Sorry, been drinking and smoking. It was a really different time. The way people communicate on the internet is so fucked now and this place kind of reminds me of the way things used to be. . . if not for all the fucking twitter screenshots.
fuck twitter screenshots.
Yeah, that's what I meant, I just didn't want to say "/b/ was never good" because I didn't want to look like a ridiculous newfriend.
Ctrl-Shift-U
25b2enter ⇒ ▲You can enter any unicode character like this.
Edit: I forgot, the non-breaking space is
a0.
Yeah I was there. I remember when "Let the f**s marry" was a popular meme, and progressive compared to mainstream discourse about gay marriage legalization.
They say the past is a foreign country, but this was just twelve years ago.
Same boat. So much time on /b/ on the school computers when we were kids.
Looking back, life could have sent me down a way worse path if I kept up with that shit.
Yeah, the antisemitism creep was ongoing just as I left. Looking back now I'm glad I got out.
The time there had primed me to be more savvy about online communities, to be able to stand lurking through fucked up shit if I need to and know when to keep an eye on particular spots on the internet that might bubble up. It was worth it, in the end.
im 150 years old and yes i can agree i did too much. i got into it from playing mmos and somehow joining a 4chan group by accident. 4chan during the bush years was kinda left leaning which was interesting
Yeah I spent a lot of time on it from 2005 to roughly 2011/12 and started to lose interest. I would leave for a while and then go back. I would only visit fewer and fewer boards. I just gave up on it completely a few years ago. I don't even look at it anymore, not even out of curiosity. I just assume it's all /pol/ now and half the users are paid to be there by thousand-aire right wingers who still think 4chan elected Trump.
Yeah, same. Things started to get weird around the time of the Scientology stuff, embedding the idea that proto-posting could change the world. I think that was the first step towards the absolute wasteland it turned into.
I mean hindsight and all. I was young and nowhere near ready for material analysis. At the time it was easy to think that this wild west internet concept was the future. That people will just go online and do cool stuff with it as long as they could do it anonymously. It's a failed experiment for sure, I just wish that was the lesson people took away from it. People still think that being anonymous makes people more truthful. But we all lie to ourselves, even when we have no reason to. That might be the biggest thing I've taken away from 4chan. People will continue to pretend and troll even when there's no stake to their identity or safety. What the fuck does that say about people? Or at least the chronically online people? I think that has a connection to spite politics that we see now. It's not that voting for Trump makes libtards mad (it does). It's that you think it makes them mad. People construct an alternate reality because of this same mentality. You have to keep trolling strangers online because you think it makes them mad.
I wish I had the words and writing ability to flesh out this idea and turn it into an essay. It's something I've never heard anyone touch on, even people like Felix who were there during that time.
420chan motherfucker. We were the ones that raided the white supremacist radio show.
I’m not sure whether it was the user experience of the software itself or if there were different social expectations that made forums better, but I’m convinced they were better. It’s interesting, for example, how much of Reddit going to shit coincides with the dominance of their god-awful app.
I used to hang around 7chan and, later, 420chan. 7chan was much smaller and very weird. I stopped going after seeing some particularly awful shit. 420chan was fun, I think. Being mostly about drugs and attracting a wider variety of miscreants and degenerate hedonists kept it from getting as grossly reactionary as other places, though racism and sexism were "ironically" and sincerely present, especially by the time I left.
Just checked in on 420chan's philosophy and social sciences board and the second thread is "How to abolish the police: lessons from Rojava," so maybe they're doing all right after all.
The worst parts of image board culture are interesting to me. It was bad, irony doesn't automatically make it cool, but if anyone actually said they were a white nationalist people would have probably torn them apart for actually believing in something.
that's how they get ya. I'm pretty sure there's an alt-right playbook episode on the irony infiltration specifically.
I'm not sure the people who turned into alt-right weirdos weren't the same people doing shitty ironic racism years before that. They're by large far too young for that. There's another factor there. Not sure what it is, though I have some ideas on how the culture started to shift.
This was made when 7chan was created (racism/homophobia warning):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq64zpcdInM
People really thought 4chan was dying at the time and 7chan would win out. lol.
4chan was boring to me so I ended up poisoning my brain with the AboveTopSecret forums instead. Can't imagine how fucked up that place is now.
