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)
As I said it’s all arbitrary. I might pick the time around Google’s founding as the early Internet, others might pick Yahoo, others might pick anything before eternal September.
Before then, it was quite unusual to see coverage of the internet by the mainstream press (and what coverage I saw took a theoretical or "far" view, i.e., as part of a discussion of governmental policy). After then, coverage exploded.
This is an American perspective: the timing was probably different in other countries.
[1] - https://yenimedya.aydin.edu.tr/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/3....
Well, this research states that "Between 2004 and 2013, Frutiger Aero was influential in advertising, media, stock images, cinema, gaming, and spatial design". That's page 4.
I see NO support for this position. No reasoning, no primary sources, no secondary sources, not even the personal experiences of the author.
I have not seen any evidence that Frutiger Aero existed before 2017, and 2017 seems like the most likely creation date to me. That’s when it was created, by combining materials from the 2000s in new ways. Call it “bricolage”, perhaps.
Addenda: if you scroll through Google Image search results for Frutiger Aero, you’ll see what looks to me like an obvious lack of actual materials from the 2000s. I see a screenshot of Windows XP, a screenshot of the Nintendo Wii home screen. Maybe a few other random screenshots of apps or web sites. As far as I can tell, Frutiger Aero was invented by taking these few materials and extrapolating a whole aesthetic movements out of it. I see a lot of artwork dated from the 2020s labeled as Frutiger Aero—that’s the true nexus of the aesthetic, Gen Z adults recreating a half-remembered image from their childhoods. Which is fine. It’s just not from 2004. Like how Vaporwave is not actually from the 1990s or 1980s, Vaporwave is from the mid-2010s. I love Vaporwave, but I know that it’s not from the past; it’s a modern remix of elements from the past.
Early Web is before most netizens (remember that?) had ever heard or seen the term "blog", and much of the web was folks' "home pages" on whatever weird topic they were interested in (some were effectively "blogging", but that wasn't a term yet—"web log" might see limited use). This was the Nerd Web.
Mid-period is from the rise of "blog" to the rise of the smartphone, Google capitulating in the never-ending war on spammers and ruining itself instead, and Facebook coming about. Roughly '08 would be the end of this period. Call this the Macromedia Flash Web, perhaps.
Everything since that is the Late, or Hellscape, Web, an age dominated to an extreme degree by spam, scams, ads, astroturfing, and absolute insanity becoming normalized and spilling over into real life. This is the part that made it clear we'd have been better off never inventing any of this.
Maybe someone can list some positive internet culture we got from 4chan that I am overlooking.
Each chan sub category tended to their own niche community and rivalry was little.
/f/ in its hayday was a wonderful creative group for Flash animations and with existent of NewGrounds made the internet fun. It's how I learnt flash and how YTMND came to be.
Someone on /vr/ once started a thread about SNES homebrew and actually made a /vr/ themed one. I wonder what happened to that guy.
Just yesterday I saw a rather interesting discussion about WD HDD internals and possible ways to figure out whether they are SMR drives. Shame this hack cut it short.
/tg/ had some seriously good chess players.
There's a board for everything. People see 4chan and think everything is /pol/. If anything, it's /a/. People have been arguing over which waifu is best girl for 20 years. 20 years.
There’s actually a number of projects that started this way though I don’t know of any that grew up to be as charming and interesting as Serenity OS. Katawa Shoujo is one, though I could definitely see people complaining about the games content. The Tox encrypted messenger is one but I’m not sure that ever went anywhere.
I think most of them, like Andreas, dropped the association with 4chan pretty soon after the project started to gain real traction.
This was around 10 years ago...
"Positive" in this sense isn't being used to mean "optimistic" or "happy". It's being used to mean "healthy for the world at large".
Regardless of whether any of us agree that 4chan was a net-negative, it should be very clear that "music that doesn't have an upbeat sound or themes" is not inherently unhealthy, but "subcultures that are unhealthy for the world at large" definitionally are.
You're dismissing the entire site for a handful of events? How is 4chan unhealthy for the world, at large? It was and is a counterculture for discussing life as seen by its members.
From some of the comments though, there might have been nice boards I would have enjoyed.
HN works for me though. (I can only spread myself so thin.)
If you’re interested in research, the summary of controversies and harassment incidents that were worthy of the 4chan Wikipedia page(1) is over 2,000 words long and links to seven other separate Wikipedia entries, and may be a good start.
Also it is very funny that this thread seems to be multiple different posters here insisting that the user JKCalhoun is wrong for not being a fan of 4chan and that personal opinion is somehow ahistorical and in need of correction. Like the goal here is to make that person post “You guys are right I actually like that website now” ?
I was simply helping to clarify the semantic issue at hand. I don't have enough personal knowledge of 4chan to pass judgement on it one way or another.
The way I see it, I lost interest in 4chan because I grew up and became an adult, and so did most of the Internet. We can look back and appreciate our childhood overall while also cringing at the embarrassing parts. 4chan has a lot of both good and bad memories for me and I think the broader Internet as well.
For far too many people "I have a moral compass" seems to mean "I don't even have the self-awareness to realize what I'm doing is evil".
I've been involved in "internet culture" since the early to mid 90s.
The only thing that I heard about that ever came out of 4chan was toxicity.
The internet is BIG and atomized.
