Used to be an early 2000s fansite for anime and video games

Yeah, once something gets "controversial" it's basically the beginning of the end for something. Same with Holla Forums, once it became known as the "darker brother" of 4chan the quality started to go down, however, if you ignore all the Holla Forums faggotery about race, Jews and whatever, I'd still actually think that Holla Forums is somewhat a decent refuge. Sometimes on other boards, I see people making decent posts, and get kinda disillusioned when they come out as Nazis one post later.
Didn't Hillary and her campaign mention Holla Forums?

I wish I still had the webm of that CNN news segment about Pepe where the reporter scroll a bit on a Holla Forums board.

Smartphones

Ultimately this, but it was a slow process and honestly the better years of the site came shortly after Chanology.
While Chanology did attract a ton of normal-fags, most of them kept to Holla Forums (the single board that Chanology did immediately kill), with the relative few that moved onto other boards such as /a/ or Holla Forums mostly being assimilated into the existing board cultures.

As 4chans size and internet presence/influence grew however the flow of normal-fags that would start using 4chan and become assimilated into the wider imageboard culture and the specific cultures of the boards they used was replaced with a flood normies.
While I cannot exactly pinpoint the point when this flood occurred (the summers after Chanology were always progressively worse and seemed to last longer as the years went by), I would however personally consider the summer of 2009 to be 4chans sad repeat of the 'Eternal September'.
By summer 2009, 4chan had simply grown to the point that the number of normies that started using the site had became the majority and were as such no longer expected to assimilate as they were before; The entire site had basically been culturally colonized.

Fast forward to 2018 and most the site is basically culturally indistinguishable from the cancer that is reddit or to a lesser extant something-awful.
The only real outliers to this being the cringy boomers and cuckold porn aficionados that inhabit Holla Forums and have engaged in their own sad little colonisation/astroturfing attempts of other boards.

Correct, but normies were only really alerted to 4chans existence by Chanology.
It is Chanology that raised 4chans public profile so much that the normies eventually took over a few years later.

I honestly cannot be arsed to put together the massive essay/sociology paper that Chanology and its effects really demands.
I guess the most basic version in regards to thread topic relevance would be that before Chanology, 4chans general cultural responses to IRL issues would be best described as either 'bemused indifference' or 'Anarchic Nihilism'.

After the embarrassing IRL campaign that was Chanology however this culture started to shift and change.
By 2009 the culture had become about being edgy, getting attention, manufactured rivalries, internet activism and other assorted shit.
Put simply, Chanology resulted in a demographic and cultural shift.

Its nothing but kids now. I doubt theres anyone left there thay remembers it from 2006. Anyone pining for the good ol days of 4chan there, are lying.

Still trying to push that phone meme, eh?

imagine my shock

You know, you may be right.

If you’re old, it was all the publicity stunts like Project Chanology and such.

If you’re new, it was user-friendliness in terms of user experience and increased homogenity of the internet, resulting 4chan to become just another website on the internet.

Im not too worried. Even if its true, Im sure CNN in all its shoddy reporting, probably just showed a brief glimpse of Holla Forums while referring to halfchan.

Im more worried about the entire mainstream media feeling the need demonize Holla Forums specifically. I dont even tell people about Holla Forums to lessen the chance.

...

They did catch wind of 8ch. Just google blacked out the site, so honestly we're lucky we got that controversial in our infancy then everyone who didn't migrat forgot about 8ch's existence except for Holla Forumsyp shills who in their autism keep linking their 700 thousand infographs onto reddit.
I forget where, but during my brief Reddit interlude (because I wanted to look at their nerve center or whatever it's called so I could see puppies from their aww subreddt) and somehow I rabbit holed into red liberal cancer to find a screencap of The_Donald (Reddit version) with 8ch.media in the post with like 50 likes or some shit.

...

This is your brain on idpol.
"Nerdism" has always been mainstream why do people think Estar Guars or shitty table top games is esoteric and unknown, just pay attention.
I don't understand how it's "the left's" fault for not being upset about first world problems.
Can't be an outsider if you were nowhere to begin with.
I can understand isolation but I have no empathy for epic pay pay kekistani autists.

