Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell access.
4chan's PHP code would offload that task to a well-know, but old and not very actively maintained EXIF library. Of course the thing with EXIF is that each camera vendor has their own proprietary extensions that need to be supported to make users happy. And as you'd expect from a library that parses a bunch of horrible undocumented formats in C, it's a huge insecure mess.
Several heap overflows and arbitrary writes all over the place. Heap spray primitives. Lots of user controlled input since you provide your own JPEG. Everything you could want.
So I wrote a little PoC out of curiosity. Crafted a little 20kB JPG that would try to allocate several GBs worth of heap spray. I submit my post, and the server dutifully times out.
And that's where I'd like to say I finished my PoC and reported the vulnerability, but in fact I got stuck on a reliable ASLR bypass and lost interest (I did send an email about the library, but I don't think it was actively maintained and there was no followup)
My impression from this little adventure is that 4chan never really had the maintenance and code quality it needed. Everything still seemed to be the same very old PHP code that leaked years ago (which included this same call to the vulnerable EXIF library). Just with a bunch of extra features hastily grafted and grown organically, but never dealing with the insane amount of technical debt.
This describes probably 95%+ of the entire software world, from enterprise, to SaaS to IoT to mobile to desktop to embedded... Everything seems to be hastily thrown together features that barely work and piles of debt that will never get fixed. It's a wonder anything actually even works. If cars (the non-software parts) were made like this, there would be millions of them breaking down by the side of the road daily.
Always check what is getting uploaded.
But in this case, it's subtly different.
This issue relies more on a quirk of how PDF and PostScript relate (PDF is built on a subset of postscript).
Imagine you had an image format which was just C which when compiled and ran produced the width, height, and then stream of RGB values to form an image. And you formalised this such that it had to have a specific structure so that if someone wanted to, they didn't have to write a C compiler, they could just pull out the key bits from this file which looks like ordinary C and produce the same result.
Now imagine that your website supports uploading such image files, and you need to render them to produce a thumbnail, but instead of using a minimal implementation of the standard which doesn't need to compile the code, you go ahead and just run gcc on it and run the output.
That's kind of more or less what happened here.
It's worth noting here that it's not really common knowledge that PDF is basically just a subset of postscript. So it's actually a bit less surprising that these guys fell for this, as it's as if C had become some weird language nobody talks about, and GCC became known as "that tool to wrangle that image format" rather than a general purpose C compiler.
The attackers in this case relied on some ghostscript exploits, that's true, but if you never ran the resulting C-image-format binaries, you could still get pwned through GCC exploits.
We still get plenty of results, because the tooling also gets better, and finding just one vulnerability is enough to be devastating, which makes it kind of frustrating. There is tons of progress, but much of it is just not paying dividends.
Has there been a single year since 2012 that didn't include a new ghostscript RCE? Exposing ghostscript to the internet is dangerous.
https://buer.haus/2019/10/18/a-tale-of-exploitation-in-sprea...
We published a PoC for file write as part of our research and bug bounty submissions:
https://gist.github.com/ziot/fb96e97baae59e3539ac3cdacbd0943...
This was a user-empowering application of the vulnerability. Obviously, a bug that allows root-level arbitrary code execution just by getting the user to load a single image could be used for some pretty bad stuff. (And perhaps was.)
Don't run versions of ghostscript from 2012?
(incidentally I am now working on compiling this old GPL ghostscript to webassembly with file isolation... it works fine... but the compilation is kind of annoying)
Per Wikipedia:
In February 2013, with version 9.07, Ghostscript changed its license from GPLv3 to GNU AGPL.
With the AGPL license being legal kryptonite I wonder if license compatibility drove the decision (and how many other installations of Ghostscript share this concern)?
How do these exploits work? Does it open an SSH port somewhere or does it show up as a browser-based terminal?
It takes the normal client/server architecture and turns it inside out. If you remember FTP and active vs passive, it works like active mode FTP.
