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I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I enjoyed browsing through sfw boards like /tg/ (tabletop media), /ck/ (cooking) and /fit/ (fitnes

I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I enjoyed browsing through sfw boards like /tg/ (tabletop media), /ck/ (cooking) and /fit/ (fitness). I had long discussions about the SW sequels on /tv/ back in 2015-19. The readership was surprisingly diverse and the anonymity lead users to provide more focused replies. With bodybuilding.com gone, the blue boards felt like the last bastion of the old internet.

irusensei 1y ago
The first llama torrents were posted on /g/ and for a long time it was the best place to go for information on local models.
MattDemers 1y ago
I think people also don't acknowledge how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there. When it breaches into Twitter (usually through funposters) people kind of ignore the unsavoury origin and rewrite the history. The anonymous nature kind of provides that petri dish of "if it's strong culture, it'll survive or be modified."
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  Don't forget the slurs. They have some unique slurs in there that have backstories too.
- thih9 1y ago
  > how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there Could you give some examples? The more unexpected, the better. Preferably with sources, because tracing word origin is difficult enough on its own.
  - boyesm 1y ago
    Moot lists some examples in this video: https://youtu.be/a_1UEAGCo30?si=JMVO5ox3K2AhxrMY&t=97 https://youtu.be/a_1UEAGCo30?si=JMVO5ox3K2AhxrMY&t=97
  - dmonitor 1y ago
    Wiktionary has a surprisingly robust list https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_4chan_slang https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_4chan_slang
    - thih9 1y ago
      Note, some of these are associated with the far right. > fren later came to prominence on sites such as 4chan and the subreddit /r/frenworld as a dog whistle used by far-right white nationalists and fascists to refer to each other https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fren https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fren
      - zer8k 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - NewsaHackO 1y ago
        Why does that matter?
        immibis 1y ago
        because if you're trying to say a site was a positive influence, because it created a number of Nazi slurs and dog whistles... complete the sentence yourself
        anigbrowl 1y ago
        So you can have a clue who you're talking to.
      - FiniteField 1y ago
        >Note, some of these are associated with the far right. I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg: - based - goyslop -> slop - normalfag -> normie
- 52-6F-62 1y ago
  I thought culture was a “solved problem” now that we have AI. I can’t keep up anymore.
  - 52-6F-62 1y ago
    Well either people thought my comment was to be taken literally, or they believe 4chan is culture and other hurting cultural gatherings like midsize live music venues were not.
- hotfist 1y ago
  This absolutely was the case for a long time. It was the cultural center of the internet where nearly all memes sprang from or gained traction and context before leaving orbit for the greater internet. That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms. But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.
  - packetlost 1y ago
    I think it's less the case now, but 4chan is absolutely still the source of new slang. It's just less concentrated on that one platform these days.
  - YurgenJurgensen 1y ago
    ‘Slop’ was a 2024 Oxford Dictionary word-of-the-year candidate, and what most of the people using it probably don’t realise is that it originated on 4chan as an abbreviation of ‘goyslop’.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      "Slop" has an etymology that extends far beyond 4chan.
  - corimaith 1y ago
    People were using "Based" and Gigachad in the late 2010s for years before the mainstream picked it up in the 20s. Also for indie video games, many do find their attention and early fanbases on /v/ before they spread out to twitter. Largely because /v/ is very information sensitive and will pick up primary news usually minutes after they arrive.
- el_cujo 1y ago
  I think this was true at one point but not for the past 5-10 years. Based off of using the site I feel like now a lot of things start on other sites (particularly smaller accounts on twitter), get aggregated and popularized on 4chan, and then get picked up on other sites (often regurgitated back to twitter). Knowyourmeme shows this for a lot of things that people typically attribute as original to 4chan. There was definitely a time when a ton of stuff originated on 4chan but these days everything is so interconnected with the same people posting on twitter, reddit, and 4chan that I think 4chan gets a lot of unearned credit
nemomarx 1y ago
the blue boards did have some slow overlap with pol in my experience - they were more distinct before 2014 or so and by 2016 I barely recognized /tg/ culture. I'm curious, why bodybuilding.com in particular? I think I've only heard of it once. I wonder if anyone on HN remembers stardestroyer.net or old weird tech forums?
- sgarland 1y ago
  I used to hang out at Head-Fi a lot in the early ‘00s. It’s a headphone and headphone accessories (amplifiers, DACs, etc.) forum, and people nerd out about building their own stuff. I recall writing a review on some obscure Chinese brand of sound card that people liked, because it happened to have a really good DAC for the rear output (it was a surround sound card, back when that was something interesting). I gradually lost interest when they started heavily pushing commercial sponsors. I get it; sites aren’t free to host, and moderator time isn’t free / unlimited, but it’s still sad.
  - torginus 1y ago
    Sites are surprisingly cheap to run all things considered - I remember asking the owner of an fairly prominent aerospace enthusiast forum (one of the biggest on the internet) how much he spends on hosting - he told me he hosts on a Linux box on DigitalOcean that runs phpBB, and he spends about $50/month for the whole website - not a crazy amount even for a hobbyist.
- h2zizzle 1y ago
  Bodybuilding.com's misc board was essentially the same sort of raunchy teen hangout as /b/, sans the porn. It wasn't anything goes, but a lot did, and of course you were dealing with the kinds of meatheads (said lovingly) who would happen upon bb.com in the first place.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
sgarland 1y ago
