RIP 4chan

The web's most notorious site is gone. What’s its legacy?

Quite possibly the most important website of the past 20 years has finally disappeared. Fitting, in a way, that 4chan was hacked, its users doxed.

The notorious image sharing board is now offline. All gone, except its source code, admins’ email addresses and user details – which has been stolen and published for all to see. It’s fitting, because this is what 4chan users routinely did to others.

Some version of the site might reappear (4chan.org homepage now just reads ‘see you soon’). But it will never be the same.

4chan was founded back in 2003 by an American teenager called Christopher Poole, who was a fan of the notorious troll forum SomethingAwful. Poole had found a Japanese image-sharing website called Futaba that allowed users to post about anything, anonymously. The anonymous Futaba users were wildly creative, highly offensive and uncontrollable. The website was notorious in Japan for gory fiction about students slaughtering teachers, anime porn, and much besides, causing general moral outrage.

Futaba’s web address was www.2chan.net. Poole - being 14 years old - obviously loved it, and decided to make an English language equivalent. He called it 4chan: ‘its [sic] TWO TIMES THE CHAN MOTHERFUCK!’ he posted under his pseudonym ‘moot’.

4chan was a simple image sharing site, where anonymous users could post under various categories. There were boards dedicated to a variety of subjects, including manga, DIY, cooking, politics and literature.

Typical 4chan thread. A lot of cats.

But the majority of the tens of million people who visited the site each month headed for /b/, otherwise known as the ‘random’ board. Every day dozens of bizarre, offensive or sexually graphic image ‘threads’ would be constantly running on /b/. With little to no moderation and almost everyone posting anonymously. The only set of (very loose) guidelines were the 47 Rules of the Internet, created by /b/users, or ‘/b/tards’, themselves, including:

Rule 1: Do not talk about /b/

Rule 2: Do NOT talk about /b/

Rule 8: There are no real rules about posting

Rule 20: Nothing is to be taken seriously

Rule 31: Tits or G[et] T[he] F[uck] O[ut] – the choice is yours

Rule 36: There is always more fucked-up shit than what you just saw

Rule 38: No real limits of any kind apply here – not even the sky

Rule 42: Nothing is sacred

Enforced anonymity, the competitive urge to outdo your fellow users and a determination to push offensiveness in the name of a vague anti-censorship ideology was all wrapped up in /b/’s catchphrase: ‘I did it for the lulz’. A phrase employed to justify anything and everything.

Thanks to /b/ and the lulz that 4chan quickly become known as the most notorious site on the internet - and for young men, one of the most popular and important.

It’s most infamous now for the rage, the cruelty, the nastiness that was part of the culture there. The site has been linked to school shootings. One man murdered his partner - and posted a photo on the site.

And it was on /b/ that I watched – back in 2013 – the worst examples of vindictive trolling I’d ever seen. I covered it in my book The Dark Net.

Female users were a novelty on /b/. Women were routinely ignored or insulted unless they posted photographs of themselves, or played ‘camgirl’ – posting sexual photographs of themselves on request. 4chan had a dedicated board for camming, called ‘/soc/’, where users were expected to treat camgirls ‘nicely’. Every day, dozens of camgirls appeared there and performed. But occasionally one foolishly strayed into /b/.

And in August 2013 I watched in horror as someone – I’ll call her Sarah – did exactly that.

‘Hi /b/!’ read the small placard that Sarah held to her semi-naked body. ‘7 August 2013, 9.35 p.m.’