The Retro Web's Revival of 4chan Culture

SpaceHey recently disabled open registrations to "keep the site cozy". The vast majority of users were divided on this change, yet (luckily) clueless about what happened "behind the scenes"–in fact the drama actually happened right on SpaceHey and was kicked off by some core users who consider themselves to be among "the most-infuental SpaceHey users". Given that I'm one of those casual users that isn't "terminally online", I signed up to their SpaceHey fork "with better moderation" and introduced myself with a blog post that intentionally alluded to my introduction on SpaceHey, albeit with the mention that I already made my fair share of terrible experiences with projects that primarily being organized on Discord. I used the same language this group of people relied on excessively and almost instantly got attacked for... insulting Discord.

I knew that I have seen this exact same pattern before and thus decided to keep lurking after I was finally able to delete my account. The core of this fork not only continued to harass a SpaceHey mod but also began to attack various random users who weren't entirely sold on their fork either, doxxed an alleged pedophile by posting the email they used to register on the fork and do a "background check", and later went on defending 4chan. One user defended the "mid-2000's to mid-2010's" era of 4chan, the other claimed that 4chan is a site where "cool stuff happened after 2016". Most of those users attempt to pull the shitpost card and claim that they're "just joking", though one mod in particular recently threatened another user that publicly claimed to have been groomed by them.

Does this sound familiar to you?

Discord absorbed most of 4chan

A rather study analyzing the "toxicity" between Reddit and Discord came to the conclusion that all communities that were cross-examined were significantly more "toxic" on Discord compared to Reddit, attributing this Discord channels harboring more "extremely toxic" users, whereas "toxicity" was more evenly distributed among the user base and rather just "heat of th moment" incidents.

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There also are plenty of YouTube documentaries discussing "the dark side of Discord" that do not only address the extreme toxicity but the massive wave of bot-run pornography servers disguised as regular public servers, teens selling their bodies to improve their social status, and various other types of oragnized crime besides neo-nazi groups, most notably 764 cult that was started by a teenager.

You may see quite a bunch of internet users defending "the old 4chan", claiming various dates at which it supposedly declined, even though it has been one of the first popular dumpsters of human nature that popularized shock content–and the more outraging the better–that eventually led to the rise of incels and the alt-right, which in turn gave us, well, Donald Trump that is bombing Iran, pushing Cuba to the brink of a humanitarian crisis and de-facto ruling over Venezuela after a hostile takeover.

"But 4chan used to be funny", you may claim now, fully ignoring what your definition of "funny" eventually contributed to that made you consider 4chan "less funny today". Let me dig out a controversy that lasted over ten years and achieved absolutely nothing.

Blood on the Dance Floor and Jessi Slaughter

It'd be pointless to recite Wikipedia article that covered this case extensively and attributed the entire blame for Dahvie Vanity, the lead singer of the emo band "Blood of the Dance Floor", never being convicted for his crimes to 4chan. 4chan users actively sided with Davhie out of spite and because the victim was a minor with signs of bipolar disorder, which they later got diagnosed with, and who was abused by their father. None of the users who contributed to the harassment ever apologized for their actions and even today a lot of people try to paint 4chan in a positive light for "at least having done something, unlike law enforcement" who were unable to help due to 4chan automatically deleting old threads and thus having rendered even casually-saved screenshots of some portions of the targeted harassment dubious.

Multiple police departments, attorneys and Barack Obama have already warned that this type of "internet vigilantism", alongside Hansen's stints that inspired this rise of vigilantism and also led to hardly any convictions and the suicide of Bill Conradt, has done more harm than good. And not even the widely- celebrated "Anonymous Operations" changed anything the grand scheme of things, with most users simply reframing Anonymous' goal which originally was to do "stuff for lulz". It all just led to the current state of things where no one's happy.

The pandemic is over; the terminally onlines dominate again

Many of those web nostalgia projects simply revived this very 4chan culture that largely migrated to Discord, only dressing as a copyleft MySpace clone that has been unmaintained for years. But SpaceHey, unlike its recent fork, was not dominated by the "terminally online", just like Neocities fostered a different, much calmer community than Nekoweb. Nekoweb appears to be just another case of a bunch of self-proclaimed "edgelords" proudly proclaiming they're better than the admin(s) of some site that surged in popularity and began to attract all kinds of spam and illegal content. Just like the SpaceHey fork and a small Twitter 2011 clone, the people behind those projects all are the same type of "terminally onlines" that are addicted to Discord, defend 4chan and are permanently hostile. All of them are either teenagers, strangly all between the ages of 15 and 18, young adults between the ages of 20 and 22, and surprisingly 30+-year-old females (whether cis or trans usually cannot be determined but the overall amount of trans users on those sites is disproportionately high).

Nekoweb is straight up owned by a shell company at an address famous among scammers and DDoS'ers.

A lot of those users claim to be "left-wing", yet a lot of those users are visibly unstable and much closer to the stereotypical alt-right user, even down to the excessive "self-descriptions" where they state to be a "neurodivergent black trans user using neo-pronouns"–the neo-pronouns phenomenon arose on Tumblr in 2014, though in retrospect I'd claim that those were 4chan shenenigans. They did start the "Cut4Bieber" hashtag on Twitter, after all, and no one outside the 4chan bubble even knew that this was a troll operation... and Tumblr, as a hotspot for fandoms and the LGBT+ community, was like a huge dinner plate to them until the infamous "porn ban" in 2017.