hates Indians and calls software and technology that it likes "the white man's choice." I could go on. This pervasive background of racism is all over 4chan, and I wonder why you're trying to downplay it.

ttw446• 1 year ago

I'm actually familiar with 4chan and lurked on it when I was underage at least daily. It was funny for the time.

I'm not sure where the idea comes from that the entire site's reputation is containerized inside /pol/ or any NSFW board. It's just misleading if you take 5 minutes to browse around (if you still can, anyway). The language and harassment used in ALL boards of any group of people or individual is disgusting.

lysp• 1 year ago

racist and antisemitic

There was a leak of the political channel by poster's country.

According to that post, the top posting country by far (226M posts) is also the same country that is at the receiving end of antisemitism.

ttw446• 1 year ago

Yet another reason 4chan and its anonymity is a misinformation and propaganda warzone.

yapyap• 1 year ago

Hacker named 4chan hacks 4chan

Red_Tarsius• 1 year ago

I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I enjoyed browsing through sfw boards like /tg/ (tabletop media), /ck/ (cooking) and /fit/ (fitness). I had long discussions about the SW sequels on /tv/ back in 2015-19. The readership was surprisingly diverse and the anonymity lead users to provide more focused replies. With bodybuilding.com gone, the blue boards felt like the last bastion of the old internet.

MattDemers• 1 year ago

I think people also don't acknowledge how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there. When it breaches into Twitter (usually through funposters) people kind of ignore the unsavoury origin and rewrite the history. The anonymous nature kind of provides that petri dish of "if it's strong culture, it'll survive or be modified."

thih92• 1 year ago

how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there

Could you give some examples? The more unexpected, the better.

Preferably with sources, because tracing word origin is difficult enough on its own.

giancarlostoro2• 1 year ago

Don't forget the slurs. They have some unique slurs in there that have backstories too.

52-6F-623• 1 year ago

I thought culture was a “solved problem” now that we have AI.

I can’t keep up anymore.

hotfist• 1 year ago

This absolutely was the case for a long time. It was the cultural center of the internet where nearly all memes sprang from or gained traction and context before leaving orbit for the greater internet.

That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms.

But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.

el_cujo• 1 year ago

I think this was true at one point but not for the past 5-10 years. Based off of using the site I feel like now a lot of things start on other sites (particularly smaller accounts on twitter), get aggregated and popularized on 4chan, and then get picked up on other sites (often regurgitated back to twitter). Knowyourmeme shows this for a lot of things that people typically attribute as original to 4chan. There was definitely a time when a ton of stuff originated on 4chan but these days everything is so interconnected with the same people posting on twitter, reddit, and 4chan that I think 4chan gets a lot of unearned credit

nemomarx2• 1 year ago

the blue boards did have some slow overlap with pol in my experience - they were more distinct before 2014 or so and by 2016 I barely recognized /tg/ culture.

I'm curious, why bodybuilding.com in particular? I think I've only heard of it once. I wonder if anyone on HN remembers stardestroyer.net or old weird tech forums?

sgarland3• 1 year ago

I used to hang out at Head-Fi a lot in the early ‘00s. It’s a headphone and headphone accessories (amplifiers, DACs, etc.) forum, and people nerd out about building their own stuff. I recall writing a review on some obscure Chinese brand of sound card that people liked, because it happened to have a really good DAC for the rear output (it was a surround sound card, back when that was something interesting).

I gradually lost interest when they started heavily pushing commercial sponsors. I get it; sites aren’t free to host, and moderator time isn’t free / unlimited, but it’s still sad.

h2zizzle6• 1 year ago

Bodybuilding.com's misc board was essentially the same sort of raunchy teen hangout as /b/, sans the porn. It wasn't anything goes, but a lot did, and of course you were dealing with the kinds of meatheads (said lovingly) who would happen upon bb.com in the first place.

sgarland3• 1 year ago

bodybuilding.com

Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online [0]. It’s so good, the Wikipedia entry [1] has a section devoted to it.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bod...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding.com

sensanaty2• 1 year ago

My personal favorite rendition of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqylqmDl0Mw (Mega64 - Flame War Theater - "Full Body Workout Every Other Day?")

cwmma• 1 year ago

For the record this is an example of the "Fencepost error" where the last item in a range gets double counted as the first item in the next range and is incredibly common in dyscalculia (the math version of dyslexia) as people will have "visual number lines" in their head that cover ranges of numbers but the ends get double counted, so there will be a 10-20 number line then a 20-30 number line.

I suspect TheJosh had something like that with the week where he visualized it with Sundays at both ends but lacked the self awareness to realize that this was not a universal representation.

throwaway2037• 1 year ago

I never saw this before. Thank you to share. Truly, this is peak Interwebs.

butterlettuce• 1 year ago

If a woman ever asks what men’s locker room talk is like, just show them that post. We really are a simple bunch.

justinator2• 1 year ago

That IS dumb -- everyone knows there are 8 days in a week. Sunday to Sunday -- you can count it on your hands!

ren_engineer2• 1 year ago

lol that was a bait thread, this is the same place that had a discussion on whether a pitbull could defeat the Sun if it snuck up on it at night

adamrezich• 1 year ago

In 2015, Vice News contacted mathematician Joanna Nelson for a resolution, and she said that TheJosh would have to schedule his workouts in two-week chunks, claiming a week is seven days from Monday to Sunday.

Why was a mathematician necessary for this assertion?

wolrah• 1 year ago

Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online

Jon Bois did an amazing video about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eECjjLNAOd4

artursapek2• 1 year ago

I love this thread so much

hsuduebc2• 1 year ago

I need to thank you for the web archive post. The argument was amusing as it was dumb.

blackhaj7• 1 year ago

Laughing my head off reading through this. Thank you

flmontpetit4• 1 year ago

It used to be a diverse place without much to tie all the boards and users together save for a shared commitment to counter-culture. Then GamerGate and Donald Trump happened. "Every board is /pol/" was one of the most frequent replies you would see for a while until all the halfway decent people left.

/g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.

johnnyjeans8• 1 year ago

/g/ genuinely was one of the worst boards on the website, but there were a handful of lurkers who made good posts in some of the general threads. the site as a whole was still was a diverse place up until yesterday, with only a few boards being unusably bad, and it was getting increasingly better.

it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.

kelipso9• 1 year ago

Yeah, after 2015 it became impossible to go to any of the boards if you weren’t a pol poster. They made it their mission to spread their vile shit everywhere.

arkh3• 1 year ago

Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays (at least in Western societies). Counter-culture is not always a good thing.

Calinterman8• 1 year ago

Gamergate and Donald Trump was a 4-6 year period depending on where you put the needle. There were 10 years before it and now close to 5 years after it. The people who continue to hammer about it are just announcing that they don't understand the site and are complaining about ancient history. The most popular board right now is the video game generals board, and second place belongs to the regular video games board.

ToucanLoucan3• 1 year ago

I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.

That's probably why a lot of websites use moderation to avoid having one section of it turn into a cesspit of every -ism you can imagine, up to and including fascism, because once you have a section of your website that is openly coordinating the pushing of fascism on society, everyone kinda forgets about the diverse and interesting other things it might have, because of the fascism.

desumeku3• 1 year ago

4chan is more moderated than you'd imagine.

fooList2• 1 year ago

That is what has saved Reddit. You cannot find society fascism coordination there because the mods are strong. If 4chan followed that model bronies might still be a thing.

wordsinaline• 1 year ago

I like that there can be wild places on the internet where people can pieces of shit. 4Chan had communist trolls, Jew-hating trolls, Zionist-trolls, pro-Christian trolls, anti-Christian pro-pagan trolls. It didn't foster any fascism in society. It was just a place where people could say mostly what they want.

moonlet• 1 year ago

/fit/ and /mu/ were good to me in my late teens, and /ck/ is the reason I actually asked my roommate’s mom to show me cooking basics when I was in college!

giancarlostoro2• 1 year ago

Funny you point to /pol/ and forget about /b/, that was the meat of 4chan in the late 2000's

eqvinox2• 1 year ago

I always thought it's /b/ that people conflate with the whole website… (for the purpose of declaring it a cesspool)

… but then again I never looked at /pol/, maybe it's even worse than /b/?

ArinaS8• 1 year ago

It is - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=/pol/&oldid=12855....

