4chan Chronicle/Mootocracy

(Oct 2005 – Aug 22 2006)

4chan's momentous golden age begins to end with moot's demotion and later resignation of admin W.T. Snacks, the resignation of Shii, and the rise of the underaged Allyson to mod status. This is seen by many anons as a harbinger of impending doom. And doom seemed imminent for all; with increasing immigration, /b/ had begun to experience sharp cultural changes that left long time users bewildered and newbies unassimilated. The board began to take more and more spotlight from the rest of the site, surpassing them in traffic, userbase and content until the majority of the site browsed /b/ alone. Its traffic doubled or tripled its follow up boards, usually /v/ and /a/, a trend that would continue until the end of the decade.

The Golden Age of /b/

Punitive Expedition against EbaumsWorld

Content Aggregators

In the early days of web 2.0, content aggregators were mostly unheard of. Search engines were a new phenomenon, and the internet had recently been small clusters of isolated communities. The practice of collecting images from other sites was deeply controversial, and various communities launched into controversy when one user "stole" their content. EbaumsWorld was the first site to conduct content aggregation en masse, hotlinking images on the frontpage that ate up bandwidth from SA and 4chan (a deeply damaging oversight). Thus, EbaumsWorld incited unprecedented retaliation from most major online communities at the time (with a young 4chan tagging along). A Something Awful user even made a flash song about it.

During this era, an inexperienced 4chan community gets its first taste of Internet warfare in a coalition attack against EbaumsWorld for its plagiarism and malicious tendencies. Although it was a fairly reactive community, the EbaumsWorld raid gave birth to a sort of organized raid culture, with raids soon becoming commonplace on /b/.

The First /b/ Raids

During this era, the inexperienced 4chan community gets it first take at Internet warfare in the coalition attack against EbaumsWorld for its plagiarism and malicious tendencies , the result was ebaumsworld becoming a meme, where they would receive the blame for every prank /b/tards pulled. Later, a /b/tard made a thread telling how he was banned from the forum Bibliocality.com, a hardcore Christian forum. Some /b/tards though it would be funny to flood the forum, and the idea took on. Soon Bibliocality was nothing but spam and insults, with infamous tripfag Soviet_Russia leading the charge. The Admin overreacted and locked down the forums, and the site eventually died. The thread was popular enough to merit the birth of a tradition of raiding sites that would be performed with bolder and bolder antics with each passing month.

The First Shitstorm

Such attacks culminated in a massive, quasi-coordinated raid to Habbo hotel, known as The Great Habbo Hotel Invasion of July 2006, giving birth to the Nigra meme, a common afro and suit attire that /b/tards and related 4channers would try to use when playing online games. School shooting plans and stadium bombings are posted thanks to the sense of anonymity, as in such a particular event, an user was arrested once his post was reported to the police, ensuing what was the first major 4chan shitstorm, with the event being mentioned in the media. A good chunk of the site though this was the end, that 4chan was going to be shut down. Ultimately, nothing directly affected 4chan. An interview with a cop chief during the event gave birth to the “DON’T MESS WITH FOOTBALL” phrase.

"/b/ was never good"

By 2006, many users thought back to a romanticized /b/ where all content was original, funny, and fresh. This belief is far from the truth, but, lacking memory, the cynical ideal quickly became a major tenet of 4chan culture. Though it was true that smaller communities were closer knit and more cohesive, "low" quality image and content during 2004 to 2006 had always been welcomed, cherished, and remixed by the members of the community, therefore becoming quality (Or should I say QUALITY) 4chan content. Later on, when mass waves of users flowed in, prejudice against newfags grew when incoming users often misinterpreted the premise of a meme.

Exponential Population Growth

The massive increase of threads proportionally increased the rate of thread deletion. Although the ratio of good to bad content changed little, the sheer magnitude of forgettable, rehashed content (What we now know as templates and macros) created class conflict between ex-SA "ldfags"and unskilled newfags. It was during this period that 4chan and /b/ became known as the assholes of the Internet. /b/ went through major cultural changes: Though at its core it was still about silliness and black comedy, its aggressiveness began to outshine everything else. /b/ attained an attack dog mentality, seeking prey to destroy, to do whatever they thought was lulzly at the time. Persecution of amusement at the detriment of everybody they deemed wanting became the biggest hobby of /b/.

The Internet Hate Machine

/b/'s raid culture began to shine around mid-2006. The board began a series of organized raids against many sites, included but not limited to: Fandom (most notoriously ZeldaUniverse), Christian, Pro-Ana, and sites for people with disabilities. June saw the total destruction of the Zelda Guide Forums and Naruto-kun.com. Any camwhores that came to the board's attention would be trolled to tears. On July /b/ staged the great Habbo raid of July 2006, saturating Habbo Hotel with nigras, black avatars with a two piece black suit, black shoes and an Afro, because of perceived racism on part of the mods. On august 16 Canadian Tom Green gets raided at his own talk show, which would become a sort of tradition.

With an ever increasing growth, and a series of continuous raids to different people, like the Hal Turner and Tom Green raids, 4chan ended up with a Fox News coverage (and a minor G4 one) of Anonymous. With Fox News being Fox News, the report was deeply inaccurate and filled with sensationalism. The report coined the term "Hackers on Steroids" and "Internet Hate Machine", gleefully adopted by /b/, among many other memes.