4chan Chronicle/The Breaking Point

(Feb 2014 –Jan 21 2015)

2014 was defined by crippling scandals in 4chan's infrastructure and moderation. 4chan has long ago cemented a reputation of being the shithole of the Internet, and the majority of the netizens dismiss the site as such. This has led to a problematic case: Whenever someone wants to spread dirty information on someone or has data that could cause a major problem, they drop them on /b/. /b/'s culture tailored itself to encourage anything that would cause chaos (and make porn threads), while the rest of the side kept on with the general "with us or against us" mentality with rather dire consequences and strong reactions whenever moderation crackdowns happened. Several boards would end up hating moot out of misconceived ideas about the site's purpose, and wild mass guessing and rumor spreading would run amok. A general feeling of betrayal set up on many boards, and moot gets labeled as an SJW due to his connections to the tech world and the games industry, which has mixed greatly with Internet Culture. This in turn led moot to abuse the rebelling boards.

The beginning of 2015 marks the most tumultuous change in 4chan history, when 4chan's owner and admin for 11 years, moot, steps down from adminhood.

The Fappening

(Aug 31 2014 – Sept 2014)

On August 31, a /b/tard makes a thread declaring that he has the nudes of celebrity Jennifer Lawrence and several others, and he will proceed to post them if they gave him certain amounts of bitcoins to his account. The situation explodes to incommensurable levels as the whole event gains immediately attention from the old media, and on top of that, the hacking scene that was behind obtaining those nudes, realizing that the cops will be on their ass very soon, declare the scene dead and proceed to dump all their content. For shits and giggles, they decide to post it on /b/. The Internet pretty much explodes when it finds out, and 4chan is swarmed with millions of people from the outside trying to get the pics, overloading the site. This also leads to no end of trouble to moot, as Jennifer took the event awfully and began to threaten everyone with lawsuits, including 4chan. The result is months of behind the scenes negotiation with the lawyers (which moots suggests in a "Fappening related stress" sentence in a Q/A regarding his lack of activity). Nobody knows why the original buyer dumped his personal batch. Some suggest it was because his buy was filled with fakes. Over the following months there would be several other leaks, adding to 5 in total. The hacking where made through Apple's Cloud system, which Apple fervently denied claiming it was impossible. Moot's only public activity regarding the site was saving the hashes of several Jennifer Lawrence pics and making it so users are unable to post them, and banning everyone who evaded the prohibition.

The Fappening had quite an impact in the 4chan staff, as Jennifer Lawrence's legal pressure made them realize how easy everything could come down.

GamerGate

(Aug 20 2014 – Oct 2014)

On August 20, a Tumblr called the Zoe Quinn Post is made by her ex-boyfriend, exposing game developer Zoe Quinn as a liar and manipulator, having slept with at least 5 men in the games industry in order to promote her content. Surprisingly, no one of the gaming press speaks about it, and many, including Kotaku, IGN and others jump on her defense. This escalates extremely quickly as dozens of people being to tell accounts regarding their experience with her and her group of friends' abuse – Sparking a massive Twitter war between e-celebrities and Zoe's clique, among them Phil Fish and many important members of the indie games' community and SJWs that believe Zoe's claims of harassment. /v/, the games board, revels in the chaos like it always does: By pointing at it and laughing. Moderators take a semi-passive stance by letting the gossip die out naturally without letting it crash the board. The jokes were dying down when things took a strange turn: Quinn decides to blame /v/ as one of the main instigators of her harassment, going as far as pretending to be hacked by the board. This sparks /v/ to act and start an enormous crusade with the objective to expose Quinn as a cheating whore. Their objective soon grows to a movement to clean the indie games industry of its blatant corruption.

The movement, being extremely reminiscent of /b/'s Chanology, is shunned by an important part of the board's population. The tensions escalates continuously, especially when /pol/ users convinces the movement to back a pro-feminism studio's campaign to make games conceived by women. This leads, as a bonus, to the creation of Vivian James as a reward for backing the Fine Young Capitalist's kickstarter. Moderators seem indecisive regarding the issue, banning it but then allowing it again. It was the found out that the mods wanted to contain the whole subject to a single thread, but due to miscommunication with the janitors, all threads ended up deleted. The ongoing tension between both parties in /v/ reaches a boiling point when the limited tactics the movement can employ (the zerg rush) interferes directly with 4chan's moderation as they mass report posts. This leads to the final ban on GamerGate on September 16. Under the notion that it would give the users cause to rally against the staff, RapeApe decides against informing the site, in spite of a majority of staff members predicting that users would be even more upset, especially since the staff already gave an modposted ok for the threads. As predicted, this is felt as a betrayal by the pro-movement /v/irgins which leads them to spam the entire site for weeks. moot later backs RapeApe's standing, under the notion that given that the users are unreasonable, nothing they say can appease them and will probably be used against them. While it’s sound logic, moot didn’t realise that said users would still be outraged either way, and the best they could do was explain the situation to the normal users that could string more than 3 coherent sentences together, which would ameliorate the situation a little by reducing the amount of users complaining.

moot makes a sticky on /v/ declaring GamerGate against the "no raids" rule. This leads to the movement's exodus to 8chan, a "make your own board" site led by Hotwheels, a heavily crippled 20 years old. From there on the movement would get increasingly weaker as imageboard, by design, don't allow much in terms of organization, which the GG opponents managing to shun the entire movement through the media.

One of GamerGate's consequences was that moot disabled all the mods from posting, officially ending all communication between the staff and 4chan. Another consequence would be that many Team 4chan members would go rogue and leak information on 8chan due to dissatisfaction with the ban. Leaks included 2 years' worth of janitor #janiteam logs. Behind the curtains, being on #janiteam during major shitstorms is now required for all janitors in order to properly coordinate containment.