Disclaimer

The Death of /b/

(Approx. Oct 2012)

With the issue of bronies quelled, and new coder desuwa working constantly on the inline extension, among other ideas such as an inline catalog, the last part of 2012 proved to be one of improvements. The end of the year saw an even higher rise on the numbers of NORP users on the site, to the point that posting old memes and catchphrases would shock /b/ as if it was the first time they were ever posted. Since one of the tenets of /b/ was that their aggressiveness would often create content or at least humorous threads, the rising amount of normal users reduced /b/ to become more or less an anonymous Facebook, divided between porn threads and “X decides what I do”. Before, all users have to do was to be patient and eventually good threads would arise. Nowadays that idea seems to be a distant possibility.

By the end of 2012, it became apparent that /b/ would not get better, the influx of what could be deemed as “Facebook users”, with an age median of 16 to 24, and a very simple-minded way of posting, forced the board into meaningless activities. Even during the days of the dark age, with /b/ at its worst, there was at least some degree of activity in any form – Be it raids, OC, discussion or even cancer – Nowadays the most important thing /b/ does is porn threads.

/pol/’s War Against the Internet

(Approx. Jan 2013)

The advent of 2013 also saw a sharp rise with issues regarding the board /pol/ - Politically Incorrect. /pol/ was created to re-contain a small band of white supremacists taking residence on boards like /int/ and /k/. They were originally from /new/ - News, a board that housed a majority of white supremacists, allegedly because 4chan once raided Stormfront, making a few of its users aware of the site’s anonymous appeal.¹² Given the cultural changes of the Internet and the rise of Reddit’s “fempire”, nobody expected what would happen next.

The general perception of /pol/ was as a quarantine board disguised as a politics board. In due aspect, most users of the site regarded /pol/ as a shithole. This board came to be notorious in various Internet communities, prompting various sites with a tendency to Social Justice¹³ to go on a crusade against the board’s perceived white supremacism. Since /pol/ is constantly being showered with spam, the residents didn’t particularly care, after all to them it was just more entertainment. All this managed was to increase the popularity of the JIDF¹⁴ meme. However the repercussions of having both groups chimping out on each other like Hatfields and McCoys would be felt site-wide, with various boards having a team of stormfags appearing whenever race or politics were mentioned, and many threads being constantly derailed by complaining feminists and liberals. /co/ would be the place the issue was felt the most, with both groups clashing and completely derailing threads.

moot and the moderation team, and most of 4chan’s userbase originally though the JIDF/SRS raids were nothing but trolls and stormfags being idiots reacting to everyone hating them¹⁵. Eventually, after a series of threads on /q/¹⁶ people began to suspect that there were actual people attempting to get /pol/ deleted. Investigation followed, more info came out, with users from /pol/ compiling and links and evidence towards the possibility of organized raids against the thread. Finally, a mod took note of all the information and vowed to direct it to moot¹⁷. Ultimately /q/ would suffer a constant onslaught of Social Justice Warriors (Or a very dedicated troll) trying to get /pol/ deleted, to the point where even the mods stepped in to tell them to shut up. The SJW didn’t stop and some even began to threaten to doxx team 4chan and start legal action. This eventually got moot fed up enough to delete /q/ on mid-2013.

The constant onslaught by not one but two different groups made serious discussion on /pol/ nearby impossible, however, all that would be rendered moot (No pun intended) as it all became a meme in and on itself, and the discussions eventually drowned in a sea of IT’S HAPPENING and troll threads. It can no longer be distinguished whenever a /pol/itician is joking or not. /pol/ also saw a rise in conspiracy and tin-foil-hat-type threads, spurn from an exodus of neo-/x/philes, a very crazy breed of anon, to the board. Many /x/ phrases such as “disinfo” have been imported to /pol/, and the quality of board plummeted thanks to them.
Ultimately, the consequences of all the strife ended up with /pol/ becoming a buzzword for any dissenting, right-waving opinion and Tumblr/SRS becoming the equivalent buzzword for any left-waving post. The whole debacle ended up becoming just another way for posters to maintain and rationalize their idealized idea of their favourite board. To this day it’s still a mystery whether the spammers were feminists or some of the most persistent trolls 4chan has ever seen.

/s4s/

(Apr 1st 2013)

For April’s fool 2013, moot embedded an Adult Cat Finder joke on /b/, and grand surprise: The creation of a board called “Shit 4chan Says”. Obviously a take on all the SRS and Reddit hate, the rule-less board was immediately filled with /b/tards of old and people looking old jokes and traditions from all ages. Threads from Thrust Vectoring to copypasta spam and she EPIN, /b/ where posted, and the whole place looked like a time vortex suddenly appeared began to spam dead memes and dubs threads. All was good and the general opinion of the board was positive. However, the board depopulated quickly, showing how much 4chan’s interests have changed. Since it was an April’s fools board, nobody knew how much the board would last. A general mood of “post-irony”, where all 4chan customs where inverted and shitposting was renamed funposting set in. Knowing the lifespan of the board was potentially short, its new userbase quickly decided to create as much OC as possible.

/s4s/’s immediate exports were the mod-created Into the Trash You Go, discovering the kek muffin and using it to replace lel and top lel and the bringing back That Fucking Cat. Many of 2006 and 2008’s users stayed and tried to bring back raids, and while this worked for some time, people was not interested and the mods quickly brought the threads down. However /s4s/, now [s4s] decided to bring back interboard raiding, this time in the form of GET stealing. Many important gets were hijacked by /s4s/, and unlike normal raids, these took much longer to be deleted. /s4s/ also gave a warm welcome to the new board, spamming the entire catalog of /gd/ with a gigantic Bateman combo, which was probably the most epic raid of the year.
By far, [s4s]’s greatest contribution was the popularization of Doge¹⁸. A reaction face of a Shiba dog with a concerned look and silly, broken dog speak in comic sans that quickly spread over all 4chan and the entire of the Internet. It got so popular it managed to get its own cryptocurrency by 2014.