4chan Chronicle/New Powers
The State of /b/
[edit | edit source](Approx. Oct 2012)
With the issue of bronies[check spelling] quelled, and new coder desuwa working constantly on the inline extension, among other ideas such as an inline catalog, the last part of 2012 proved to be one of change for /b/. Up to 2011, most of the site still thought of /b/ as an OC factory gone awry, and most 4channers still expected them to put themselves together and go back to that routine. However by 2012, /b/’s (perceived) position as the Internet’s prime content creator was swept away by Reddit, Imgur and 9gag. The end of the year saw a rise on the numbers of “casual” users on the board, to the point that posting old memes and catchphrases would shock /b/ as if it was the first time they were ever posted. Since one of the tenets of /b/ was that their aggressiveness would often create content or at least humorous threads, the amount of normal users conflicted with /b/’s notion of themselves as a factory of OC, as they were more or less an anonymous Facebook divided between porn threads and “X decides what I do”. While it could not be described as an identity crisis, as /b/ already saw itself as a shithole for a while now, it did rob them of the last expectation they had of themselves.
By late 2012 /b/ accepted it’s more idle culture, the influx of what could be deemed as “Facebook users”, bored teenagers with a knack for dark comedy and an age median of 16 to 24, put the board in a routine of passive activities. While quality wise its nothing new, as even during the days of the dark age with /b/ at its worst there was at least some degree of activity in any form – Be it raids, OC, discussion or even cancer – /b/ shifted towards a culture of passive encouragement: It will take any opportunities that present themselves, and play along with anything it considered humouristic, but it will not go out to generate any new content (or problems) like it used to do, merely limiting itself to laugh at stuff and make porn threads.
/pol/’s War Against the Internet
[edit | edit source](Approx. Jan 2013)
The advent of 2013 also saw a sharp rise with issues regarding the board /pol/ - Politically Incorrect. /pol/ was created to re-contain a small band of white supremacists and trolls taking residence on boards like /int/ and /k/. They were originally from /new/ - News, a board meant for the discussion of world news and inevitably political events, /new/’s culture however degraded into right-minded politics (as their predecessor, /n/, did before failing its probation period). Given the cultural changes of the Internet and the rise of Reddit’s “fempire”, nobody expected what would happen next.
The general perception of /pol/ was as a quarantine board disguised as a politics board. In due aspect most users of the site regarded /pol/ as a shithole filled of racists . This board came to be notorious in various Internet communities prompting various sites with a tendency towards Social Justice to go on a crusade against the board’s white supremacism. Since /pol/ is constantly being showered with spam the residents, most of them trolls, didn’t particularly care, after all to them it was just more entertainment. All this managed was to increase the popularity of the JIDF meme. However the repercussions of having both groups chimping out on each other like Hatfields and McCoys would be felt site-wide, with various boards having a team of /pol/lacks appearing whenever race or politics were mentioned, and many threads being constantly derailed by complaining feminists and liberals. /co/ would be the place the issue was felt the most, with both groups clashing and completely derailing threads.
The Jewish Internet Defense Force. It was already notorious before this happened for being the Jewish equivalent of Stormfront.
moot and the moderation team, and most of 4chan’s userbase originally though the JIDF/SRS raids were nothing but trolls and a minority of actual stormfags being idiots reacting to everyone hating hem . Eventually, after a series of threads on /q/ people began to suspect that there were actual people attempting to get /pol/ deleted. Investigation followed, more info came out, with users from /pol/ compiling and links and evidence towards the possibility of organized raids against the thread. Finally, a mod took note of all the information and vowed to direct it to moot . Ultimately /q/ would suffer a constant onslaught of Social Justice Warriors (or a very dedicated troll) trying to get /pol/ deleted to the point where even the mods stepped in to tell them to shut up. The SJWs didn’t stop and some even began to threaten to doxx team 4chan and start legal action. This eventually got moot fed up enough to delete /q/ on mid-2013. To this day moot still calls /q/ a mistake that went from 4chan discussion to /deletepol/.
Given its status as a quarantine board, most users believe /pol/ to be completely inhabited by white supremacists. In fact, /pol/ actually (as of 2012) tends to discuss politics, but with a tongue-in-cheek or dark humour manner. In many ways this reminds of the /b/ of old, with trolls trolling trolls, catchphrases and memes flying around constantly and people acting silly for the sake of it.
The onslaught by not one but two different groups made serious discussion on /pol/ nearby impossible, however all that would be rendered moot (no pun intended) as population of the board ended accepting it as a meme in and on itself and the discussions eventually drowned in a sea of IT’S HAPPENING and troll threads. It can no longer be distinguished whenever a /pol/itician is joking or not. /pol/ also saw a rise in conspiracy and tin-foil-hat-type threads spurn from an exodus of neo-/x/philes, a very crazy breed of anon, to the board. Many modern /x/ phrases such as “disinfo” have been exported to /pol/ and the quality of board plummeted due to their influence. Their insanity was made fun of and led /pol/lacks to create much content mocking the more paranoid side of the community
Ironically, the JIDF/SRS (Or whoever it was) also contributed to solving the issue: Their constant complaining about /pol/ on /q/ (With their threads being derailed by stormfags all the time) eventually led other users to compile their own multiple-posts-long “evidence” vouching for /pol/’s deletion detailing all the links and information regarding the possibility of a Stormfront awareness group, who dedicated themselves to spread their agenda via victimization of the white people, visiting 4chan to spam their ideals there. This wouldn’t be really possible, arising from the fact that Stormfront’s pseudo-ideology is one of the most closed-minded of all and still believes 4chan is out to get them like years ago, but there’s still the fact that whenever you mention race on the site a small band of people will start to drop pseudo studies about why black people is inferior.
