4chan

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4chan
Website logo
Imageboard
languages English
operator 4chan community support LLC
editorial staff Christopher Poole
Registration No
programming language PHP
On-line October 1, 2003 (currently online)
https://www.4chan.org/

4chan (mainly known in Japan as Yotsuba Channel ) is an English-language imageboard . The site is based on the Japanese model of the Futaba Channel and is one of the most visited sites on the Internet. Its users drew attention to themselves through network campaigns and it is considered the cradle of the Anonymous movement .

4chan is particularly popular as a constant source of new web phenomena in text, images and audio. 4chan is home to a large number of different subcultures, including those that stand out for right-wing extremism , racism and misogyny . The spread of such extremist views via the platform and the consumption there can lead to the rapid recruitment and radicalization of other people, which gave 4chan the reputation of promoting this development. Most notably, the politically incorrect board , known as / pol / , appears in this regard.

history

Emergence

moot (Christopher Poole) in 2010

4chan was founded in October 2003 under the domain 4chan.net by Christopher Poole (* 1988). Poole was a regular user of the Something Awful Internet forum, especially the sub-forum for Anime , Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse, or ADTRW for short, and the IRC channel Raspberry Heaven. He originally conceived the site as a pure anime forum for these two communities, based on the Japanese forum Futaba Channel, which was also largely about anime, manga and otaku culture . To this day, anime and manga content has made up a large part of the site and its culture.

Poole's identity was unknown until it was exposed by the Wall Street Journal in July 2008. The site is an English version of the Japanese imageboard Futaba Channel, which in turn goes back to 2channel . 4chan was the second English-language channel page after World2channel , a page that was also used a lot by the ADTRW community. Unlike 4chan, however, it was largely based on 2channel , so there was no way to share pictures. However, three months before 4chan was founded, World2channel also introduced Imageboards.

The first and originally only 4chan board was / b /, which was then called Anime / Random . However, in the early days of the site, more forums were introduced including / h / ( Hentai ), / c / ( Anime / Cute ), and / s / ( Sexy Beautiful Women ), which became the site's first forum not for Anime was intended.

In February 2004 GoDaddy , 4chan's hosting provider, suspended the site, whereupon it switched to the 4chan.org domain .

At the end of October 2004 the boards / l / ( Lolikon ) and / sm / ( Shotakon ) were deleted because they threatened the continued existence of the site due to their controversial content. In early November 2004, Poole founded a new, independent site called not4chan , on which the boards were revived.

In September 2012, Poole introduced the option of buying a 4chan pass , which allows the usual Captcha verification before posting and reporting and shortens the time that has to pass between two posts. It also enables the / vip / ( Very Important Posts ) board introduced in 2016 to be used. The 4chan Pass was introduced to give users an opportunity to support the site financially without having to fall back on donations.

Hiroyuki Nishimura (2005)

In September 2015, Poole sold 4chan to Hiroyuki Nishimura , the founder of 2channel, and also gave him the post of administrator.

In November 2019, the site announced that it would move all “job- safe ” boards to the 4channel.org domain . This domain only links to other work-safe boards, unless this has been deactivated in the settings. On such boards it is not allowed to share certain content (especially pornography and extreme violence). For a long time these boards have been differentiated from the rest by color.

functionality

4chan is divided into several thematic sub-categories. There are currently over fifty channels on which pictures are posted and commented on. Topics of the individual imageboards go from nature ( / to / ) to weapons ( / k / ) and cars ( / o / ) to anime, manga ( / a / etc.) and erotic ( / h / , / s / , / d / among others). The image board / b /, which bears the name Random, is the biggest and most popular. Here every user can post and comment on any pictures of any topic. Often pictures are posted that are supposed to shock. In contrast to conventional forums, threads and posts on 4chan are very short-lived. Depending on the imageboard, the entire content is displaced by something new after hours or a few days. Since each area only accepts a certain number of threads - and more active ones are put on top - inactive ones are deleted at the end of the list. An essential point that distinguishes 4chan is that the site uses terminology created by the users themselves, which outsiders can usually not understand easily.

Spiegel Online describes 4chan as

“[…] A meme slingshot, a breeding ground for contagious ideas, but also an abysmal place where atrocities, racist and sexist tirades and images are published far beyond the limits of good taste. [...] The world of 4Chan is dark and strange, like the inner workings of a confused provincial teenager at 3 o'clock in the morning. "

- Felix Knoke

Technical

4chan is based on the Yotsuba software developed especially for it, a modified version of Futallaby, which in turn is a spin-off from Futaba, the software on which Futaba Channel is based. Originally the site ran on a modified version of GazouBBS, the software that 5channel also uses and is based on Futaba. Both Futallaby and Yotsuba were developed for the site by employees of 4chan after 4chan's establishment.