Gamergate. And their failed attempt to bury it.
I still remember hundreds and hundreds of threads with thousands of deleted posts.

The format killed it.
Imageboards lead you to believe you are around friends and peers when a comprehensive post history would reveal you're as different from one another as Bernie Sanders and Rosa Luxemburg. From there, all other pathologies follow.

The Captcha and those particular board deletions.

Seems legitimate.

Chanology, Gamergate, 2016 Election, & the final nail in the coffin as of now is the influx of the_donald from Reddit, & boomers discovering Holla Forums on Facebook, Twitter, & possibly Reddit as well.

2009 wasn't that bad.
Then again, I say this comparatively - 2009 was riddled with forced memes (now the only kind of 4Chan "meme"), but you could still go there for weeb shit and porn expertise and decent nihilist shittery. Then again, I found chanology pretty amusing, too.

Also, this.

There were waves, the fox news broadcast, the skirmish with stormfront and the creation of Holla Forums, the creation of /mlp/, the fappening, gamergate, and the general rise of smart phones where people wanted something to browse for a few minutes. There was always a steady stream of people from digg or reddit or whatever popular forum that didn't ban discussion of the site outright and got people curious, but it seems like all of the major cancer was punctuated by major events that caused people to flock to the source.

Honestly it felt like the entire internet metamorphosized around 2010 with the rise of smart phones. Forums and meta communities on websites like YT and reddit seemed to crash and burn. It's been conglomerating into a few major sites/apps and become festering shitholes while all the obscure places die slow deaths from lack of users. It also started the commodification of internet culture. It used to be that memes were nothing more than running internet jokes, but now companies seem to have entire teams geared towards viral marketing. There's an entire meme culture where people create content with the intention of them becoming memes and to be famous. That's why I love 8ch so much even if there are only a few boards worthwhile, it really feels like an internet community in the mid 2000's. It's refreshing in a way.

Like others have said it was a combination of things that started with Chanology and finally peaked with the 2016 election.
Basically Eternal September in effect en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The thing that made 4chan great back in the day was that it was pretty apolitical. It was nothing more than a hobbyist board where people can discuss anime, music, and vidya. I mean sure there were always arguments over worldviews ( I specially remember the atheist vs christfag threads way back when on Holla Forums) but there was never a specific focus on political discussion until the creation of /new/ which then became a containment board for the worst types of posters (fuck niggers lulz). Moot realized that stormfags ruined that board and decided to delete it because reactionaries gonna reaction and then all the /new/sman like myself fled to /int/ where they shitposted about whiteness. Then moot finally brought back Holla Forums and /r9k/ in 2012 I believe and basically pandora's box was flung wide open with Holla Forums gaining more and more traction each year with Flim Flam zim zam all the way to the Donald. Bringing any type of political discussion to a hobbyist board is gonna attract a bunch of normalfags talking about real world problems like politics and tfw no gf. Gone are the days where you can tell stories of jerking off when your sister's friends are sleeping over, now it's all NIGGERS AND JEWS ARE USING THE LEFTISTS TO DESTROY WHITE CIVILIZATION. Moot bringing back Holla Forums was a mistake cause it brought back the worst and most overtly edgy posters and then the newfags took that shit hook, line, and sinker. The only hope 4chan has of redemption is delete all political discussion and boards so that way stormweenies can find a different safe space. However, that is unlikely to happen cause gook moot likes the revenue and clicks that Holla Forums brings.

Before captchas the spam on 4chan would kill boards and delete loads of threads

This was more the final nail in the coffin that pushed away the quality posters ad invited all the rightards in

t. phoneposters

Popularity, and a broadening of internet access and usage. There's a lot of normies on the internet now, they get everywhere, in part thanks to this

If you don't explicitly censor racism, it will grow.

Better days.

Much better days user. I was on halfchan today and legitimately just didn't see the point of the website anymore. Its all just screaming into a void.

