It’s likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again. But everything now—from X and YouTube to global politics—seems to carry its toxic legacy.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250422233152/https://www.wired.com/story/4chan-is-dead-its-toxic-legacy-is-everywhere/
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There used to be a dozen sites like 4chan. I don’t know if any of them are still around, but I’m willing to bet that if 4chan doesn’t come back there will be a new website that takes its place.
4chan is a pretty unique experience. Most of the internet is forming into echo chambers, where having a different opinion than the “correct” opinion for that community will get you downvoted or banned. My understanding with 4chan is that post popularity is determined by replies, and frequently controversial opinions/etc get the most replies. So posting stuff that most people will agree will result in a less popular thread than posting something controversial, offensive, or wrong.
I think this leads to a lot of the negative things you’ve heard about 4chan, but encouraging disagreements between its members keeps it from becoming a full echo chamber like a lot of social media. They still have some dominant community opinions, but those opinions can’t really smother all the other opinions like on most sites.
To be clear, 4chan is a cesspool. But for all it’s flaws it does offer something unique that’s largely missing on other websites.
It didn’t have any algorithm for popularity. It was newest first, posts bumped threads to the top, and posts got deleted very quickly when they fell beyond the maximum length. That’s how I remember it working, anyway.
Yes, that’s right.
What I was mostly referring to was
posts bumped threads to the top
The controversial threads get more posts, so usually they get bumped to the top over and over until the hit the post cap. Being on top also attracts more posts, but seemingly the easiest way to get a newly created thread to succeed and attract posts is by posting something controversial first.
For example if I wanted to talk about Morrowind, and I think that overall most users there like Morrowind, I’d be more likely to have a successful thread/discussion by making a first post that was something like “I can’t believe I fell for the meme that this was actually a good game”. I’ll get more intial responses of people disagreeing with me, and that will help the thread get started. After that the discussion can move on to other things about the game.
I personally used it daily for years. There was more to the site than neo-nazi threads on /pol/. Anime, manga, kpop, and vtuber threads were some of the most popular and they were all highly moderated.
I enjoyed the lack of username/post history meaning no worshipping prolific posters or doxxing people by going through their history to find a post where they talked about their work.
No upvotes or ranking system meant good and bad posts weren’t labeled. You figured that out yourself without other people (or an algorithm) telling you how to feel about it.
Frequent thread deletion meant the site was constantly a snapshot in time. It’s like going to a bar. You’re not going to know the conversations people had in that bar yesterday. It might not even be the same crowd as yesterday. The vibe is created by the people there at that time and it’s constantly changing.
The site had barely changed how it functioned in 20 years. It was honestly one of the last bastions of the old internet before everything became about “engagement” metrics.
according to my friend who uses it, some went to 8chan (4chan but can create new communities in the same vein of reddit), and the more extreme ones would go to soyjack or kiwifarms
I vaguely remember reading that some dude created 8chan because he thought 4chan was too heavily moderated or smth, which considering the little I saw while perusing 4chan ages ago, makes me wonder the depths to which 8chan can go.
Also it’s kind of funny but fully expected that Kiwifarms would attract the most extreme among the extreme considering it’s literally just the “harass and dox queer people” website.
I vaguely remember reading that some dude created 8chan because he thought 4chan was too heavily moderated or smth, which considering the little I saw while perusing 4chan ages ago, makes me wonder the depths to which 8chan can go.
You’d be surprised how uptight people can be about certain things, even while being extremely liberal with others.
Was 8chan created by the little disabled guy who moved to The Philippines?
Funny that he created a haven for the Nazis who would throw his ass in an oven in a heartbeat.
The piracy threads and general game discussion on /tg/ used to be mostly decent. /b/ was always the face of 4chan though, and that was the main pipe spewing and spilling sewage everywhere
And let’s not forget, 4chan was possibly one of the biggest reasons for MLP success back in 2012 or so (probably a hangover from too much Robot Unicorn Attack)
/ck/ (cooking - mentioned by the article), /vg/ (where people discussed video games; /v/ aka /b corta/ was a shithole), /sci/ (science) were also decent.
/tr//vp/ (Pokemon) was also really fun, at least when I still enjoyed the franchise. /a/ (anime) was a bit of hit-or-miss./b/ was only the main pipeline of cancer until /pol/ was created and took over the crown - instead of cancer mixed with dumb trolls and memes, /pol/ was pure and distilled cancer.
probably a hangover from too much Robot Unicorn Attack
Fuck, I miss that Flash game. Catchy song, simple but addictive mechanic, weird and awesome.