> bodybuilding.com Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online [0]. It’s so good, the Wikipedia entry [1] has a section devoted to it. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751 https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bod... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding.com
- sensanaty 1y ago
  My personal favorite rendition of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqylqmDl0Mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqylqmDl0Mw (Mega64 - Flame War Theater - "Full Body Workout Every Other Day?")
  - sgarland 1y ago
    This is amazing, thank you.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    I had to watch that at 2x to keep the thoughts-per-second above catatonic. In the same vein, for those who haven't seen it, the classic "Is soup a drink?" debate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IDNuz_VFJtU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IDNuz_VFJtU Somewhere, there are ancient Greek rhetoric teachers spinning in their graves.
    - valiant55 1y ago
      Is cereal soup?
      - ethbr1 1y ago
        Objection.
      - what 1y ago
        No, that’s just an extra dressed salad.
flmontpetit 1y ago
It used to be a diverse place without much to tie all the boards and users together save for a shared commitment to counter-culture. Then GamerGate and Donald Trump happened. "Every board is /pol/" was one of the most frequent replies you would see for a while until all the halfway decent people left. /g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.
- johnnyjeans 1y ago
  /g/ genuinely was one of the worst boards on the website, but there were a handful of lurkers who made good posts in some of the general threads. the site as a whole was still was a diverse place up until yesterday, with only a few boards being unusably bad, and it was getting increasingly better. it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.
  - flmontpetit 1y ago
    I guess the thing that really changed is our tolerance for bad actors. As far as I'm concerned even a 99% signal-to-noise ratio is unacceptable if the 1% represents a contingent of determinedly obnoxious and hateful people, and 4chan was never anywhere close to 99% signal.
    - johnnyjeans 1y ago
      Nah, the board culture really did change in the last 7 years. In a past that's not too distant nobody was obsessed with trans folk. That's not to say there weren't vulgarities and unpleasantries, but there was definitely a substantial IQ drop somewhere around 2018 and 2019. I haven't seen the "Install Gentoo" meme in a while, the old board culture was basically replaced with cringe fringe zoomerisms.
      - deleted 1y ago
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. That's probably why a lot of websites use moderation to avoid having one section of it turn into a cesspit of every -ism you can imagine, up to and including fascism, because once you have a section of your website that is openly coordinating the pushing of fascism on society, everyone kinda forgets about the diverse and interesting other things it might have, because of the fascism.
- desumeku 1y ago
  4chan is more moderated than you'd imagine.
  - jtvjan 1y ago
    this might be conspirational thinking, but i don't think it's an accident that the site came out like this. yes, there's moderation, but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on moderating racism[1]. it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole. that's not to say stringent moderation doesn't make a site less welcoming, though. it's about choosing what's the lesser evil to you, i guess. [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4chan-into-the-internets-racist-engine/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
    - johnnyjeans 1y ago
      > it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole. Considering the site has been around for over 20 years and people still call out and flame racism, I think this is an uncharitable and unfounded cynicism. I'm not sure declarative claims of 3rd order effects in a system so chaotic are capable of being accurate.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        I think people, whether they know it or not, rightly realize that race is too simplistic of a way to mark people as good/bad or whatever so even in communities that would be fine with racism it's gonna catch a lot of shit for simply not being a good way to accomplish its goal.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
moonlet 1y ago
/fit/ and /mu/ were good to me in my late teens, and /ck/ is the reason I actually asked my roommate’s mom to show me cooking basics when I was in college!
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Funny you point to /pol/ and forget about /b/, that was the meat of 4chan in the late 2000's
eqvinox 1y ago
I always thought it's /b/ that people conflate with the whole website… (for the purpose of declaring it a cesspool) … but then again I never looked at /pol/, maybe it's even worse than /b/?
- ArinaS 1y ago
  It is - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=/pol/&oldid=1285511620 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=/pol/&oldid=12855....
- _345 1y ago
  it is, and unfortunately from 2016 onwards it kind of outgrew the rest of the site like a tumorous growth until the whole site became markedly more neonazi and less goofy. something to do with donald trump i suspected
  - eqvinox 1y ago
    Good to know. My opinion of 4chan was formed 2010-ish, I guess I should, er, update it.
  - api 1y ago
    I've heard multiple times about a bit of lore that holds that 4chan once tried to brigade Stormfront, causing Stormfront to brigade back, and that was how the cross pollination occurred and started turning 4chan fascist. No idea if this is true but it sounds plausible.
    - geriatric-janny 1y ago
      In its earliest years /b/ started prank calling the radio show of nazi Hal Turner, then messed with Stomfront as the conflict widened. There was little activist component to this. They just thought it was funny to rile up people who took themselves very seriously. I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation. 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting word filters that I can't repeat here without my post getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of hate. I think very little has changed in twenty years really. Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now, when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant contrarianism. If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call your son gay until he grows out of it.
fastglass 1y ago