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.
Who shoves it down someone's throat though? I can't remember the last time I used tiktok, probably 3 or 4 years ago, and I don't feel like anyone forces me to.
I am locked out from viewing reading groups unless I have a facebook account. I can't even read reviews on Amazon without a Amazon account.
You do have the choice not to view, watch or use. And if you desire to create your own site for "social media" the uphill battle is so greatly regulated in their honour you can't due to not having the resources to do so.
Have you read the new UK rule sheet for internet websites?
How many sites do I visit where I get a Google popup asking if I want to sign in?
Stack-overflow does this, Reddit does too.
Fediverse exists quite successfully.
I hate the whole gimmick of 150 character messages. That's not independent like the web was once.
Discord makes you pay to upload videos, sounds and those were all existing on MSN, Yahoo, A!M for free.
Everyone at my school knew of NewsGrounds, mySpace, BeBo, LiveJournal. Me and my friends had hosted ProBoards forums where we used to discuss stuff. You can't even do that according to the new Ofcom laws.
It's not just one instance and not even one frontend existing for what can be described as "fediverse". Decentralization is the whole point.
> "a very niche set of individuals?"
Everything depends on the instance you're using. Some of them, like mastodon.social, are very active, others are not.
> "I hate the whole gimmick of 150 character messages"
Find a better instance. On the one I use it's 2k characters limit.
> "That's not independent web like it was."
Yes, because it's a whole new level of independence. NewGrounds, Myspace and everything you mentioned are centralized platforms, which is practically vendor lock-in, because you're dependent on just one vendor for everything you do on these platforms, while on fediverse, you aren't. Instances are completely (except for showing posts from one another) independent from each other - there's no central "authority" controlling all of them like there would be on a centralized platform. Thousands of them exist for every frontend imaginable, and you can create one yourself.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-administration-r...
It's an illusion, a very believable one in an internet where billionaires try to goad you to include your name and address with every thing you post. I don't see why people care so much about Doxxing when every social media company makes them do it for free.
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.
"Jannies" (janitors) are pseduo-mods on 4chan (the subject of the linked thread) who clean up posts and do other work, for free. Actual 4chan mods are paid.
As far back as I can remember they were also volunteers. When did hiro start paying people?
The joke on 4chins actually is that the Jannies do it for free. Never cared to fact check it, but it is a popular saying.
Also sage in all fields
That is hardly unique. There are any number of phpbb (and other) boards that allow mostly the same that were/are/will continue to be the same. The only difference is the clientele and noteriaty, but I'd argue 4chan is basically the same thing as somethingawful is/was in that regard. People act like 4chan was this ground-breaking thing but it was just one of many many similar boards.
Also for 4chan, you'd only go to 4chan to go to 4chan. People went to geocities and xoom and angelfire and all the other old internet things for niche website content from individuals, not because of the site that hosted it. It's like going to a bar to chat vs going to a library to study: going to the bar/4chan is an undeniable part of the culture, but let's not pretend it is anything significantly different amongst a constellation of other chat/forum sites (somethingawful, fark, ebaumsworld, discord, IRC etc etc etc)
> 4chan's design is early web 2.0
Web 2.0 (even early) was very JS heavy, coming down from the advent of Mootools/Prototype/etc and had a very specific visual design sense.
4chan is easily the last of the Web 1.0 sites, probably up there with Craigslist. They very much "just fucking work".
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 :(
Isn't viciousness the notorious bread and butter of 4chan?
Any increase in human suffering is unfortunate, regardless of one’s take on just desserts or karma or whatever.
The staff has cut down a lot on organized harassment that 4chan was notorious for in recent years. Those people migrated to private discords, telegrams, and other forums (like kiwi farms, soy party, etc). Ex, #gamergate was mostly an 8chan, Twitter, reddit, and IRC phenomenon - #gg people would get banned if they tried posting about it on 4chan
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.
If the hacker is a state actor then I don't think anyone has learned anything about Free Speech.
People can leave the platform. They can't leave their race.
Even though it might be hard to ignore the well-budgeted choir of well-intentioned promoters of status quo, you still don't have to believe in this concept.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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
Doesn't 8chan/kun still exist?
soj.ooO [1] which is similar on the other hand doesn’t have the captcha.
[1] https://soj.ooO
What is your affiliation with it?
Usenet?
It even has the issue of old posts disappearing when the retention at your UNIX system / ISP rolled over.
2chan is a japanese site.
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).
About half the posts were pornography, racist rants, or memes making fun of someone, often for being mentally handicapped.
Five percent was accusing the moderators of sleeping on the job.
Edit: I love that people are down-voting this, it really shows how much people like to have an opinion even while they can't recognize even the most obvious things that requires any information about the subject.
People like to confuse "free speech absolutism" for "tolerating right-wing speech" because the free speech absolutist narrative has been pushed by right-wing accelerationists, but every site has its limits, even 4chan.
The elephant in the room is that USA appointed itself as a policeman for the whole network. Demands of its state and business entities are somehow tied to the fact that there is no true free speech on the open internet.
Racism, hate speech in general, as well as anything illegal, will quickly result in deletion and IP ban.
The site will also, as it's obvious, cooperate with authorities, when it comes to crimes.
4chan is far from being a free-speech absolutist site.
I would presume Anon would which to remain anon.