This week, we mourn the death of 4chan. We honor the legacy which 4chan had through its influence as a controversial, popular, and untameable stomping ground for the silent anonymous posters who carved out existence through the ripple effect of their ideas spreading across humanity. We lament over the inevitable decline of 4chan, cemented by a shutdown incurred through a hacker's leak, one motivated through a tale of intrigue and retribution. We look back to the history of 4chan, its impact upon the world, and the future for its scattered users.

The state of a society can be encapsulated by the discourse of its people. In an online generation, this flow of ideas is mapped out through the medium of the internet. Particular apps, websites, forums, and chatrooms act as the alcoves in which important conversations spiral into social movements, aesthetic tribes, mass conscious egregores, and the heralding of great change. Of all the places online which cast out reverberations to change the real world through sheer momentum, no place was more notorious, iconic, or important than 4chan.

Most people might not understand why a website deserves a eulogy for being shut down for a short period of time, let alone why 4chan deserves to be mourned. To the average uninformed person, 4chan represented a shadowy boogeyman of disgusting connotation. News outlets described the imageboard as a cesspool of frightening anonymous activity which led to public shootings, suicides, grooming, political assassinations, major hacks, and any other variety of mayhem and mischief they could construe some flimsy correlation of responsibility onto 4chan for.

Simultaneously, to those who have any amount of experience online beyond surface level content aggregation, 4chan represented the core of the internet itself. It was seen as a crucible of creative energy, an ethereal source of new ideas where memes themselves originated to be dispersed across the network and evolve beyond recognition. Whether you visited the website or not, 4chan affected you personally. Its vilification at the hands of institutional media only accelerated as it became clear that the imageboard has a direct effect on the rise of dissident political backlash to an order that 4chan and /pol/ could be directly credited as responsible for Trump himself getting elected beyond all expectation.

This is just one of many times 4chan has “died” throughout the past 22 years of its existence. Like any online community, there was a persistent anxious discourse regarding the imageboard's internal cultural identity. The site's growing number of boards (4chan's channels centered around specific discussion topics) each had their own particular subcultures, their amalgam loosely defining 4chan's overall user identity. Very quickly, distinct eras would be catalogued as entry points for which category of user someone would occupy, defined by the years in which they first started using the platform.

Different eras came to be categorized in various terms, increasing in derogatory nature with each passing year. One specific cluster of years would be called "cancer" while another would mark the influx of Redditors (regarded as the great satan of unsouled content consumers). Users demarcated themselves in split categories between "oldfags" and "newfags" to establish their seniority as a level of tenure justifying their authority of opinion. While the new vs old discourse had specific defining points, often people would joke that they were the "real" 4chan oldfags along with everyone who joined before themselves and that everyone who joined after was a contemptible newfag with no credibility towards 4chan's 'actual' culture.

Throughout 4chan's existence, these waves of newcomers were paired with swathes of users exiting the imageboard, fundamentally changing board culture over time. Changes of significant volume resulted in distinct shifts, many of which would be lambasted by the oldfag population as the nail in the coffin for the website they once loved. Personally, I define 4chan's "death" as having occurred in the several years preceding 2015, when the website's founder, Christopher 'moot' Poole sold the website to Hiroyuki Nishimura, founder of the Japanese 2chan image board which served as 4chan's inspiration during its creation in 2003.

4chan has experienced several of these "deaths", many preceding my own foray into the website sometime in 2012. Veterans would call me a newfag who never truly experienced 4chan and they may be right, but during my foray I found a website which held a vitality of uninhibited posting that could scarcely be found anywhere else online. 4chan was special because it was a beacon of genuine discourse, an oasis of anonymous candid discussion sheltered from the suffocating encroachment of cancel culture.

The anonymous aspect of 4chan was crucial towards fostering original thought. During the golden age of the internet, various forums practiced anonymity and pseudonymity, divorcing the user from their real-life identity and allowing them to engage in a manner which may be considered too risky or vulnerable. While the imageboard seems like antiquated technology in comparison to the mobile app algorithm optimized perfected UI of social media, it was new technology in stark contrast to the more traditional static forums, mailing lists, and foreign BBS's of the Web 1.0 era.

The moralizing chastisement of 4chan's "radical" anonymous posting is a symptom of Web 2.0 culture, a grand shift into active user generated content defined by a state-supported corporate push towards synchronizing personal real-life identity with online identity. Before 2005, nearly every forum, chat, and website online had people using creative fictional characters for their avatars and colorful aesthetic usernames to pair with controversial and offensive posts that slung slurs as freely as an Xbox360 Call of Duty voicechat lobby.

As people grew beyond their adolescence and the wild west of the internet became tamed by the mass influx of non-online people developing doxxed social media accounts, the core tenets of Web 1.0 culture would fade away. Forums would die, websites would get taken down, and crucial original media would be drowned out as the internet itself would be consolidated into a handful of major content aggregates owned by multibillion dollar corporations.

4chan remained defiant against this shift, holding onto the spirit of the Network while retaining its relevance throughout the 2000s and 2010s. The imageboard acted as a consistent chainlink between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, forging the culture of the internet itself as new memes were made within its crucible to be trickled down to the masses for regurgitation.

