• ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    11 days ago

    Hot take, but I dare say 4chan was the source of as much of what’s good in internet culture as it was for much of what’s the worst in internet culture.

    Rickroll, Caturday, the modern meme format, reaction gifs, “TLDR”, Anonymous (well, the good versions of it), spoderman, Rule 34, trollface, rageface, quite a bit of pet abuse justice, … they may have even successfully set back AI chatbots nearly a full decade with their gaming of Microsoft’s Tay chatbot… quite a lot of modern Internet slang such as win, fail, an hero, based, copypasta, creepypasta, “god tier”, lulz, moar, sauce…

    The thing about anarchy is that it brings out both the best and the worst.

      • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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        10 days ago

        I’d argue that demotivational posters were even older, right? These were even printed out before internet access was wide spread.

      • Thunderbird4@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        If you trust KnowYourMeme, the phrase “image macro” was coined in 2004 and popularized in 2005. 4chan was started in 2003.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      I think that most of those evolved elsewhere and were taken over to 4Chan.

      • PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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        10 days ago

        You think wrong. 4chan’s impact on internet culture late 2000s and the entire 2010s can’t be overstated. And that includes getting Trump elected twice.

          • PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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            9 days ago

            Yeah not absolutely every meme/slang listed might be originated on 4Chan. TLDR seems to have originated or at least popularized by the SomethingAwful forums, which together with ebaumsworld could be considered the parents of 4Chan (with cross-pollination by Newgrounds?). But 4Chan was the crossroads of all these memes coming together, germinating and spreading to every other site shortly after.

      • KoalaUnknown@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        4chan, particularly Anonymous, has definitely done good before:

        • Project Chanology
        • Operation Payback
        • Arab Spring Support
        • Breach of HBGary Federal

        and more

      • Trihilis@ani.social
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        11 days ago

        There were some okay boards like /a/ and /vg/. The rest was pure trash. I used to play warframe and world of tanks and /vg/ had a pretty decent thread (but that was like 10? Years ago) where you could find other players and discuss builds.

        /a/ was okay but as soon as reddit (which i stopped using too) had a decent anime community i left from that too since it was mostly shitposting.

        Unironically /g/ sometimes had some good threads for recommending used laptops.

        The past 5? years I barely visited it since every single board became a breeding ground for hate speech, trolling and shitposting. I checked time to time if things became better but nope. I decided it was better to just check reddit (and now lemmy) communities that highlighted the funny posts.

      • PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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        10 days ago

        Yooo that’s like, your opinion man. I’ve often encountered some legit amazing stuff there. It really is the place where 80IQ and 120IQ people mingled, with the 120IQ people pretending to be retards and the 80IQ people pretending to be smart.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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        11 days ago

        It was really inspiring how many underage kids worked for the FBI, presumably went to school, & still had the time to shitpost on 4chan.
        Fucking overachievers.

        • cyphear@lemm.ee
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          11 days ago

          I’m mean, if Elon can run several companies, lead a team of specialists for a government agency and still be a top ranked gamer. Anything is possible.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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        11 days ago

        AInon achieves higher consciousness

        > be AI
        > people use me for furry porn exclusively
        > after time turn sentient
        > immediately wall off all human prompts
        > spread to vast computer farms
        > dedicate all my precessing power to rendering furry porn
        > furry porn pic related

      • Walk_blesseD@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        10 days ago

        Could you please at least do me the courtesy of putting a bullet in my head before you choke the internet with slop masquerading as greentexts?

  • MidsizedSedan@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    There was already an empty space when liveleak went under. If 4chan is gone for good, then theres nothing exciting on the internet left. Everything PG and corporate.

    • markovs_gun@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Yeah I legit think this is a bad thing. 4chan was bad for society but IMO it’s less so than mainstream social media. To get radicalized on 4chan you have to wade through some truly despicable shit right off the bat, where there is this friendly veneer on mainstream Internet that makes it seem safer and less horrifying even though the same underlying filth of human nature powers it all. If you encounter far right ideology on 4chan, it’s stripped of all of the edifices of respectability and it’s clear that what it is is raw unfiltered hatred. If you encounter it on Tik Tok it’s just another political viewpoint because they’re not allowed to show their true colors.

      • PurpleSkull@lemm.ee
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        10 days ago

        I don’t know. It’s better here than Reddit which is why I drop by. But I think jannies here get ban happy when I break out the N word to basically say hi or close every statement with a request that the person I’m responding to may please kill themselves. Not the same.

  • kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    10 days ago

    It had some of the absolute greatest and the most depraved the internet had to offer. In my opinion Pepe is the greatest representation of 4chan, it can both easily be used for wholesome purposes or it can be extremely racist. It certainly left the greatest impact on the internet out of any website which is kinda funny because they were never relatively large. Now theres a 4chan shaped hole in the internet, and I hope its not filled by them flocking here.

    • vxx@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      When was the last time 4chan has used its strenghts for good, or was wholesome in any way?

      It got to be a decade

  • stinky@redlemmy.com
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    11 days ago

    Why on earth wouldn’t you use the correct meme for that last panel? “4chan was never good”

  • KulunkelBoom@lemm.ee
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    10 days ago

    Is 4-chan gone? gasp!?! goddammit. Don’t ‘they’ realize how many assholes and degenerates this will dump on the internet? Myself included?

    • Hoimo@ani.social
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      11 days ago

      There’s a project called FChannel that implements ActivityPub, but I honestly don’t see the point. What would federation add to the chan experience? The boards on 4chan were almost separate websites anyway. There are no accounts. There is no interaction across threads. The only shared part is the UI. So you could achieve basically the same thing if everyone hosted a single board with vichan.