I feel too many people who don't conflate /pol/ with the whole website, as well as the others, don't know why /pol/ was created. It was eventually a replacement for the /new/ board, where news of the arab spring first started, shortly before it was shut down. However, it was plagued with proto-pol behavior before anyone was bothering to complain about pol. There was always these 'cells' of non /jp/ shitposters, if they weren't the OG shitposters themselves, that would post about left-right politics ad nauseum, and in the most hallmark unproductive ways. It was when trolling evolved from 'clever this and that' to shear brute forcing. It was the topic of the news that attracted these unsavor political actors into that place, which was for a short period of time, a great diverse place for collecting news. This social phenomena and history could never be repeated enough, particularly since we might be finally ending the story of pol/4chan - which was more popular than 4chan itself.
- Calinterman 1y ago
  I feel too many people who conflate /pol/ with the whole website are just regurgitating information they heard from other social media sites. The most popular boards, by far, since 2020 have been the video game and vtuber boards. With Video Game generals being the most popular board for the past five years outside of the occasional political season. You can check this on 4stats. People who still complain about /pol/ look a little like people who would still complain about ebaumsworld: Completely out of touch individuals who equate everything to a tiny phenomena.
  - sleepybrett 1y ago
    sorry buddy, but it's the nazi bar analogy. Let one nazi into your bar the whole bar is a nazi bar. I don't care if some other sub-board is all sunshines and happiness, it's a nazi forum because of all the nazis that are coddled there.
    - lastcobbo 1y ago
      That’s a silly thing to think about any site on the internet. Have you vetted every person on any site you post on? Or even this thread? If not, how do you expect a moderator to do that? This isn’t a pub, it’s a site used by tens of thousands of people.
helle253 1y ago
/pol/ and /b/ were containment boards, up until they got so popular that everything else ended up being containment boards. I still miss hanging out on /v/ and /fa/. When they split /vg/ out into its own board, the colour started to drain from my experience.
throwaway795737 1y ago
The more popular blue boards were pretty bad too, let's be honest. It wasn't hard at all to find things on those boards that wouldn't be tolerated on any mainstream social media, for good reason.
- swarnie 1y ago
  What is the good reason? Where I'm sat the only reason our three (?) social media companies restrict none illegal speech/content is to make it more appealing to advertisers. I miss the internet before it was driven by advertisers and their investors.
- Blikkentrekker 1y ago
  It wasn't hard to find things no, but the narrative one often reads is that it's the mainstream consensus there to the universal opinion rather than a fringe opinion which exists and isn't banned from having.
- SkyeCA 1y ago
  I'm not looking for corporate sanitized social media site #102032. Imageboards if nothing else allow people to be people and you know what? Sure sometimes people suck, but I don't want some overvalued social media companies in America deciding what I can and can't see. Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which I've stayed in contact with long term.
- asdff 1y ago
  Maybe today's social media. It's basically early xbox live tier banter. A relic of a different time on the internet that is incomprehensible to the outsiders who weren't around for it.
Bjorkbat 1y ago
/vg/ also had a pretty cool amateur game dev general thread (/agdg/). No one was making any hidden gems there, but it wasn't trash either. At any rate, I liked it.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  I remember one user who made a really fun arcade flight simulator.
- diath 1y ago
  Not hidden gems, no, but some of big titles originated from /agdg/, both Risk of Rain and VA-11 Hall-A started as progress posts in /agdg/ before hitting combined >1M sales.
Calinterman 1y ago
It's, funny enough, identical to people who conflate all of old 4chan with /b/. The current most popular boards are video game boards and have been since Covid hit. There's a site called 4stats which charts this, and shows how the end of Trump's presidency spelled the death knell of /pol/ dominating 4chan. Which, by comparison, was four years. It's been five years since then. It's kind of like how the golden age of /b/ was a shade over three years (2004-2007) but all of old 4chan is equated to the memes made in this prehistoric era.
swarnie 1y ago
Ignore /b/ /pol/ and /r9k/ and most of the rest were good communities compared to the modern internet. Reddit can't get close due to its voting system.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
LinuxBender 1y ago
I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I believe that's fair. Sure, it's "a different board" but it's just another URL on the same domain and same administrator, just different janitors. So it is really the part of the whole website. I know that 99% of people on 4chan disagree with me because they do not wish to be associated with /pol/ /b/ /gif/ but if they wanted to disassociate themselves with those boards then they should be on an entirely different domain without 4chan in name. polchan perhaps.
- Hamuko 1y ago
  Do people also treat Reddit the same way?
  - LinuxBender 1y ago
    I don't know. I've never created an account there. In it's early days it just seemed like they were trying to make a platform that could be monetized some day so I never bothered. I assumed incorrectly that it would just fade away. If that is the case that might explain why so many on 4chan feel that different URL's are different sites. Most of the current members seemed to have shown up from Reddit. Most of the original members grew up and left, myself excluded. I still visit from time to time but don't stick around long as most threads and posters are obviously just 4chan-GPT and people being tricked into replying to it. There are certainly overlapping circles between Reddit, 4chan and HN. 4chan people talk about and make fun of members of this site all the time. They also make fun of Reddit but don't seem to call out specific people on it.
  - SkyeCA 1y ago
    They do not. Reddit is a big corporate social media site and largely gets a pass in online discourse despite the horrible communities that do and have existed there.
codexon 1y ago
> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4chan-into-the-internets-racist-engine/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha... On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right. I discussed it somewhat recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276865#42283887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276865#42283887
