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All 4Chan boards have been down since Monday evening in an apparent cyberattack. Rumors circulating the 4Chan refugee community in the Down Detector comments section indicate that the site was penetrated by hackers approximately one month ago. The damage inflicted was extreme. Statements by 4Chan’s (strictly unpaid) janitorial staff indicate the site could be down for weeks. Hope is rapidly dimming that the site will be back at all.
There are a number of both ideological and state actors that could be responsible for the attack: the Israeli Mossad, the Ukrainian SBU, the American Central Intelligence Agency, any number of Democratic Party functionaries. But at this time the provenance of the attack is unknown, and no one has taken credit.
What is also unknown is the political ramifications of the Id and meme generator of the internet being abruptly taken offline. Almost all memes on the internet originate from 4Chan and without it, the wellspring of internet creativity and culture will die with it.
Also unknown is what the effect will be of hundred of thousands of Chan refugees migrating across the internet. 4Chan is well known as a containment unit and gulag for the most dangerous ideological elements on the internet. The level of weaponized autism that stands to escape can only be equated to a earth shaking digital Chernobyl.
The final unknown and most troubling question is whether coffee is in fact good for you.
/vt/ being down right as Gura retires is a tragedy, but in general the site seems to have been in serious decline for years now. Didn't they get rid of the "unique ips" counter in threads because it showed there were usually only a few people posting?
Previous times there's been a 4chan issue people flooded into refugee/bunker boards, but either I'm out of touch with the altchan scene or there just aren't enough people to notice now.
Kind of sad to see people keep repeating this.
For many hobbies and interests, 4chan is THE biggest public (i.e. not a discord) forum on the internet. Bigger and more active than whatever the corresponding subreddit is. For a lot of more niche video games, the most active community is the corresponding /vg/ thread. /ic/ is the biggest art/drawing forum on the internet. etc.
Depends on the thread and how active the board is, but for a lot of long-running generals it wasn't uncommon to see 80-90 unique IPs.
A lot of communities are setting up at 8chan.moe.
I would have agreed with you only 5 years ago. I used to browse /tg/ a lot, but the quality on there has steeply declined. Very few stories are posted there any more, and all discussion threads are derailed by posters spamming NoGames or accusing other posters of being Bumpfag. I can't speak to the other boards, but that one used to pump out so much iconic content and has been reduced to a shell of itself.
I used to treasure /tg/ as a creative outlet and source of inspiration. Putting a fresh idea on there got people riffing, shitting-on, and yes-and-ing it for days, in retrospect it was like an LLM with a quirky, rotten, beautiful soul instead of hollow obsequiousness. Made a setting with their help, my content is still on 2d4chan to this day. Ran a quest I never finished. I kept going back to poke the dead cat, hoping it will get up again, but it just posts empty engagement-farming threads.
I was in the middle of refining a short story that really only works in the context of /tg/'s board culture. My feedback on the first draft amounted to "This feels like 2012 again. What happened to us?"
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