_3452• 1 year ago

it is, and unfortunately from 2016 onwards it kind of outgrew the rest of the site like a tumorous growth until the whole site became markedly more neonazi and less goofy. something to do with donald trump i suspected

fastglass• 1 year ago

I feel too many people who don't conflate /pol/ with the whole website, as well as the others, don't know why /pol/ was created.

It was eventually a replacement for the /new/ board, where news of the arab spring first started, shortly before it was shut down. However, it was plagued with proto-pol behavior before anyone was bothering to complain about pol.

There was always these 'cells' of non /jp/ shitposters, if they weren't the OG shitposters themselves, that would post about left-right politics ad nauseum, and in the most hallmark unproductive ways. It was when trolling evolved from 'clever this and that' to shear brute forcing. It was the topic of the news that attracted these unsavor political actors into that place, which was for a short period of time, a great diverse place for collecting news.

This social phenomena and history could never be repeated enough, particularly since we might be finally ending the story of pol/4chan - which was more popular than 4chan itself.

Calinterman8• 1 year ago

I feel too many people who conflate /pol/ with the whole website are just regurgitating information they heard from other social media sites. The most popular boards, by far, since 2020 have been the video game and vtuber boards. With Video Game generals being the most popular board for the past five years outside of the occasional political season. You can check this on 4stats.

People who still complain about /pol/ look a little like people who would still complain about ebaumsworld: Completely out of touch individuals who equate everything to a tiny phenomena.

helle2533• 1 year ago

/pol/ and /b/ were containment boards, up until they got so popular that everything else ended up being containment boards.

I still miss hanging out on /v/ and /fa/. When they split /vg/ out into its own board, the colour started to drain from my experience.

throwaway795737• 1 year ago

The more popular blue boards were pretty bad too, let's be honest. It wasn't hard at all to find things on those boards that wouldn't be tolerated on any mainstream social media, for good reason.

swarnie4• 1 year ago

What is the good reason?

Where I'm sat the only reason our three (?) social media companies restrict none illegal speech/content is to make it more appealing to advertisers.

I miss the internet before it was driven by advertisers and their investors.

Blikkentrekker8• 1 year ago

It wasn't hard to find things no, but the narrative one often reads is that it's the mainstream consensus there to the universal opinion rather than a fringe opinion which exists and isn't banned from having.

SkyeCA3• 1 year ago

I'm not looking for corporate sanitized social media site #102032. Imageboards if nothing else allow people to be people and you know what? Sure sometimes people suck, but I don't want some overvalued social media companies in America deciding what I can and can't see.

Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which I've stayed in contact with long term.

asdff4• 1 year ago

Maybe today's social media. It's basically early xbox live tier banter. A relic of a different time on the internet that is incomprehensible to the outsiders who weren't around for it.

Bjorkbat• 1 year ago

/vg/ also had a pretty cool amateur game dev general thread (/agdg/). No one was making any hidden gems there, but it wasn't trash either. At any rate, I liked it.

matheusmoreira6• 1 year ago

I remember one user who made a really fun arcade flight simulator.

diath• 1 year ago

Not hidden gems, no, but some of big titles originated from /agdg/, both Risk of Rain and VA-11 Hall-A started as progress posts in /agdg/ before hitting combined >1M sales.

Calinterman8• 1 year ago

It's, funny enough, identical to people who conflate all of old 4chan with /b/. The current most popular boards are video game boards and have been since Covid hit. There's a site called 4stats which charts this, and shows how the end of Trump's presidency spelled the death knell of /pol/ dominating 4chan. Which, by comparison, was four years. It's been five years since then. It's kind of like how the golden age of /b/ was a shade over three years (2004-2007) but all of old 4chan is equated to the memes made in this prehistoric era.

swarnie4• 1 year ago

Ignore /b/ /pol/ and /r9k/ and most of the rest were good communities compared to the modern internet.

Reddit can't get close due to its voting system.

LinuxBender5• 1 year ago

I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.

I believe that's fair. Sure, it's "a different board" but it's just another URL on the same domain and same administrator, just different janitors. So it is really the part of the whole website. I know that 99% of people on 4chan disagree with me because they do not wish to be associated with /pol/ /b/ /gif/ but if they wanted to disassociate themselves with those boards then they should be on an entirely different domain without 4chan in name. polchan perhaps.

Hamuko• 1 year ago

Do people also treat Reddit the same way?

codexon8• 1 year ago

I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.

Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...

On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.

I discussed it somewhat recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276865#42283887

kypro2• 1 year ago

I like /pol/ and although I'm not really interested in defending it (I 100% understand why people don't like it) I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously.

/pol/ isn't trying to be like the millions of other politic discussion forums online. It's literally intended to be politically outrageous so when people like yourself complain that it's full of outrageous alt-right content you're typically missing the point.

It's full of things that appear to be alt-right because stuff like racism, sexism and transphobia is extremely politically incorrect. While far-left views might be equally reprehensible, these views are not seen as equally politically incorrect. It's actually quite hard to hold politically incorrect far-left views unless you incorporate some far-right views – being so pro-trans that you hate biological women or something stupid. This is why you tend to see less left-wing content there. It's hard to be offensive and left-wing.**

But even then I think it's wrong to say /pol/ is full of alt-right content to be honest. There are alt-right people there for sure, but huge amount of the political memes posted on /pol/ are mocking the alt-right and the right more broadly. The board is constantly roasting the MAGA movement, for example.

As a brit my favourite threads on /pol/ are the brit/pol/ threads which basically just post politically incorrect memes mocking Brits and joking about how shit the UK is. These threads largely just Brits shitposting with each other and it would be wrong to assume the existence of hateful anti-British content on /pol/ is somehow evidence that /pol/ is xenophobic against Brits. People should take a similar views of the racist/alt-right threads – the vast majority of people there are just trolling and being offensive for a laugh. You don't have to like the humour, but most of it is just people shit posting.

they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.

Loads of stuff gets removed... If you're posting content that "goes against the alt-right" you're probably taking the board way way to seriously and you probably should be banned.

** Interestingly another commenter in the thread asked about why there's so much interracial porn on /pol/ if it's so racist, which kinda highlights my point here. Just hating white people isn't politically incorrect – there's people doing that all over Reddit. To make hating white people offensive you basically have to incorporate racist stereotypes about about how whites are genetically inferrer to blacks in various way, but then in doing this you'll get viewed as racist and alt-right because you're using racial stereotypes about how blacks are more athletic, etc.

If you're up for it I challenge you to be politically incorrect from a left-wing perspective without it being possible to argue that it's actually far-right.

FiniteField4• 1 year ago

All of this sentiment is many years out of date. "Alt-right" hasn't been a term of self-identification for almost a decade, and hasn't been used as an identifier by pretty much anyone for at least half of that. /pol/ is not the epicentre of the radical online right and has not been for years - it's a backwater in that regard now.

The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.

Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.

lurk219• 1 year ago

On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.

Lurk moar.

timeinput• 1 year ago

Piling on the "some parts of 4chan was good until it wasn't" theme: I really liked /ck/ for a while. Then there was this weird trend of just like "all food tubers are garbage" whether that was "Kenji-Cucks", or people hating on Rageusa, or what ever.

Combining that with the "post hands" request for a lot of food it was just an unpleasant community to participate it.

Weirdly trying to load the page right now I'm getting Connection timed out. Is hackernews ddosing 4chan? What a world.

gosub1002• 1 year ago

Ragusea is an idiot, though and I arrived at that conclusion without any help from 4ch.

s3krit4• 1 year ago

/ck/ from around 2015 to hmm… maybe 2018-19 was pretty good, and probably my home board. Decent cook along threads (I hope Patti is doing ok), /ck/ challenge threads where there was some theme we had to follow and posts would get ranked… and of course the yearly lemon pig [1] threads. Sadly I guess fast food posting, shitting on foodtubers, and general /pol/ shittery made it go down in my view. Still went there most days until yesterday though.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_pig

ren_engineer2• 1 year ago

/g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI, also where llama weights were first leaked

canjobear• 1 year ago

/g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI

Is this documented?

