HN Reader

The take on 4chan on here is super intriguing. I always felt that the current social media/doomscroll/memesharing landscape which has become so common worldwide is indiscernable and in some ways worse than 4chan. It feels like 4chan left it's homepage and went worldwide sometime in the early 2010s when iPhone-style phone use became more commonplace.

I remember that 4chan users had more honor than users on the internet today. One example would be 4Chan's "Not your personal army" mentality vs. the widespread doxxing/"call their place of employment!" witch hunts, driven by huge accounts on IG/Tiktok/etc, that hit normal people daily.

The modern social media landscape has become far more hectic, harmful, and downright scary than 4chan. Dodging explicit imagery is harder on Instagram's explore page than on 4chan, and the widespread popularization of OF creators has zero bounds across the socials. DOXXING is no longer frowned upon and now commonplace. And memes have become less unique and funny and more commoditized.

Rip 4chan. For all the bad it did, 4chan also made at least one real contribution to science [1], specifically to the study of superpermutations (aka the Haruhi problem), which was cited by genuine academics. We should try to remember it by that.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/18019464/4chan-anon-anim...

Is there anyone doing something akin to the data analytics which happened for the Panama Papers?

I appreciate this has overtones of doxxing. I am not asking for "the list" but more if there is an intent to tie up some loose ends about influence relating mainly to /pol/

Any articles about the technical details of the hack?

You know, I always found Twitter (even pre-X) to be worse than 4chan ever was. Not in obvious terms, but in how it fucked with your head.

It was bound to come tumbling down eventually. I've had good times in some of the discussion boards and especially with some of the more chill and creative boards like /qst/. the influence of /pol/ overshadows pretty much every board though, and it's rare to see a thread go by without some racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic bile being spilled unfortunately.

I'll ask I guess.

People still use 4chan?

I recall 4chan at one short point in time being a semi amusing meme posting spot on the web but as always as soon as it was popular it turned into a lot of "edgelord" spam and drama.

I did some digging and the hacker posted which exploit he used.

Apparently some boards allowed uploading PDF files, but the site never checked if the PDF file was an actual PDF file. Once a PDF file was uploaded it was passed to a version of Ghostscript from 2012 which would generate a thumbnail. So the attacker found an exploit where uploading a PDF with the right PostScript commands could give the attacker shell access.

Incidentally, KYM website is an original dinosaur like PHP, both loaded full of invalid / cargo cult practices, such as blocking proxy users from reading their (mostly read-only) website. Guessing it's bloated garbage made by some kid and this is part of the reason.

I hope it comes back. Although I don't agree with a lot of what's on there, it's one of the only places you can find hot, fresh, (mostly) uncensored, and unalgorithmed content.

My official association with 4chan ended in 2010, but I still recognise a good third of those names and would wager the leak is legit.

Wow doxing the Jannies!

I mean, wow, they’re doxing people that helped keep a legacy internet place alive and compliant with the law.

Who would do that?

If you lamented the disappearance of the "old internet", well, this was a part of it, and now it may be gone too.

The title is also a fair bit understated.

They're leaking the moderators home addresses and work contact info (for admins, who are(were?) paid moderators)

Hosting a copy of phpMyAdmin behind basic HTTP authentication in 2025 really is asking for it.

It looks like it's back up - sort of. Loading very slowly, anyway. After a compromise like this, I'm a little surprised.

Jannies had it coming tbh. They were certainly tightening the rope when it came to free speech in the last few years

Wow, the comments on this thread are much more divisive than I thought.

I've always felt that the 'there are only two internet cultures: 4chan and tumblr' has felt somewhat accurate. Unfortunately moreso now that /pol/ and /r9k/ have taken over broad swathes of the internet.

It's sad to see how far this old haunt has fallen. Lurking /v/ in my early/mid teens was a formative experience for me. It wasn't as hateful as it was, until Gamergate.

