On April 15, 2025, rumors are that 4chan has been hacked. This is being written on that same day – but not about the hacking, though. I mean, the hacking is something; it’s being said that someone managed to get access to the backend of the website. What happens to them after that, I don’t know, but what I do know is that a TechCrunch article about it was one of the first things that came up when I typed the subject into the search bar.

Here’s what caught my attention:

I am so mad at the people who wrote this article.

There are a lot of things we can say about 4chan. I think it passed its prime almost ten years ago and it no longer has its ear to the ground where it comes to popular sentiment. The /co/ board was consistently full of the same old arguments about shows that went off the air twenty years ago. The /tg/ board has been sterile since 2009 when the moderators nuked the place. /mlp/ has been a tragic experiment in how long the question of “what if ponies wanted to have sex” can sustain itself as a conversation topic. Then of course there’s also the fact that they knowingly allowed people to deploy LLM chatbots across the site so long as they paid for a “4chan pass”, which ensured that you couldn’t know if you were even talking to a human. The site has truly become a burned-out husk of what it once was.

But a central axis to the alt-right movement?

This right here. THIS. This is why people have lost all faith in the media’s ability to report on anything in an objective and valuable manner. This so-called reporter had a bias in their mind and decided that part of how they’re going to “inform” readers about a major event is to just say that bias is an objective fact, and not a clear flag that this person has possibly never even seen the front page of 4chan before.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. There are supporters of the far-right on 4chan, but do you know there’s an even stronger hub of right wing support? On Facebook, on Youtube, and, of course, Twitter! Twitter, now called “X”, is owned and operated by one of the most high-profile and wealthiest supporters of the alt-right. The mainstream social media is where the alt-right is gathering, and for that matter, the “alt-right” is in the White House right now. They’re currently deporting people to El Salvadore while speaking publicly, on the record, about how convenient it would be do that to US Citizens. Can we really accuse 4chan of being the core of a movement once that movement has taken over the Department of Justice?

I feel like one of the hundreds of threads about how Korra was hot, but her show’s writing sucked, does not fully encapsulate exactly what’s happening in the right wing these days in the same way that all of 4chan felt barely in touch with anything happening anywhere. The site had become a rut, living off the fumes of its past glory, and ironically any association 4chan ever had with the right wing was because the original owner, moot (Christopher Poole if you wanted to use his government name), was trying to emulate the major tech moguls who were always saying that social media can’t be allowed to moderate political discussion.

Of course to know that, you’d have to have been involved in the 4chan community at some point, or you’d have to have talked to someone who was involved with it. In fact, when we go all the way back to when 4chan did matter and people did care, it was only the “seedy underbelly” as far as the fact that it was a very popular message board and it was barely moderated. From its inception until about 2009, the entire site was free to do whatever it wanted, and all policing was done by users bullying each other or by creating in-jokes which outside agitators weren’t keeping up with at the time. That was how the site developed its infamous, rapacious culture. It was this era in which Fox News reported on the site as being “the dangerous hacker known as 4chan”. Fox blew up a van to scare your parents and really drive the point home (the van was hacked with malicious 4chan posts, see).

We laughed at how out of touch Fox News was, but as Facebook, Google, and the other tech cartels began to really take everything over and make billions of dollars off irresponsibly lax anti-trust enforcement, moot began to ask himself if there was any way for him to turn 4chan into some kind of horrific leviathan that would ruin all our lives while making him money, the same way Facebook was doing. Fortunately for us all on 4chan, moot didn’t really understand the kind of business and power the tech cartels were amassing. Unfortunately for us, that mostly meant he wasted a lot of time trying to micromanage 4chan’s users into being more palatable to advertisers.

He never did succeed at making 4chan into an international, money-printing doomsday machine. He never had the capital to vertically integrate the website with anything, and maybe never realized that was Facebook’s real business model. However, 4chan did continue to be a place where people could discuss current events anonymously, albeit with invasive and arbitrary moderation practices that he was constantly changing. That meant that interesting things still happened on the site in spite of moot doing everything to prevent it, and one happy day, 4chan spawned the My Little Pony Fandom, which was the last major online fandom to ever rise organically, as of this date.

I don’t mention My Little Pony just because I made fun animated videos for the fandom. It’s very, very important to note. Have you ever wondered why there’s never been another major, organically-driven fandom? It seems like surely something would have to come around eventually, right?

And something probably would have. We’d all be aware of some other huge fandom going around, and there’d be huge conventions you could attend. So where is that new thing? We’ve had plenty of corporate astroturfing campaigns, but those “fandoms” drop off as soon as the advertising budget does. There have been multiple factors contributing to this, but I think one major aspect of this is that the tech cartels have completed their consolidation of the internet.

