4chan hack

damas · 2025-04-15T12:01:54+00:00

4chan got PWNED. Thoughts and payers?

Aero

tyl
I completely agree. I feel like there's definitely a bunch of factors that go into why the old internet is dead, but my pet theory is that the internet died with the iPhone. I LOVE incoherently rambling about this. Pre-iPhone, the internet was a place for universities, businesses, and most importantly, hobbyists. In short, a "harder" crowd that could use the internet as a tool, completely under their control. Post iPhone, the gates were opened to the masses. That damn device got everyone using the internet through facebook. Not inherently bad, except these people did NOT have the drive to learn how to use the net properly and expected it to cater to their needs instead. And hey, when they're the majority, any business-savvy site owner is going to cater to their largest user base. Along the way, businesses also figured out that the average person is also completely malleable and totally unwilling to push back on any changes they make. The removal of comment sections, the tons and tons of ads, and the removal of all customization on youtube channel pages come to mind. The number of people I see without an ad-blocker is completely insane, and they are completely afraid to try and install one. "Oh I'll get a virus from it," "Oh I can just pay for premium," Oh it's not that bad." It's endless. Like some kind of bird trapped in an unlocked cage. Now the internet uses its users.

I think that's what made 4chan feel so good. It wasn't in the hands of its owners. It was a site mostly defined by its users. Perhaps debatable with the number of bots and silly actions taken by the admins, but at the very least it's in stark contrast to other sites where content is force fed to you, and to the few content creators, what you can post is heavily influenced by the site.

Anyways, the wild west days are over. The caliber of user has severely dropped, and the rest of us are swept up in their tides. Vertical slop and consolidation is the future. Tech literacy is dead. <Insert third thing for dramatic effect>. All that I feel we can do now is find safe harbor in these cozy little holes and watch the fall from paradise.

tyl

Aero The smartphone was the perfect device to be exploited by social media, its the combination of the two that destroyed the internet (and the world). I mean I always hated facebook but it was slightly less bad when it was on PC so people actually more likely used it for communication meanwhile post-smartphone everyone just scrolls the endless garbage there. Normies online weren't really a big issue pre-smartphone, they just used it for work or to Skype distant relatives or read legacy news and shut it off immediately after and were completely oblivious to everything else, they didn't really interfere too much as they do now, not even just the "4chan is so evil dark web racists hackers how can we allow this to exist" "online ID to save the children and stop terrorism!" Look at all the tourists like on twitter "Im a big fan of this anime ive never watched and that why my entire feed is dedicated to protesting the involved companies and harassing fans (when not retweeting insane amounts of gay furry porn) to get it censored or banned because its too degenerate".
If anything I can learn to live with the first kind, that will just stay contained away in their phone apps for the most part, and its not like they didn't also exist back in the day, the second tho is even worse.
Social media at this point absolutely is worse and more harmful than legacy news TV/newspapers ever could hope to be, it was already hard enough to get through to normies that no the experts that tell you how you must think and act dont actually have your best interests in mind but with social media its a 100x worse, there is absolutely no way to explain how everything is completely carefully top down controlled, any user choice is just an illusion, "but I choose who to follow, i can block everyone who doesnt 100% conform to my beliefs, i can say anything, anything that they disallow is for good reason, if it doesnt work for you you're just posting stuff no ones interested in"

Aero Yeah, not saying they have to be removed but it does kinda suck they tank the whole site, thats the only thing 4chan is known for, the few boards full of garbage, if you never visited yourself you'd never even know there was anything but the garbage when its just probably like 20% of the site at worst. Apparently the other chan that performed the hack is exclusively for below b/pol tier posts and this was their way of proving that their site culture or whatever is superior.
If anything I hope maybe this can push more of the quality posters to the likes of lainchan, get some more activity there, still I don't think there is a real replacement for all the good boards of 4chan even if people were willing to move to begin with, doesn't matter if and when it comes back this will have lasting negative effects, probably more undesirable posters will come in due to media coverage, and good posters will leave, I can already see many good threads probably won't be returning.

magicrabbit

Aero I don't know if I feel more productive, in fact I'd argue for the contrary. I feel a little broken, 4chan was my little piece of socialization during the day, my pleasure and entertainment that drove me forward to be productive and later take tiny breaks to read and post about the things I like. There's nothing in my life currently that quite matches the feeling of making webms for airing shows to post on threads either on request or because I liked a certain scene; or seeing my posts reposted months or even years later because people liked them enough to share again.
I've been studying programming (mainly Assembly) recently and my progress rate has taken a considerable drop because I don't have that much to motivate me anymore.

