Where the Internet's Ideas are Born

4chan	1823 up, 439 down
	An image board in which jaded and cynical internet users compete to see who can be the biggest asshole. Imagery on 4chan ranges from funny and clever, to "shocking" gore and morbid type imagery, to paedophile humour and other inanely retarted crap. 4chan users have invented their own language in an attempt to create a psuedo-culture, much in the same vein as the emo, and the lolcats people. You will typically see words like "Moar" and "newfag" plastered across the boards. Whilst those of us looking objectively at 4chan might think "Stop slaughtering the English language you illiterate fuckhole", such words are apparently used to communicate within this E-community. Many users of 4chan are passionately defensive about the website, and often praise it as a tight knit global community and place for people to communicate whatever they want, uncensored. Others see it as a chaotic cesspit where people with no personality or ideals can vent uncreative cynicism and pretend they're clever. Typical thread in 4chan: User 1 posts a gif of a petite Asian girl smothering fecal matter all over her face. User 2 responds with "Sauce" User 3 responds with "Moar" User 4 responds with "fap fap fap" User 5 responds with "This is the first time i've been to this website... haha you douchebags are fucking lame as hell. User 6 responds with "must be newfag" Courtesy of Wikipedia:  This post from Urban Dictionary pretty much sums up the horrors of what 4chan is. 4chan, created in 2003, it was originally intended for discussing anime and manga, but from there, it grew, launching out to spread, create and use popular memes and other subcultures. It has declared war on the Church of Scientology and started internet fads like pedobear, lolcats and rickrolling. The most notorious and popular thread is titled "Random" or "/b/" which has minimal posting rules and enjoys huge popularity. The title is a play off of the Japanese image board, 2chan and has only had one real employee while having many volunteers. 4chan is immensely popular and has been losing money for the costs of maintaining the site.  A large part of the popularity that has been associated with 4chan is that each and every person is anonymous and can stay anonymous as long as they want. If they want to, they can also post under names that they come up with or names that have already or are currently in use. Ideologically, the website maintains that anonymous is not a single person, but a group, mass or horde of people. The mods all can take down posts, images and sub-threads along with posting with a special cap code. They also have "mods in training" deemed janitors which can take out images and posts and suggest users to ban from the site but can't post with the cap code.  The creator, Christopher Poole, with the alias "moot" only had his real life identity revealed in 2008and in 2009, the people of 4chan attempted to and succeeded to hack the Time 100's most influential people list to place moot at the top with over 16 million votes. It was considered fairly obvious that it was hacked, because the initials of the first names of the people in the list in order spell out, "marblecake also the game." Under the alias of moot, he has given speeches at Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but is having difficulty making money off of 4chan and has lived with his mom many times. He is quoted by many sources to be one of the most influential people of the 21st century and is thought to be by Fred Leal of the Brazilian newspaper Estadão, the creator of the anti-thesis to social networking itself. This place has been considered the origins of the group Anonymous and has many associations with it.  The /b/ board has few rules. They have bans on certain illegal content, such as child pornography, invasions of other websites (posting floods of disruptive content), and under-18 viewing, all of which are inherited from site-wide rules. The second rule about invading other websites was adopted after the 2006 overflow of Habbo Hotel.  4chan created a massive culture and various fads such as calling each other fags. Poole has also stated that the websites traffic as of 2008, the website garnered an outstanding rate of 150,000 - 200,000 posts a day. This large amount of posts allows new memes, or internet catchphrases or pictures to be spread in days or hours According to the Washington Post, "the site's users have managed to pull off some of the highest-profile collective actions in the history of the Internet."[49]. This has been proven multiple times after they have attacked Youtube more than once, a law firm, multiple film industries and have even helped police track down potential terrorists. The most famous work of internet tracking was done in 2009 when a 14 year old boy was video taping himself abusing a cat named dusty. After the 4chan users contacted the local police, he was arrested and the cat was treated by veterinarians. -------- 4chan can be a place of immense evil and horror, but it is also a place of internet intellectuals and sociopaths. The threads and posts of the various users with the anonymity of the internet has resulted in the antithesis to social networking and has done things that one can only imagine. ---------------------------------- -The Observer