FMecha5• 1 year ago

/g/ was also the home of a Windows XP source code leak (at least publicly). Some gaming-related leaks also came from /v/, such as the 1999 Duke Nukem Forever builds.

torginus3• 1 year ago

It's interesting to note the popularity of the website, and the massive traffic it handled, despite the lack of everything we assume necessary for a modern (social media) website

- no modern web frameworks

- no microservices/kubernetes clusters

- no algorithmic curation/moderation/recommendation algoritmhs

One wonders just how much of the modern engineering developed in the past decades, that cost a fortune to develop and run is actually necessary or even beneficial for running a modern social media website

conradfr• 1 year ago

Should have had updated dependencies though.

potato37328425• 1 year ago

I worked for a major internet company until 2020. HN would be aghast how much "if we failed to provide this service a good chunk of the internet would either go down or sites wouldn't function properly and the stock market probably would dip" stuff runs on redundant pairs of LAMP stacks and other unsophisticated old stuff HN would turn up its nose at.

rcpt• 1 year ago

otoh the entire site is no longer running because they fell behind on updates

Aerroon• 1 year ago

I think no algorithmic curation is its strength. It means that even if an echo chamber appears anybody can still post their opinion and it doesn't get downvoted into oblivion when people disagree.

milesrout• 1 year ago

Nobody that is over 30 thinks any of those things are necessary because we all remember them not existing and websites handling plenty of traffic fine.

bigfatkitten3• 1 year ago

Even /b/ was pretty good back in the day. Memes and inside jokes galore with almost no porn to be seen.

irusensei• 1 year ago

The first llama torrents were posted on /g/ and for a long time it was the best place to go for information on local models.

keepamovin2• 1 year ago

I still don't understand how to read threads. How do replies work? How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back? How is it organized visually??

DecoySalamander2• 1 year ago

How do replies work

Reply references the post it is replying to by ID, most boards will turn that ID into a link or even create a UI to view a chain of replies.

How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back?

You shouldn't, an anonymous imageboard invites you to engage with ideas, not people. However, on most boards you can enter a password with your post, which is displayed as a hash, changing you from anonymous to pseudonymous (although this is generally considered attention-seeking and is frowned upon).

ogurechny7• 1 year ago

If that's your thing, you can turn nicknames and avatars on in profile settings after registration.

brap• 1 year ago

You’re right but only if ignoring the last 5 years or so.

I discovered 4chan around 2008 as a kid, it was much less hostile back then. Even as an adult I used to go on /fit/ every now and then. It was useful and funny and even “wholesome” in its own special way.

But over the last few years, the entire site became /pol/, and other boards became unusable. Maybe once a year I will pop in and immediately regret it.

RKFADU_UOFCCLEL2• 1 year ago

This. It's just a website (where anyone can post, quite rare in these overpoliticalized days).

A Soyjak.Party users also shared a list of emails they claimed are associated with janitor and moderator accounts, including three .edu emails. Although some internet users claimed that the leaks included .gov emails associated with members of the moderation team, this remains unverified.

Like who cares?

brigandish5• 1 year ago

I see a lot of hate for 4chan here. Why? I’ve never used it, know it by reputation, but not sure why there’s so much hate for it.

Philpax4• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan#Controversies_and_harass...

brigandish5• 1 year ago

Honestly, that didn't help. There's a wide type of "controversy" there, and I don't see how 4chan are inherent to any of them, they could've been done via any forum. Or maybe I missed something, specificity would be good.

wewxjfq• 1 year ago

This still stings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373

karn972• 1 year ago

Even more true in 2025

beeflet2• 1 year ago

made me LOL

1231231231e• 1 year ago

Ask HN: Why is nobody using [obscure niche technology from the 80s]?
Why [popular technology] is [unexpected opinion]

ozmodiar• 1 year ago

I hope this isn't too contentious but I'll try to cover most things. I've posted this a few times, but I checked out 4Chan about twice in the early days and saw CSAM both times and it gave me personally a visceral hatred of the site. I've heard it got better/that's not representative but it's a hard thing to shake. The origin of the site is also supposedly Moot getting kicked off SomethingAwful for posting 'lolicon' (child anime porn). They've also gone after and doxxed pedophiles though, so the sites relationship with that sort of content is... complicated. I think most of the worst ended up moving to 4Chan clones quite awhile ago because it really splintered again at some point and became known as the cleaner Chan board.

It's also known for its extremely abrasive mildy sociopathic culture and 4Chan posters have a very samey 'posting voice' where if you don't like it you can hate it. It permeates a lot of the internet, but 4chan is kind of seen as the epicenter. I think it also gets blamed for a lot of negative internet culture like doxxing and choosing targets to harass, although I'm not sure how much of that was actually 4Chan. I think most of those people moved on to Kiwifarms. 4Chan probably gets some hate for things that other Chan sites have like Qanon in a sort of 'you started this' way.

And finally the politics are complicated. It actually used to be slightly left leaning or at least libertarian or anarchist, but over the years pol in particular has been known to be hard right wing. It definitely seems like they had a shift in political tone for the (IMO) worst at some point.

Personally I won't hide that I'm a hater and an unapologetic curmudgeonly old man, but that's my perception. On the other hand if you think the CP stuff is overblown, don't care about the negatives because there are apparently good boards there that are insulated, or are just hard right yourself then it is one of the last major discussion boards on the net. Some of that's probably out of date (like I said I gave up on it pretty quickly) but I'd wager most people with negative opinions are thinking of one or more of those. I'd be interested if any haters have other reasons.

sjsdaiuasgdia• 1 year ago

It actually used to be slightly left leaning or at least libertarian or anarchist, but over the years pol in particular has been known to be hard right wing.

If your bar doesn't kick out nazis, your bar becomes the nazi hangout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Whoppertime3• 1 year ago

I don't know what CSAM is and after reading the rest of your post I don't want to Google it

brigandish5• 1 year ago

Thanks, that gives me something to go on. I appreciate the time you took with your reply.

throwaway7432• 1 year ago

Because people think /pol/ is 4chan, and it's easier to think that and what others say about something than to invest time into looking into something they were uninterested in looking into to begin with

gherkinnn• 1 year ago

You know, I always found Twitter (even pre-X) to be worse than 4chan ever was. Not in obvious terms, but in how it fucked with your head.

1970-01-013• 1 year ago

This is a pretty good take! It's because you could verbally attack and fight the 4chan idiots with a swarm of common sense and be lauded for doing that job.

Doing the same on X will just get you banned for whatever reason Elon feels is best 'for the community'.

lesbolasinc3• 1 year ago

I dont understand why twitter is so prevalent in the tech community; and it's not like you can just 'not use it' - you are at a true disadvantage if you aren't on twitter because of how much discourse around new tech, private equity, etc transpires on it.

I'm surprised a literal echo-chamber in which free speech is suppressed for disagreeing with the party line is responsible for so much productivity because of how many techbros are active on it. What happened to the time where being a techbro meant you were an open source libertarian like Stallman?

bananalychee2• 1 year ago

The pompous tone of your comment exemplifies what actually makes most social media platforms awful, which is how people act on them. Inconsistent moderation is everywhere, and most people getting banned from X absolutely deserve it. If you posted something like this on 4chan, people would quickly tell you to get off your high horse (in more vulgar terms). The nice thing about an anonymous message board is that without a name or upvote count attached to your name, you don't get positive reinforcement for putting on a show of moral superiority, and struggle sessions via petty call-outs or pile-ons are not a thing beyond the lifetime of a thread. And on the other side of the same coin, people are not afraid of damaging their reputation by being uncouth, which helps not take anything too seriously, and enables direct feedback instead of passive-aggressive behavior.

newZWhoDis2• 1 year ago

Everything happens on X now.

Even when I’m forced to go back to Reddit, all the niche subs I follow just post back to X links where the actual discussion is happening.

Blikkentrekker8• 1 year ago

This is a pretty good take! It's because you could verbally attack and fight the 4chan idiots with a swarm of common sense and be lauded for doing that job.

This is actually a big reason why 4chan never messed with my sanity and blood pressure opposed to say Reddit or Twitter. It feels like on 4chan there are some people who are completely off the rails, but they can be insulted and called out. On Reddit or Twitter, it feels like almost everyone is “somewhat of the rails” and they all concentrate among each other, as in almost every Subreddit has some collectively held belief that simply appears as nonsensical to people outside of it, but as much as politely disagreeing will get one blocked by that specific user in many cases, or just banned from the subreddit so it's far more obnoxious. Also, it feels like arguing against an endless current whereas at best on 4chan it's two waves that clash into each other of even size.