I was expecting to see the one or two faggots that usually pop up defending gamergate, I'm glad we're finally over that shit once and for all.

Moot should have ended the site when he left.

Did this just turn into a feels thread?

They broke rules 1 and 2

/trv/ and /mu/ are the only boards I still visit and even still I have to tell the occasional Holla Forumstard to fuck off.

Moot should have done that when he deleted Holla Forums the first time, now the genie's out the bottle and Holla Forumsyps have pushed out pretty much the entirety of the old userbase. They'd have to ban literally everyone.

Nigga, they have to do that shit on /a/. Fucking /a/.

tfw I was an underage newfag on Holla Forums somewhere around 2008 and might have been one of the fucks who helped kill it. From that perspective, I think that ED might have a part in the killing, as it removed the need for lurking to seem like you fit in, and thus helped the chan culture to deteriorate into a parody of itself.

Half of these websites were killed off by Youtube when people found out that acting like retards for money was easier and more lucrative than making anonymous content.

Newgrounds could've stayed relevant as another trash can of the internet, but Tom Fulp decided to make it into a respectable portfolio website for web-artists that nobody really needed, while alienating the core membership of shitposters.

In a few years we will likely see further centralization of the internet with Google and Facebook subsuming everything, and 2-3 websites replacing the functionality of what used to be dozens.

Capitalism sucks.

I wonder what the eventual fifth panel will look like.

beyond nightmarish, the likes of which mere images cannot comprehend. Worse than cancer.

The great replacement is real
#StopOldfagGenocide

I remember /a/ was the best at self moderation, they managed to keep the normalfags at bay for the longest. It was only a matter of time before they succumbed

Is it weird how I got a feeling that /trash/ is perhaps the only part of 4chan that didn't get absorbed by Holla Forums because it's completely hidden from the board log. Even if all /trash/ is nowadays is fetishes and furries instead of "you were a retard who broke the rules but this thread is bretty gud"

I only browse the homebrew general on /vg/, mainly to know how switch homebrew is going the amount of drama and classcuckery that goes on modern homebrew communities is staggering, I miss the days of dark_alex and sometimes /a/ and /jp/, even if /jp/ is depressing with so many generals and 3DPD shit.

Honestly, I feel like janitors fucking around did as much harm to /a/ as Holla Forumsyps.
Shit like "banning" generals, that mainly did kill some great threads like the sadpanda threads, who actually got shit done from time to time while leaving actual generals alive, or banning sakurafish and koumeposter, who were mostly harmless.

Moderation and janitors have been shit or non-existent (in the case of Holla Forums) on 4chan for a while so I'm not surprised.

The current state of /a/ makes me depressed. Its filled to the brim with newshits, Holla Forumstards & Holla Forumscucks complaining about non-whites or jews as usual.

It was, I was a regular there for a while and the fact that they were so hostile to new members is what kept it so good for so long. The "no spoon feeding" rule was there so you did your homework before you started posting and you didn't clog up the board with dumb requests for gateway shows or a goddamn MPC download link, and while you scanned the threads looking for those things you were bound to pick up some of the board's etiquette and general knowledge about the medium. Basically once you started to interact with the community you were already a somewhat quality poster and that made discussion MUCH smoother than in any other board. Sure, you got the occasional faggot who tried too hard to fit in, but they stuck out like a sore thumb and were usually called out.
I eventually left because I got tired of waifu circlejerks (I know they were always a thing, but at the time they were everywhere and filled with 3DPD shitposters) and seasonal threads being nothing but best girl spam. But it was honestly ok, I knew that for better or for worse it was part of /a/'s culture and I was getting fed up with imageboards in general anyways.
Yeah sorry for the blog post, I got a bit nostalgic.

I may be wrong, I had already left by then, but didn't the Dragon Ball general turn into a shitfest and bring in loads of Holla Forums and Holla Forums (like there's a fucking difference) crossboarders? That said, never would I have thought that sakurafish and sadpanda would get the axe…

See normies.

...