In 2014, we all got to enjoy a phenomenon called “Gamergate”. If you read the wiki article or look at most of what was written by the press at the time, it was an event that happened spontaneously for no reason. All at once, because it was apparently always true, every person who played video games and everyone on 4chan or on the internet was sexist. In some cases, the sexism was subconscious. Maybe you were “micro” sexist, and you had internalized sexism. Denying it, especially, made you sexist.

Some girl made a really terrible “Choose Your Own Adventure” book about depression, she had some kind of sexual relationship with some guy who wrote for games journals. Her boyfriend, or her ex, or something wrote a blog post about it. And for some reason, we all cared, and it somehow said a lot about society, your place in society, and your identity.

This gets pinned on 4chan, which always makes me mad, because it was at that same time that Google was experimenting with more “engagement” driven content across its platforms. The more people interacted with a video and the longer anyone watched it, the more they promoted it everywhere. In that time, we had incredibly toxic gems like “LeafyIsHere” whose whole content library revolved around bullying people or making negative commentary on things. Being terrible was a great way to achieve fame and money in that era, and it wasn’t 4chan promoting it – it was the mainstream web giants.

And it wasn’t 4chan that was using an algorithm to promote the major instigators of Gamergate, either. Youtube’s system was able to figure out which side of that issue you fell under, and then made sure it showed you content produced only by that side. This is when the United States, and in fact a lot of the world, began to grow divided beyond any point of reconciliation. Google began to place people into opposing political groups so as to maximize engagement and drive ad revenue, and somehow we got an online civil war over something that in hindsight almost certainly did not matter.

It’s hard to get people to sit down and really listen to or understand how manipulative these algorithmic systems really are. They’re so bad for us. It really can’t be underplayed or understated – and part of what makes them so devious is that they do use little kernels of truth to get everyone going.

On the one side of Gamergate, you had people arguing that video games and their communities could be frankly kind of toxic towards women. Prior to 2014, I don’t think saying that would have even been a controversial statement. There were a lot of young, teenage boys in the gaming world, and if for nothing but their age, they could certainly make a chat room uncomfortable for a girl just trying to set your ass on fire in Team Fortress 2.

On the other side, you had people frustrated that games journalism had become toothless patrons to the games industry, and that they refused to honestly rate or report on anything. If a game was bad, it got a good score, because the journals didn’t want to upset their advertisers. When a rumor began to circulate that some dumb girl was getting her game promoted because she slept with a game journalist, it was a spark hitting a keg of gunpowder. The consumers already didn’t trust the journalists, and when all the journalists rallied behind one another to deflect the root anger of those consumers, it made the situation worse.

Journalists excluded, the two core sides of Gamergate didn’t actually have grievances at odds with one another. Games could have been more inclusive without being condescending. Games journalists needed to report more honestly on games and figure out a business model that didn’t fully compromise their core value to their consumers. There’s no war here. There was no battle. Nobody on a side in Gamergate actually had something to gain by crushing the other side because the two sides weren’t striving for opposite goals.

What was happening was a war over the narrative. Google provided one narrative to one side, and it provided a completely different narrative to the other side. They fought over which narrative was true, and they fought over whether either side was acting in good faith by trying to change the subject. The villain was Google and the tech monopolies that control how we access information, how we learn narratives. They still are that villain.

In 2016, we elected Donald Trump, and this was the result of the exact same engagement-driven information network. Donald Trump had run for president numerous times before, mainly using it as a publicity stunt, and nobody took him seriously until the tech industry created an information network that could shape narratives and divide people into different camps by creating two separate stories about any single thing. The alt-right’s hub was Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the algorithms they used. They do this to make money from advertising.

4chan is merely just a byproduct of the reality we live in. Nobody on /co/ is really talking about anything new or interesting because fun and enjoyable things don’t get promoted across our information networks anymore. You might find people on /pol/ spewing racism and crackpot theories, but an anti-vaxxer is in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, so why would an unmoderated politics forum not be talking about crackpot medical theories? Under what conditions would it not be full of racism? How could it be anything but a reflection of the information people are consuming these days? Nobody would believe a word being said on /pol/ if there weren’t a tireless machine working every day to make sure people believe these things.

4chan isn’t the central hub of anything these days. It’s a set of old bones. Anything horrible you’ve seen there lately is just a ripple on the surface of a much deeper, more powerful, better funded problem, and if TechCrunch ever reported on it seriously, their SEO would mysteriously implode and their survival as a media company would come to an end.