The anonymous forum thrived when edgelord content wasn’t acceptable on more mainstream social media. Today, it can be found most anywhere.
I never used 4chan myself but I was in high school in the late 2000's and knew folks in my computer science classes who used to spend much time there. The late 2000's was before "mainstream social media" right? Only facebook.com was there and you could post whatever you wanted including "edgelord" stuff on facebook of the late 2000's as that version of facebook wasn't really moderated...
And then you had reddit also which at that time had many subreddits where you could post anything including 4chan stuff. I remember people on reddit back then complaining that reddit was for people too scared to go to 4chan. And I would laugh at the comments because they basically described me back then haha.
Mainstream social media stuff that this article talks about...that happened later in the 2010's....
Also it is still so surreal to me to see prestigious publications like the New Yorker talking about 4chan. Back in the 2000's and early 2010's 4chan was one of those super nerdy silly kinda dumb underground things that you didn't really talk about in public because it would be cringe worthy. I remember in 2016 when somebody shouted "PEPE!" at some Hillary Clinton rally and looking at the video of that and feeling cringe. The thought that history students in the future would have to study memes and the thought that people in the "real world" like CNN would be writing about some dumb silly nerd meme website was so bizzare. Even now in 2025 the fact that The New Yorker has this giant article about 4chan is so weird to me.
4chan...those "edgelord memes"....crazy reddit subreddits....Pepe the frog....
All these things were not supposed to change the "real world." Like I said earlier, I never used 4chan myself, but I really don't think anyone actually using 4chan or any of us using reddit back in the late 2000's or early 2010's ever imagined that anything posted on those sites would ever have any impact on the real world. The internet was just this place where nerdy people could go to post silly shit. What the hell happnened?
No I cannot openly post about how much I fucking hate religious people because who knows my next employer may very well be a card carrying Christian (they are rare here but do exist). Anonymity has it's place.