I miss those comfy summer of 2005 tech info dump threads

What began as IRL shitposting ended very, very badly.

I still remember the story where one protestor streaked through a Scientology center covered in vaseline and pubic hair.

2006 was the last year that was real.

Yeah, DBS and other assorted shonenshit, with some crossboarder bait anime like Youjo Senki brought more crossboarders that /a/ could handle.
Anime becoming more popular among normalfags and the whole ironic weeb thing didn't help, either.

What can we do to fight against this? It would have been so much better if all this social media shit was decentralized and open-source. Do we start developing communist apps?

I used to browse /mu/ back in the day but it gets stale after a while. Checked in on it not to long ago and it seems like it's one of the last bastions against Holla Forumsyps most of the time (even tho the metal general I loved to browse can be full of them sometimes) it kinda made me happy. I think most Holla Forumsyps are the type of retards to either be listening to anime and video game OSTs or they try hard to be normie and listen to normie music.

Besides that I occasionally browse /vg/ but it's more filled with Holla Forumsyps and it gets annoying after a while.

I only to /mu/ for sharethreads now. The discussion has gotten stagnant I agree.

why do i miss the bush era so much

Despite all the bad shit going then it was still a simpler time
nostalgia googles most likely

Society hadn't gone completely downhill yet and there was still at least the illusion of hope in the future, there was still good media coming out, and the Internet was fucking great.

It's a simple result of the natural dialectics of memes. 4chan is the place where memes started. Quick overview:

(Era I. "Primitive memery") Memes are simple references to things users enjoyed.

(Era II. "Classical memery") Memes become a way to signal you're a loyal member of the anonymous community. Creativity accelerates.

(Era III. "The meme empire") Memes spread over the internet. Hatred arises between 4chan and other sites. Memes are a way to differentiate yourself. Creativity surges.

(Era IV. "Ironic memery") Trolls adopt enemy memes, people see through this and go along. This becomes a meme in itself.

(Era V. "Meta-ironic memery") Other sites eventually see through this and mimic ironic memery as well. 4chan begins to struggle.

(Era VI. "Post-ironic memery") 4chan becomes more and more outrageous in an attempt to shake off thieves. Ironic memes are utilized for far-right political purposes.

(Era VII. "Transcendental memery") (You are here.) Everyone now knows what 4chan is and what they're up to, but freely choose not to hold it in high regard. Different levels of ironic memery are blurred as people stop caring about differentiating themselves.

(Era VIII. "Socialism") We seize the memes of production and instate a dictatorship of the lurking class.

(Era IX. "Communism") The internet fades away as it is no longer necessary.

But that isn't true.

It is true. I have a PhD in advanced meme theory. Trust me.

Probably one of the more successful containment boards

Where did memes truly start, in your opinion?

Is this a new meme we're testing?

this except minus 9 years

I agree, but even still the internet has become a shittier place in just those five years alone.

this. i miss the atheist socdem internet culture from 2013-and-before even though i don't even really relate to it. anything's better than this crypto-fash bs that's taken over

encyclopediadramatica.rs/Moralfag

Its a really strange phenomena

did 'do it for the lulz' turn leftist?

I refuse to believe 2005 4chan Holla Forums and 2018 Holla Forums have more than a 1% overlap

2005 Holla Forums is not 2018 Holla Forums
Exhibit B:

Anyone who was around for copyleft, creative commons, pirate party, rise of torrents could not possible be an unironic trump supporter.

Maybe they are children and don't remember the Bush presidency?

There's almost certainly no originalfags left. There's now soccer moms, Reddit users and boomer normalfags. Pic related, it makes my fucking blood boil. I can't imagine what 2003 4chan would think if they knew that this is what their site would one day be.

Cursed image.

Why do they all call themselves pedos

I've been thinking the same thing. I miss the days when TJ The Amazing "Shove nanners up my ass" Athiest was considered the edgy faggot on YT.

I asked this before and apparently it's something to do with the title of some electronica song called Centipede, though I don't know the precise relationship. Still, it seems like a dumb oversight to not recognize the uncomfortable similarity between pede and pedo.