That's just one way to do it. If the attacker wants to actually listen on an open port on a compromised server that's behind a firewall, look up 'NAT traversal' for like half a dozen ways to do it.
One interesting method to get a shell that I read about is (ab)using ICMP echo requests. ICMP echo requests can contain arbitrary bytes as a payload. So the exploit will poll the attacker's IP address with ICMP echo requests. The exploit will have data payloads that have the shell's output. The attacker's server will respond with ICMP echo requests that have whatever the attacker wants to type into the shell. It's kinda janky but it works. Lots of firewalls might block outbound UDP/TCP connections from internal servers that don't need to make outbound connections, or might whitelist the addresses they're allowed to connect to. But they won't block ICMP, either because it's considered harmless or they forgot or they didn't know it needs to be blocked separately with other rules.
The point is there's any number of ways to do it, each more clever than the last.
Once you can run any command, you start passing in whatever commands you want.
do you know what the legal implications are for this?
if the company that owns 4chan finds the identity of the attacker, could they sue him in civil court? or do they send whatever logs they have to the FBI and the FBI would initiate a criminal prosecution? also what is the criminal act here? is it accessing their systems, or is it posting the data that they found "through unauthorised means" on a public channel like twitter? does the "computer fraud and abuse act" apply?
like if you found this exploit, and sent it to the company in good faith (ie a "good hacker"), are you free from prosecution? and what is the grey area, like if you found this exploit and then just sat on it for a while (let's say you didn't report it to the company, but let's also say you didn't abuse it, ie leak private data to twitter)
Some boards used to allow PDF files to upload too.
Kiwifarms is also discussing, links to code and griefing - https://kiwifarms (NSFW/NSFL) .st/threads/soyjak-party-the-sharty.145349/page-1468#post-21102686
I remember that 4chan users had more honor than users on the internet today. One example would be 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts, driven by huge accounts on IG/Tiktok/etc, that hit normal people daily.
The modern social media landscape has become far more hectic, harmful, and downright scary than 4chan. Dodging explicit imagery is harder on Instagram's explore page than on 4chan, and the widespread popularization of OF creators has zero bounds across the socials. DOXXING is no longer frowned upon and now commonplace. And memes have become less unique and funny and more commoditized.
That's too generous. "Not your personal army" started because 4chan had a well-earned reputation for harassment - usually raiding other web sites, but often targeting individual people who caught their attention for one reason or another.
The "not your personal army" slogan came about because people who were very aware of this reputation were showing up, hoping to make a web site or person they disliked the next target. That got annoying fast, hence they told those people to go away.
It wasn't a moral stance against target harassment - far from it. It was a stance that the group mind will choose the next target when they feel like it - not because some rando is mad at their ex or something
Each and every post must stand alone and be judged alone. You do not know if it was posted by someone you hate or adore. It doesn't get hidden or promoted based on what a bubble voted. You see the post and you must judge it alone.
There are a lot of people who have nothing to contribute to a conversation, and a lot of people who are actively detrimental to a conversation. It used to be that you would put up with the craziest ones for the benefit of finding novel and overlooked ideas, but as the internet has become more accessible, the former group now outnumbers the latter.
I would be inclined to think that the problem is that I just grew out of the shock value, but I see the same trend on almost every other platform, too.
That said, HN functions decently well, though in some ways it is even worse in the censoring the outliers.
The core reason why HN is superior (IMO) is the curation and the moderation.
United by hatred of a scapegoat that they didn't choose on a random whim or due to some common agenda. Otherwise it's completely fine.
Since 4chan overtly resists it, it'd rapidly move off of there, but it's still a great place to find like-minded folks that'd follow someone to another server to go brigade someone.
Imagine how good a place it could have been if people over there talked like people on HN.
Like many others coming from social web, you expect to find some kind of community which fashions everyone shares, an apparel you can put on. The idea is complete opposite: you don't need to follow any fashion, or imagine yourself “part of the team” any more than you want to. Even though it's not written in any rules, you don't have to use slang or tone if you find them dumb, overused (globally or locally), or forced. Neither do you have to treat stupid posts with respect.
