While I no longer visit 4chan regularly, I love its extensive influence on human society.<p>* lolcats<p>* rage comics<p>* anonymous<p>* a lot of the 1% movement<p>* getting random people in jail because they think animal cruelty is funny<p>* making Moot TIME's person of the year and getting him a TED talk -> <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for...</a><p>While most of what goes on there hinges somewhere between vile and horrible. 4chan has a lot of good in it, plenty of times there can be surprisingly good and high quality debates.<p>And come on, it's where all the memes are born. That's <i>profound</i>. What other startup can claim to be such a big influence on western society?<p>PS: 4chan has also invented a clever sorting algorithm - <a href="http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1295544154" rel="nofollow">http://dis.4chan.org/read/prog/1295544154</a><p>PPS: sometimes they even manage to count to 10. I think the record was 100.<p>edit: when I say meme, I mean "A meme ( /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena." ... I <i>don't</i> mean, "funny picture".<p>A lot of responders misunderstood this, I think.
The thing that strikes me is how... Ubiquitous as it is, and at the same time, unknown to so many more. "Browsing 4chan" truly is the "reading Rolling Stone magazine" of its day. And somehow, it retains that while being huge.<p>I say this as someone fired for visiting it[1], and finding it impossible to get a job in the news industry a year later. Now, the news industry is hardly considered cutting edge, but people hear "now, the site has pornography, but-" and that's it. (Especially in this employer's market!)<p>Conversely, I applied to two tech companies over the past year, and being forthcoming as I am, I share this with them. Both were mystified at my being fired for visiting 4chan. ("What? Where do you LIVE?")<p>[1] I found out about the site from news coverage years ago (the NFL thing; "Don't mess with football!".) As Anonymous rose, it became interesting from a news standpoint. And yes, I casually just visited as well. I understand many consider this fire-able, and don't argue. That's kind of my point though, that divide.
I would be surprised if there wasn't an overlap between HN and 4chan (same as with SA). Being run in diametrically opposed way it fills its role rather well, I think. There is no reputation system, no limits, no censorship, etc.. This means it produces many utterly vile posts - but all of them are true expressions of people as they are, not as they pretend to be. I think people often don't appreciate this. It's not just people being dicks on the Internet, it's people saying what they think with no regard to social acceptance or basic politeness. And since there are no credentials, your posts are just that - some text and images conveying ideas. The only authority comes from the content.<p>Here's to another billion.
Moot really deserves praise for sticking around for 8 years and keeping the site running. I can imagine a lot of people giving up after a couple of years.
Considering the somewhat objective nature of a lot of 4chan's content I am surprised it is where it is now. Very interesting article, I really enjoyed reading the history behind 4chan, will be interesting to see where the site heads next.
Wow, nice.<p>Many years ago I rewrote the 4chan wikipedia article, and got it to featured level. It appeared on the Main Page a few years later, but by then I had lost interest. It's nice to see it's still in good shape, though not as popular as the site itself - <a href="http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/4chan" rel="nofollow">http://stats.grok.se/en/latest90/4chan</a>