For whatever reason, centipedes got really popular with them. Might have been something Trump said, I don't know, I don't like the comedy which is American Politics very much.

It comes from the You Can't Stump the Trump youtube series
youtube.com/watch?v=MKH6PAoUuD0
This is the song used
youtube.com/watch?v=GKzsktuqwyU

Well I got the song right, I just wasn't entirely sure on the context.

The guy who made that series is now left-wing apparently

Really? source?

The last video he posted two months ago seems left wing
youtube.com/watch?v=dxSsFRHWDDU

based.

As I see it, the best way to describe it would be that the teenage and college-age politically incorrect libertarian-ish crowd of the earlier days gradually evolved into Nazis and then when gamergate happened and 4chan attracted even more attention than before most of the actual nazis jumped ship to 8ch and the dedicated Holla Forums-ish elements left on the site are basically just trolls, shitposters, people 2extreme4reddit and a motley assortment of relatively normal people venting in ways that would render them pariahs were it not for their anonymity. There aren't many other places on the internet where someone can say "but that's wrong you stupid nigger" or crack a joke about the holocaust in almost any discussion without facing any consequences.

yes - pic related

…is this not already in place? All major social media is owned by either of those enterprises.

Nobody supports neo-cons, definitely not on 4chan

Had a similar thread on this before
8ch.net/leftypol/res/2377961.html

if you still support Trump after the Shayrat missile strike, you're a neocon

LTV applied to the internet. The users are the ones that create the Internet's value. They write the posts, they share links and images, they create OC, they moderate the boards and forums, they do most of the advertising by word-of-mouth, and so much more. Yet, they are alienated from the value they create and instead exploited by advertisers who harvest data and manipulate their minds. We can only save the internet by seizing it for the users.

...

Hey Howard, did you write that massive essay on 4/qa/?

this is it
link is desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1536413

that's some quality autism

Tbh I love everything about 4chan humor and culture, it usually isn't cancerous as long as there's no talk about politics.
I first came on there long after the normie invasion though so I don't have the same nostalgic memories as some of you do

A more refined exploration of how 4chan changed over the years would have to address how Holla Forums's (and, to a lesser extent, /r9k/ and /a/) culture of frustration and non-stop rage came to dominate the board, slowly smother and homogenize the cultures of other boards, and eventually came to be seen as synonymous with 4chan's culture writ large. I personally regret participating in the ragefest that was the Endless Eight saga on /a/ - by the fourth episode we grew to enjoy our anger at a show that pretty much none of us was going to pay for. You get hooked on the rush that this kind of anger provides. By 2013, the average geek, redditor, tumblrina, or SA goon saw the stereotypical chantard as a pissed-off teenager that would mail you fake anthrax for using VLC instead of MPC-HC.
GG just accelerated the spread of this culture within 4chan and outside to the rest of the Internet. Even smaller boards that were largely ignored by Holla Forumsirgins were eventually overrun.

But even before then, this attitude really did smother a lot of the collaborative culture that held together early 4chan communities. People on /jp/ got a stick up their collective asses over the biannual doujin music download threads. Lots of people just plain stopped coming to contribute, since no one appreciated their volunteer efforts and used the threads to complain endlessly like the entitled rich failsons they were and still are.
Man back in 2013 you could still attack people for being republicans and conservatives on 4chan without having autists shouting you down.

Using a smartphone drastically changes how you interact with people on an image board. First of all, you probably aren't going to be posting images unless you're in the habit of carrying around your junk folder on your person at all times. But more importantly, the futaba format was never made with small screens activated and manipulated by stubby little appendages in mind. It's harder and takes way longer to crank out a long post, spelling and autocorrect errors are easier to make, reviewing your own text is harder to do effectively, and jumping back and forth between different posts is much more of a pain. Most users just get pushed to engage in low-effort, one-line response discussion which contributes nothing and adds more white noise to the board.

