Hi All! This article was written by a friend of mine who is an intern at the Claremont Institute - however, he’d like to remain anonymous beyond that. As a long-time browser of 4chan (since 2019), he graciously offered to write a history of the infamous imageboard for this publication. Enjoy! - Genesis Myrzmada
This article is about one of the most influential websites to grace the internet, 4chan. This is about what made it great. This is about what killed it.
You see, there has been an attempt from a bunch of gays (like literal actual sodomites) to smear 4chan as something it is not. So, this article will be an 100% true history, written for those of you who are not in the know. I used 4chan for 3 years but have mostly cooled down from my extremism.
The beginning of 4chan was hardly auspicious. 4chan was founded by a 15-year-old self-described “incel” Christopher Poole (though he now prefers to go by “Chrissy” and she/her pronouns nowadays), aka moot. He was prompted to do this after being banned off of Japanese website 2chan for spamming “thug shaker” videos. 2chan was primarily for discussion of anime and 4chan ripped it off in this regard. Anime, manga, and other Japanese media have always been a key part of 4chan culture despite modern-day revisionism.
So the first “board” was /a/, anime and manga. The second was the board for other topics of discussion, /b/, the “random” board. Out of the primordial soup of /b/ were the other boards spawned. For instance, the “Warhammer Wednesday” threads on /b/ were so popular that moot created a board for tabletop games, /tg/.
The various boards were the lifeblood of 4chan. /v/ for video games, /tv/ for film and television discussion, /sp/ for sports, /fit/ for fitness were boards for some commonplace interests. All of these have immense influence over the rest of the internet - /fit/ alone merits a series of articles, including one about its mysterious leader Zyzz. Yet other more niche boards emerged, especially ones for pornography. Some were mostly unused and seem to have to been there solely because of moot’s own fetishes, but others were immensely popular. Many claim the deletion of the /bbw/ and /loli/ boards in 2015 (due to feuding between their respective userbases) was the beginning of the end for 4chan.
We would not be talking about this right now if it were not for /pol/, the crown jewel of 4chan. But let’s break down a few things about the site’s mechanics first so you can understand its success.
4chan, as mentioned before, is divided into boards. Each board has a catalog of threads - /g/ is depicted below:
When you post in a thread, it is pushed to the top of the catalog. Whenever a new thread is made, the thread at the bottom is archived and can no longer be posted in. So, discussion is ephemeral by design. Nothing lasts except what is preserved in screencaps and 3rd party archives.
Now, there were very few actual rules on 4chan. On Twitter you cannot call a fat girl fat without getting a suspension. On 4chan you can call her fat and an ugly whore, find her address, and organize your fellow “anons” to harass her IRL.
And that’s the second thing about 4chan. It is almost completely anonymous. There are no accounts. There are no followers. No profile pictures. And thus when the mask is worn, the posters can reveal who they really are. (There was a way to generate a unique username via “tripcode” but only homosexuals and attention-seeking egirls did this and were universally derided as “tripfags”. Anonymity is a big part of 4chan culture.)
These two features created an anarchy of sorts. There was no rank or status. The great antithesis of 4chan, Reddit, was the opposite, where you must make posts that are well-liked in order to get “karma” which denotes how much of a heckin goodboi you are. If you posted an unpopular opinion, then everyone would “downvote” you and your karma score would tank. Many subreddits require a karma minimum to post, so the system created echo chambers even about topics that are not politically charged.
4chan despised this. The only status there was seniority, because newer posters were perceived as being worse than older ones. (But anyone could claim to have been posting there since its inception.) Here are some classic memes from the Golden Era of 4chan (2016-2020) that my fellow “oldfags” may understand.
But I digress. Before /pol/, 4chan was a place where you went to scream. /b/, for instance, was home of every horror your virgin eyes could not even imagine. I remember the eel video someone posted in a “you laugh you lose” thread on /gif/ that was so bad I didn’t go back for a week. Newfags today totally couldn’t handle old 4chan.
But with the introduction of /pol/, “politically incorrect”, things started moving in a different direction. As my friend Anasazi Cannibal Groyper puts it, 4chan shifted from shocking the senses to shocking the sensibilities. /pol/ became wildly popular because it was one of the only places on the internet where you could praise Adolf Hitler and say the n-word with zero repercussions whatsoever.
Shocking, yes, but clearly this is what many young people craved. /pol/ quickly grew in popularity, traffic, and power. And with these things, influence. /pol/ created and popularized memes, such as the now commonplace Pepe the Frog.
/pol/ even influenced the 2016 Presidential Elections, resulting in the victory of Donald John Trump. Soon after, Shia LeBeef did some gay publicity stunt where he hoisted a flag that said “He (referring to Adolf Hitler, I think) Will Not Divide Us” and put up a livestream where it was displayed 24/7. /pol/ users tracked planes in the background of the livestream and triangulated its exact location. Soon after the flag was torn down and replaced with a NSDAP flag.