Ultimately, the consequences of all the strife ended up with /pol/ becoming a buzzword for any dissenting, right-leaning opinion and SRs and later Tumblr becoming the equivalent buzzword for any left-leaning post. The whole debacle ended up becoming just another way for posters to maintain and rationalize their idealized idea of their favourite board. To this day it’s still a mystery whether the spammers were feminists or some of the most persistent trolls 4chan has ever seen.
The /sp/ Uprising
[edit | edit source](Apr 16, 2013 – May 8, 2013) /sp/ was a rather mundane board until 2012. The Olympics led to a spike in its userbase, which, already rebellious, was starting to become incontrollable. The (then) temporal addition of /int/’s country flags to the board further encouraged chaos amongst the /sp/astics and for the duration of the event, the board devolved into pure shitposting. Surprisingly, the mods decided to keep the country flags. The even resulted in permanent changes to the board’s attitude, cementing a deliberately dumb form of irony meant to rile up people. While their posting methods became shunned by the rest of the site, the board became steadily influential. They first coined the iconic Constanza meme, and later several others such as WHY and Absolutely Disgusting.
By mid-2013 the state of the board deteriorated greatly, and moot decided it was time to crack down on them. The purge, whose aim was to curb shitposting, had a major flaw: No staff member was familiar with even the most basic aspects of /sp/’s culture and as a result they unwittingly forbid cherished board traditions. This led to outrage from the users who aggressively resisted the changes, mocking the staff and protesting. This was to no avail, and the board was thrown in disarray as posters refused to mellow out and got most of their non-serious threads deleted.
The situation escalated and by June, /sp/ users backed by /int/ and channers from other like /ref/ and GETchan, who lend a helping hand in the /int/ uprising, sites began to spam /sp/ non-stop mocking the staff and the janitor in particular. The off-site channers provided and organized front and created tons of OC, including writing songs to the janitor. The catalog got filled with pictures of a janitor dog from the Arthur cartoon followed by the copypasta >he does it for free. /sp/astics and off site channers began to call themselves #outlaws and spammed boards around 4chan, posting edited lel face images and calls for rebellion.
On April 21 /sp/ users began to spam a list of demands, demanding the return of pre-2012 traditions like power level, event bowl threads and screencap/meta threads, among more blatant shitposting like feels, sportfus and porn discussion. Later stages of the uprising included the spamming of “bro culture” threads which the outlaws ironically parodied. On April 28, an alleged 4chan moderator appeared on /ref/ and requested a peace talk. The uprising later died down but unlike /int/, who managed to get rid of their insane janitor, /sp/ didn’t manage to change a thing. The situation stabilized and /sp/ returned to its usual football-futbol arguments. What did change was the site wide popularization of the >he does it for free meme, which came to be celebrated even among staff members.
/s4s/
[edit | edit source](Apr 1st 2013)
For April’s fool 2013 moot embedded an Adult Cat Finder joke on /b/ and grand surprise: The creation of a board called “Shit 4chan Says”. Obviously a take on all the SRS and Reddit hate the rule-less board was immediately filled with /b/tards of old and people looking for old jokes and traditions from all ages. Threads from Thrust Vectoring to copypasta spam and she EPIN, /b/ where posted and the whole place looked like a time vortex suddenly appeared began to spam dead memes and dubs threads. All was good and the general opinion of the board was positive. However the board depopulated quickly as nobody expected it last long and 4chan’s interested have long gone away from old memes. Since it was an April’s fool’s board, nobody knew how much it would last. A general mood of “post-irony” where all 4chan customs where inverted and shitposting was renamed funposting set in. Knowing the lifespan of the board was potentially short its new userbase quickly decided to create as much OC as possible.
/s4s/’s immediate exports became extremely popular, the mod-created Into the Trash You Go, discovering the kek muffin and using it to replace lel and top lel, the return of That Fucking Cat and breaking the 10000 replies mark where all memorable moments in the history of the site. Many of 2006 and 2008’s users stayed and tried to bring back raids, and while this worked for some time, people were not interested and the mods quickly brought the threads down. However /s4s/, now [s4s], decided to bring back interboard raiding, this time in the form of GET stealing. Many important gets were hijacked by /s4s/, and unlike normal raids these took much longer to be deleted. /s4s/ also gave a warm welcome to the new boards, spamming the entire catalog of /gd/ with a gigantic Bateman combo, which was probably the most epic raid of the year.
By far, [s4s]’s greatest contribution was the popularization of Doge . A reaction face of a Shiba dog with a concerned look and silly, broken dog speak in comic sans that quickly spread over all 4chan and the entire of the Internet. It got so popular it managed to get its own cryptocurrency by 2014
Originally a small, dead meme called Shibe from Tumblr, which before discovery got 24 reblogs at best. The meme also appeared on Reddit before surfacing from 4chan, but it was also a very small subreddits. While it’s creating it not [s4s]’s doing, its popularization definitely was.