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WIRED: 4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere
WIRED - (archived: https://archive.ph/rdYPd ) 4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere
Ryan Broderick
Culture
Apr 22, 2025 10:40 AM
It’s likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again. But everything now—from X and YouTube to global politics—seems to carry its toxic legacy.
My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOL cat memes, which were brand new at the time.
Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can haz cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying, "ORLY?" was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up from laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.
It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for internet culture and an anonymous waystation for the internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right facism around the world. A virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the Bush administration.
It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X, to Facebook, to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist.
/snip
Ryan Broderick
Culture
Apr 22, 2025 10:40 AM
It’s likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again. But everything now—from X and YouTube to global politics—seems to carry its toxic legacy.
My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOL cat memes, which were brand new at the time.
Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can haz cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying, "ORLY?" was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up from laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.
It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for internet culture and an anonymous waystation for the internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right facism around the world. A virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the Bush administration.
It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X, to Facebook, to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist.
/snip