frijole del alta I also feel that way with vidya, for the last few years my interest in games has declined gradually until the point it is now, where the most I'll have is my interest piqued for a week or two on a game that I'll casually play for a while before quickly getting bored and never touching it again.
This applies not only to new games as a lot of people complain about, but also to games I remember really liking when I was younger. Maybe we do just grow up, maybe it's that we changed not in a good way and can't come to like things as easily anymore, and maybe it really is technology's fault.
futures~ made of~ virtual insanity~

tyl What's sad is there is (or was) an effort against this "centralization of the web" or "web2", but it's mostly been a failure or too weak to matter. The alternatives that were set-up to the current ecosystem didn't go anywhere (such as crypto and decentralized servers as a replacement to advertisement and data collection revenue and centralized cloud storage) and everyone else's idea of making federated clones of existing platforms and hoping it all works out somehow hasn't done all that much. And as you mentioned, even if these options had gone places, it's very likely governments would have fucked it up somehow because it's in their direct interest to have everything nice and centralized for them to control reliably.
These days I'm generally leaning toward Dark Nets as the final stand of the old internet, hosting a website on Tor is much the same as it was decades ago, whereas it has only gotten more complicated on the Clear Web, the anonymous culture also pushes everyone toward forums, blogs and imageboards, while also directly contradicting external control from corporations and governments as it happens in the modern internet. I expect one day if things get bad enough, there will be a small effort to migrate to Tor, i2p and others while "normal" people stay on their godamned instergram and tictac. Or maybe I'm delusional.

frijole del alta

magicrabbit Maybe we do just grow up, maybe it's that we changed not in a good way and can't come to like things as easily anymore, and maybe it really is technology's fault.

I've always assumed its because as we grow older we lose a bit of our imagination and wonder in things. Then again, the over saturation of technology has dulled our minds unlike how back then the mind would be blown over a advancement in something. 500gb aint huge anymore, even in the TBs aint impressive anymore.

magicrabbit futures~ made of~ virtual insanity~

perhaps we can coin the term/phenomenon "virtual saturation" or "tech-saturation"

Kaper

Gigachad Won't lie I get loads from Instagram, it feels like they barely moderate on there, especially reels, so in a weird sense it has the same edgy meme culture as 4chan.

Pon

frijole del alta sloppification

frijole del alta

Pon
funny enough i think that term "slop" came from 4chan. or thats where i first heard it from .-.

Kaper

frijole del alta No you're correct it did come from 4chan but originally alongside another word which slowly fell out of use elsewhere due to obvious reasons if you know.

tom_tomson

Gigachad work, lol

Ayayaya

Fantasy

If the site is down for 20-30 days like I've been seeing as an estimate that is long enough to break a lot of habitual posting. It's easy to see people moving on and finding new places and not feeling a need to go back.

It's going to be interesting to see how this might affect the wider intarwebz similar to that Tumblr debacle a few years back, although I think that 4chan's modern userbase is too small to really be noticeable on most of the "big few" websites we all are stuck on now.
I'm quite the newfag, I only started intermittently lurking between 2014-2018, and only became a regular in 2019-2021 maybe, so this is just going off of the dust of internet history, but 4chan really used to be much more influential cultural space online from what I can tell, and not in the awful /pol/ way you could argue it has now. I suppose it could just be that internet culture was absorbed by whatever "global culture" the world has developed with modern SNS. Most people will just seep through into various big social medias and become ironically far more faceless than they ever were.
I found a freshly registered account of a /pol/fag, talking to no one about all the typical stuff. I imagine many people from that board will end up like him. At best, lots of insular discord groups; those really can't be escaped anymore.

BronzeAge

I hope it doesn't come back, it was a rotten corpse. /pol/, that is. /his/ and /lit/ could be good, those should come back.

Aero

BronzeAge
The site would be a lot better off without /pol/ and a few of the other red boards (but mostly /pol/). The sucky users it attracted probably won't all leave though...

Frog

i remember using 4chan about 2-3 years ago for a short period of time (like a month). i just looked at the usual most popular boards like /pol/, /b/ an /int/. really wished that i looked at the hobby boards instead, but it seems like that is too late.

anyways despite not having used 4chan in a long time, after its hack i have been looking at different chan boards. sadly most are filled with loli, and i'm worried that some sites may be data-mine info. so far i've just been lurking lainchan, denpa-chan and sushichan for 10-15 minutes. they're pretty cool sites with normal posts, so that's good.

Aero

tyl
Yeah the sharty (soyjack doy party portmanteau) was made of ex-/qa/ posters. I've been on their booru to look for soyjaks but it's a pretty unhinged place. There's a few ways to look at them. To the outside observer, they're literally the hacker known as 4chan. To the average channer, they're an amalgamation of the worst posters, a sort of mega /pol/ consumed in some kind of one-upping, ouroboric cycle of post irony. On a more detached view, they embody some of that more wild element of 4chan that used to be more notorious in the day like the Sarah Pailin email hacks. The truth probably lies somewhere between.

