this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Popular internet humor as we know it was basically all forged between the slur-stained walls of 4chan anons cursed basements, and people posted way worse things than slurs on there. You wouldn't pick me out as a former /b/slur in real life cause you'd probably be envisioning a straight white male. Ironically there was something very accepting about the site I didn't have in real life which is a sentiment shared by many users of the site from this era.
One of the mistakes I see otherwise accurate depictions of 4chan making, talking about the very good "Kill All Normies" book and some others, which really focus on 4chan from 2010-onward, is they gloss over the site before this decade and interpret it as a single userbase. I'm sure there's some constant users between these decades but I don't know anyone who used 4chan when I did who continued to use it even into the MLP era. I would point to Project Chanology as the turning point, the infamous 4chan protest against the Church of Scientology, which popularized the idea of "Anonymous," often referred to as "teh cancer killing b" both genuinely and ironically.
I would argue this is also when the site began succumbing to irony poisioning as people began to sincerely post things the site became infamous for in the 2010s. The "lulz" of baiting corporate media with exploding vans and "Anonymous" had played out and the site now began to adopt an "identity," whereas before these abhorrent things sort of just happened there and the userbase wasn't considered this singular entity. This would have been about when I graduated HS, and when I met former 4chan users in college we mostly all derided the site for being garbage.
In recent years the nostalgia for what the internet was in this era has to include 4chan, but I don't think anyone who was on the site then would say they were good people for using the site and likely the opposite, nor would we probably have assumed the site from this era would have become so influential.
I think the current state of 4chan is inevitable as a result of the 4chan you loved, because 4chan pretended to be a place of bigotry, foolishness, and ill will.
I doubt anyone who used the site would use "love" and "4chan" in the same sentence lol. The point is if you used it during this time you witnessed something that people who didn't can only morally condemn at a distance, they can't talk about the real experience of using the site and meaningfully criticize it. Likewise being there for the true 00s internet wild west and seeing it turn from that into what it became was a blessing for understanding on a visceral level what we all witnessed in the 2010s with incels and maga etc.