I assume that after 15-20 years of being part of collective consciousness, anonymous image boards have mostly the same public as any average site. Amount of crap that you can read there is just the same as everywhere (though in some cases this or that Big Brother hides it from your view — obviously, to make you more comfortable, and spend more time in his warm embrace). The difference is that regular social fashions mandate the use of suitable set of candy wrappers for the crap, then there are customary ways of dealing with them, so in the end people just spend their time wrapping and unwrapping crap, but are proud of themselves, and call it “civilised discourse”.
That's antithetical to many of the foundational rules of the internet, which are core to 4chan culture.
The whole point is that they don't let the fluctuating, weak-willed whims of normie sensibilities determine what's allowed.
If it was pleasant to the senses then it wouldn't be counterculture.
with no names, likes, virality, accounts, etc there’s less focus on writing the basic filler comments. less companies trying to sell me stuff. less focus groups trying to tell me what to think. and with less censorship you end up seeing more creativity
I’m not sure you’ve actually been to 4chan…
The ubiquitous expectations for modern humor among younger and even middle-aged people rely a lot more on knowing not just the joke but the culture and context it evolved in, and that sort of thing very much dominated bubbles of terminally online people before many people became terminally online and there was an expectation that everyone would know what you meant if you sent an image macro as the entire reply to an email.
You can find example after example from not that long ago of people who are not so terminally online being completely perplexed, on TV and otherwise, and memes like "what the fuck is he saying" "let's get you to bed grandpa" about the cultural disconnect.
Unfortunately, this sort of attention minmaxing without enough deliberation and learning around it produces people who are uncritical of what they consume and just want the next hit.
The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...
The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...
"Not your personal army" but 4chan users would routinely dox, swat, and otherwise harass people all the time.
I have no idea why people are whitewashing 4chan so hard.
Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online [0]. It’s so good, the Wikipedia entry [1] has a section devoted to it.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bod...
I suspect TheJosh had something like that with the week where he visualized it with Sundays at both ends but lacked the self awareness to realize that this was not a universal representation.
Why was a mathematician necessary for this assertion?
Jon Bois did an amazing video about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eECjjLNAOd4
Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
I discussed it somewhat recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276865#42283887
The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.
Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.
Lurk moar.
/pol/ isn't trying to be like the millions of other politic discussion forums online. It's literally intended to be politically outrageous so when people like yourself complain that it's full of outrageous alt-right content you're typically missing the point.
It's full of things that appear to be alt-right because stuff like racism, sexism and transphobia is extremely politically incorrect. While far-left views might be equally reprehensible, these views are not seen as equally politically incorrect. It's actually quite hard to hold politically incorrect far-left views unless you incorporate some far-right views – being so pro-trans that you hate biological women or something stupid. This is why you tend to see less left-wing content there. It's hard to be offensive and left-wing.**
But even then I think it's wrong to say /pol/ is full of alt-right content to be honest. There are alt-right people there for sure, but huge amount of the political memes posted on /pol/ are mocking the alt-right and the right more broadly. The board is constantly roasting the MAGA movement, for example.
As a brit my favourite threads on /pol/ are the brit/pol/ threads which basically just post politically incorrect memes mocking Brits and joking about how shit the UK is. These threads largely just Brits shitposting with each other and it would be wrong to assume the existence of hateful anti-British content on /pol/ is somehow evidence that /pol/ is xenophobic against Brits. People should take a similar views of the racist/alt-right threads – the vast majority of people there are just trolling and being offensive for a laugh. You don't have to like the humour, but most of it is just people shit posting.
> they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
Loads of stuff gets removed... If you're posting content that "goes against the alt-right" you're probably taking the board way way to seriously and you probably should be banned.
** Interestingly another commenter in the thread asked about why there's so much interracial porn on /pol/ if it's so racist, which kinda highlights my point here. Just hating white people isn't politically incorrect – there's people doing that all over Reddit. To make hating white people offensive you basically have to incorporate racist stereotypes about about how whites are genetically inferrer to blacks in various way, but then in doing this you'll get viewed as racist and alt-right because you're using racial stereotypes about how blacks are more athletic, etc.