Over time, 4chan experienced increasing authoritative pressure, both from state entities surveilling the website as a hotspot for criminal activity and from heavy handed moderation which would often smother or wipe out entire board communities. In turn, these communities rebelled and splintered, creating various "altchans" as a refuge from 4chan's "sold out" overpolicing and attempting to return to a more genuine core tone.

The most notorious of these altchans became 8chan, a controversial imageboard which often carried out various memetic campaigns and hosted a number of infamous incidents ranging from the playful He Will Not Divide Us capture-the-flag prank harassment of Shia Labeouf on livestream to the manifesto and announcement of the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand.

Various other altchans have sprung up over the past two decades, both directly from 4chan and from the dissolution of 8chan following its many scandals. These imageboards grew in number as 4chan's offshoots were increasingly embroiled in purity spirals, reactive exodus, and novel attempts at iterating upon the imageboard technology, such as the realtime chat mechanic utilized in Miladychan.

4chan's recent downfall was credited to one such altchan, Soyjak.party. Following the purchase of 4chan, the new owner Hiro (dubbed Hiroshimoot) created a board called /qa/ which was dedicated to meta discussion of 4chan itself. This board was considered a dumping ground for questions regarding the website's development and future, a place to aggregate everyone's concerns into one functional board.

Almost immediately, /qa/ was organically transformed into a board dedicated to the constant production of memes. People on /qa/ used the board as a testbed factory for producing wojaks, frogposting, cuteposting, and a variety of other fast production content in a trial and error fashion. Moderators on 4chan looked down upon /qa/ posters, denigrating their content as low-effort and off-topic. The entire board was taken down as a result, an action which many /qa/ posters felt was a deliberate vindictive act of petty curmudgeon busybodying.

Soyajk.party was the result of /qa/'s forced eviction, a content focused continuation of /qa/ style posting now hellbent on retribution for what they felt was a flagrant abuse of moderator power. For at least the better part of a year, if not longer, one of their members managed to infiltrate 4chan through exploiting a PHP backend which had not received any updates for over a decade.

The hacker lurked quietly, accruing as much information as possible and collecting everything before deciding to strike this week. The hacker leaked data about the moderators and jannies (janitorial staff members that assist moderators—they do it for free) but deliberately withheld any leaks of user information, such as emails of 4chan passholders.

Besides jannies having their emails posted on soyjak threads, files of 4chan's source code and glimpses into the private moderator board, and the GitHub development logs were all points of interest in Soyjak's leak thread as it became disseminated across various Twitter posts and news publications. The leak forced 4chan to shut down, as they had no ability to patch the vulnerability on their aging platform.

Estimates of 4chan's eventual return range anywhere from 2 weeks to a little over a month, but the incident has been defined as the ultimate death blow to the imageboard, marking the apotheosis of its steady decline. Historically, the website has never been down for more than a couple days. Every time a platform goes down, there is always a permanent loss of users which increases in magnitude the longer the platform takes to recover. 4chan's periodic eras of exodus have led to a general lessening of quality in posters. The most significant recent diaspora found its way to Twitter sometime in 2018. Masses of anons eked out meager profiles, attaching avatars and names to their verbal physiognomy and recognizing old friends in the faces of strangers.

Like freshly liberated occupants of Plato's cave pairing familiar voices to people who were once shadows, this horde of posters quickly built a network of connections under the oppressive thumb of Dorsey-era DEI Twitter, fighting back against the COVID-19 global mandate tyranny, furthering the Overton Window towards normality, and helping trample upon the dying corpse of institutional media blanket propaganda.

Humanity has always yearned for the great communal campfire where ideas can be exchanged freely to ferment and evolve without impingement. Before Twitter, before 4chan, before the internet itself, the fire of the age was passed from various iconic gathering places. The cafes of Paris where writers rubbed shoulders with artists in the early 20th century, the cafes of Vienna where philosophers crossed paths with dictators, the agora in Athens where Western philosophy was built by history's greatest thinkers, all of these locations of significance act as an unbroken chain in which 4chan was the most recent distinct link.

While there is some tragedy in 4chan's forlorn decline and unceremonious toppling at the hands of its own disgruntled splinter, like a bastard child killing his father out of vengeance, a great legacy has cemented itself in the imageboard's reign of over 20 years. 4chan kept the spirit of the Network alive, acting as a continuous symbol of freedom, creativity, and chaos to anyone even slightly familiar with using the internet.

4chan was more than just a website, it was a pseudonymous self pruning auxiliary to the format of the forum itself. 4chan was not a startup, it was not an SaaS, it was not a vaporware product propped up to fleece VC's, it was the ultimate imageboard, a grassroots shift into the future during the time of its creation and a pillar of legacy posting during the waning days of its end.

Nobody truly knows what will happen with 4chan. Promises are made of its return, yet many seem dismayed at the general trajectory of the site over the last few years. Whether 4chan returns to the same purgatorial plateau it was traversing already, whimpers slightly before its final end, uproots its malaise into a glorious renaissance for new age, or evolves through its descendants, one certainty is that 4chan will always remain as an icon to look towards in the great encapsulation of the Network's primordial history.

4chan is dead. Long live 4chan.

Michael Dragovic is Chief of Staff at Remilia Corporation and goes by Scorched Earth Policy on Twitter (@scearpo). When he's not working, you can find him hovering above the Pacific Ocean as a 750-mile wide metal cube rotating and oscillating at Mach 5.