The name Yotsuba is Japanese for "four leaves" and an allusion to the name of the site and its predecessor Futaba, whose name means "two leaves".

Range

Alexa permanently lists 4chan among the top 1000 websites worldwide ( US : Top 300). Daily unique visits are around 220,000 (monthly: ≈6.8 million), generating around eight million page impressions (monthly: ≈240 million). The community recorded 450,000 postings per day in April 2009. It is free to use. The average 4chan visitor is between 18 and 34 years old and male.

Choice Moots the world's most influential person

The founder and administrator Christopher Poole was named "World's Most Influential Person 2008" by Time magazine at the end of April 2009 . However, it found that the poll-based poll was influenced by people close to the community. Within a very short time, Christopher Poole received almost 17 million votes - more than all other candidates combined. The election was also manipulated in such a way that the first letters of the following 23 candidates formed the message “Marble cake also the game ” - an allusion to the IRC channel, in which the protest against Scientology was once formed. Christopher Poole is now officially number 35 on the list.

Important boards

Boards on 4chan (2020)

/ b /

The most popular subboard, with around 350,000 anonymous postings per day, is the "Random" or "/ b /" board, which does not deal with a specific topic and except for extreme violations of the law, personal information, calls for the distribution of such or for raids , Spam , advertising and My Little Pony content can all be posted unabashedly. Here the regular readers who call themselves “/ b / tards” ( corruption of “retard”, English actually “disabled” or “backward”, meant more like “complete idiot”) break with every conceivable taboo, from hardcore pornography to towards explicit depictions of violence and gore . This has its own slang and code of conduct, which newcomers call themselves "Newfags" (literally "new fagot " in English , whereby the suffix "-fag" is always used as a characteristic) - for example, it is not called "drawing artist" (drawing artist Artist) or "German" (German / r), but then "drawfag" or "germanfag") can be acquired on external wikis such as the Encyclopedia Dramatica . The first two rules are based on the movie " Fight Club ", a thriller from 1999:

  1. do not talk about / b /.
  2. do NOT talk about / b /.
  3. We are Anonymous,
  4. Anonymous is legion.
  5. Anonymous never forgives.
  6. Anonymous can be a horrible, senseless, uncaring monster.
  1. Don't talk about / b /.
  2. DO NOT talk about / b /,
  3. We are Anonymous,
  4. Anonymous is Legion [cf. Mk 5.9  EU ].
  5. Anonymous never forgives.
  6. Anonymous can be a terrible, senseless and uncaring monster.

At 4chan, especially on the / b /, provocative images are often shown, such as dead people or animals ( gore ) or pornography. Duration and frequency of use by individuals are not visible.

The 500 millionth post was published on August 15, 2013, and commented on from the website's Twitter account:

“… And / b / 's 500 millionth post is a 4channer bragging about banging Polish prostitutes in London.”

"... and the 500 millionth post on / b / is a 4channer bragging about banging Polish prostitutes in London."

/pole/

/ pol /, which bears the name politically incorrect (German: politically incorrect) is a board about politics on 4chan. He is often said to have a right-wing extremist orientation.

Culture

A permissive contribution policy, the fast-paced architecture and supposedly anonymous participation encourage the emergence of unusual web phenomena. Moderators monitor the content on partly board-specific, not necessarily civilian manners. Irrelevant or illegal contributions as well as sporadically are deleted, the responsible users can be excluded from the board. For this purpose, the log files and IP addresses are saved as the only user data that you have given yourself for the life of the posts.

GamerGate

In 2014, 4Chan assumed postings about the alleged sexual permissiveness of Zoë Quinn , which were originally posted by her ex-boyfriend under the hashtag #gamergate and were further distributed by other users.

Memes

Individual texts and images sometimes develop a “life of their own” through the lively exchange, which makes them known beyond the site. In this tradition, various Internet phenomena emerged , such as the "Caturday", "Pedobear" or the "Epic Fail Guy", one of many stick figure comic strips, the plot of which is continued with every answer to the thread.

Lolcats

The spread of cat photos with absurd sayings and obviously wrong grammar goes back to an initiative of the community, the "Caturday".

Modification from Kumā to Pedobear

The board is also said to have modified kumā , an internet phenomenon from 2channel , to pedobear. The originally harmless bear Kumā was perverted to the extent that he now appears in the role of a pedophile in pictures and videos with young children and makes appropriate comments or shows gestures.

