4chan... A part of internet (history) for sure

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.
- The modern meme format was around before 4chan. They were called "image macros."
  
  I'd argue that demotivational posters were even older, right? These were even printed out before internet access was wide spread.
  
  If you trust KnowYourMeme, the phrase “image macro” was coined in 2004 and popularized in 2005. 4chan was started in 2003.
  
  Think they are talking about rage comics, wojack, and whatever the new one is called.
- I think that most of those evolved elsewhere and were taken over to 4Chan.
  
  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.

4chan was one of the websites on the internet.
- It had text.
  
  The text was green.
- You could say it was one of the websites of all time.
  
  Are you actually banned or is that some fancy effect on your username

Is 4-chan gone? gasp!?! goddammit. Don't 'they' realize how many assholes and degenerates this will dump on the internet? Myself included?
- Hacked by a rival image board, all its moderators, janitors and premier users who made accounts have been doxxed.
  The new owners who bought it from Moot in 2016 legitimately never updated the backend... The server was still running on a nine year old version of FreeBSD and PHP.
  
  well damn...
  
  made accounts
  Huh?

Remember when 4chan was good?
4chan was never good.
- Playing capture the flag with Shia LeBoof was kinda fun tho
- I once read on 4chan: "One cannot hope without suffering." One of the realest shit I've ever read.
  
  One cannot be nostalgic without hating their current circumstances.
- I very much believe that there was a very short period when it first opened when it was all innocent. Then all the edge trolls took over.
  
  moot created the site in response to lowtax banning hentai on Something Awful, I'm not sure I'd call that "innocent"

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.
- When was the last time 4chan has used its strenghts for good, or was wholesome in any way?
  It got to be a decade
  
  its been a very long time. 4chan was less bad before the whole gamer gate thing.

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.
- 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.
  
  Interesting viewpoint.
- kinda hits the spot, at least IMO. nothing exciting left.
- There are other chans if you're into that.
- You're forgetting about the fediverse
  
  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.

It contained some of the best and the worst of the internet, but its legacy is cemented with its greentexts which explores the sometimes dark and depraved aspects of us all without flinching away from it.
I believe the website has done more good than harm, but acknowledge that the harm it has inflicted has been targeted and substantial.
- Well, the harm that it did is possibly being one of the catalysts for the modern alt-right movement which directly lead to fascist america so...
  Sure, it wasn't the only thing, but it sure as hell was a bug part of it (especially during gamergate)
  
  I'd argue that they were co-opted, rather than spawned it. 4chan was an edgy place pre-2016 sure, but the users there were only half into their conspiracy bullshit. The Q stuff came out of seemingly nowhere and instead of being shot down as the usual bullshit, somehow it was being elevated and promoted. That smells like outside interference to me, but I have no data to back it other than my own bullshit theory...
  
  Somedays I wonder if that was driven by actual rightwing sentiment, or by a desire to just destroy and hack everything. Go back to the days of gaming American Idol to push Sanjaya, or the gags of gaming other polls to like, send Bieber to North Korea or Pitbull to Alaska etc.
  Like, they realized they could do a lot, and just keep finding ways to go even further.
  I look at what TFG is doing nowadays and honestly if it wasn't a system I depend on to live, it would be easy to mistake him for some kind of grey hat hacker exploiting every single hole he can find in said system in the worst possible way in order to compel people to close them.
  I will say this, too... 4chan's opintel is completely amazing. The way they were able to track Shia Lebouf's HWNDU by doing things like... correlating airplane noises with flight patterns is like... beyond next level.

Its going to be back in a week relax
- And when it does, it'll be the biggest WE'RE SO BACK ever!
- For real. It's an imageboard. Im surprised they don't nuke it all monthly to start fresh everytime.

A mix of the best and worst of humanity shoved into a small room and given no supervision
- There is zero good on 4 chan. Never has been, never will be.
  
  4chan, particularly Anonymous, has definitely done good before:
  Project Chanology
  Operation Payback
  Arab Spring Support
  Breach of HBGary Federal
  and more
  
  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.
  
  There is Net-zero good
  
  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.
  
  Ehh it wasn't that bad in 2004ish
  
  They got credited for scientific research: link
  
  Maybe nowadays, it was a very different place in 2010

Why are we talking like 4chan is actually dead? It's just offline
- Apparently the source code revealed a ton of insecurities that would make it all but impossible for them to relaunch without a major redesign, or at least that's what the actual coders that hang about here have said.
  
  nah, they'll just redo it in Dreamweaver again.
  
  Yeah I'm sure that's what they'll do, but I doubt they'll just pack it up and quit
  
  I'm still trying to find a link to the sauce

Gonna miss the fake and gay greentexts
- Don't worry, the LLMs can fill that void just fine.
  
  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
  
  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?

It definetly was the platform ever. Like, no doubt about it.
- Fed honeypot tho
  
  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.

So you're saying Tumblr actually won all these years later?

Who is 4chan?
- He got hacked by the hacker known as 4chan
  
  *4 hackers. 4 4chan-hackers.
- I'll do one better. Why is 4chan?
  
  Nobody ever asks how is 4chan :(

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

Fedi-chan when?
- Please, just let it die.
  
  Burn down one crack house, five more open up
- 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.
  
  SSO?
  Easier xposting