- optimalsolver 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - sanswork 1y ago
    You can still be attracted to someone even if you think you are genetically superior. Or you can get off on interracial power dynamics. Lots of reasons. Go look of descendants of American slaves who do DNA tests only to find out they have European ancestry.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - codexon 1y ago
    interracial porn is frequently used by the alt-right racists to point out the evils of "race mixing" and to blame jews for being the producers of it. It is not an anti alt-right point at all. Even if its posted by someone that is against the alt-right, it becomes a post to unify alt-right users.
    - Der_Einzige 1y ago
      It’s because they sexualize their fears. A lot of real fear of the BBC from scrawny white kids there. Also why cuckolding, and other very embarrassing (for men) fetishes are popular there. I unironically worry more about the degenerate fetishes that 4chan spreads more than the dumbass political ideologies they purport to have. Americans views of sexuality is so warped and sad because of mind viruses like this.
timeinput 1y ago
Piling on the "some parts of 4chan was good until it wasn't" theme: I really liked /ck/ for a while. Then there was this weird trend of just like "all food tubers are garbage" whether that was "Kenji-Cucks", or people hating on Rageusa, or what ever. Combining that with the "post hands" request for a lot of food it was just an unpleasant community to participate it. Weirdly trying to load the page right now I'm getting Connection timed out. Is hackernews ddosing 4chan? What a world.
- gosub100 1y ago
  Ragusea is an idiot, though and I arrived at that conclusion without any help from 4ch.
  - garfield_light 1y ago
    Why? He seems better than the average foodtuber.
    - gosub100 1y ago
      If he stuck to food it would be fine. But he can't talk about a cheese sandwich without detouring into racially polarized woke politics.
    - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
      You're talking to a well known troll, sadly
- s3krit 1y ago
  /ck/ from around 2015 to hmm… maybe 2018-19 was pretty good, and probably my home board. Decent cook along threads (I hope Patti is doing ok), /ck/ challenge threads where there was some theme we had to follow and posts would get ranked… and of course the yearly lemon pig [1] threads. Sadly I guess fast food posting, shitting on foodtubers, and general /pol/ shittery made it go down in my view. Still went there most days until yesterday though. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_pig https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_pig
ren_engineer 1y ago
/g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI, also where llama weights were first leaked
- canjobear 1y ago
  > /g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI Is this documented?
  - ren_engineer 1y ago
    Gwern talked about it when GPT 4.5 came out, a ton of breakthroughs with image and text AI came from anons trying to optimize models for their waifus. That's basically the origin of chat models in general - https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1izpgct/comment/mf5t53u/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1izpgct/comment/mf5...
- FMecha 1y ago
  /g/ was also the home of a Windows XP source code leak (at least publicly). Some gaming-related leaks also came from /v/, such as the 1999 Duke Nukem Forever builds.
torginus 1y ago
It's interesting to note the popularity of the website, and the massive traffic it handled, despite the lack of everything we assume necessary for a modern (social media) website - no modern web frameworks - no microservices/kubernetes clusters - no algorithmic curation/moderation/recommendation algoritmhs One wonders just how much of the modern engineering developed in the past decades, that cost a fortune to develop and run is actually necessary or even beneficial for running a modern social media website
- conradfr 1y ago
  Should have had updated dependencies though.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  I worked for a major internet company until 2020. HN would be aghast how much "if we failed to provide this service a good chunk of the internet would either go down or sites wouldn't function properly and the stock market probably would dip" stuff runs on redundant pairs of LAMP stacks and other unsophisticated old stuff HN would turn up its nose at.
  - TZubiri 1y ago
    "Redundant pair of LAMP stacks" Damn you got two of those? That's advanced magic
    - protocolture 1y ago
      Active/Passive and no one has ever done a failover test.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        We did a failover test last time a motherboard failed. It went so well it made the news.
- rcpt 1y ago
bigfatkitten 1y ago
Even /b/ was pretty good back in the day. Memes and inside jokes galore with almost no porn to be seen.
keepamovin 1y ago
I still don't understand how to read threads. How do replies work? How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back? How is it organized visually??
- DecoySalamander 1y ago
  > How do replies work Reply references the post it is replying to by ID, most boards will turn that ID into a link or even create a UI to view a chain of replies. > How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back? You shouldn't, an anonymous imageboard invites you to engage with ideas, not people. However, on most boards you can enter a password with your post, which is displayed as a hash, changing you from anonymous to pseudonymous (although this is generally considered attention-seeking and is frowned upon).
  - keepamovin 1y ago
    Thank you for explaining it.
- ogurechny 1y ago
  If that's your thing, you can turn nicknames and avatars on in profile settings after registration.
brap 1y ago
You’re right but only if ignoring the last 5 years or so. I discovered 4chan around 2008 as a kid, it was much less hostile back then. Even as an adult I used to go on /fit/ every now and then. It was useful and funny and even “wholesome” in its own special way. But over the last few years, the entire site became /pol/, and other boards became unusable. Maybe once a year I will pop in and immediately regret it.
RKFADU_UOFCCLEL 1y ago
This. It's just a website (where anyone can post, quite rare in these overpoliticalized days). > A Soyjak.Party users also shared a list of emails they claimed are associated with janitor and moderator accounts, including three .edu emails. Although some internet users claimed that the leaks included .gov emails associated with members of the moderation team, this remains unverified. Like who cares?