4chan is “arguing against an idiot”, Reddit and Twitter becomes “arguing against idiots, being surrounded by them, and very often not even really being allowed to argue lest one be banned”. It's a very frustrating experience that makes one's blood boil.

amadeuspagel4• 1 year ago

Browsing different forums helps you recognize how discourse is shaped by different feedback loops, how people troll on 4chan or conform on reddit, rather then assuming that twitter is real life.

carabiner• 1 year ago

I received really heartfelt (to me) and sincere life advice on 4chan. I think the fact that it's anonymous without a real karma/voting system means there's a lot less ego-driven, self-centered posting. People don't try to attack as much or have bitter back-and-forths as much as twitter, reddit. They might argue for a bit and then just say f it and move on. But there's no motivation for ragebait, karma farming like there is on twitter.

SkyeCA3• 1 year ago

It's not just that there's no voting system it's that there's no names. It's pointless to argue on a site like Reddit, but it's ridiculous to argue back and forth on a site like 4chan where you can't even know if you're arguing with the same person from post to post.

Likewise an outside observer can't assign any identity to a series of posts in an argument, so you really have to take every post at face value.

arkis22• 1 year ago

I like this quote from a great philosopher of our time: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1273406-tyler-the-creators-c...

the anonymity makes it kind of the only site where thats true

underseacables• 1 year ago

I have been to 4chan maybe 4 times in my life. The first was like ok.. Then I visited /b and LOL'd for a couple of hours. Then it just got redundant and depressing. It really is the arsehole of the internet, but some people seem to find it useful.

Blikkentrekker8• 1 year ago

but some people seem to find it useful.

Honestly, it filled a very specific hole for me that I found nowhere else. Everyone is talking about the “unfiltered content” and all those things but to me it was mostly just topical. It was really one of the few places where one could get a good discussion on the internet about Japanese female-oriented entertainment which I'm well aware isn't the first thing people think about with 4chan but pretty much every other forum about Japanese entertainment is completely dominated by male-oriented entertainment, except when they go out of their way to specifically make a board catered to female-oriented entertainment, but that has the side effect that people on those boards end up talking more about gender politics than about the entertainment itself and I just want to talk about my favorite television shows and comic books and really don't care about all the politics.

4chan by it's nature doesn't drown out minority tastes and voices. This really isn't just a “female-oriented entertainment” thing but really any minority taste that just gets drowned out on most boards to the point that it disappears. The only other place I know where one can do this is Tumblr, more or less, but it's a very different experience, not necessarily better or worse but there just isn't this kind of “live discussion” atmosphere and vibe going on on Tumblr about episodes that are currently airing where people post small comments as the episode is airing and they're watching it. It's more for long impressions after it was aired and it doesn't have the same degree of interaction, it's a blogging place, not a message board.

As said, it isn't just that but “obscure taste” in general. You can make a thread on 4chan about some really obscure piece of fiction that no one knows and get a discussion going, half with the people that do it know, in part because it's an imageboard so they're drawn in to an image they recognize and it stands out, and half with people that never heard of it before, see the images in the thread, see it looks interesting and try it out. The images are the key I feel, it lowers the barrier of entry for people to try out something obscure because they see the images which lures them in. It was one of the best places to get a discussion going about some obscure piece of fiction which Tumblr doesn't do either, the only things that are being discussed are the really big titles. There are so many relatively obscure titles I enjoy I will possibly never get to discuss with anyone in my life again if 4chan not come back. I know many of those titles from 4chan because people constantly promote and share fairly obscure things there and the images again sell it.

shipscode• 1 year ago

The take on 4chan on here is super intriguing. I always felt that the current social media/doomscroll/memesharing landscape which has become so common worldwide is indiscernable and in some ways worse than 4chan. It feels like 4chan left it's homepage and went worldwide sometime in the early 2010s when iPhone-style phone use became more commonplace.

I remember that 4chan users had more honor than users on the internet today. One example would be 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts, driven by huge accounts on IG/Tiktok/etc, that hit normal people daily.

The modern social media landscape has become far more hectic, harmful, and downright scary than 4chan. Dodging explicit imagery is harder on Instagram's explore page than on 4chan, and the widespread popularization of OF creators has zero bounds across the socials. DOXXING is no longer frowned upon and now commonplace. And memes have become less unique and funny and more commoditized.

gtirloni• 1 year ago

Isn't that the path that most platforms follow once they get mildly popular?

amadeuspagel4• 1 year ago

"Not your personal army" goes father then not doxxing. It's a rejection of any attempt to imagine a community of strangers, united by hatred of a scapegoat.

shadowgovt3• 1 year ago

If someone rallied a hate-mob on 4chan, though, how would people know?

Since 4chan overtly resists it, it'd rapidly move off of there, but it's still a great place to find like-minded folks that'd follow someone to another server to go brigade someone.

bboygravity• 1 year ago

So "not your personal army" == don't be a journalist?

smsm423• 1 year ago

united by hatred of a scapegoat.

United by hatred of a scapegoat that they didn't choose on a random whim or due to some common agenda. Otherwise it's completely fine.

foolfoolz• 1 year ago

modern 4chan has a certain authentic charm to it. this is missing from most other places. you have to sift past loads of junk to get it, but you have to do that on any app to get the content you want.

with no names, likes, virality, accounts, etc there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments. less companies trying to sell me stuff. less focus groups trying to tell me what to think. and with less censorship you end up seeing more creativity

LeafItAlone2• 1 year ago

there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments

I’m not sure you’ve actually been to 4chan…

profmonocle3• 1 year ago

4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts

That's too generous. "Not your personal army" started because 4chan had a well-earned reputation for harassment - usually raiding other web sites, but often targeting individual people who caught their attention for one reason or another.

The "not your personal army" slogan came about because people who were very aware of this reputation were showing up, hoping to make a web site or person they disliked the next target. That got annoying fast, hence they told those people to go away.

It wasn't a moral stance against target harassment - far from it. It was a stance that the group mind will choose the next target when they feel like it - not because some rando is mad at their ex or something

KennyBlanken2• 1 year ago

Multiple white supremacist mass shooter have been 4chan users and they cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...

The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...

The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:

https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...

"Not your personal army" but 4chan users would routinely dox, swat, and otherwise harass people all the time.

I have no idea why people are whitewashing 4chan so hard.

sph7• 1 year ago

How many of these used Facebook, Twitter or Reddit? They are not mentioned in mainstream media because they are popular, but I assure you there are a lot of deranged people that never even posted on 4chan and just stuck to the “good” ones.

smsm423• 1 year ago

This is a cheap bait - of course when there's a small number of leniently moderated popular platforms, there will eventually be a high-profile criminal that would use one of them, because a) that what "popular" means and b) anti-social types would gravitate to more leniently moderated platforms. And of course on the same platforms there would be online edglelords that would make sure to cheer whatever causes the most offense, because that's what they are there for. If you close 4chan, there would be another platform that would become focus of the same people - because the people focus on the platform, not the platform causes the people to become bad. The press that tried to frame it the way which reverses the cause and the effect is doing you a disservice, and you may want to consider using a better source of information. If, of course, you are interested in understanding the causes and the effects of things, not just feeling good by having your preconceptions confirmed.

PixelForg2• 1 year ago

My main problem with 4chan is how they talk, like the language they use. They really don't care about anyone's feelings and show a lack of empathy. Unfortunately this has been spreading to other social media as well.

Imagine how good a place it could have been if people over there talked like people on HN.

HaZeust3• 1 year ago

HN is 4chan in many ways - the smart, civilized people just come here. Whereas the smart people that are willing to act disabled go there.

YurgenJurgensen3• 1 year ago

Nobody on Twitter or Reddit or Bluesky or Facebook or whatever ever cared about anyone’s feelings either, they just avoid using certain no-no words.

willis936• 1 year ago

Feature, not bug. Edgy teens don't want responsible adults in their clubhouse. Unfortunately it also attracts manchildren.

If it was pleasant to the senses then it wouldn't be counterculture.

ogurechny7• 1 year ago

There is no “they”.

