4chan Chronicle/The Internet Hate Machine

The Internet Hate Machine
(Sept 2006 – Jun 2007)

The /b/-day marked a new stage on the Internet. Having to deal with not one but many iterations of /b/, the Internet began to consider it one of worst places of its realm. The period between 2006 and 2007 marked rapid change on 4chan, as more and more people explored the site in curiosity. Post speed increased dramatically and the ways of posting changed. 4channers would no longer speak like little kids but rather they would shout catchphrases and spam copypasta on every possible occasion. It was also a time of uncertainty – Anything could happen. 4chan could go down and they would flood 7chan, moot could go nuts and embed and mind bogglingly awful CSS with epilepsy inducing flashing colours, a mod could begin to ban everyone on the board and sticky the bans and entire sites got tricked into 4chan pranks. Sometimes 4chan jokes even got on TV. It was a chaotic times where one could truly feel anything could happen. Hilarious things like the DSFARGEG bans, the Allyson/BRING BACK SNACKS drama, the infernal rape GET and the great re/b/oot went and left a memorable mark on the memory of anyone from those times.

On the rest of the site, things were calm and cozy. /b/ haven't taken the habit of interboard raiding yet, and things still looked like they were before the /b/-day. /v/ was on its earliest days, where mods could easily moderate the board and nobody would insult you just for the sake of insulting, /a/ and /m/ where butting heads over the definition of GAR, /co/ was arguing incessantly about the quality of Marvel's Civil War crossover, /tv/ was not a haven for pedophiles and a newborn /tg/ was producing tons of anime-esque OC about Warhammer 40k.

The Mass Appeal of 4chan
(Circa Jul 2007)

During 2007, 4chan's Internet presence reached the point where most Internet culture spawned from its womb. There wouldn't be a corner of the Internet that hasn't been touched by 4chan, be it in the form of memes or raids. An exponential growth led to a massive surge of newcomers during the American summer. This time, quality of content dropped massively, many users came from notoriously annoying sites such as AnimeZuki and Gaia Online. Even more came in expecting to find a hacker paradise. The age median lowered, going underage. Many aspects of 4chan culture, like GETs, completely disintegrated. The Raid culture was severely distorted from coordinated raids to simple zerg rushes of spam and memes, losing an important part of their effectiveness. Though there was a considerable amount of high-quality content in a self-fulfilling cycle, the sheer number of pointless threads, repost and spam made /b/ the equivalent of having to swim though an ocean of shit, just to find the diamonds that glitter.

This upheaval of new users led many other *chans to despise /b/ even further, and began to take precautions to keep them out of their forums, like entering partyhard mode every time /b/ or 4chan was down, commonly used by 7chan with the infamous partyhard.css and 420 with the rave mode.

Not long before this, increased migration to and from 4chan had pushed its culture memes into the forefront of Internet fame. _Something__Awful_ users emulating 4chan's Caturday sparked Eric Nakagawa to create I can haz cheezburger, which began, and later monetized, the meme industry outside of 4chan. On the fledging site Youtube, 4chan users popularized Tay Zonday's Chocolate Rain and created an adaptation of the Duckroll for video, known as the Rickroll. The Rickroll would later become the most definitive meme of the era. 4chan trolls spread across the Internet to cause rage. Newfags come in expecting a hacker playground, and after the Fox News report on Anonymous, 4chan's /b/ eventually regains a strong raid mentality that the mods have given up on stopping.

The rise of the meme industry produced unwanted interest in the site that created it all. The social problems of population growth, mainstream appeal, and problematic subcultures reached its greatest crescendo during the "newfag summer", and it's seen by many users as 4chan's Eternal September.