I once saw a guy steal a skull from the catacombs and proceed to fuck it on 4chan.
Oh dang I remember that
So much better than an ECHO CHAMBER! /s
Last tine I went on there I got a 3 month ban for making fun of Roy Moore losing to Doug Jones. It’s as much an echo chamber as anywhere else, if not worse.
(Caveat lector: IDK/DC who are Roy Moore or Doug Jones.)
…this sort of power-tripping bastard, desperate to enforce their opinions, was really common in 4chan. However Fubarberry is talking about structure; structurally speaking 4chan highlighted divisive opinions, while e.g. Lemmy, Lebbit etc. do the opposite.
now we have plenty of toxic lemmy instances as the modern alternative.ml
correct me if I’m wrong but I heard a theory that either Hexbear or .ml started as a group on 4chan
I think it should be fully funded, and kept alive.
To keep those psychopaths there, in their own little Nazi Utopia, where they belong.
Cesspool is the only word you needed to type. Fuck that place.
Meh. Truth be told I’d rather however did this put the effort into getting rid of Kiwi Farms instead
I miss the wallpaper board, and cooking board, and retro game board.
That’s about it, tho.
I miss when moot ran it and it didn’t have “mainstream” interest boards.
Why won’t it be back in a week? There’s nothing stopping it from coming back.
Most likely lack of resources. The codebase of the site is so old that it needs a complete rebase, which is a time consuming task. Relaunching without fixing the oustanding flaws is not really an option.
It’s been over a week since it went down, that’s a long time for a website to be down, I think the hackers royally fucked them and it’s hilarious.
There’s a supposed message from one of the admins promising it will return
If it does come back it will likely take ages given much of the 20 year old hacked together source leaked. If they simply relaunched as is it would likely go down again in minutes
And other reasons why “security through obscurity” is bullshit.
From the little I’ve seen about it, the code they were using was basically incredibly old and vulnerable, and the cost and effort required to repair it is a lot.
That’s all based on hearsay though.
It’s entirely likely. That site hasn’t changed a bit in over 2 decades. .
While publicly known external security vulnerabilities may have been found and patched over the years, having the source leaked means a look behind the hood at new weaknesses and a field day with exploiting them.
If 4Chan does come back, I think it will look significantly different.
I’m glad it’s dead.
I love the idea of imageboards. I love “anonymous” posting as a default. I love ephemeral threads.
I thought generals were pretty good. Board culture was real. People would make nontrivial 4chan optimized original content for what I assume was love of art.
There was something special about 4chan that I don’t think exists in forums, lemmy, tumblr, tiktok, or the other forms of social media we have now.
But the place was a shithole.
Split as it was by boards and threads, I could insulate myself from it to some extent but the culture on 4chan was getting worse year by year. The famous boards attracted the MAGA crowd and population had a large effect on what threads lived and died. I had so many threads hidden and yet I would still get a wave of revulsion looking at the catalog on my favorite board.
There are other imageboards. There are open source imageboard projects. Without 4chan’s shadow, I hope that imageboards and imageboard culture develop in different directions.
4chan in the past years was mostly known as a far right shithole. But I think 4chan had more than that, they also had more progressive hacktivism like Anonymous and they produced a lot of historical memes for the internet. I hope we can have some real historian work that highlights the good and the bad from it and not just its sad ending.
4chan in the past years was mostly known as a FBI honeypot.
And my little pony. The containment board wasn’t enough and ponies would spill whenever mods were asleep
Little pony in a jar
Also was turning anti trump
When I first used 4chan, more specifically /b/ in like 2009 and it was wild. There were definitely a lot of horrible people, but it was far from the majority of the posts there; there was actual interesting content and interesting discussions at times.
Every time I’ve been to /b/ over the last 5-10 years has been nothing short of horrific.
The content of /b/ over the last however long would variably look like this:
Extremely racist thread
Thread of actual gore showing severally mutilated human beings or less frequently animals
Trans hate thread
Intimate pictures of people you know viewed as porn thread Another racist thread
Another trans hate thread
4 more similar pornographic threads
Another gore thread
Rinse & RepeatFuck 4chan and virtually everyone who’s been active on /b/.
The right literally used it as a dog whistle to get their people on a site they could be fed info. That’s why 4chan was central to being seen as white supremacist by fox news. They announce it is, and so they go there to check it out.
Over the last decade it really has been a decay, of even the porn threads being nothing but race focused. I think it was around the time Pepe started becoming another connection with 4chan, that’s when it got noticeable.
