at age 31 it would be insincere to start patterning myself as an old lady who is a veteran of the "old" internet, but being online for about 20 years now, i have observed some significant shifts in online culture. the rise of social media, slowly eroding privacy, but to me, the most fascinating has been how 4chan became a huge influential thing and eventually propelled a culture of racism, edginess and political incorrectness into the mainstream. being on 4chan at age 13 was decidedly not a great thing for a kid my age to have been doing, but that exposure gave me a taste for the niche and directly lead me to media like serial experiments lain and touhou project. i wouldn't be may without 4chan, sometimes i wonder if i would even be trans without being in that kind of environment where gender norms were often questioned (if you can believe it, 4chan used to be like that!)

i used to be an avid lurker, posting on rare occasions, but felt actually interacting with image boards was more abbrasive than it was worth. i was happy to find out what flavor of the month anime or video game were getting posted on /a/ and /v/, and i often went to /jp/ once my interest in touhou began to set in. i fondly recollect it now, but i've since completely excised 4chan from my rotation of websites i keep up on. the reasons should be glaringly obvious to anyone whose looked at the place lately, and anyone i still know from back then has done the same.

it was on 4chan that i gained my taste for anime, indie games, that kind of thing. believe it or not, when you got past all of the shitposting and arguments, 4chan was not entirely terrible as an outlet for discussing media on the bleeding edge of culture, stuff seen no where else. /a/ was always eager to have threads for FLCL, welcome to the NHK, gurren lagann, /v/ would discuss guilty gear and blazblue well before anime fighting games became a little more palatable to the average gamer... there were other outlets you could find this stuff, but they were similarly entrenched in internet culture if they weren't outright sharing a userbase. 4chan culture was pervasive and the memes born in the annals of /v/, /b/ and /a/ would spread to reddit, twitter, etc. people still post old 4chan screencaps. 4chan was the internet's black sheep, always a convenient scapegoat to blame internet toxicity on, but it was beloved for being unique.

i hesitate to call it a "golden age", but i do fondly reminisce on when 4chan was just a bunch of anons talking about weird interests, being mean, or generally being a nuisance at best. of course you had individuals who took things too far, but generally the worst thing that happened is that /b/ would occaisonally go harass the church of scientology or track down someone who was abusing animals. sometimes /g/ broke into a school's PA system and would play loud cacophonic micspam and laugh as confused teachers looked around in disbelief and rushed to unplug each speaker.

now, it's something else. i guess i feel stupid for being so naive. faux racism attracts real racists. joking about extremeism pulled in actual extremists. i didn't keep up on /pol/ when it was just starting out. it struck me as a containment board, meant to act as a honeypot for users who would make politically extreme shitposts in other boards. it quickly gained a reputation being as unpalatable as /b/, full of disingenuous posters who were more interested in pushing the bounds of what was socially acceptable to say online than saying anything of substance. /pol/ skyrocketed in popularity during the 2015 electoral season, eventually becoming 4chan's most popular board.

donald trump's social media team, seemingly aware of /pol/, began playing to their newfound audience. this sudden and surreal mixing of online culture and mainstream politics culminated in the posting of a trump-ified pepe the frog to trump's official twitter account. i feel like this was the exact moment the shark got jumped. the president was posting pepe the frog and wojak! posters celebrated. "he's /ourguy/!!!" trump supporters flocked to 4chan, and suddenly it became a hivemind of weirdo republican cocksuckers. wojaks and pepes became the sole memetic export of the website. suddenly, 4chan wasn't about counter culture, it was about american politics. being edgy isn't "cool" anymore, now it is socially acceptable for a sitting representative to call one of her constituents "tranny" and for the president of the united states to call a governer the r-slur. did 4chan cause this? i dunno. does it feel surreal that politicians that are being voted for by real people feel comfortable talking exactly like a mid-2010s anon would on /b/? absolutely.

moot, the previous owner, had sold the website in 2015 to a man named hiroyuki nishimura, a veteran in the space who had previously founded 2channel (not to be confused with futaba channel, sometimes known as 2chan), a japanese message board with a somewhat similar culture as 4chan. i always blamed hiroyuki for this downfall. having inherited a dumpster fire and needing a way to make it profitable overnight, i had assumed 4chan's descent into weird, reactionary politics was hiro's doing, a desperate hail mary to make a completely unmarketable website a profitable success. it was a commonly held belief, a convenience in how it split the website's history into two distinct halves, "moot" and "hiroyuki". it enshrined moot as the benevolent founder who believed in his website, and hiro as the greedy outsider who just wanted to make a quick buck.

i guess nobody was expecting the actual truth to come out of the epstein files, lol.

now rather infamously, the release of the epstein files confirmed that moot created /pol/ mere weeks after meeting epstein and his associates. it's the kind of sucker punch you don't expect coming after you've believed naively that this entire thing was caused by a change in ownership.

it's a complicated feeling having been on the ground floor of all of this. i feel guilty for going along with it. it makes me wonder if 4chan didn't exist, would all of this had still happened? younger people who have never interacted with the site refer to people like me detrimentally, disingeniously calling "4chan trans" as having a "nazi phase" that we're all trying to collectively sweep under the rug. i don't think it's that simple, but these accusations often come from individuals who aren't even old enough to reflect on their teenage years yet. i feel pretty strongly about the narrative being foisted onto me by people who weren't even online during 4chan's hayday, only knowing it as a magnet for the worst kind of person they can imagine.

"/b/ was never good" was a phrase that bounced around a lot on 4chan but i feel it is just as fair to say "4chan was never good". racism was always abound, posters were intentionally abbrasive and rude, but all of it felt like a bit of aposematism to scare off "normies". i'm not trying to excuse it, but the mood generally was that it was all for trolling's sake. unserious, exagerated, intentionally unpalatable noise that everyone eventually tuned out.

4chan was never good, but i'm glad to have been around to see it before it stopped being interesting.