Like many others coming from social web, you expect to find some kind of community which fashions everyone shares, an apparel you can put on. The idea is complete opposite: you don't need to follow any fashion, or imagine yourself “part of the team” any more than you want to. Even though it's not written in any rules, you don't have to use slang or tone if you find them dumb, overused (globally or locally), or forced. Neither do you have to treat stupid posts with respect.

I assume that after 15-20 years of being part of collective consciousness, anonymous image boards have mostly the same public as any average site. Amount of crap that you can read there is just the same as everywhere (though in some cases this or that Big Brother hides it from your view — obviously, to make you more comfortable, and spend more time in his warm embrace). The difference is that regular social fashions mandate the use of suitable set of candy wrappers for the crap, then there are customary ways of dealing with them, so in the end people just spend their time wrapping and unwrapping crap, but are proud of themselves, and call it “civilised discourse”.

starfezzy2• 1 year ago

3/10 troll

That's antithetical to many of the foundational rules of the internet, which are core to 4chan culture.

The whole point is that they don't let the fluctuating, weak-willed whims of normie sensibilities determine what's allowed.

143• 1 year ago

As a parent I have seen first hand some of the bullying teens face on some of the mainstream platforms. Kids being bullied in an instant on snap where things are spread around at lightning speed for one example. But I have also seen some bad things happen on 4chan. People releasing nudes of their exes or posts where users submit clothed pictures of girls they want to see photoshopped naked and a person does so. Or the rekt threads with gore content blocked on most other sites. I guess my feeling is that no matter the site you will always get bad actors.

rincebrain2• 1 year ago

The memetic speedrun that's so common now on social media has some roots there, to be sure, but I think a lot of it was parallel evolution combined with cribbing things that were already polished from years of metaphorical rock tumbling on 4chan, in the best ifunny.com style.

The ubiquitous expectations for modern humor among younger and even middle-aged people rely a lot more on knowing not just the joke but the culture and context it evolved in, and that sort of thing very much dominated bubbles of terminally online people before many people became terminally online and there was an expectation that everyone would know what you meant if you sent an image macro as the entire reply to an email.

You can find example after example from not that long ago of people who are not so terminally online being completely perplexed, on TV and otherwise, and memes like "what the fuck is he saying" "let's get you to bed grandpa" about the cultural disconnect.

Unfortunately, this sort of attention minmaxing without enough deliberation and learning around it produces people who are uncritical of what they consume and just want the next hit.

Ferret74462• 1 year ago

4chan will always be superior than modern social media to me, for one very simple reason: all posts are anonymous and there is no voting/ranking.

Each and every post must stand alone and be judged alone. You do not know if it was posted by someone you hate or adore. It doesn't get hidden or promoted based on what a bubble voted. You see the post and you must judge it alone.

sph7• 1 year ago

Agreed. I would go so far as to say all the ills of modern social media are because of ranked platforms, such as upvote/downvote-based, or like-based. They turn into echo chambers, that promote witty one-liners over nuance, and any sort of controversial position is effectively censored.

That said, HN functions decently well, though in some ways it is even worse in the censoring the outliers.

lurk219• 1 year ago

This used to be a selling point for me when I was younger, but increasingly I find myself not wanting to deal with poorly-moderated platforms. I can’t tell if it’s because the transgressive vulgarity that these platforms enable has lost its novelty as I’ve gotten older or because the median user has less to contribute. Every time I try to browse 4chan these days I find that half the posts are repulsive, basically pornographic representations of the world, and the other half is the product of psychosis (that is, the people making the posts likely need to be institutionalized).

There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation, and a lot of people who are actively detrimental to a conversation. It used to be that you would put up with the craziest ones for the benefit of finding novel and overlooked ideas, but as the internet has become more accessible, the former group now outnumbers the latter.

I would be inclined to think that the problem is that I just grew out of the shock value, but I see the same trend on almost every other platform, too.

anonfordays2• 1 year ago

That is heretical now, unimaginable to huge swaths of the Internet.

smsm423• 1 year ago

This is good sometimes but also horrible sometimes, because reputation exists for a reason. It's a filter, and if you have terabytes of information around which has mostly garbage quality you need filters if you want to make it useful. Of course, reputation does not solve the problem entirely, but at least it makes some steps towards the solution. Otherwise, you're basically on your own against the ocean of garbage, and not many people can really handle that.

ropable• 1 year ago

Hard disagree. Finding anything of quality on 4chan is like searching for gold nuggets by hand in a mountain of radioactive poop. The only times I've ever seen anything useful in there is when someone else has already done the hard work of curating a post.

The core reason why HN is superior (IMO) is the curation and the moderation.

cobson• 1 year ago

gem

sensanaty2• 1 year ago

no coal to be found here

greazy2• 1 year ago

4chan is a reflection of the depraved, extreme side of humanity. Twitter has taken on the mantle of 'asshole of the internet', but I think the rotten apples post in both.

4chan is oddly accepting of gay and trans people. I've seen gay and trans porn side by side with bbc and bwc porn posts. Strange to see racist trans porn lovers.

I like 4chan for the minor boards, not /pol/ or /b/. But /boardgames/ and /dyi/ and /international/. The absurd humor, green texts that make absolutely no sense, or ones that lead down a strange and wonderful path.

I like being anonymous on the internet.

Blikkentrekker8• 1 year ago

4chan is oddly accepting of gay and trans people. I've seen gay and trans porn side by side with bbc and bwc porn posts. Strange to see racist trans porn lovers.

It only seems odd because many people interpret this through a U.S.A. “culture war” lens and “gay people”. You believe they're “accepting of gay people” in the sense of that culture war because of the “gay porn”. In reality, they take more of a classical Graeco-Roman approach to it and believe it's completely normal for the average male to be attracted to cute twinks as the Romans did and often even reject the very notion of “sexual orientations” to begin with. Their “support” is definitely not in the sense of what one would expect of the U.S.A. “culture war”, jokes such as the below illustrate well what the culture is:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/55/fe/d1/55fed16b625f9c5869587908f...

greazy2• 1 year ago

I should have used a better example to support my point.

I was referring to the website it self allowing gay and trans content, and even other non mainstream content (furry, MLP). The content is not just porn related (though a big chunk of it is).

On the porn front, I don't agree with liking 'lady dick' twink lovers only. There's 'normal' gay content (male on male).

On the non porn content, lots of posts will begin with 'Im a gayfag' (fag here I used as a catch all self deprecating term, some users will say I'm a oldfag, even seen ladyfag). Never seen any outright harassment of gay people when they post.

Having said that, there is straight gay, trans, minority hating posts and content.

4chan is a wild jungle. Or was.

thatguy0900• 1 year ago

Hardly universal, if you go to those threads and BBC threads it's usually full of people also commenting that they believe it's a Jewish psyop to corrupt young men

ashleyn• 1 year ago

Neither site is a den of repute but it's notable that I can still say the word "cisgender" on 4chan, or openly insult moot and call him whatever I want without being banned for it (while mainstream sites select who is protected from harassment and who isn't, either along political lines or who owns the site).

Klonoar3• 1 year ago

moot hasn't been relevant for years.

panny• 1 year ago

4chan is a reflection of the depraved, extreme side of humanity.

I think moderated forums like this one are the reflection of depraved and extreme. After all, you need to be a depraved and extreme host to try to micromanage what everyone says. People who run sites in such a way must have depraved power fantasies.

Just set up a host and allow people to speak their minds? That sounds like someone who believes the good of humanity will triumph, and the right to speak freely is a fundamental one. Section 230 exists and puts the responsiblity of what is said directly on the poster, not the host. So there really seems no reason not to do this... unless you have depraved and extreme power fantasies about controlling what other people say and think.

unethical_ban• 1 year ago

This is one of the most naively optimistic posts I have ever seen on HN.

Unmoderated message boards are not a haven of intellect.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theo...

omnivore• 1 year ago

Meh, good riddance. The old internet wasn't all good.

pfdietz• 1 year ago

It was always possible to ID 4chan posters via court orders, wasn't it? I mean, Sheriff Mike Chitwood had 3 (or was it 4) people who posted death threats against him there arrested

matheusmoreira6• 1 year ago

Of course. I remember reading transcripts of Cristopher Poole cooperating in court during a trial. He used to straight up tell users he would fully cooperate with authorities if required. Nobody there is in the business of going to jail.