It was always possible to ID 4chan posters via court orders, wasn't it? I mean, Sheriff Mike Chitwood had 3 (or was it 4) people who posted death threats against him there arrested

/lit/ is a goldmine, I’ve discovered so many amazing books there. Everywhere else on the web is algorithm or voting skewed so no real opinions can be shared

I have been to 4chan maybe 4 times in my life. The first was like ok.. Then I visited /b and LOL'd for a couple of hours. Then it just got redundant and depressing. It really is the arsehole of the internet, but some people seem to find it useful.

I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I enjoyed browsing through sfw boards like /tg/ (tabletop media), /ck/ (cooking) and /fit/ (fitness). I had long discussions about the SW sequels on /tv/ back in 2015-19. The readership was surprisingly diverse and the anonymity lead users to provide more focused replies. With bodybuilding.com gone, the blue boards felt like the last bastion of the old internet.

This is some vBulletin software jankness

There's a KnowYourMeme [0] post with additional details and context. Most interesting to me is finding out that there' s a word filer / transformer, so SMH becomes BAKA and TBH becomes DESU, as two examples.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/april-2025-4chan-hack

Running a site like 4chan on outdated software is not just a choice, but one of the choices of all time.

Really, it was gonna happen one of these days.

4chan sized site that gets attention from all sorts of unique people...ran ancient php? Ouch

For all the sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: “website running 15 year old software gets pwned again”

Has Fireship made a video about this yet? I bet we'll see one tomorrow.

Interesting to see HN user astrange as the admin.

China could say less restricted American internet is racist, because we tolerate content they do not. Like 4chan tolerates what Reddit does not. Would it be a fallacy to say people who chose to escape Chinese censorship online are racists? Maybe it’s a matter of degree or something?

besides the fact 4chan is a cesspool I think there's a certain sadness that comes with the possible death of another "early-internet" forum.

I feel like 4chan was the last living source of what the young internet was like - raw, unfiltered, and honest. You've got to admit in today's day and age that's genuinely something rare especially in current time of grift culture.

so much history potentially gone, just like BB.com's forums...

QA won? what the butt

This makes me wonder whether there's anything in there that can point to the identity of the original QAnon. That would be a pretty interesting outcome.

gem

One of the best websites on the internet. Hopefully not gone forever.

Meh, good riddance. The old internet wasn't all good.

Is the source code which leaked everything one would need to host their own copy of the site?

ShartyGods stay winning

Meh, I don't feel bad.

The worst interview I ever had in tech was with Christopher Poole when he was founding canv.as, it's hard to feel bad for him.

I see a lot of hate for 4chan here. Why? I’ve never used it, know it by reputation, but not sure why there’s so much hate for it.

It truly is an end of an era. I popped in every so often to check the temperature and was rarely disappointed by the level of crazy pervading it. Amusingly, despite it having such a massive influence on internet as a whole including its lingo and memes, my wife did not even knew about it existed until today.

I do not think it will be missed by many, but that kind of hole does not exactly disappear without a trace.

Honestly surprised this isn't getting more coverage, not just in the media but here.

I left 4chin by the time it became impossible to dodge pedophiles, room temperature IQ and absolute lowest tier trash. It used to be fun to hunt for quality content, but it seems nobody of value visits that site anymore.

There are, of course, many people with memories of 4chan that precede that of mine (oldf*) - I could only even articulate what I was seeing on 4chan at the age I was around 2014. But by 2015 - with only 1-2 years of experience on the site - I noticed a drastic downturn of the authenticity in posts and comments that I was used to. Then, I saw quality of topics and speaking points go down in 2020. And finally, I saw the social fabric of 4chan itself go down essentially right after Omegle was shut down. By mid-2024, I couldn't even trust it for contrarian or less-conventional (or, frankly, brutally honest) viewpoints of topics they purported to care about.

And honestly, as things got better in my life and I went out to be more recreational, I went from going on 4chan once a day - to once a week - to once a month - and finally, to only when I wanted to see edgy takes on divisive current events.

I'll miss all that, despite all it lost over the years. And I'll miss the element of design and mannerisms in its userbase. It required an upfront investment to even understand how to engage with, and a "lurk moar" attitude. RIP.

