Now over a week the site is still down, which I expected. I did expect more of a statement out of 4chan than just "
it will take time". I try not to read the proverbial tea leaves too much because an absence of information doesn't confirm anything.
Hiroyuki posted on the 16th that the site will come back "
Later!", but talk is very cheap. Even if Hiroyuki gets to the point of concluding he doesn't want to bring back 4chan himself, the domain and site name alone is still a valuable asset. Not an asset for every buyer out there, but there would undoubtedly be interested buyers.
My current guessing (guessing is fun):
- Interest as of now has not waned for 4chan as an individual site to return. The leaked letters to janitors mention that new hardware was acquired but they hadn't gotten it running yet prior to the hack. From a capital expenditure perspective, that's already hit the books. That gives Hiroyuki more incentive to bring the site back instead of just selling the domain name.
- The state of the leaked Yotsuba source code combined with the ancient backend versions makes me think it's more likely that 4chan abandons Yotsuba as board software in favor of another imageboard software. The proponents of fixing the existing software would correctly argue that 4chan has its own feel from its own board software, and that the 4chan board software was performant. However, the negatives vastly outweigh the positives. We're talking about board software so ancient with terrible security practices (like hardcoded credentials) that they didn't bother to update their PHP version for almost a decade after end of life because Yotsuba used calls that weren't supported in the next PHP version. Are you gonna trust random internet strangers not to insert a backdoor, and are you going to trust that the people who are interested in "getting it working again" are gonna be trustworthy people to continue to patch the site software? Easier to take a new server, install a modern supported imageboard software, and then tweak the configuration to your needs.
All of this is really reliant on if the site has core people to run it that Hiroyuki trusts, which the quiet nature of the site admins in terms of response is undoubtedly due to the mod/janitors being doxed. If they aren't willing to come back that presents an immediate challenge to maintaining the site. No mods/janitors or inadequate numbers would make the moderation insufficient, which would punish ad revenue money when the advertisers get scared away. And you do not just want to take randos off the street for a site like 4chan, or any moderation in general, because if they aren't actively looking to sabotage you, they're often terrible powertrippers (and if you're of the opinion that 4chan mods/jans meet that description, you definitely CAN do worse, particularly if you recruit these people without inadequate vetting to make sure you have enough warm bodies).
I hesitate to make any projection on
when the site will return because it would be completely speculative in a vacuum of information. We don't know if they're doing damage inventory yet, we don't know if they're still assessing using the old site software and fixing it or using new imageboard software, we don't know how much of the mods/jans are willing to return or not, we don't know who they trust/have to do the technical work to bring it back either way and their availability/expertise, all of these are critical inputs in terms of a timeline.
If you put a gun to my head and demanded that I make some guess when the site returns, my guess would be around a month after the hack, or about three weeks from now. Probably on new imageboard software. This is an assumption with a ton of potential error for the reasons I listed earlier, so we'll see. I don't think it matters if they take longer as there is no eminent successor where people are migrating to.
I saw a lot of speculation that 4chan users would migrate to Twitter, and I found the memes editing
The Iron Giant general clip of "
where's the robot now, mansley!?!?!"" funny, but modern infinitely scrolling social media apps and their number of users are vastly different from the scale and imageboard software of 4chan. There's something about interacting with a forum*, particularly a forum where the default is anonymity, that you can't replace with named tagged social media apps.
(*Some people will call you an idiot if you call imageboards forums and those people are stupid. I respect the term imageboard to refer to a subset of forum software with a unique set of features/norms but arguing that it isn't forum is pants on head retarded.)
Guess I'll end my diatribe and say that maybe 4chan was never good, but it will be back in some form.