You're anonymous to other users. Unless you're behind seven proxies, connecting your posts to your real identity is as simple as correlating 4chan logs with ISP logs. Usually that requires court orders so it tends to happen in response to real offenses. Insulting each other with slurs isn't enough for a court order so it's fine. Chances are the NSA knows all your posts regardless.

danso• 1 year ago

Any articles about the technical details of the hack?

bitbasher2• 1 year ago

Meh, I don't feel bad.

The worst interview I ever had in tech was with Christopher Poole when he was founding canv.as, it's hard to feel bad for him.

johnnyjeans8• 1 year ago

What was bad about the interview? Can you share any details?

bitbasher2• 1 year ago

The arrogance and better than thou attitude. He was like the male version of Ellen Degeneres.

pizzadog• 1 year ago

Can you expand on this? I remember canv.as, it was a weird but interesting project but it seemed doomed from the outset.

anigbrowl6• 1 year ago

He sold the site years ago so this is not affecting him in the slightest.

cherryteastain2• 1 year ago

Rip 4chan. For all the bad it did, 4chan also made at least one real contribution to science [1], specifically to the study of superpermutations (aka the Haruhi problem), which was cited by genuine academics. We should try to remember it by that.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/18019464/4chan-anon-anim...

lwidvrizokdhai3• 1 year ago

Oh wow, that's genuinely cool.

anigbrowl6• 1 year ago

I think this is more of a temporary concussion, it'll be back up by the weekend.

spacemule• 1 year ago

I'm not understanding the issue. The article isn't so clear to me. Would you mind clarifying what problem they solved?

Per my understanding, there is a show with 14 episodes that the viewer wants to watch in every order possible. How is this not just 14 factorial?

I know this can't be the problem, but it's just not clear to me from the article.

Edit: I found this link that explains it to anyone else as confused as I was: https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bvn1rz/...

cherryteastain2• 1 year ago

Given a set of characters, find the shortest string with all permutations of that set. With 2 characters a,b the answer would be "aba", length 3 (not 2! like you suggested).

robtherobber• 1 year ago

Interesting to see HN user astrange as the admin.

lesbolasinc3• 1 year ago

besides the fact 4chan is a cesspool I think there's a certain sadness that comes with the possible death of another "early-internet" forum.

I feel like 4chan was the last living source of what the young internet was like - raw, unfiltered, and honest. You've got to admit in today's day and age that's genuinely something rare especially in current time of grift culture.

so much history potentially gone, just like BB.com's forums...

fooList2• 1 year ago

China could say less restricted American internet is racist, because we tolerate content they do not. Like 4chan tolerates what Reddit does not. Would it be a fallacy to say people who chose to escape Chinese censorship online are racists? Maybe it’s a matter of degree or something?

lwidvrizokdhai3• 1 year ago

It was bound to come tumbling down eventually. I've had good times in some of the discussion boards and especially with some of the more chill and creative boards like /qst/. the influence of /pol/ overshadows pretty much every board though, and it's rare to see a thread go by without some racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic bile being spilled unfortunately.

tannhaeuser• 1 year ago

Why are we speaking in the past tense here? Is it established that 4chan is going down?

geor9e2• 1 year ago

It is down. It was up in the past. Past tense seems to make the most grammatical sense. But I get why it adds ambiguity about it's future.

helle2533• 1 year ago

Wow, the comments on this thread are much more divisive than I thought.

I've always felt that the 'there are only two internet cultures: 4chan and tumblr' has felt somewhat accurate. Unfortunately moreso now that /pol/ and /r9k/ have taken over broad swathes of the internet.

It's sad to see how far this old haunt has fallen. Lurking /v/ in my early/mid teens was a formative experience for me. It wasn't as hateful as it was, until Gamergate.

h2zizzle6• 1 year ago

/r9k/ is such a weird situation, because its original incarnation prided itself on being an intellectual bastion on the site. The robot meant that you couldn't meme so easily; you had to attempt to write something substantial or meaningful (or at least original). Most were simply discussions, but you'd also get creative gems like futureguy's sobering predictions (well, history, for him).

tfwnogf really did kill everything.

throwanem13• 1 year ago

I've always felt that the 'there are only two internet cultures: 4chan and tumblr' has felt somewhat accurate.

"Somewhat accurate" is exactly right.

This formulation overstates the number of Internet cultures by one, in that the deepest and most shameful secret of both websites' most avid users is that they have always been both websites' most avid users.

Other than that, there's nothing wrong with it.

lurk219• 1 year ago

in that the deepest and most shameful secret of both websites' most avid users is that they have always been both websites' most avid users.

This isn’t true at all.

helle2533• 1 year ago

I disagree with this statement, but I get what you're saying.

Two communities with distinct cultures, whose membership nonetheless overlaps, are still two distinct cultures.

They may influence each other through that overlapping membership, but that does not mean they're the same.

skifreevictim• 1 year ago

For all of its many flaws and the boatload of trouble that has come of it, I still ultimately believe that 4chan is unfairly maligned.

I can't deny that the majority of the website's culture has been tainted by idpol bickering ever since /pol/ was added to it, but I'm always going to appreciate 4chan for being a place where I can write ostensibly anonymous posts and talk with other likeminded people about anything and everything. When you have a funny, good faith conversation with someone else on a website that gives you no incentive whatsoever to have one, it feels good.

Soyjak.st is unfortunately nothing like that. It is a website about itself, and itself is a parody of post-2014 rightwing 4chan meme slop culture. It is earnestly what most people believe the entirety of 4chan to be.

on_the_train• 1 year ago

What a sad day. It's the best page on the net by a wide margin. Hope they'll recover

creatonez2• 1 year ago

It better not recover. 4chan should be burned to the ground. And so should Soyjak.Party. It's a blight on humanity.

duxup2• 1 year ago

I'll ask I guess.

People still use 4chan?

I recall 4chan at one short point in time being a semi amusing meme posting spot on the web but as always as soon as it was popular it turned into a lot of "edgelord" spam and drama.

Loughla5• 1 year ago

There was a time that if you weren't on 4chan, you missed everything good. I remember staying awake for 20 hours tracking one thread. If you left it was gone forever and you genuinely missed out. 2004-5 area.

That being said, I haven't been back since 2014? It was always pretty heavily influenced by b and pol, but it got really bad the two years before Trump 1. Alt right bullshit took over completely.

It astounds me that people think 4 Chan is a place for deviants, but Twitter is fine. Twitter is 10,000x worse.

lastcobbo3• 1 year ago

And longcat, don’t forget him

duxup2• 1 year ago

Good point.

s3krit4• 1 year ago

I’ve used it probably daily since about 2006. Which is kind of sad actually.

throwaway7432• 1 year ago

/pol is trash.

/b used to be good till early-mid 2010s when it became 95% hentai/porn instead of 30%, after sabu squealed and the fbi took over.

partiallypro• 1 year ago

Honestly surprised this isn't getting more coverage, not just in the media but here.

robotnikman2• 1 year ago

I did some digging and the hacker posted which exploit he used.

Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell access.

lastcobbo3• 1 year ago

Bobby Tables can’t keep getting away with this

jncfhnb• 1 year ago

Bobby Ignore All Previous Instructions however…

ranger_danger• 1 year ago

Why would you say how you did it? Now they can't do it all over again when it comes back /s

0x303• 1 year ago

Got a source? Not doubting, just curious.

robotnikman2• 1 year ago

search through the thread on the site where that attack came from. ctrl+f postscript and you will find the post

A_D_E_P_T2• 1 year ago

Here: https://i.ibb.co/9mWLp4m9/4chanhack.jpg

aaron695• 1 year ago

Source: https://www.soyjak.st/soy/thread/10615723.html#:~:text=What%...

Kiwifarms is also discussing, links to code and griefing - https://kiwifarms (NSFW/NSFL) .st/threads/soyjak-party-the-sharty.145349/page-1468#post-21102686

loves_mangoes• 1 year ago

That checks out. Years ago I noticed a vulnerability through the photography board. You'd upload your pictures, and 4chan would display all the EXIF info next to the post.

4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users happy. And as you'd expect from a library that parses a bunch of horrible undocumented formats in C, it's a huge insecure mess.

Several heap overflows and arbitrary writes all over the place. Heap spray primitives. Lots of user controlled input since you provide your own JPEG. Everything you could want.