By the end /aco/ and /gif/ were haltingly slow. Even gif didn’t have threads reach the limit and start a continuation anymore.
Porn is a very dominant way of convincing people. Its half of why ai is so adored. You can make them believe anything through suggestion or outright flattery.
I really appreciate seeing an article written by someone who is actually familiar with the culture and history of the site.
Qanon and Actual Nazis were not 4chan norm back in the day. The alt right nazi hateful shit was posted but it was more like larping/shock value immature crap and nothing like what we see in the mainstream social/media today. Misogyny too. I’m not denying that there weren’t people there who meant it but it was 99% shitposting. There’s also the hacktivism, social activism, soooooooo many memes like as substantial as YouTube as establishing the humor culture of the internet. I find the site so fascinating and much more than some cesspool of evil it became.
It is weird it is gone. I suspect moot is not so interested in sticking his neck and wallet out to protect the freedom of speech for facscists trying to destroy democracy and that’s why it’s not back. I’m pretty sure 4chan has been down before for various reasons more substantial than hacking but it could be fabricated memory
Moot sold 4chan years ago.
moot sold the site to hiro in 2015, but I think your reasoning is valid - it’s possible hiro is not too eager to defend the fascists who infested 4chan, and simply won’t bother to put the site up again.
If that was the case he could have deleted /pol/ and banned its users. 2016 would have been a great time for that.
Fair point. And frankly, he should’ve done this.
What the fuck are you talking about? Stormfront came in in 2012 and it’s been nazis all the way down since
Yeah, there’s a lot of revisionist history ITT, if I had to guess, it’s because people don’t want to admit/accept that it was already an extremist site by the time they were frequenting it.
And 4chan normalized it, and recruited legions of pissed off, horny young boys.
It’s more that they colonized than normalized, meaning they kept shitting up the place until nearly everyone not racist left in disgust
Then they looked around and saw mostly racist posts and concluded that it was ‘normal’ and then Steve Bannon directed all their ambient anger towards Gamergate and the rest is history, disgusting bigoted history.
newlemmings can’t triforce
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No
I remember when /b/ was good. But then that “moot” newbie came in, and ruined things forever.
…jokes aside I’m going to miss 4chan. Or at least the 4chan from the late 00s ~ early 10s, that I used periodically; it was already problematic, but as other users here said it was a unique experience.
See ya, space cowboys.
Its like watching your childhood home burn down after a methhead moved in.
Perfect analogy. I still used /vg/ and very rarely /a/, but nowhere as much as I did before. Methheads moved in, I moved out, and now the house burned.
Gtfo summerfag
NO U
Can you even triforce? NO YOU CAN’T BECAUSE YOU’RE A NEWBIE, THE CANCER KILLING /b/! FUCKING SUMMER
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▲ ▲…fuck, I can’t triforce either!
(About the -fag suffix: sorry to be “that guy” but let’s avoid using it, OK? It’s 2025, and we aren’t in 4chan, that implicit “-fag means nothing” context is gone.)
There are terrorist on Facebook, there are real nazi on YouTube and Twitch, there are ideological extremist on Bluesky and X, and there are Reddit. I think calling 4chan a “toxic” place is too much. The majority isn’t that bad
Did you read archive link with the full text? It talks about how the culture of 4chan started and then spread out across other social media platforms. Other sites weren’t always as toxic as they are today, yet 4chan began rotting much earlier on. The problem is that the rot, which originated on 4chan, has become mainstream. That’s why we see this shit everywhere now.
Not saying I necessarily agree with you, but I do find it interesting that 4chan is the only site out of the ones you listed that isn’t owned by a massive tech conglomerate. They never figured out how to make a bunch of money off of it.
I respected you for that. People on big tech site are more likely to create rage bait content. On 4chan it chaos, all post are equal. People call them hater, racism … never see ultranationalist group on facebook, they are even more fucked up and disgusting
Maybe dumb question, but I didn’t follow this too closely: Why don’t they just update their software and install a backup?
A typical 4chan user is very concerned about privacy, because it’s a place they do stuff they wouldn’t do elsewhere.
Once a trust is broken, it is very hard to regain. Technically, nothing stops it from appearing again. But will the userbase follow?
Nah, they’ve blocked Tor since many years. That’s not the issue here.
Quite proud to say that I’ve never ventured into any of the #chans. They frighten the fuck outta me, frankly.
What happened to 4chan?
They got hacked, the data and source code was leaked.
Got hacked a week ago. Site has been down since then.
Who shot Hannibal?