Rickrolling

In 2005 the internet phenomenon "duckroll" emerged after moot had used a word filter on 4chan that changed "egg" to "duck". In a discussion someone posted a duck on wheels. In March 2007, the trailer for the game Grand Theft Auto IV was released. Due to the high demand, the video could no longer be viewed on the manufacturer's website after a while. An anonymous 4chan user adapted the principle of "duckroll" and uploaded a video on YouTube that promised the trailer - but in reality it showed Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". The "Rickroll" was born. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Astley said he found "rickrolling" fun and bizarre.

Raids

When “Anonymous” becomes active outside the / b / board, it is called a “raid”, a kind of attack that can hit not only other websites but also the other sub-forums of 4chan. Here, too, it is primarily about the entertainment value that causes anger ("... Anonymous must have no higher cause than its own cruel amusement ...", "... Anonymous must have no higher concern than his own cruel amusement ...").

A raid is carried out with different "weapons", u. a. Spam, flooding , DDoS attacks, joke calls, exploiting security gaps in websites (simple registration, identical user data on different pages) to deleting entire databases.

Google and the swastika

When an unknown person wrote the HTML code for a swastika on a 4chan board in July 2008 , thousands of readers then typed or copied the symbol into the Google search text field. Then the search and the symbol landed at the top of Google's “Hot Trends” list, which lists the most frequent searches at the moment. Google removed the swastika from search results and apologized.

The vote for the “World's Most Influential Person” of 2012 was also influenced by 4chan users. The North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was voted the most influential person of the year through voting programs specially programmed for this election. The voices of the other participants were also deliberately manipulated. So the first letters of the top 14 places resulted in the message “KJU GASCHAMBER” - an allusion to the headline-making labor camps in North Korea.

"Pornday" on YouTube

On January 6, 2010, 4chan participants strained the filter instances of the Google video portal YouTube by massively publishing pornographic material disguised as music or children's videos . The reason for the protest was the blocking of the local user account "Lukeywes1234". A boy from Wichita, Kansas, who was not yet 13 years old , had published videos on this channel in which he showed improvised role-playing games with characters or appeared as a ghost hunter. Since the YouTube terms and conditions require a minimum age of 13 years, his user account has been blocked by YouTube. 4chan participants, who had previously spread their request to subscribe to this channel virally and thus boosted the number of its subscribers from eleven to 15,000 within one weekend, called for “PornDay” on January 6, 2010 as a retaliatory action.

Chanology project

The occasion was a web-wide deletion of an unfavorable interview with Tom Cruise by Scientology . 4chan's response is the largest campaign to date that has emerged from the / b / board and aims to "ban Scientology from the Internet ... and systematically destroy it ..." (Dibbell). Last but not least, it has led to the high profile of Anonymous .

Impersonators

Due to the high popularity and importance of 4chan, the site inspired a large number of imitators, who often advertised themselves with different rules or a more specific focus. 1chan , which was founded in November 2003 by a friend Christopher Pooles who worked with him on 4chan, was the first such site and focuses on rail transport .

The best known and most successful imitation of 4chan is 8chan , which was founded in October 2013 by Fredrick Brennan. Its unique selling point is, on the one hand, less restrictive rules and, on the other hand, the ability to freely create and moderate subforums. The site experienced a huge surge in popularity in September 2014 after discussion of the Gamergate affair was banned on 4chan.

Krautchan was a German imitation site that existed between 2007 and 2018. It was the origin of the Polandball comics and has been criticized several times for announcing criminal offenses. The users addressed each other by the name "Bernd" in order to remain anonymous. The successor is Kohlchan .