Edit: It was also very crazy watching small groups of people turn insider-jargon into mainstream terminology. I'll also never forget watching the thread of QAnon's conception in real-time. Crazy stuff originated there - both in substance and meaning.

Why are we speaking in the past tense here? Is it established that 4chan is going down?

4chan was never known for high security, early versions were pretty close to pasting raw user input into HTML, which was eagerly used by griefers, for example by pasting right-to-left unicode overrides in their comments which was enough to spill to the whole page.

Surprised that the admins have any personal details associated with their 4chan profile.

Not the first time this has happened, and probably not the last. I hope they bounce back from this like they did before. It's a special place.

4chan is a reflection of the depraved, extreme side of humanity. Twitter has taken on the mantle of 'asshole of the internet', but I think the rotten apples post in both.

4chan is oddly accepting of gay and trans people. I've seen gay and trans porn side by side with bbc and bwc porn posts. Strange to see racist trans porn lovers.

I like 4chan for the minor boards, not /pol/ or /b/. But /boardgames/ and /dyi/ and /international/. The absurd humor, green texts that make absolutely no sense, or ones that lead down a strange and wonderful path.

I like being anonymous on the internet.

Posted link is a tad vulgar and scarce on information. A bit of a collection forming on The Sun's live blog post:

Thousands of 4Chan users report issues accessing controversial website - https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/34472708/4chan-down-updates-co...

Watching hacker news try use cold analytical intellect to deconstruct 4chan's jokes and culture (and still missing the point) has got to be the funniest joke ever. Perhaps a little more analysis will yield the answer to understanding the complexity of a green frog or running bear. Though I wouldn't count on it. It has to mean something nefarious. Much like the soft 'schlop schlop schlop' of a dog's tongue lapping up water -- its meaning to us is a mystery.

What a sad day. It's the best page on the net by a wide margin. Hope they'll recover

For all of its many flaws and the boatload of trouble that has come of it, I still ultimately believe that 4chan is unfairly maligned.

I can't deny that the majority of the website's culture has been tainted by idpol bickering ever since /pol/ was added to it, but I'm always going to appreciate 4chan for being a place where I can write ostensibly anonymous posts and talk with other likeminded people about anything and everything. When you have a funny, good faith conversation with someone else on a website that gives you no incentive whatsoever to have one, it feels good.

Soyjak.st is unfortunately nothing like that. It is a website about itself, and itself is a parody of post-2014 rightwing 4chan meme slop culture. It is earnestly what most people believe the entirety of 4chan to be.

/pol is trash.

/b used to be good till early-mid 2010s when it became 95% hentai/porn instead of 30%, after sabu squealed and the fbi took over.

4chan will be studied for years for its role in alt-right radicalization as well as being a baroemeter for young male discontent.

For example, QAnon started on 4chan (I believe as a joke?) [1]. Nowadays a lot of 4chan users and traffic have since migrated to Twitter for pretty obvious reasons. Pseudo-intellectual racism has a lot of roots in 4chan (eg the popularity of Julius Evola [2]) that's deeply tied to "trad" content, Andrew Tate fandom, the manosphere and "self-improvement" [3].

Things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club originated on 4chan and it's full of racist memes [4]. A lot of racist and antisemitic memes originated on 4chan.

Worst of all, it seems like Elon Musk is motivated by a deep desire to be liked by 4chan [5].

So the point is that 4chan users (and admins) have a lot of real-world influence and that's kinda scary. It also makes them a target for this kind of hack. I suspect a lot of people will be exposed by this and in more than a few cases, you'll find ties to the current administration.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-...

[2]: https://jacobin.com/2022/12/fascism-far-right-evola-bannon-b...

[3]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00732-x

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpH3O6mnZvw

[5]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/4/6/how-musk-ushered...

Hacker named 4chan hacks 4chan

We've heard it time and time again that 4chan is the so called "last bastion of free speech on the internet" when this so called free speech is just being unapologetically racist and antisemitic. I hope its gone for good.

4chan has been completely dead for almost ten years and i dont understand why anyone talks about it still.