If you're up for it I challenge you to be politically incorrect from a left-wing perspective without it being possible to argue that it's actually far-right.
That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms.
But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.
Could you give some examples? The more unexpected, the better.
Preferably with sources, because tracing word origin is difficult enough on its own.
I can’t keep up anymore.
- no modern web frameworks
- no microservices/kubernetes clusters
- no algorithmic curation/moderation/recommendation algoritmhs
One wonders just how much of the modern engineering developed in the past decades, that cost a fortune to develop and run is actually necessary or even beneficial for running a modern social media website
It was eventually a replacement for the /new/ board, where news of the arab spring first started, shortly before it was shut down. However, it was plagued with proto-pol behavior before anyone was bothering to complain about pol.
There was always these 'cells' of non /jp/ shitposters, if they weren't the OG shitposters themselves, that would post about left-right politics ad nauseum, and in the most hallmark unproductive ways. It was when trolling evolved from 'clever this and that' to shear brute forcing. It was the topic of the news that attracted these unsavor political actors into that place, which was for a short period of time, a great diverse place for collecting news.
This social phenomena and history could never be repeated enough, particularly since we might be finally ending the story of pol/4chan - which was more popular than 4chan itself.
People who still complain about /pol/ look a little like people who would still complain about ebaumsworld: Completely out of touch individuals who equate everything to a tiny phenomena.
… but then again I never looked at /pol/, maybe it's even worse than /b/?
That's probably why a lot of websites use moderation to avoid having one section of it turn into a cesspit of every -ism you can imagine, up to and including fascism, because once you have a section of your website that is openly coordinating the pushing of fascism on society, everyone kinda forgets about the diverse and interesting other things it might have, because of the fascism.
I discovered 4chan around 2008 as a kid, it was much less hostile back then. Even as an adult I used to go on /fit/ every now and then. It was useful and funny and even “wholesome” in its own special way.
But over the last few years, the entire site became /pol/, and other boards became unusable. Maybe once a year I will pop in and immediately regret it.
I still miss hanging out on /v/ and /fa/. When they split /vg/ out into its own board, the colour started to drain from my experience.
I'm curious, why bodybuilding.com in particular? I think I've only heard of it once. I wonder if anyone on HN remembers stardestroyer.net or old weird tech forums?
I gradually lost interest when they started heavily pushing commercial sponsors. I get it; sites aren’t free to host, and moderator time isn’t free / unlimited, but it’s still sad.
Reddit can't get close due to its voting system.
/g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.
it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.
> A Soyjak.Party users also shared a list of emails they claimed are associated with janitor and moderator accounts, including three .edu emails. Although some internet users claimed that the leaks included .gov emails associated with members of the moderation team, this remains unverified.
Like who cares?
Reply references the post it is replying to by ID, most boards will turn that ID into a link or even create a UI to view a chain of replies.
> How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back?
You shouldn't, an anonymous imageboard invites you to engage with ideas, not people. However, on most boards you can enter a password with your post, which is displayed as a hash, changing you from anonymous to pseudonymous (although this is generally considered attention-seeking and is frowned upon).
Where I'm sat the only reason our three (?) social media companies restrict none illegal speech/content is to make it more appealing to advertisers.
I miss the internet before it was driven by advertisers and their investors.
Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which I've stayed in contact with long term.
I believe that's fair. Sure, it's "a different board" but it's just another URL on the same domain and same administrator, just different janitors. So it is really the part of the whole website. I know that 99% of people on 4chan disagree with me because they do not wish to be associated with /pol/ /b/ /gif/ but if they wanted to disassociate themselves with those boards then they should be on an entirely different domain without 4chan in name. polchan perhaps.
Combining that with the "post hands" request for a lot of food it was just an unpleasant community to participate it.
