i've only used imageboards for a little under two years, so to me the constant Holla Forums stormniggery feels like the status quo - i've never known any different
can some oldfags enlighten me as to what the golden age was like, back before Holla Forums got big? were things really any better than they are now?
pic unrelated
It was always shit, but I do miss the days when the racism was ironic and threads weren't bombarded with 'cuckcuckcuck'
whatever was good about imageboard cuture was killed by stormniggers and GG
It was always shit, but it used to be a lot less shitty.
I was underage, and I used to browse Holla Forums a lot (not that I was still there by the time Holla Forums came about) so my memory is a bit off no doubt.
People would do things like spam nigger and do raids on websites like habbo hotel with swastikas, but there was never any real racism beyond - it offends you so its funny. No one really discussed politics outside of edgy Ron Paul supporters. To be honest, a lot of 4chans group initiatives were pretty positive, calling the cops on people and shit as opposed to mass death threats.
I never went on /new/ but my understanding is that it was a containment board that actually worked. When it was deleted they all came to /int/, a place I posted regularly - and they completely destroyed it. moot eventually made Holla Forums and for some reason the cat was out of the bag now. I'd argue that they unfortunately became more outspoken and obnoxious with gamergate.
As someone who supported GG from a left perspective, this always bugs me.
When would you say you quit? I was there for almost a year but it slowly degenerated into a lolbert torture chamber more offended about SJWs than anything the gaming industry actually did so I jumped ship.
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Probably not long after the migration here. I found leftypol and never looked back.
Well I wasn't AS left as I am now. I was a socdem liberal who had done some marxist reading, but hadn't really gone all the way down the rabbit hole. I was struggled to reconcile my hatred of tumblr style idpol and my hatred of stormtards. Holla Forums helped me understand what I basically already knew but didn't understand.
It was funnier, and more of a sense of community because it wasn't enormous like it is now. But I guess any online community gets that was (see: early Reddit vs Reddit now)
Anyone remember Anonidate? I met a guy off of there in 2008. He was very odd. He REALLY liked bento boxes, to near obsessiveness.
This sums it up nicely. But I actually like the cuck meme because I have a retarded sense of hunor.
I'm still in GG. You are like little baby.
I was involved-ish with GG from when it started to about early October, mainly because I enjoyed watching the shitshow, but also because I hated the fact that an abuser like Quinn was being treated like some precious victim.
But after a month or so the drama stopped being fun so I stopped caring around the time of the exodus.
I first found board culture in 2007. I think the Scientology stuff started in 2008 which is when the media first became aware of "anonymous". Back then everyone still called each other niggers but the boards didn't seem to be as filled with hate as they are now. We would raid Habbo Hotel or make fun of some religious people on youtube (venomfangx). Ron Paul was very popular before the 08 US election there but that's all of what I remember of the little politics that ever was discussed then. A furry got the 100m'th post on Holla Forums.
I started posting on Something Awful in 2010 and missed the rise of Holla Forums.
Also, adding to this, I liked the goofy shit moot did back then like #fortune or when they made Cotton Eye Joe loop on every page. The sense of fun is kinda gone.
Yeah the last time I was really active on 4chan was late 2010-early 2011, and even then there was a sense of humor about the place that has long since disappeared.
The common response was humor and ridicule rather than feigned/pretentious disdain for whoever you disagree with. If someone said something you don't like/was stupid, you made fun of them or whatever their post was about. Normalfaggotry–which isn't just doing normal things but insisting that everyone behave like you, ie "normal"–was not tolerated. People that regularly contributed were celebrated instead of shit on by the edgy and envious. No one was right, everyone was wrong, and you were a faggot for even caring.
Alas, all those memes and shitposts, flown away like leaves on the river.
Nothing was taken as seriously. Everything was in jest. It was about being crude and offending people, not your actual views.
u wot m8?
Pic related, it's 2006ish (?) Fox coverage of the Dangerous Anonymous Terrorists.
This statement is sublime.
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Here's your (you) ironically.
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Saw it coming, but happy it did.
you're a faggot
It matters when the quote in is true. Replace 'idiots' with 'racists'. Think about all the people who would've otherwise kept some slightly fucked up views secret, not really perpetuated them, who now go to Trump rallies and get caught up in this spiralling up, this kind of widening of the Overton window of not politics but basic humanity. It would be excessive to trace the rise in fascism in Europe and the alt-right in the US to imageboards, but if a great many publicly concealed cunts (or even simply impressionable teens) went onto 4chan's nascent Holla Forums and their seeds of thoughts were not only normalised but underwent extreme composting, and these people then spoke openly about such views in a diminished form to their friends… you can see how this would cause a slow rising of the leviathan which we thought was sunk forever after the Nazis.
Which is why Holla Forums should focus more on producing propaganda for the wider internet, and spread theory in person to their friends.
People would have never kept their fucked up views secret, as facebook, twitter and tumblr decisively prove. Any attempt to shut them up, including site-wide bans, or even legislation and police intervention - much less taboos and social pressure - is bound to fail. Freedom of speech cannot be constrained without crippling the communication channels, and, since internet is now an economic necessity, it just won't happen.
The difference that anonymous imageboards make is not existential but qualitative. They're a melting pot of creativity that has a power to make any message into a memetic powerhouse. That they're now utilized solely by the alternative right is a result of everyone else closing themselves off in a bubble. The liberal "left", in particular, not long ago condescendingly believed 4chan to be just a juvenile phase in the evolution of the social web, on the way to be superseded by their more "mature" communities with higher "standards". And then Trump came and they never knew what hit them - and given how they keep advertising imageboards as the dangerous (read: cool) nazi hangout, they still have no fucking idea.