literature

  • Kevin Kuhn : Hikikomori (Berlin Verlag, 2012). The novel takes up structures and linguistic characteristics from 4chan.
  • Gerald Himmelein: The Troll Paradise - An Internet subculture is developing from a web troublemaker to a global movement . In: c't - magazine for computer technology . No. 6 , 2008, p. 98-103 .
  • Julian Dibbell: The Assclown Offensive . In: Wired . October 2009.
  • Cole Stryker: Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web . Overlook, 2011, ISBN 1-59020-710-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b 4chan: Siteinfo , Alexa. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  2. ↑ a b Konrad Lischka, Christian Stöcker, Ole Reißmann: 4chan: The original soup from Anonymous. In: Spiegel Online . March 26, 2012, accessed May 10, 2020 .
  3. ↑ a b Right Cyber ​​Culture: Glossary about the extreme right digital subculture. In: belltower.news. April 16, 2019, accessed May 10, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Sonja Peteranderl: Troll researcher Whitney Phillips: How the Internet was flooded by hatred. In: Spiegel Online . August 6, 2019, accessed May 10, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Christopher "Moot" Poole Testimony in Palin Email Trial. In: The Business Insider. Retrieved on September 4, 2010 (English): “Q .: Approximately when was it founded? A .: October 1st, 2003. "
  6. ^ Jamin Brophy-Warren: Modest Web Site Is Behind a Bevy of Memes. In: WSJ.com. Dow Jones & Company, Inc., July 9, 2008, accessed September 19, 2012 .
  7. ↑ a b c 4chan FAQ. Retrieved September 19, 2012 .
  8. ↑ Jerry Langton: Funny how `stupid 'site is addictive. In: The Star. Toronto Star, September 22, 2007, accessed September 29, 2019 .
  9. ↑ 4chan Pass - 4chan. In: 4chan. 4chan Community Support LLC, accessed December 16, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Christopher Poole: IF ONLY IT GREW ON TREES. In: 4chan. September 18, 2012, accessed December 16, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Johannes Boie: Christopher Pool sells 4chan to Hiroyuki Nishimura. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH, September 23, 2015, accessed on August 13, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Felix Knoke: Web guerrilla wants to flood YouTube with porn. In: SPIEGEL ONLINE. January 5, 2010, accessed September 19, 2012 .
  13. ↑ 4chan.org Visitors Worth , visitorsworth.com. Retrieved August 23, 2013.
  14. ↑ Patrick Dax / Thomas Thaler: 4chan: Lolcats and Splatter. April 21, 2009. Retrieved September 19, 2012 .
  15. ↑ 4chan.org advertise. In: 4chan.org. Retrieved July 11, 2014 .
  16. ^ The World's Most Influential Person Is ... In: TIME. April 27, 2009, accessed September 19, 2012 .
  17. ↑ Birgit Riegler: Hackers hijack the celebrity choice of Time magazine. In: derStandard.at . April 18, 2009. Retrieved September 19, 2012 .
  18. ↑ Rick Astley: The 2009 TIME 100. In: TIME. April 30, 2009, accessed September 19, 2012 .
  19. ↑ Tweet , twitter.com/4chan. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
  20. ↑ 4chan Rules. Retrieved September 19, 2012 .
  21. ↑ 4chan - FAQ. Retrieved July 23, 2013 .
  22. ↑ Gaming & Culture - Chat logs show how 4chan users created #GamerGate controversy , arstechnica.com, October 9, 2014.
  23. ↑ Konrad Lischka: Web guerrilla manipulates US celebrity election. In: SPIEGEL ONLINE. April 17, 2009. Retrieved September 19, 2012 .
  24. ↑ a b The Biggest Little Internet Hoax on Wheels Hits Mainstream. (No longer available online.) In: FOX News. FOX News Network, LLC., April 22, 2008, archived from the original on April 22, 2008 ; accessed on September 19, 2012 (English).
  25. ↑ Sean Michaels: Taking the Rick. In: guardian.co.uk. Guardian News and Media Ltd., March 19, 2008, accessed September 19, 2012 .
  26. ↑ David Sarno: Web Scout exclusive! Rick Astley, king of the 'Rickroll,' talks about his song's second coming. March 25, 2008, archived from the original on May 23, 2011 ; accessed on September 19, 2012 (English).
  27. ↑ Julian Dibbell: The Assclown Offensive: How to Enrage the Church of Scientology. In: wired.com. Condé Nast, October 2009, accessed September 19, 2012 .
  28. ↑ Christian Stöcker: Guerrilla against Google. In: SPIEGEL ONLINE. July 15, 2008. Retrieved September 19, 2012 .
  29. ↑ Sarah Wagner: "4chan" makes Kim Jong Un Man of the Year. In: Focus. December 12, 2012, accessed June 5, 2013 .
  30. ↑ lukeywes1234. In: Know Your Meme. 2010, accessed on September 19, 2012 .
  31. ^ MG Siegler: 4chan Presents: YouTube Porn Day (NSFW). In: TechCrunch. AOL Inc., January 4, 2010, accessed September 19, 2012 .
  32. ^ Anonymous: Message to Scientology. (Online video) In: YouTube. January 21, 2008, accessed September 19, 2012 .
  33. ^ Adrian Chen: Gamergate Supporters Partied at a Strip Club This Weekend. In: New York Magazine. New York Media LLC, October 27, 2014, accessed October 10, 2019 .
  34. ↑ Jan Stark: KrautChan.net is the hardly entertaining, provincial, German copy of 4Chan. In: Vice. March 31, 2014, accessed March 2, 2020 .
  35. ↑ Marcel Rosenbach, Vera Deleja-Hotko, Melanie Amann, DER SPIEGEL: Digital disguise ban : Schäuble also wants clear names on the Internet - DER SPIEGEL - Netzwelt. Retrieved March 2, 2020 .