So I wrote a little PoC out of curiosity. Crafted a little 20kB JPG that would try to allocate several GBs worth of heap spray. I submit my post, and the server dutifully times out.

And that's where I'd like to say I finished my PoC and reported the vulnerability, but in fact I got stuck on a reliable ASLR bypass and lost interest (I did send an email about the library, but I don't think it was actively maintained and there was no followup)

My impression from this little adventure is that 4chan never really had the maintenance and code quality it needed. Everything still seemed to be the same very old PHP code that leaked years ago (which included this same call to the vulnerable EXIF library). Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.

bigfatkitten3• 1 year ago

As far as I can tell, no real maintenance has happened since Poole sold the site a decade ago. Hiroyuki paid for it and then mostly forgot about it.

ryandrake4• 1 year ago

Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.

This describes probably 95%+ of the entire software world, from enterprise, to SaaS to IoT to mobile to desktop to embedded... Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features that barely work and piles of debt that will never get fixed. It's a wonder anything actually even works. If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.

lazystar• 1 year ago

as someone who had to upgrade a stack from php 5.3 to 7.1 back in 2019... do you know what version of php they were running?

qingcharles• 1 year ago

This is such a common hole. One of my early hacks was a forum that allowed you to upload a pfp but didn't check it was actually an image. Just upload an ASP file which is coded to provide an explorer-like interface. Found the administrator password in a text file. It was "internet" just like that. RDP was open. This was a hosting provider for 4000+ companies. Sent them an email. No thank you for that one.

Always check what is getting uploaded.

Arch-TK6• 1 year ago

Uploading ASP as an image and having it execute server side is one thing.

But in this case, it's subtly different.

This issue relies more on a quirk of how PDF and PostScript relate (PDF is built on a subset of postscript).

Imagine you had an image format which was just C which when compiled and ran produced the width, height, and then stream of RGB values to form an image. And you formalised this such that it had to have a specific structure so that if someone wanted to, they didn't have to write a C compiler, they could just pull out the key bits from this file which looks like ordinary C and produce the same result.

Now imagine that your website supports uploading such image files, and you need to render them to produce a thumbnail, but instead of using a minimal implementation of the standard which doesn't need to compile the code, you go ahead and just run gcc on it and run the output.

That's kind of more or less what happened here.

It's worth noting here that it's not really common knowledge that PDF is basically just a subset of postscript. So it's actually a bit less surprising that these guys fell for this, as it's as if C had become some weird language nobody talks about, and GCC became known as "that tool to wrangle that image format" rather than a general purpose C compiler.

The attackers in this case relied on some ghostscript exploits, that's true, but if you never ran the resulting C-image-format binaries, you could still get pwned through GCC exploits.

mr_mitm2• 1 year ago

These were fun times. I've been working as a pentester for the past ten years, and the job got a lot harder, with everything using frameworks and containerization.

We still get plenty of results, because the tooling also gets better, and finding just one vulnerability is enough to be devastating, which makes it kind of frustrating. There is tons of progress, but much of it is just not paying dividends.

Funes-• 1 year ago

Reminds me of how people were crashing the PSP's XMB with BMP and TIFF files twenty years ago. I was just a kid, and began "pirating" every one of my classmates' consoles (some in exchange for a small amount of money). Good times.

GlumWoodpecker• 1 year ago

The `Memory Pit` exploit for the Nintendo DSi works in a similar way - it exploits a buffer overflow in the reading of image meta data by the Nintendo DSi Camera application in order to achieve arbitrary code execution.

https://dsibrew.org/wiki/Memory_Pit

profmonocle3• 1 year ago

When the first-gen iPhone was out there was a TIFF vulnerability so bad that you could jailbreak an iPhone just by visiting a specific web site. I remember going to Best Buy and seeing all of the display phones had been jailbroken. (It was easy to tell - this was before the App Store, so having extra app icons on the home screen wasn't normal.)

This was a user-empowering application of the vulnerability. Obviously, a bug that allows root-level arbitrary code execution just by getting the user to load a single image could be used for some pretty bad stuff. (And perhaps was.)

FMecha5• 1 year ago

4chan, ironically enough, had something similar where steganographic images were posted designed to be copied to Paint, saved as a bmp, renamed to an .hta file, and then executed. It would then spam the board with other variations of itself.

rincebrain2• 1 year ago

"Bannerbomb", on the Wii, has entered the thread.

https://wiibrew.org/wiki/Bannerbomb

jrochkind1• 1 year ago

This is an old well known exploit.

Don't run versions of ghostscript from 2012?

profmonocle3• 1 year ago

I would also say don't run ghostscript with the same permissions as the web server, especially not if you can just hand it your PDF through stdin and take a PNG through stdout. Sandbox it as much as possible. PDF is a really complex format which means lots of opportunities for buffer overruns and the like. (Edit: Actually, reading through Arch-TK's post above, it sounds like it was much dummer than something like a buffer overrun.)

donnachangstein• 1 year ago

Don't run versions of ghostscript from 2012?

Per Wikipedia:

In February 2013, with version 9.07, Ghostscript changed its license from GPLv3 to GNU AGPL.

With the AGPL license being legal kryptonite I wonder if license compatibility drove the decision (and how many other installations of Ghostscript share this concern)?

easterncalculus• 1 year ago

Does this vuln have a CVE number, or other details? Just curious, since from the posts explaining things this doesn't seem to be based on memory corruption.

karel-3d• 1 year ago

Newer Ghostscript versions are Affero GPL, that might be problem for some people, although probably not for 4chan (they don't modify it so it should be fine)

(incidentally I am now working on compiling this old GPL ghostscript to webassembly with file isolation... it works fine... but the compilation is kind of annoying)

casey22• 1 year ago

Such a useless feature too. There was like 1 or 2 book sharing threads in sci in the last few years and 1 in arts and crafts and 99.9% of people don't even know about it and just use offsite hosts

areyourllySorry• 1 year ago

eh, there's a lot of neat pdfs on the papercraft and origami board

xattt• 1 year ago

could give the attacker shell access.

How do these exploits work? Does it open an SSH port somewhere or does it show up as a browser-based terminal?

ryandrake4• 1 year ago

This is a great question, one I've always wondered. "Shell access" typically requires a terminal to, you know, type stuff in, right?

nwallin• 1 year ago

Usually the attacker, on their own computer, or some other server they have root on, will open a port and expose it to the internet and listen. The exploit payload will then make an outbound connection to that port. Once it's connected, the exploit will give the attacker's computer shell access. Search terms include 'reverse shell'.

It takes the normal client/server architecture and turns it inside out. If you remember FTP and active vs passive, it works like active mode FTP.

That's just one way to do it. If the attacker wants to actually listen on an open port on a compromised server that's behind a firewall, look up 'NAT traversal' for like half a dozen ways to do it.

One interesting method to get a shell that I read about is (ab)using ICMP echo requests. ICMP echo requests can contain arbitrary bytes as a payload. So the exploit will poll the attacker's IP address with ICMP echo requests. The exploit will have data payloads that have the shell's output. The attacker's server will respond with ICMP echo requests that have whatever the attacker wants to type into the shell. It's kinda janky but it works. Lots of firewalls might block outbound UDP/TCP connections from internal servers that don't need to make outbound connections, or might whitelist the addresses they're allowed to connect to. But they won't block ICMP, either because it's considered harmless or they forgot or they didn't know it needs to be blocked separately with other rules.

The point is there's any number of ways to do it, each more clever than the last.

thifhi• 1 year ago

A shell's stdin and stdout can be redirected to a tcp socket which connects to the attacker. Here are some examples: https://www.invicti.com/learn/reverse-shell/

lbotos• 1 year ago

https://blog.sucuri.net/2013/07/malware-hidden-inside-jpg-ex...