Weirdly trying to load the page right now I'm getting Connection timed out. Is hackernews ddosing 4chan? What a world.
The title is also a fair bit understated.
They're leaking the moderators home addresses and work contact info (for admins, who are(were?) paid moderators)
Say what you will about 4chan but I am concerned for the team managing it - them and their close ones are certainly going to be exposed to a whole lot of viciousness soon :(
Mostly because, as more people came online, they mistook offensive humor for conservatism; and thought "counter-culture" meant "being opposed to the political party currently in power", rather than "being opposed to political parties".
Also where did you see that they are leaking home addresses and work contact info? I think they just leaked the emails (I don't understand why home addresses and work contact info should be present in the 4chan database, everyone moderating the site for free).
I would presume Anon would which to remain anon.
That said, my info is not on the list, I assume it was deleted when I left.
Finally, I was there and using it when the website went down and this did not resemble an actual hack but technical issues. First there were a couple of hours where the website was up but no posts went through for anyone except occasionally when a new threat was bumped, mirroring the normal pattern of downtime issues that sometimes occur and then it just went down completely. This doesn't really resemble how a hack plays out but looks more like technical issues to me.
Even now, going to the front page, it loads for me, except very slowly and incompletely. This does not resemble a hack but technical issues.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/18019464/4chan-anon-anim...
Per my understanding, there is a show with 14 episodes that the viewer wants to watch in every order possible. How is this not just 14 factorial?
I know this can't be the problem, but it's just not clear to me from the article.
Edit: I found this link that explains it to anyone else as confused as I was: https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1bvn1rz/...
[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/april-2025-4chan-hack
The term “weeaboo” as a term for western anime fans only came about because it was what the word “wapanese” filtered to. It was originally a nonsense work made up in a Perry Bible Fellowship comic.
A note that the filter for "doublechan" was never updated to include its current name, nor the place where this current attack originated was ever filtered, afaik.
I've always felt that the 'there are only two internet cultures: 4chan and tumblr' has felt somewhat accurate. Unfortunately moreso now that /pol/ and /r9k/ have taken over broad swathes of the internet.
It's sad to see how far this old haunt has fallen. Lurking /v/ in my early/mid teens was a formative experience for me. It wasn't as hateful as it was, until Gamergate.
tfwnogf really did kill everything.
"Somewhat accurate" is exactly right.
This formulation overstates the number of Internet cultures by one, in that the deepest and most shameful secret of both websites' most avid users is that they have always been both websites' most avid users.
Other than that, there's nothing wrong with it.
4chan is oddly accepting of gay and trans people. I've seen gay and trans porn side by side with bbc and bwc porn posts. Strange to see racist trans porn lovers.
I like 4chan for the minor boards, not /pol/ or /b/. But /boardgames/ and /dyi/ and /international/. The absurd humor, green texts that make absolutely no sense, or ones that lead down a strange and wonderful path.
I like being anonymous on the internet.
I think moderated forums like this one are the reflection of depraved and extreme. After all, you need to be a depraved and extreme host to try to micromanage what everyone says. People who run sites in such a way must have depraved power fantasies.
Just set up a host and allow people to speak their minds? That sounds like someone who believes the good of humanity will triumph, and the right to speak freely is a fundamental one. Section 230 exists and puts the responsiblity of what is said directly on the poster, not the host. So there really seems no reason not to do this... unless you have depraved and extreme power fantasies about controlling what other people say and think.
It only seems odd because many people interpret this through a U.S.A. “culture war” lens and “gay people”. You believe they're “accepting of gay people” in the sense of that culture war because of the “gay porn”. In reality, they take more of a classical Graeco-Roman approach to it and believe it's completely normal for the average male to be attracted to cute twinks as the Romans did and often even reject the very notion of “sexual orientations” to begin with. Their “support” is definitely not in the sense of what one would expect of the U.S.A. “culture war”, jokes such as the below illustrate well what the culture is:
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/55/fe/d1/55fed16b625f9c5869587908f...