irusensei 1y ago

The first llama torrents were posted on /g/ and for a long time it was the best place to go for information on local models.

MattDemers 1y ago

I think people also don't acknowledge how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there. When it breaches into Twitter (usually through funposters) people kind of ignore the unsavoury origin and rewrite the history. The anonymous nature kind of provides that petri dish of "if it's strong culture, it'll survive or be modified."

giancarlostoro 1y ago
Don't forget the slurs. They have some unique slurs in there that have backstories too.
thih9 1y ago
> how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there Could you give some examples? The more unexpected, the better. Preferably with sources, because tracing word origin is difficult enough on its own.
- boyesm 1y ago
  Moot lists some examples in this video: https://youtu.be/a_1UEAGCo30?si=JMVO5ox3K2AhxrMY&t=97 https://youtu.be/a_1UEAGCo30?si=JMVO5ox3K2AhxrMY&t=97
- dmonitor 1y ago
  Wiktionary has a surprisingly robust list https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_4chan_slang https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_4chan_slang
  - thih9 1y ago
    Note, some of these are associated with the far right. > fren later came to prominence on sites such as 4chan and the subreddit /r/frenworld as a dog whistle used by far-right white nationalists and fascists to refer to each other https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fren https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fren
    - zer8k 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - NewsaHackO 1y ago
      Why does that matter?
      - immibis 1y ago
        because if you're trying to say a site was a positive influence, because it created a number of Nazi slurs and dog whistles... complete the sentence yourself
      - anigbrowl 1y ago
        So you can have a clue who you're talking to.
    - FiniteField 1y ago
      >Note, some of these are associated with the far right. I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg: - based - goyslop -> slop - normalfag -> normie
52-6F-62 1y ago
I thought culture was a “solved problem” now that we have AI. I can’t keep up anymore.
- 52-6F-62 1y ago
  Well either people thought my comment was to be taken literally, or they believe 4chan is culture and other hurting cultural gatherings like midsize live music venues were not.
hotfist 1y ago
This absolutely was the case for a long time. It was the cultural center of the internet where nearly all memes sprang from or gained traction and context before leaving orbit for the greater internet. That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms. But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.
- packetlost 1y ago
  I think it's less the case now, but 4chan is absolutely still the source of new slang. It's just less concentrated on that one platform these days.
- YurgenJurgensen 1y ago
  ‘Slop’ was a 2024 Oxford Dictionary word-of-the-year candidate, and what most of the people using it probably don’t realise is that it originated on 4chan as an abbreviation of ‘goyslop’.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    "Slop" has an etymology that extends far beyond 4chan.
- corimaith 1y ago
  People were using "Based" and Gigachad in the late 2010s for years before the mainstream picked it up in the 20s. Also for indie video games, many do find their attention and early fanbases on /v/ before they spread out to twitter. Largely because /v/ is very information sensitive and will pick up primary news usually minutes after they arrive.
el_cujo 1y ago
I think this was true at one point but not for the past 5-10 years. Based off of using the site I feel like now a lot of things start on other sites (particularly smaller accounts on twitter), get aggregated and popularized on 4chan, and then get picked up on other sites (often regurgitated back to twitter). Knowyourmeme shows this for a lot of things that people typically attribute as original to 4chan. There was definitely a time when a ton of stuff originated on 4chan but these days everything is so interconnected with the same people posting on twitter, reddit, and 4chan that I think 4chan gets a lot of unearned credit

nemomarx 1y ago

the blue boards did have some slow overlap with pol in my experience - they were more distinct before 2014 or so and by 2016 I barely recognized /tg/ culture. I'm curious, why bodybuilding.com in particular? I think I've only heard of it once. I wonder if anyone on HN remembers stardestroyer.net or old weird tech forums?

sgarland 1y ago
I used to hang out at Head-Fi a lot in the early ‘00s. It’s a headphone and headphone accessories (amplifiers, DACs, etc.) forum, and people nerd out about building their own stuff. I recall writing a review on some obscure Chinese brand of sound card that people liked, because it happened to have a really good DAC for the rear output (it was a surround sound card, back when that was something interesting). I gradually lost interest when they started heavily pushing commercial sponsors. I get it; sites aren’t free to host, and moderator time isn’t free / unlimited, but it’s still sad.
- torginus 1y ago
  Sites are surprisingly cheap to run all things considered - I remember asking the owner of an fairly prominent aerospace enthusiast forum (one of the biggest on the internet) how much he spends on hosting - he told me he hosts on a Linux box on DigitalOcean that runs phpBB, and he spends about $50/month for the whole website - not a crazy amount even for a hobbyist.
h2zizzle 1y ago
Bodybuilding.com's misc board was essentially the same sort of raunchy teen hangout as /b/, sans the porn. It wasn't anything goes, but a lot did, and of course you were dealing with the kinds of meatheads (said lovingly) who would happen upon bb.com in the first place.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

sgarland 1y ago

> bodybuilding.com Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online [0]. It’s so good, the Wikipedia entry [1] has a section devoted to it. [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751 https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bod... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding.com

sensanaty 1y ago
My personal favorite rendition of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqylqmDl0Mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqylqmDl0Mw (Mega64 - Flame War Theater - "Full Body Workout Every Other Day?")
- sgarland 1y ago
  This is amazing, thank you.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  I had to watch that at 2x to keep the thoughts-per-second above catatonic. In the same vein, for those who haven't seen it, the classic "Is soup a drink?" debate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IDNuz_VFJtU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IDNuz_VFJtU Somewhere, there are ancient Greek rhetoric teachers spinning in their graves.
  - valiant55 1y ago
    Is cereal soup?
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      Objection.
    - what 1y ago
      No, that’s just an extra dressed salad.