Once you can run any command, you start passing in whatever commands you want.

bouncycastle• 1 year ago

most likely "shell access" was confused with execution of "shellcode" which is a type of code, typically bytecode, that gets injected by the hacker and the server gets tricked into executing it. Once it's executed, it can do anything, leave new files, open ports, disable firewalls, change the admin password, etc

wnevets• 1 year ago

Ghostscript from 2012

Has there been a single year since 2012 that didn't include a new ghostscript RCE? Exposing ghostscript to the internet is dangerous.

skilbjo• 1 year ago

pretty interesting discovery if that was the hack.

do you know what the legal implications are for this?

if the company that owns 4chan finds the identity of the attacker, could they sue him in civil court? or do they send whatever logs they have to the FBI and the FBI would initiate a criminal prosecution? also what is the criminal act here? is it accessing their systems, or is it posting the data that they found "through unauthorised means" on a public channel like twitter? does the "computer fraud and abuse act" apply?

like if you found this exploit, and sent it to the company in good faith (ie a "good hacker"), are you free from prosecution? and what is the grey area, like if you found this exploit and then just sat on it for a while (let's say you didn't report it to the company, but let's also say you didn't abuse it, ie leak private data to twitter)

mmcwilliams2• 1 year ago

Assuming US jurisdiction this would pretty clearly be at least one, probably many CFAA violations which are criminal.

nailer• 1 year ago

Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files

Some boards used to allow PDF files to upload too.

brundolf• 1 year ago

Periodic reminder that a PDF is a turing-complete script that generates a document and should be treated as foreign code

fp64• 1 year ago

If you disable JavaScript, it’s not. PDF removed loops etc from the PostScript it supports

kriro• 1 year ago

Fascinating, that has been the attack vector in a couple of hackthebox like systems I've done over the last couple of years. The easier ones usually just require file name changes, the medium ones intercepting and mimetype change.

dwedge• 1 year ago

So the article blaming out of date PHP was off base?

jofla_net• 1 year ago

Same or similar thing happened to Gitlab. it used some common parsing library that worked on images and perl scripts... you can see where this is going

bbuerhaus• 1 year ago

Interesting. I published research on this style of attack in 2019 when I found Slack and a few other big websites vulnerable to it. In their cases, LibreOffice was passing the files off to specific parsers based on magic headers rather than file extensions.

https://buer.haus/2019/10/18/a-tale-of-exploitation-in-sprea...

We published a PoC for file write as part of our research and bug bounty submissions:

https://gist.github.com/ziot/fb96e97baae59e3539ac3cdacbd0943...

casey22• 1 year ago

QA won? what the butt

mikrl• 1 year ago

For all the sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: “website running 15 year old software gets pwned again”

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 1 year ago

It truly is an end of an era. I popped in every so often to check the temperature and was rarely disappointed by the level of crazy pervading it. Amusingly, despite it having such a massive influence on internet as a whole including its lingo and memes, my wife did not even knew about it existed until today.

I do not think it will be missed by many, but that kind of hole does not exactly disappear without a trace.

Loughla5• 1 year ago

After leaving when it got too shitty, I would go back once a year or so to check the racism in pol, see if maybe b was back to doing things instead of just porn, and read the plainly undiagnosed schizophrenia on the paranormal board.

Like you said, not a lot of people in my life have any idea what it is, but it does hold a special place in my heart. It started when I was trying to establish my own personality, and it provided me with a safe avenue to try out different "me's".

perdomon• 1 year ago

Has Fireship made a video about this yet? I bet we'll see one tomorrow.

doctorshady• 1 year ago

It looks like it's back up - sort of. Loading very slowly, anyway. After a compromise like this, I'm a little surprised.

ggm• 1 year ago

Is there anyone doing something akin to the data analytics which happened for the Panama Papers?

I appreciate this has overtones of doxxing. I am not asking for "the list" but more if there is an intent to tie up some loose ends about influence relating mainly to /pol/

Uptrenda• 1 year ago

Watching hacker news try use cold analytical intellect to deconstruct 4chan's jokes and culture (and still missing the point) has got to be the funniest joke ever. Perhaps a little more analysis will yield the answer to understanding the complexity of a green frog or running bear. Though I wouldn't count on it. It has to mean something nefarious. Much like the soft 'schlop schlop schlop' of a dog's tongue lapping up water -- its meaning to us is a mystery.

Loughla5• 1 year ago

From what I can tell, there's not much analysis of 4chan going on here, but more people just sort of remembering their time on the site.

That's what this has been for me; a walk down memory Lane to my teenage edgelord years.

EcommerceFlow• 1 year ago

/lit/ is a goldmine, I’ve discovered so many amazing books there. Everywhere else on the web is algorithm or voting skewed so no real opinions can be shared

a_bonobo• 1 year ago

I agree, I'd even go so far and say it's one of the best places on the internet to discuss 'serious' books (within all the rampant troll posts). Book discussions on reddit are far too positive when it comes to terrible books, /lit/ will call a bad book a bad book. Plus there was always an undercurrent in interest in 'obscure' books - there are great reading charts out there for all kinds of literatures and languages made by /lit/ users.

weberer2• 1 year ago

They even wrote their own book collaboratively

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28282177-hypersphere

coolKid721• 1 year ago

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2025/01/how-4chan-becam...

squigz• 1 year ago

Do you really truly believe 4chan is the only place opinions can be shared on the Internet?

HaZeust3• 1 year ago

There are, of course, many people with memories of 4chan that precede that of mine (oldf*) - I could only even articulate what I was seeing on 4chan at the age I was around 2014. But by 2015 - with only 1-2 years of experience on the site - I noticed a drastic downturn of the authenticity in posts and comments that I was used to. Then, I saw quality of topics and speaking points go down in 2020. And finally, I saw the social fabric of 4chan itself go down essentially right after Omegle was shut down. By mid-2024, I couldn't even trust it for contrarian or less-conventional (or, frankly, brutally honest) viewpoints of topics they purported to care about.

And honestly, as things got better in my life and I went out to be more recreational, I went from going on 4chan once a day - to once a week - to once a month - and finally, to only when I wanted to see edgy takes on divisive current events.

I'll miss all that, despite all it lost over the years. And I'll miss the element of design and mannerisms in its userbase. It required an upfront investment to even understand how to engage with, and a "lurk moar" attitude. RIP.

Edit: It was also very crazy watching small groups of people turn insider-jargon into mainstream terminology. I'll also never forget watching the thread of QAnon's conception in real-time. Crazy stuff originated there - both in substance and meaning.

Loughla5• 1 year ago

I was on there almost from the beginning. Early 2004.

It was never good, but it definitely went entirely to shit when all the alt-right nut bags started flooding the site with nonsense starting around 2014-15. I have to believe it was a coordinated effort, it just seemed too immediate across the entire site.

zeofig• 1 year ago

I hope it comes back. Although I don't agree with a lot of what's on there, it's one of the only places you can find hot, fresh, (mostly) uncensored, and unalgorithmed content.

127• 1 year ago

I left 4chin by the time it became impossible to dodge pedophiles, room temperature IQ and absolute lowest tier trash. It used to be fun to hunt for quality content, but it seems nobody of value visits that site anymore.

praptak• 1 year ago

4chan was never known for high security, early versions were pretty close to pasting raw user input into HTML, which was eagerly used by griefers, for example by pasting right-to-left unicode overrides in their comments which was enough to spill to the whole page.

plumbus• 1 year ago

This is some vBulletin software jankness

Havoc• 1 year ago

4chan sized site that gets attention from all sorts of unique people...ran ancient php? Ouch

gaiagraphia2• 1 year ago

Makes you wonder what all these 'advanced frameworks' have actually offered the internet..

(hard mode: don't mention advertising)

slackfan• 1 year ago

Trick question, they haven't. (Perl was the pinnacle of webdev and I anybody telling you otherwise is lying, or a javascript programmer.)

gradientsrneat• 1 year ago

Automatic crash reporting with time travel debugging with capability for graphical snapshots of the frontend.

Bandwidth reductions involving incremental loading of images, or not having to reload the whole site after a click.

Most sites are better off with static pages + server-side rendering + vanilla js though.

lenerdenator• 1 year ago

Running a site like 4chan on outdated software is not just a choice, but one of the choices of all time.

Really, it was gonna happen one of these days.

RKFADU_UOFCCLEL2• 1 year ago

Incidentally, KYM website is an original dinosaur like PHP, both loaded full of invalid / cargo cult practices, such as blocking proxy users from reading their (mostly read-only) website. Guessing it's bloated garbage made by some kid and this is part of the reason.

smeeger• 1 year ago

4chan has been completely dead for almost ten years and i dont understand why anyone talks about it still.

ReitardXd• 1 year ago

ShartyGods stay winning

4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak

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