There's still a few glowing embers among the ashes. Things usually pick up a bit after a new Touhou game and during comiket.

Please see the following chart on MEMES

/qa/ is a /jp/ colony, nerdboi.

It's still fine if you stick with specific boards like small ones or weeb shit. THe bigger the mainstream the foulest it gets: see Holla Forums, /int/, Holla Forums,…

And if I had to put the blame on someone for the situation, it's moot. He was the one who reintroduced Holla Forums despite it being deleted before for being a cesspool, he felt for the containment meme, and when it became unmanageable, he bailed out.

tl;dr: liberals get mad they are yelled at by conservatives

This pretty much sums up leftists as a whole.

inb4 liberals aren't leftists

Yes, they fucking are, you are all liberals.

I bet you think conservatives aren't liberals too

shouldn't you be out using your right-wing nazi schtick to get some china

meet me in Sutro Heights Park so I can crack your jaw

Conservatives are liberals too, yet they don't get mad when liberals yell at them, funny enough.

And why don't you come to my house so I can shoot you.

explain yourself then

I am not mad nor a conservative.

bitch please, you came in here sperging about some random nonsense and then threatened to shoot a guy
like clockwork

give me your address then

I'm going to assume you are an American because I am an American and I also used to think like this.

American politics uses liberal as a sort of generic term describing the left side of their political spectrum, but the term liberal in the accurate historical sense can be applied to the entire mainstream American discourse from Ted Cruz to Bernie Sanders. Some people specifically identify as 'small-l liberals', indicating they are using the historical term as opposed to 'big-L Liberals' who use the more colloquial definition which has come to roughly means American progressive.

Basically liberals the intellectual descendants of John Locke. Communists and Anarchists are not part of this group, although some more moderate socialists have liberal leanings.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

I was responding to some random nonsense in this thread.
After he gets threatened to get his jaw cracked.
I'm a monarchist, dum dum.

You are liberals because you act exactly like liberals, small hurt fee fees at the big meanie words.

You are denying this because you know liberals are mad and bad.

And no, I'm not an american, and no, you are just a liberal in denial.

In fact, the actual commies in modern Europe are pretty much liberals or they support liberal policies.

1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500

you're not fooling anyone mutt

...

...

You almost certainly aren't a /jp/sie. Don't talk about things you have no experience with, because if you did you'd know that screenshot is referring to the tendency for Holla Forumsyps and Holla Forumsermin derailing upload thread after upload thread with their autism. It destroyed the community and a lot of uploaders fucked off because of it.

They feverishly support an administration that is almost indistinguishable from the Bush and Obama administrations.

...

Why is it that they always default to this when they run out of real arguments.

fuck off back to reddit

A major contributing factor was the rise of "General threads."

Most general threads with non autistic topics were fine, and the autistic ones wored pretty well for contentment.
General Threads were the last bastions of community and real discussion left on

General threads destroyed the entire board's ecology. Instead of topics rising to the top based on their content, everything was channeled into "generals" where the majority viewpoint predominated and forced out everything else. This ended up corralling all content into general threads while relegating the rest of the board to worthless meme spam. General threads are nothing but absolute cancer.

albinoblacksheep.com/flash/mrhahn

I miss when Internet was just random shit like this, instead of srsbsns it always is today.

The specialization of boards destroyed the diversity of discussion and the amount of topics you can discuss on any particular board. You use to be able to talk about history and politics on /int/ but after Holla Forums came back and /his/ was created the only thing /int/ could do was become language generals. I have nothing wrong with the concept of generals its just when you have an entire board dominated by them the conversations eventually become stale and almost samefaggy. Holla Forums breaking of into a million boards also relegated muh gaming journalism and new AAA titles and all the other oldfag or specific generalism got sent to /vr/ and /vg/ respectively.

This nigga knows.

Professional autism.

you cant even browse porn on that site without a thread breaking into a political discussion. It's trash and half the boards I once frequented are hardly active

I lament the state of Holla Forums and /x/, though the latter has always been kinda shit if we're being honest. Now it's even worse.