I mean, wow, they’re doxing people that helped keep a legacy internet place alive and compliant with the law.
Who would do that?
Thousands of 4Chan users report issues accessing controversial website - https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/34472708/4chan-down-updates-co...
Really, it was gonna happen one of these days.
You're anonymous to other users. Unless you're behind seven proxies, connecting your posts to your real identity is as simple as correlating 4chan logs with ISP logs. Usually that requires court orders so it tends to happen in response to real offenses. Insulting each other with slurs isn't enough for a court order so it's fine. Chances are the NSA knows all your posts regardless.
/b used to be good till early-mid 2010s when it became 95% hentai/porn instead of 30%, after sabu squealed and the fbi took over.
That's what this has been for me; a walk down memory Lane to my teenage edgelord years.
I appreciate this has overtones of doxxing. I am not asking for "the list" but more if there is an intent to tie up some loose ends about influence relating mainly to /pol/
(hard mode: don't mention advertising)
Doing the same on X will just get you banned for whatever reason Elon feels is best 'for the community'.
the anonymity makes it kind of the only site where thats true
I can't deny that the majority of the website's culture has been tainted by idpol bickering ever since /pol/ was added to it, but I'm always going to appreciate 4chan for being a place where I can write ostensibly anonymous posts and talk with other likeminded people about anything and everything. When you have a funny, good faith conversation with someone else on a website that gives you no incentive whatsoever to have one, it feels good.
Soyjak.st is unfortunately nothing like that. It is a website about itself, and itself is a parody of post-2014 rightwing 4chan meme slop culture. It is earnestly what most people believe the entirety of 4chan to be.
Particularly, when these are good people who put a lot of effort into keeping 4chan a pleasant community, by e.g. removing hate speech and CSAM, as well as banning offenders.
I feel like 4chan was the last living source of what the young internet was like - raw, unfiltered, and honest. You've got to admit in today's day and age that's genuinely something rare especially in current time of grift culture.
so much history potentially gone, just like BB.com's forums...
Honestly, it filled a very specific hole for me that I found nowhere else. Everyone is talking about the “unfiltered content” and all those things but to me it was mostly just topical. It was really one of the few places where one could get a good discussion on the internet about Japanese female-oriented entertainment which I'm well aware isn't the first thing people think about with 4chan but pretty much every other forum about Japanese entertainment is completely dominated by male-oriented entertainment, except when they go out of their way to specifically make a board catered to female-oriented entertainment, but that has the side effect that people on those boards end up talking more about gender politics than about the entertainment itself and I just want to talk about my favorite television shows and comic books and really don't care about all the politics.
4chan by it's nature doesn't drown out minority tastes and voices. This really isn't just a “female-oriented entertainment” thing but really any minority taste that just gets drowned out on most boards to the point that it disappears. The only other place I know where one can do this is Tumblr, more or less, but it's a very different experience, not necessarily better or worse but there just isn't this kind of “live discussion” atmosphere and vibe going on on Tumblr about episodes that are currently airing where people post small comments as the episode is airing and they're watching it. It's more for long impressions after it was aired and it doesn't have the same degree of interaction, it's a blogging place, not a message board.
As said, it isn't just that but “obscure taste” in general. You can make a thread on 4chan about some really obscure piece of fiction that no one knows and get a discussion going, half with the people that do it know, in part because it's an imageboard so they're drawn in to an image they recognize and it stands out, and half with people that never heard of it before, see the images in the thread, see it looks interesting and try it out. The images are the key I feel, it lowers the barrier of entry for people to try out something obscure because they see the images which lures them in. It was one of the best places to get a discussion going about some obscure piece of fiction which Tumblr doesn't do either, the only things that are being discussed are the really big titles. There are so many relatively obscure titles I enjoy I will possibly never get to discuss with anyone in my life again if 4chan not come back. I know many of those titles from 4chan because people constantly promote and share fairly obscure things there and the images again sell it.
But sure, if you have all that and the source code, you're all set. Godspeed!
