[The OP below uses “4chan” as having two meanings: 1) the website 4chan, and 2) the ideology expressed by (but not necessarily created by) 4chan.]
The 4chan [not hotlinked - NSFW] imageboard / message board has been around since 2003. Some of you have never heard of it, some of you know all about it and visit it daily. Some of you really, really, really shouldn’t ever visit it. It hasn’t been talked about too much on SDMB. There are only 56 threads here that mention 4chan, and those are only since 4/3/2005, 2 years after its creation. Only one of those threads explicitly referred to 4chan in its title, and that thread had 0 replies. There have been 118 individual posts explicitly mentioning 4chan.
But, since we’ve started allowing free posting, the mention of 4chan has increased dramatically. Since Sept 1, there have been 16 threads mentioning 4chan, and 44 individual posts (not counting this thread). That is a 40% increase in threads and a 60% increase in individual posts from the time SDMB switched to free posting (3.5 months), compared to the number of threads/posts from the first mention of 4chan in 2005 (3.5 years).
Should this worry us, at the SDMB? Is this because 4chan has only recently become very popular (probably starting with lolcats / caturday, and then accelerating in its popularity’s growth since then)? Or is it due to the free posting?
In either case, the cause for concern remains the same: 4chan is growing at an accelerating rate.
“So what?”, you say.
“4chan is going to take over the world”, I say.
4chan, and especially its subforum “/b/”, is a forum that moves incredibly fast in its rate of postings and replies. /b/ alone generates 150-200,000 posts PER DAY. This is mostly fueled by the fact that the majority of the posters remain as Anonymous, allowing them to post anything and everything without fear of repercussion. The result is a shitstorm of, well, shit. There is so much noise in /b/ that it’s hard to keep up with threads. A thread that you are reading at the moment on the 1st page may very well be moved to the 5th page of threads by the time you click to go to only the 2nd page of threads.
But does the anonymity of 4chan fuel this amount of noise alone? 4chan is (in)famous for starting internet memes like lolcats and rickrolling. A meme can’t be created by one person. The first mention or posting of an idea is started by one person, surely; but the entire upward popularity of that idea takes more than one. It even takes more than two, or three or ten. It takes a community.
And that’s what the scary part is. In all these thousands of posts every hour, there is a sense of cohesion. The people on 4chan get it. 4chan is so rapid-paced, but the community responds in kind. The type of humor expressed on 4chan is very much in a non-sequitur style. It is very fast, very off-the-wall. It’s as if a hundred thousand Robin Williams all started their own internet community and spend their days making each other laugh.
4chan humor is the type of humor that is appreciated by kids with ADHD. And yet, it is the very same type of forum that those same ADHD kids understand. It moves at their level of understanding, because they are the ones who are running it. The ADHD kids of the world are finding a home where they are anonymous and where they are a part of something that is growing.
The SDMB, and other message boards, is being infiltrated by the ideology of 4chan. It can be seen in the off-the-cuff responses in so many threads lately: “I accidentally my XX”, “I can has…”, “It can be XX tiem nao, plz?”
It can be argued that this sort of language is a natural phenonmenon that finds its own roots in the internet and BBS-jargon. To wit: nerd-speak begat leet-speak, which begat h4xx0r-jargon, which begat internet-jargon (“u”, “lol”, “r”).
However, the advent of threaded forums expounds on this and has begat such terms as “tl;dr”, “fyp”, “1st”, “qft” and so on. So, some forms of language can only stem from being used in a populous community. Trends and memes can’t survive by themselves, after all. So, the very nature of a threaded forum such as 4chan (and SDMB) naturally brings about themes which are popular within its own community.
But because 4chan is so populated and contains so many posts, those individual themes can easily leak out into the internet community as a whole. The entire process is very organic, when one thinks about it:
An idea is created and rejected. An idea is created and rejected. An idea is created and rejected. (We’ll call these “A”)
An idea is created and accepted by a small group (such as those people participating in an individual thread), but rejected by those outside of that small group (“B”). B is rejected. B is rejected. B is rejected.
B is accepted by a larger group, perhaps all the members of the parent forum (such as /b/), but rejected when that idea is shown to the rest of the website. (“C”). C is rejected. C is rejected. C is rejected.
C is accepted by 4chan as a whole, but that meme is rejected when it is cross-posted or utilized on another forum (say, SDMB). (“D”). D is rejected. D is rejected. D is rejected.
D is accepted by some small faction of readers in a forum, say the readers of BBQ Pit. And so the cycle repeats, each idea or meme being created and rejecting, growing outward into the internet at an organic rate.
Of course, this organic-meme idea isn’t unique to 4chan. Surely such has happened on SDMB or its predecessors on AOL (“1920’s style death rays”, “Rio, by Duran Duran”, “Hi, Opal!”). Also consider other meme-generating sites such as Fark, or Something Awful, or Slashdot. However, the volume of posts on 4chan trumps this. 4chan is, in a sense, a meme-factory. There is so much volume that relatively more popular ideas come from 4chan than any other individual place, and as 4chan becomes more popular, that number will continue to grow.
And it will grow like kudzu. The rapid-paced manner of communication popular on 4chan will begin to catch on at an accelerating rate on other forums. A new form of language is being created. It can b moar new lang-wage tiem, nao, pl0x?
If 4chan remains unbridled, this sort of communication will begin to permeate every public channel on the internet. Once 4chan has its hooks in every forum, it will spread out to published blogs and articles. 4chan is like a virus, one that will actually transcend the barrier between the internet and humanity, because it is a virus of language and ideas. Soon, this sort of quick-paced form of communication will be prevelant in everyday face-to-face speech. I have noticed this in real life, and not just with myself being the speaker; for example, saying “ell oh ell” in real life, as opposed to actually laughing.
Already an entire generation exists not having lived without the internet. If 4chan continues to grow, an entire generation might exist that speaks only in this type of language: “R’ing sandwich, kthx. In return, homework, lulz”. Businesses will be run by these people. Just as well, because just as 4chan is a meme-factory, so to will it become an business idea-factory. Just as some humorous memes become popular, so too will some business ideas take off organically and grow into companies that change the world.
It can be argued that the kids that use 4chan will grow out of it. I argue that they will not grow out of it:
These same kids, the ones who have never lived without the internet, have the entire internet and its resources at their disposal. We are all familiar with Wikipedia and it’s usefulness in our lives. However, there exists a wiki for this very type of humor and way of thinking: Encyclopedia Dramatica (also not hotlinked, also very NSFW). While ED can be said to be published in a very tongue-in-cheek fashion (“just for the lulz”, as it were), it is a clear example of how the resources of the internet will allow this type of language and ideology to survive. If ED were to be destroyed, another wiki would take its place.
ED is necessary to understand this way of thinking. There are articles on ED on real-world topics, such as Barack Obama or Iraq. Compare these articles to the corresponding articles on Wikipedia. The articles on ED are clearly humourous, but there is still the underlying permeance of this 4chan idealogy.
Just as ED mirrors Wikipedia, perhaps there will someday be an ebay for Anonymous, where you can trade your worldly possessions for a real-world punch in the balls. Or an IMDB whose inaccuracies fuel the production of real-world movies.
This type of thinking will continue to grow throughout the internet. As it infiltrates every corner of our web, there will not be any “growing out of it”, because it will be used and in your face every single day.
Can this be stopped? SHOULD this be stopped? If 4chan is allowed to grow organically and take over the world, should we allow it to happen at its own natural pace?
I do not feel it can be stopped, EVER. Slowed down, maybe. But, just as 4chan is a meme-factory, so to is it also a 4chan-factory.