The last rites were premature. 4chan, down for more than a week after hackers got in through an insecure script that handled PDFs, is back online. A blog post—the platform's first in years—keeps it simple: "Testing testing 123 123…" Wired's retrospective puts it all in context, though we now have the living site as well as its legacy to contend with.
4chan was founded by Christopher "Moot" Poole when he was just 15. A regular user on slightly less anarchic comedy site Something Awful, Poole… wanted to give Western anime fans their own version, so he poorly translated the site's code, and promoted his new site, 4chan, to Something Awful's anime community. Several core features were ported over in the process. 4chan users were anonymous, threads weren't permanent and would time out or "404" after a period of inactivity, and there were dozens of sub-boards you could post to. That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized echaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom gutter culture unlike anything else on the web. The dark endpoint of the techno-utopianism that built the internet. On 4chan you were no one and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether.
Poole escaped his creation's clutches just in time. The rest is history.
Previously:
• Anonymous anime fan solves complex superpermutation puzzle on 4chan
• To understand trumpism, study the self-professed 'betas' of 4chan
• Musk boosts 4chan claim that women are incapable of critical thinking
• Hate speech on 4chan is up by 40% since 2015, analysis of one million comments finds