It's also known for its extremely abrasive mildy sociopathic culture and 4Chan posters have a very samey 'posting voice' where if you don't like it you can hate it. It permeates a lot of the internet, but 4chan is kind of seen as the epicenter. I think it also gets blamed for a lot of negative internet culture like doxxing and choosing targets to harass, although I'm not sure how much of that was actually 4Chan. I think most of those people moved on to Kiwifarms. 4Chan probably gets some hate for things that other Chan sites have like Qanon in a sort of 'you started this' way.
And finally the politics are complicated. It actually used to be slightly left leaning or at least libertarian or anarchist, but over the years pol in particular has been known to be hard right wing. It definitely seems like they had a shift in political tone for the (IMO) worst at some point.
Personally I won't hide that I'm a hater and an unapologetic curmudgeonly old man, but that's my perception. On the other hand if you think the CP stuff is overblown, don't care about the negatives because there are apparently good boards there that are insulated, or are just hard right yourself then it is one of the last major discussion boards on the net. Some of that's probably out of date (like I said I gave up on it pretty quickly) but I'd wager most people with negative opinions are thinking of one or more of those. I'd be interested if any haters have other reasons.
I do not think it will be missed by many, but that kind of hole does not exactly disappear without a trace.
Like you said, not a lot of people in my life have any idea what it is, but it does hold a special place in my heart. It started when I was trying to establish my own personality, and it provided me with a safe avenue to try out different "me's".
People still use 4chan?
I recall 4chan at one short point in time being a semi amusing meme posting spot on the web but as always as soon as it was popular it turned into a lot of "edgelord" spam and drama.
That being said, I haven't been back since 2014? It was always pretty heavily influenced by b and pol, but it got really bad the two years before Trump 1. Alt right bullshit took over completely.
It astounds me that people think 4 Chan is a place for deviants, but Twitter is fine. Twitter is 10,000x worse.
And honestly, as things got better in my life and I went out to be more recreational, I went from going on 4chan once a day - to once a week - to once a month - and finally, to only when I wanted to see edgy takes on divisive current events.
I'll miss all that, despite all it lost over the years. And I'll miss the element of design and mannerisms in its userbase. It required an upfront investment to even understand how to engage with, and a "lurk moar" attitude. RIP.
Edit: It was also very crazy watching small groups of people turn insider-jargon into mainstream terminology. I'll also never forget watching the thread of QAnon's conception in real-time. Crazy stuff originated there - both in substance and meaning.
It was never good, but it definitely went entirely to shit when all the alt-right nut bags started flooding the site with nonsense starting around 2014-15. I have to believe it was a coordinated effort, it just seemed too immediate across the entire site.
The worst interview I ever had in tech was with Christopher Poole when he was founding canv.as, it's hard to feel bad for him.
For example, QAnon started on 4chan (I believe as a joke?) [1]. Nowadays a lot of 4chan users and traffic have since migrated to Twitter for pretty obvious reasons. Pseudo-intellectual racism has a lot of roots in 4chan (eg the popularity of Julius Evola [2]) that's deeply tied to "trad" content, Andrew Tate fandom, the manosphere and "self-improvement" [3].
Things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club originated on 4chan and it's full of racist memes [4]. A lot of racist and antisemitic memes originated on 4chan.
Worst of all, it seems like Elon Musk is motivated by a deep desire to be liked by 4chan [5].
So the point is that 4chan users (and admins) have a lot of real-world influence and that's kinda scary. It also makes them a target for this kind of hack. I suspect a lot of people will be exposed by this and in more than a few cases, you'll find ties to the current administration.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-...
[2]: https://jacobin.com/2022/12/fascism-far-right-evola-bannon-b...
[3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00732-x
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpH3O6mnZvw
[5]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/4/6/how-musk-ushered...
There is no "baby filter" on 4chan. You are solely responsible for believing and/or not being offended by anything. Well, that is true everywhere on the Web, but there is zero veneer of it on 4chan vs the partial safety bubbles you get on other sites.