flmontpetit 1y ago

It used to be a diverse place without much to tie all the boards and users together save for a shared commitment to counter-culture. Then GamerGate and Donald Trump happened. "Every board is /pol/" was one of the most frequent replies you would see for a while until all the halfway decent people left. /g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.

johnnyjeans 1y ago
/g/ genuinely was one of the worst boards on the website, but there were a handful of lurkers who made good posts in some of the general threads. the site as a whole was still was a diverse place up until yesterday, with only a few boards being unusably bad, and it was getting increasingly better. it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.
- flmontpetit 1y ago
  I guess the thing that really changed is our tolerance for bad actors. As far as I'm concerned even a 99% signal-to-noise ratio is unacceptable if the 1% represents a contingent of determinedly obnoxious and hateful people, and 4chan was never anywhere close to 99% signal.
  - johnnyjeans 1y ago
    Nah, the board culture really did change in the last 7 years. In a past that's not too distant nobody was obsessed with trans folk. That's not to say there weren't vulgarities and unpleasantries, but there was definitely a substantial IQ drop somewhere around 2018 and 2019. I haven't seen the "Install Gentoo" meme in a while, the old board culture was basically replaced with cringe fringe zoomerisms.
    - deleted 1y ago

ToucanLoucan 1y ago

> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. That's probably why a lot of websites use moderation to avoid having one section of it turn into a cesspit of every -ism you can imagine, up to and including fascism, because once you have a section of your website that is openly coordinating the pushing of fascism on society, everyone kinda forgets about the diverse and interesting other things it might have, because of the fascism.

desumeku 1y ago
4chan is more moderated than you'd imagine.
- jtvjan 1y ago
  this might be conspirational thinking, but i don't think it's an accident that the site came out like this. yes, there's moderation, but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on moderating racism[1]. it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole. that's not to say stringent moderation doesn't make a site less welcoming, though. it's about choosing what's the lesser evil to you, i guess. [1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4chan-into-the-internets-racist-engine/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
  - johnnyjeans 1y ago
    > it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole. Considering the site has been around for over 20 years and people still call out and flame racism, I think this is an uncharitable and unfounded cynicism. I'm not sure declarative claims of 3rd order effects in a system so chaotic are capable of being accurate.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      I think people, whether they know it or not, rightly realize that race is too simplistic of a way to mark people as good/bad or whatever so even in communities that would be fine with racism it's gonna catch a lot of shit for simply not being a good way to accomplish its goal.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

moonlet 1y ago

/fit/ and /mu/ were good to me in my late teens, and /ck/ is the reason I actually asked my roommate’s mom to show me cooking basics when I was in college!

giancarlostoro 1y ago

Funny you point to /pol/ and forget about /b/, that was the meat of 4chan in the late 2000's

eqvinox 1y ago

I always thought it's /b/ that people conflate with the whole website… (for the purpose of declaring it a cesspool) … but then again I never looked at /pol/, maybe it's even worse than /b/?

ArinaS 1y ago
It is - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=/pol/&oldid=1285511620 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=/pol/&oldid=12855....
_345 1y ago
it is, and unfortunately from 2016 onwards it kind of outgrew the rest of the site like a tumorous growth until the whole site became markedly more neonazi and less goofy. something to do with donald trump i suspected
- eqvinox 1y ago
  Good to know. My opinion of 4chan was formed 2010-ish, I guess I should, er, update it.
- api 1y ago
  I've heard multiple times about a bit of lore that holds that 4chan once tried to brigade Stormfront, causing Stormfront to brigade back, and that was how the cross pollination occurred and started turning 4chan fascist. No idea if this is true but it sounds plausible.
  - geriatric-janny 1y ago
    In its earliest years /b/ started prank calling the radio show of nazi Hal Turner, then messed with Stomfront as the conflict widened. There was little activist component to this. They just thought it was funny to rile up people who took themselves very seriously. I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation. 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting word filters that I can't repeat here without my post getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of hate. I think very little has changed in twenty years really. Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now, when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant contrarianism. If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call your son gay until he grows out of it.

fastglass 1y ago

I feel too many people who don't conflate /pol/ with the whole website, as well as the others, don't know why /pol/ was created. It was eventually a replacement for the /new/ board, where news of the arab spring first started, shortly before it was shut down. However, it was plagued with proto-pol behavior before anyone was bothering to complain about pol. There was always these 'cells' of non /jp/ shitposters, if they weren't the OG shitposters themselves, that would post about left-right politics ad nauseum, and in the most hallmark unproductive ways. It was when trolling evolved from 'clever this and that' to shear brute forcing. It was the topic of the news that attracted these unsavor political actors into that place, which was for a short period of time, a great diverse place for collecting news. This social phenomena and history could never be repeated enough, particularly since we might be finally ending the story of pol/4chan - which was more popular than 4chan itself.