/pol/ attracted a userbase that was very diverse in some ways. For example, on 4chan, nobody cared what race you were as long as you were racist. But, if you want to imagine the average /pol/ack, think of a polite young man you know with no friends who doesn’t have sex and is always looking at his phone.
The average /pol/ thread would look like this:
>*picture of a buxom woman in lingerie* Thoughts on coffee bros? Is coffee good for you? Have the Jews been lying to us that it’s unhealthy?
>Coffee is awful for you, you dumb n*gger. OP is a faggot yet again.
>I would do unspeakable things to that braphog
Before some janitor would delete it for being off-topic.
/pol/’s archenemy was Tumblr, home of a legion of SJWs and what I like to call “transfats”. I’m no expert on Tumblr, but something about its format just attracted absolute freaks and degenerates. (Note: the reason why there is so much furry porn on Twitter is because Tumblr banned porn a few years back. Get on Gab.com, protect your chastity!)
Tumblr mischaracterized /pol/ as a place of crass bigotry and redneck-style ignorance. But /pol/ was a place of science and rational thinking. Constantly popular were the “infographic” threads where certain “extreme” beliefs were justified with evidence and statistics. Threads often involved in-depth discussion of history, policy, ideology, economics, sociology, biology, and other erudite fields. During my time there, the nascent ideology was centered around many traditional values but justified with utilitarian thinking, e.g. sleeping around is bad not necessarily because it is a sin, but because it is scientifically proven to be unhealthy, spread disease, destroy pair bonding mechanisms, and potentially sabotage a future marriage thus resulting in a costly divorce.
These are not what made /pol/ so popular, however. These topics are discussed all over the Internet. But no one cares about, say, the Salo Forum. This is because /pol/, and /pol/ culture, were centered around humor.
When you want to tell someone everything they believe is a lie, you better soften that harsh blow. And thus came in the MVP of the 4chan radicalization cabal - the daily (if not hourly) humor threads. Memes slandering the Jewish people, mocking the deaths of minorities and women, and of course classic GIFs like the one where a Russian beats a dog to death with a shovel.
Talking about the humor threads brings back bad memories. I would waste hours of my life spreading anti-semitic myths and canard. I just fell for logical fallacies because they were clothed in such a palatable manner.
You see, if you want to feed an ideology to kids, you have to sugarcoat it. The Left does this also, by sugarcoating communism with promises of free money. Kids don’t care about theory. No 15-year-old wants to read some old boring commie. But every 15-year-old wants free money.
So, material benefits are one thing that can be used. But now you know that the Far Right uses humor. In order to prevent the radicalization of our children, it may be necessary to ruin their sense of humor by having them watch The Simpsons and Family Guy daily.
All good things must come to an end, however. 4chan was constantly under attack from within and without. Powerful organizations such as the ADL decried 4chan as a wellspring of hate speech (not untrue) and even the JIDF had unpaid interns (typical) disrupting /pol/. Grassroots groups joined in also. So-called “discord trannies” forewent hours of dilating to instead spam interracial porn on /pol/ because it made “poltards” angry. Furthermore, due to the design of the website, spamming low quality bait threads guaranteed to garner outrage would cause actual quality threads to be “slid” off the catalog.
Other subversives were lurking on 4chan itself. /r9k/, “Robot9001”, was a bizarre board home to the dregs of humanity. Some of its denizens were just young men who had lost their way and lost their hope. The pressures of outside society broke them. The iconic “>tfw no gf” is a product of /r9k/.
But other users of /r9k/ were psychotic and warped freaks who should have been malthanized (euthanized but nothing “eu” about it, get it?) The worst product of /r9k/ were perhaps the “pinkpill” threads, where young men (many of them really just boys) were encouraged to take HRT as the magical solution to their problems. Not to mention the /lgbt/ board which was theoretically a “containment” board but really never should have been created to begin with.
Thanks to subversives within and without, cracks began to appear in the foundation. But what really killed the image of the website was how it was commodified. It was reduced to another crazy ahh meme warehouse where literally ANYTHING goes lmao epic pepe moment. The most popular export of 4chan is the “greentexts”. Here’s a classic one:
Something like that would be interacted with on 4chan, laughed at, remembered, and most definitely shared to other websites. And that was fine. But then people realized you did not have to find a good “greentext”, you could simply make your own, screencap it, and post it.
Thus opened the floodgates of hordes of leftist entryists who began a dark revisionism campaign, claiming that 4chan is le communist website where people think femboys are hecking cute and valid and have quirky sex. Take a look at this immensely popular and disgusting twitter account:
The site is currently unusable at the moment - all boards. Not even my beloved /cm/ produces any threads I enjoy browsing. All the energy that was on 4chan is elsewhere now.
Personally I am glad I stopped using 4chan. Instead, I went outside, touched grass, got myself connected with real movements, and enjoyed the miracle of life for a moment. I have a cute hapa tomboy girlfriend now and she also likes conservative politics. Look: what’s important is stuff in REAL LIFE, and taking REAL ACTION - don’t get irony poisoned!
Thank you for reading my friend’s article. Let his example be a warning against dating or reading the Claremont Review.