SoylentNews

Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/4chan-may-be-dead-but-its-toxic-legacy-lives-on/ [arstechnica.com]

My earliest memory of 4chan [arstechnica.com] was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.

Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can has cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying “ORLY?” was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on.
[...]
It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the Internet entirely last week by hackers [wired.com] from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online.
[...]
It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X to Facebook to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan.
[...]
"The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world's five or so richest people and the government of the United States," the Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells WIRED. “Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man.”
[...]
4chan was more complicated than it looked from the outside. The site was organized into dozens of smaller sections, everything from comics to cooking to video games to, of course, pornography. Holderness says she learned to make bread during the pandemic thanks to 4chan's cooking board. (Full disclosure: I introduced Holderness to 4chan way back in 2012.)
[...]
Holderness calls 4chan the Internet's “Wild West” and says its demise this month felt appropriate in a way. The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now.
[...]
"The snippets that we have of what 4chan was—it's all skewed,” Holderness says. “There is no record. There's no record that can ever encapsulate what 4chan was."

Original Submission