Calinterman 1y ago
I feel too many people who conflate /pol/ with the whole website are just regurgitating information they heard from other social media sites. The most popular boards, by far, since 2020 have been the video game and vtuber boards. With Video Game generals being the most popular board for the past five years outside of the occasional political season. You can check this on 4stats. People who still complain about /pol/ look a little like people who would still complain about ebaumsworld: Completely out of touch individuals who equate everything to a tiny phenomena.
- sleepybrett 1y ago
  sorry buddy, but it's the nazi bar analogy. Let one nazi into your bar the whole bar is a nazi bar. I don't care if some other sub-board is all sunshines and happiness, it's a nazi forum because of all the nazis that are coddled there.
  - lastcobbo 1y ago
    That’s a silly thing to think about any site on the internet. Have you vetted every person on any site you post on? Or even this thread? If not, how do you expect a moderator to do that? This isn’t a pub, it’s a site used by tens of thousands of people.

helle253 1y ago

/pol/ and /b/ were containment boards, up until they got so popular that everything else ended up being containment boards. I still miss hanging out on /v/ and /fa/. When they split /vg/ out into its own board, the colour started to drain from my experience.

throwaway795737 1y ago

The more popular blue boards were pretty bad too, let's be honest. It wasn't hard at all to find things on those boards that wouldn't be tolerated on any mainstream social media, for good reason.

swarnie 1y ago
What is the good reason? Where I'm sat the only reason our three (?) social media companies restrict none illegal speech/content is to make it more appealing to advertisers. I miss the internet before it was driven by advertisers and their investors.
Blikkentrekker 1y ago
It wasn't hard to find things no, but the narrative one often reads is that it's the mainstream consensus there to the universal opinion rather than a fringe opinion which exists and isn't banned from having.
SkyeCA 1y ago
I'm not looking for corporate sanitized social media site #102032. Imageboards if nothing else allow people to be people and you know what? Sure sometimes people suck, but I don't want some overvalued social media companies in America deciding what I can and can't see. Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which I've stayed in contact with long term.
asdff 1y ago
Maybe today's social media. It's basically early xbox live tier banter. A relic of a different time on the internet that is incomprehensible to the outsiders who weren't around for it.

Bjorkbat 1y ago

/vg/ also had a pretty cool amateur game dev general thread (/agdg/). No one was making any hidden gems there, but it wasn't trash either. At any rate, I liked it.

matheusmoreira 1y ago
I remember one user who made a really fun arcade flight simulator.
diath 1y ago
Not hidden gems, no, but some of big titles originated from /agdg/, both Risk of Rain and VA-11 Hall-A started as progress posts in /agdg/ before hitting combined >1M sales.

Calinterman 1y ago

It's, funny enough, identical to people who conflate all of old 4chan with /b/. The current most popular boards are video game boards and have been since Covid hit. There's a site called 4stats which charts this, and shows how the end of Trump's presidency spelled the death knell of /pol/ dominating 4chan. Which, by comparison, was four years. It's been five years since then. It's kind of like how the golden age of /b/ was a shade over three years (2004-2007) but all of old 4chan is equated to the memes made in this prehistoric era.

swarnie 1y ago

Ignore /b/ /pol/ and /r9k/ and most of the rest were good communities compared to the modern internet. Reddit can't get close due to its voting system.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

LinuxBender 1y ago

I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I believe that's fair. Sure, it's "a different board" but it's just another URL on the same domain and same administrator, just different janitors. So it is really the part of the whole website. I know that 99% of people on 4chan disagree with me because they do not wish to be associated with /pol/ /b/ /gif/ but if they wanted to disassociate themselves with those boards then they should be on an entirely different domain without 4chan in name. polchan perhaps.

Hamuko 1y ago
Do people also treat Reddit the same way?
- LinuxBender 1y ago
  I don't know. I've never created an account there. In it's early days it just seemed like they were trying to make a platform that could be monetized some day so I never bothered. I assumed incorrectly that it would just fade away. If that is the case that might explain why so many on 4chan feel that different URL's are different sites. Most of the current members seemed to have shown up from Reddit. Most of the original members grew up and left, myself excluded. I still visit from time to time but don't stick around long as most threads and posters are obviously just 4chan-GPT and people being tricked into replying to it. There are certainly overlapping circles between Reddit, 4chan and HN. 4chan people talk about and make fun of members of this site all the time. They also make fun of Reddit but don't seem to call out specific people on it.
- SkyeCA 1y ago
  They do not. Reddit is a big corporate social media site and largely gets a pass in online discourse despite the horrible communities that do and have existed there.