Nickname

I think it's worth considering that there is the likelihood of malicious and bad faith paying Hiroyuki and/or the moderation staff to shill their games and organize shit stirring raids against one another. When /a/ and /mobage/ generals on /vg/ moved to 8chan (no, not that one), there has been a noticeable drop of low quality baitposting, Korean superiority posting, and infighting between the gacha threads you'd normally see on 4/vg/ and nu-/a/. There's also a significant drop of webtoon shilling on 8/a/'s 4ch diaspora right now despite 4/a/ became one of the most active places for Solo Leveling discussion in recent years. Companies like Mihoyo/Hoyoverse, Nexon, and Webtoon might be paying the 4chan staff some hefty loads of money to run their dark marketing operations in there, which of course contributes to the overall degradation of the site's quality. Hiro's no stranger to this and he has done this before

Aero

Nickname
That's fascinating. I didn't know there was another 8ch or that stuff about the jannies. Do you mind sharing more?

Pon

Nickname I feel like the theories that they pay moderation is kinda crackpot. With how jannies are unpaid volunteers someone would have leaked something juicy over the years. I think its far more likely they just hire a few botfarms to astroturf on the various boards, far cheaper and easier to do.

Nickname

Aero there's a sizeable amount of 4ch refugees currently residing on 8chan.moe

Pon Yeah I agree but I think some of the jannies have been participating in schizo raids on the topics they don't like, from games to anime. They themselves should be blamed to the current malaise and quality degradation the website's experiencing.

frijole del alta

Pon
I would agree as well. its bots, jannies, shills, and just the other etc. that play along. Ive always heard "they"(idk who they is) would congregate on discord to wreak havoc on boards like /biz/

magicrabbit

I don't know exactly what the situation around shilling on 4chan is, but there is some janny involvement.
A lot of posters on /a/ are convinced it's just one janny doing it, same situation on /g/ where they think it's a mod doing it. I know for a fact the /a/ shilling janny is real and shills webtoons while shittalking anime and Japan. I know this because during the time of Solo Leveling's first season, the shilling and spam was disgustingly obvious, and so I began to act like a schizo and pattern recognize the threads' OPs. I managed to recognize his writing style and started confronting him everywhere he went. Eventually during a confrontation, I was muted (a power exclusive to jannies) and my posts deleted, the thread had only just started so it's unlikely a janny answered a report that quickly, much less used a power that they're only supposed to use in extreme cases.
For those that don't know, Muting posters is something jannies can do, it's essentially an unofficial ban that lasts only 15 minutes, it's rare for jannies to use it as they're only usually deleting posts and calling the mods to ban people. According to IRC oldfags they even get in trouble for using it inappropriately. Given the contents of my posts (accusing OP of spamming the catalog, accusing Solo Leveling threads to be inorganic) it's more likely a janitor was trying to silence me. And you can probably find other anons with similar experiences, I a least remember seeing multiple complain about their posts being deleted just for criticizing Solo Leveling.
/v/'s condition also leads me to believe there's genuine marketing departments out there that target 4chan, but I have no proof of that, unlike with /a/.

Katabazi

magicrabbit The schizophrenics you can find posting on 4chan is one of the most fascinating aspects of the site. There aren't many other large sites online anymore where the userbase has COINTELPRO level conspiracies in regards to the upper level management of the site, making it that much funnier when they're often exposed as justified. On top of this is that is how jaded the userbase is to the presence of legitimate schizoposters and/or jannies who use whichever board as a stage to display their mental instability, like Jeremy from the /mha/ threads, or Mario for the Tower of God threads that he kept up for the better part of two years after the anime ended.
Another thing I found really interesting about the screenshots from /j/ that sharty leaked was how differently the jannies and mods seemed to talk in there, they didn't seem to share the same "4chan cadence" like the rest of the site, if you get what I mean. That may just be me falling for the usual 4chan paranoid schizophrenia that you pick up through osmosis on the site, but who knows.

Somnolence

magicrabbit
I've never seen anything that looked incredibly inorganic on /v/ that wasn't obviously "anon is shilling his indie game". Bug Fables was the last big offender that comes to mind and even then, they were a regular poster on the gamedev threads, so I think it got a bit of a pass.
Most of the time people say there's "inorganic" or "shill" threads on /v/, it's sour grapes and for things like Coffin of Leyley and Andy. "Flavor of the month" for 16 months, 26,000 steam reviews, and approaching 3k results on Rule 34 - there's no way people could want to talk about that; buy an ad.

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