The New Yorker:

The anonymous forum thrived when edgelord content wasn’t acceptable on more mainstream social media. Today, it can be found most anywhere.

By Kyle Chayka

4chan was where I learned that the internet could be bad. I first encountered the site during high school, not long after its founding, in 2003, by an American teen-ager named Christopher Poole (better known by his username, moot). Poole copied the format of a Japanese message board nicknamed 2channel; users on 4chan could anonymously post an unfiltered mix of text, images, and animated gifs. Illicit material was never hard to find on the internet, but 4chan served as an early hub—or “dumping ground” might be more apt. The site was inundated with pornography, pirated files, and uncensored screeds about dating or politics. Its background, a pale yellow gradient, still gives me a slight frisson, like a Playboy issue hidden under the bed. I would often test the censorship settings on a library or school computer’s lan internet connection by trying to load 4chan. Usually, it wouldn’t work, which hinted at the site’s infamy: even the grown-ups knew at least its name, and that it warranted a place on ban lists.

On 4chan, usernames were most often just “Anonymous” or a string of numbers. I never posted, but I understood the appeal of hiding behind a mask and becoming one of a crowd. The site formed a collective id that could be called up in a web browser, years before the digital gang wars of Twitter began. Learning the forum’s slang was the key to understanding its jokes: lulz, fren, TFW, troll. Posts were deleted when they stopped getting new engagement, which typically happened quickly, especially if the messages failed to provoke. At a time when the internet was still sparsely populated, 4chan guaranteed constant energy, no matter the time of day or night. But as the social-media landscape grew up around it, during the twenty-tens, and other sites competed as spaces for “shitposting,” that digital term of art, 4chan faded in relevance. In 2015, Poole sold it to the owner of 2channel, the Japanese site that had inspired it. It survived as a basement of the internet—dingy, subterranean, and in a state of arrested development—which is why it wasn’t exactly surprising when, on April 14th, 4chan suddenly disappeared. A spinoff forum called Soyjak.party (even harsher and more political than its predecessor) took credit for hacking the site and shutting it down.

Go to link