codexon 1y ago

> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it. https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4chan-into-the-internets-racist-engine/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha... On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right. I discussed it somewhat recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276865#42283887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276865#42283887

optimalsolver 1y ago
[flagged]
- sanswork 1y ago
  You can still be attracted to someone even if you think you are genetically superior. Or you can get off on interracial power dynamics. Lots of reasons. Go look of descendants of American slaves who do DNA tests only to find out they have European ancestry.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- codexon 1y ago
  interracial porn is frequently used by the alt-right racists to point out the evils of "race mixing" and to blame jews for being the producers of it. It is not an anti alt-right point at all. Even if its posted by someone that is against the alt-right, it becomes a post to unify alt-right users.
  - Der_Einzige 1y ago
    It’s because they sexualize their fears. A lot of real fear of the BBC from scrawny white kids there. Also why cuckolding, and other very embarrassing (for men) fetishes are popular there. I unironically worry more about the degenerate fetishes that 4chan spreads more than the dumbass political ideologies they purport to have. Americans views of sexuality is so warped and sad because of mind viruses like this.

timeinput 1y ago

Piling on the "some parts of 4chan was good until it wasn't" theme: I really liked /ck/ for a while. Then there was this weird trend of just like "all food tubers are garbage" whether that was "Kenji-Cucks", or people hating on Rageusa, or what ever. Combining that with the "post hands" request for a lot of food it was just an unpleasant community to participate it. Weirdly trying to load the page right now I'm getting Connection timed out. Is hackernews ddosing 4chan? What a world.

gosub100 1y ago
Ragusea is an idiot, though and I arrived at that conclusion without any help from 4ch.
- garfield_light 1y ago
  Why? He seems better than the average foodtuber.
  - gosub100 1y ago
    If he stuck to food it would be fine. But he can't talk about a cheese sandwich without detouring into racially polarized woke politics.
  - AlexeyBelov 1y ago
    You're talking to a well known troll, sadly
s3krit 1y ago
/ck/ from around 2015 to hmm… maybe 2018-19 was pretty good, and probably my home board. Decent cook along threads (I hope Patti is doing ok), /ck/ challenge threads where there was some theme we had to follow and posts would get ranked… and of course the yearly lemon pig [1] threads. Sadly I guess fast food posting, shitting on foodtubers, and general /pol/ shittery made it go down in my view. Still went there most days until yesterday though. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_pig https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_pig

ren_engineer 1y ago

/g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI, also where llama weights were first leaked

canjobear 1y ago
> /g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI Is this documented?
- ren_engineer 1y ago
  Gwern talked about it when GPT 4.5 came out, a ton of breakthroughs with image and text AI came from anons trying to optimize models for their waifus. That's basically the origin of chat models in general - https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1izpgct/comment/mf5t53u/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1izpgct/comment/mf5...
FMecha 1y ago
/g/ was also the home of a Windows XP source code leak (at least publicly). Some gaming-related leaks also came from /v/, such as the 1999 Duke Nukem Forever builds.

torginus 1y ago

It's interesting to note the popularity of the website, and the massive traffic it handled, despite the lack of everything we assume necessary for a modern (social media) website - no modern web frameworks - no microservices/kubernetes clusters - no algorithmic curation/moderation/recommendation algoritmhs One wonders just how much of the modern engineering developed in the past decades, that cost a fortune to develop and run is actually necessary or even beneficial for running a modern social media website

conradfr 1y ago
Should have had updated dependencies though.
potato3732842 1y ago
I worked for a major internet company until 2020. HN would be aghast how much "if we failed to provide this service a good chunk of the internet would either go down or sites wouldn't function properly and the stock market probably would dip" stuff runs on redundant pairs of LAMP stacks and other unsophisticated old stuff HN would turn up its nose at.
- TZubiri 1y ago
  "Redundant pair of LAMP stacks" Damn you got two of those? That's advanced magic
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Active/Passive and no one has ever done a failover test.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      We did a failover test last time a motherboard failed. It went so well it made the news.
rcpt 1y ago

bigfatkitten 1y ago

Even /b/ was pretty good back in the day. Memes and inside jokes galore with almost no porn to be seen.

keepamovin 1y ago

I still don't understand how to read threads. How do replies work? How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back? How is it organized visually??

DecoySalamander 1y ago
> How do replies work Reply references the post it is replying to by ID, most boards will turn that ID into a link or even create a UI to view a chain of replies. > How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back? You shouldn't, an anonymous imageboard invites you to engage with ideas, not people. However, on most boards you can enter a password with your post, which is displayed as a hash, changing you from anonymous to pseudonymous (although this is generally considered attention-seeking and is frowned upon).
- keepamovin 1y ago
  Thank you for explaining it.
ogurechny 1y ago
If that's your thing, you can turn nicknames and avatars on in profile settings after registration.

brap 1y ago

You’re right but only if ignoring the last 5 years or so. I discovered 4chan around 2008 as a kid, it was much less hostile back then. Even as an adult I used to go on /fit/ every now and then. It was useful and funny and even “wholesome” in its own special way. But over the last few years, the entire site became /pol/, and other boards became unusable. Maybe once a year I will pop in and immediately regret it.

RKFADU_UOFCCLEL 1y ago

This. It's just a website (where anyone can post, quite rare in these overpoliticalized days). > A Soyjak.Party users also shared a list of emails they claimed are associated with janitor and moderator accounts, including three .edu emails. Although some internet users claimed that the leaks included .gov emails associated with members of the moderation team, this remains unverified. Like who cares?