http://archive.is/tczEq
THE INTERNET MAKES sense in metaphors. Superhighways, clouds, pages, links. Facebook is a town square. Wikipedia, a kind of brain. So what about 4chan, the imageboard site where users post just about anything, with anonymity and impunity? If you trust 4channers themselves, it’s the internet’s soul.
Well, that’s alarming.
4chan has never been a nice place. Most people don’t spend time there, but most people feel its effects, everything from fake news to doxing. Outsiders prefer different metaphors: Cesspool. Swamp. Sea of trolls.
There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online—but communities of prototrolls were beginning to crawl out of the primordial ooze of the early web. One was a Japanese collective called Ayashii Warudo, sometimes translated as Nameless World, where users engaged in edgy, brazen banter and banded together to raid rival sites.
Across the Pacific, American geeks were eyeing their Japanese counterparts lustily. They fetishized everything about Japanese culture, not just videogames and samurai swords but manga and hentai (anime porn). Naturally, they found their way to places like Ayashii Warudo, and one enthusiast, a New Yorker named Christopher Poole, set out to create an English-language alternative. He ported over the ethos, populating the site with Japanese-style boards like /h/ (for hentai) and /y/ for yaoi (gay male hentai for a female audience). Announcing his creation’s existence in October 2003, Poole wrote: “regging [webspeak for registering] 4chan.net. brace for faggotry.” The tone was established.
THE INTERNET MAKES sense in metaphors. Superhighways, clouds, pages, links. Facebook is a town square. Wikipedia, a kind of brain. So what about 4chan, the imageboard site where users post just about anything, with anonymity and impunity? If you trust 4channers themselves, it’s the internet’s soul.
Well, that’s alarming.
4chan has never been a nice place. Most people don’t spend time there, but most people feel its effects, everything from fake news to doxing. Outsiders prefer different metaphors: Cesspool. Swamp. Sea of trolls.
There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when trolls didn’t really exist online—but communities of prototrolls were beginning to crawl out of the primordial ooze of the early web. One was a Japanese collective called Ayashii Warudo, sometimes translated as Nameless World, where users engaged in edgy, brazen banter and banded together to raid rival sites.
Across the Pacific, American geeks were eyeing their Japanese counterparts lustily. They fetishized everything about Japanese culture, not just videogames and samurai swords but manga and hentai (anime porn). Naturally, they found their way to places like Ayashii Warudo, and one enthusiast, a New Yorker named Christopher Poole, set out to create an English-language alternative. He ported over the ethos, populating the site with Japanese-style boards like /h/ (for hentai) and /y/ for yaoi (gay male hentai for a female audience). Announcing his creation’s existence in October 2003, Poole wrote: “regging [webspeak for registering] 4chan.net. brace for faggotry.” The tone was established.