Contrarian, edgy, and hostile towards outsiders and morons. 99% of tripfags were cancerous. Also furfags. Nothing was ever taken seriously. People who took things seriously were idiots.
So much the same, even if it has mellowed a bit, and furfags aren't the shitposting faggots they used to be.
Instead any board Holla Forums likes is unbrowsable, and every thread on every board is in danger of Holla Forums derailing it. I preferred the furfags tbh.
this
people have never kept their shit off the internet. LiveJournal, anyone?
Which becomes in and of itself a revelatory disjunction, to which the authors are partially fucking oblivious. They end up writing their way into unemployment by their own narration of the form this antagonism takes.
Good analysis
Oh, also
The word meme once referred to an internet phenomenon, not a picture with words on it (i.e an image macro)
Some things like dat boi and harambe can be considered memes, but just posting something like "when he xyz" isn't a meme in itself.
Memes are not exclusively image macros, memescrub. Any inside joke that spreads is a meme.
Technically, any IDEA that spreads is a meme.
Stories are memes. Ideologies are memes. Words are memes.
I think you're overestimating a bit the power of imageboards. Sure, Holla Forumsyps are a very vocal part of trump supporters but they're a minority. Look at trump rallies, his voterbase is rednecks and old fucks, memes aside he doesn't have anything that GW Bush didn't have. And probably memes aren't as influencial as we think.
It's where everybody say niggers and faggots as hello.
So not much different from now, just that back then, trolls aren't paid to troll.
Yes, but to make up something and post in, never to be reposted again, doesn't make it a meme. I know people who say shit like "I posted a meme on facebook" - meaning something they made that no one will ever spread.
It was much more innocent and fun.
1990-2010
was the golden age of the Internet in terms of creativity and orginality, everything after that has been completely shit.
I wouldn't call SHOOT DA ZOG Occupied Government innocent and fun.
I dunno, I'd say pre-2005 was pretty glorious and then 2005 until around either 2011 or 2013 was a pretty decent, if not amazing stretch.
Since then it's been unbearably shit.
That's precisely what makes his takeover of social media so impressive. He never had the numbers. What he had was superior weaponry.
Pretty much this. It's really pathetic how that became corrupted to the word it's used now.
Honestly had I known that being ironically racist was going to lead to Holla Forumsack views being tolerated…
But if you would have told me 5 years ago that chan culture was opening a door to a literal nazi takeover of the board I would've laughed at you. And called you a faggot
Cranky Old Man Mode Turn On
I got in near the periphery a few years earlier, but from what I can tell the difference is the spam of synonyms for 'nigger' and le windmill of friendship and tolerance were initially done ironically, which summerfags, normalfags and stormfags didn't understand or care about. It was meant to offend, and to keep away the easily-offended, and like any innoculation it left its populace vulnerable when a resistant strain of the disease evolved Gribblemode: or was grown in some DARPA lab. Also cuck maymay wasn't a thing and people had thick skins and occasionally had actual arguments instead two fragile poopsoc pantywastes calling each other JIDF cointelpro shills from redditumblr reptoid cryptogommunisds.
From what I could tell from lurking and e-osmosis, the only politics anybody seemed to care about was not letting people abuse animals, esp. cats; shitting on the CoS and other hotpocket factories, and occasionally assembling Voltron to fight the early SOPA prototypes or other external threats or deserving targets. Like the Borg, the hivemind ignored that which it didn't either consider a threat or a resource. Which suited me and everybody else just fine, seemed like.
The memes were and felt more like the product of artisans doing something because they wanted to, than that of a printing press under the control a small team of propagandists and advertisering execs churning out as many variations as they can wring out of one of the two unfunny extremes of an A. Wyatt Mann cartoon or yet another meaningless advice animal to put on an overpriced Hot Topic t-shirt about a year after the internet has vaguely forgot about it; less like somebody cranked them out to be the new cool thing or to shill some head of the corporatist hydra or other. There was no 'hey everybody I came up with a new meme let's spam it on X board, that'll show em!' shit, at least none I ever encountered. The humor wasn't about jacking off to 'proving' you were right about something political with a dingbat source or jpeg artifact. The early memes (that I've seen) were made as tools of expression or humor, not weapons for electronic shouting matches and 'who's more smug?' contests. They were designed for dicking around on the internet. It seems like the internet itself has changed since then from a place for nerds to dick around and argue to a mirror of the vertical have-and-have-not world the NORPs/normies/normalfags built everywhere else.
Honestly the whole internet was less political back then, even after the War Criminal Cokenegro/Assburger Ballast vs. Senile Old Fuck/Blowup Doll Ballast 'election' in 08. How fortuitous to the Establishment that the polyps started to gain traction right after SOPA-PIPA got its shit rekd in part by 4ch back in 2012…
Pretty much every fringe group has gotten bigger and fringier since the internet. I miss the days when the Furries and vampirefags were the biggest annoyance in that category.
Shady Businessman can neither program nor see his penis w/o the use of a handmirror.
On the Internet, one autist is louder as 10000 normalfags. Num
fucking blissful
no really, imageboards have always been cancer
Holla Forumslacks just allowed us to give it a name
actually scratch that: I remember when I first discovered teh Holla Forums it actually was a pretty cool place. It was fucking funny. It had plenty of cancer, but only during summer, the rest of the year, you could always find something legit to laugh at, like peoples' stupidity in raiding
But, I do think this image has it right
this
I'm going to posit a t'eory, if y'all are up for it:
the interwebz turned shit because we who had never had this wondrous place had lived autism-free lives and knew how to control out baser instincts
Now, kids who've grown up ALWAYS knowing teh Holla Forums and watched gleefully the shit we were doing joined in but had never known a world without trolling and knew nothing on how to be non-autist