Unified Internet Conspiracy Theory - Mapping out the connections and shared histories of SomethingAwful, 4chan, etc.

[PCSXROMS]

I've always been interested in the history of websites like 2chan, 4chan, SomethingAwful, 8chan, and their myriad of predecessors, spin-offs, and successors. In reading about them, I have come across the many ways in which they are related, either through shared users, administration, or general culture and history. It's fascinating to see how they connect to one another and how these connections continue to impact the culture of the modern Internet.

On one hand, you have the lineage of 2channel, started by Hiroyuki Nishimura, which is to this day one of the most accessed message boards in Japan. 2chan/Futaba Channel was started as a sort of back-up for 2chan, which Moot (Tim Pool) eventually based 4chan off of. In a convoluted twist of fate, Jim Watkins, the current owner of 8chan, ended up stealing 2channel from Nishimura (later re-naming it to 5channel in an attempt to avoid legal issues), and then Nishimura subsequently bought 4chan from Moot, who is as of now probably working in some dungeon underneath Google HQ. This administrative game of musical chairs has lead to the bizarre situation of Japan's most popular message board being owned and run by the man who is very likely behind the QAnon phenomenon.

Shifting tracks, we can look at the lineage of SomethingAwful, of which Moot was a regular user of before creating 4chan, and is where much of 4chan's original userbase migrated from. SomethingAwful itself is a sort of primordial spawning ground of Internet culture, giving rise to several communities such as "Weird Twitter" through FYAD, the "SJW" clique as we know it through Helldump and Laissez’s Fair, as well as r/SRS, which is rumored to have been a goon-led campaign to take over the moderation of popular subreddits through threats and blackmailing.

Moving into more conspiratorial waters, you have the strange connections between sites like SomethingAwful or 4chan and intelligence agencies such as the FBI and CIA. While it is all but confirmed that the FBI monitors and posts on imageboards like 4chan and 8chan, the suspicious connections of SA goons are even stranger. For example, you have SA user Brown Moses (real name Elliot Higgins) who admitted to receiving money from the Open Society Foundation (George Soros's NGO) and the National Endowment for Democracy (a known CIA front) for his "journalism" website, Bellingcat, which basically acts as a mouthpiece for the US State Department and the CIA. Furthermore, there is the case of Vilerat (real name Sean Smith), a moderator in SomethingAwful who was a member of the US Foreign Service (a section of the State Department) and died in the 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.

I'm not really alleging any actual conspiracy or anything, I'm merely interested in the history and strange connections all these sites have with one another. If you have any interesting facts or anecdotes, information about a related site I didn't mention, or if you think I've left anything out, feel free to post it here.

 

[seri0us]

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
who cares

 

[Sanshain]

Hugely popular internet forums (in their day) had an extremely diverse set of users that just happened to include feds and prominent officials. Who knew?

Seriously, Trump used Twitter. Being part of internet culture is a totally normalized activity for most people. I would be utterly unsurprised to learn that the Secretary of Defense shitposted on 4chan or something like that. They're just normal dudes.

 

[PCSXROMS]

sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
who cares

Hugely popular internet forums (in their day) had an extremely diverse set of users that just happened to include feds and prominent officials. Who knew?

Seriously, Trump used Twitter. Being part of internet culture is a totally normalized activity for most people. I would be utterly unsurprised to learn that the Secretary of Defense shitposted on 4chan or something like that. They're just normal dudes.

I think both of you missed the last paragraph of my post

I'm not really alleging any actual conspiracy or anything, I'm merely interested in the history and strange connections all these sites have with one another. If you have any interesting facts or anecdotes, information about a related site I didn't mention, or if you think I've left anything out, feel free to post it here.

I just included the connections to intelligence agencies because I thought they were interesting, not because I think they're evidence of some grand plot by the CIA.

 

[Idiot Asshole]

The vast majority of people in the world have never heard of Something Awful or 4chan. Of those few who have most would have heard of them in passing and never interacted with them. Of those even fewer who have actually interacted with them only a slight fraction would ever have any sort of entrepreneurial aspirations, let alone involving them. The end result is that only a handful (0.0000000001%) of people would ever bother trying to run these places, resulting in an extremely tiny pool and the inevitable musical chairs of ownership. And that's before the incestuous nature of niche cliques, especially ones online where groups can sequester themselves far more easily comes into play. Not to mention the potential stigma from running these edgy sites in an ever-more sanitized internet (the wheelchair cuck would be a good example).

The bottom line: it takes a very special person to want to run one of these places and most people just want to let be and not be special.

 

[PCSXROMS]

The vast majority of people in the world have never heard of Something Awful or 4chan. Of those few who have most would have heard of them in passing and never interacted with them. Of those even fewer who have actually interacted with them only a slight fraction would ever have any sort of entrepreneurial aspirations, let alone involving them. The end result is that only a handful (0.0000000001%) of people would ever bother trying to run these places, resulting in an extremely tiny pool and the inevitable musical chairs of ownership. And that's before the incestuous nature of niche cliques, especially ones online where groups can sequester themselves far more easily comes into play.

Yeah, that's primarily the reason why I'm interested in it. There's a relatively small amount of people at the center of most of these sites, which makes it all the more wild how massively influential many of them went on to be. Practically everyone who became "internet famous" before social media became a thing (and many who did even after that) has some connection to one of these communities. I just find it interesting to excavate and archive it from a historical point of view.

 

[PCSXROMS]

I've also collected a few lists of (mostly defunct) imageboards, textboards, and similar websites, most of which are spin-offs of the big ones (2chan, 4chan, 8chan, etc.).
Might be of some interest.

The Great Imageboard Directory of Shit (last updated 1/7/20)
https://www.allchans.org/ (last updated 3/16/21)
Cool Places + internet edition + (last updated 4/11/21)
Creamy's Homemade List of Forums, Image Galleries, and Other Sites with Commentary (last updated 10/14/16)

 

[CreamyHerman’s]

not because I think they're evidence of some grand plot by the CIA.

Plot twist, the CIA brainwashed the japs to create sites to actively track those with acute mental disabilities

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

When people took an interest in 2chan someone at SA created a front end in english, it was just a webpage with board names translated to english. Because [footage missing] 4chan was started as the english equivalent of 2chan. Don't remember what made people give up ADTRW.

SA also spawned the Something Awful Sycophant Squad(SASS) that resided on sass.buttes.org, it was run by Weev most famous for GNAA and Daily Stormer. When that board croaked it spawned TNE, SMYD and MPC. SMYD was a stillborn, TNE lasted a couple of years then died due to a rage-quit, which led to SomethingSensitive(thread about that drama in general). During the Trump years MPC - My Posting Career, that place has a thread - gained some fame as "the alt-rights foremost think-tank" or some bullshit.

There's also TheRizone and that paranoid tranny site along with a long history of private bittorrent sites but none of those ever amounted to anything.

 

[tehpope]

I think the theory is that all the mods on major internet sites were friends on SA and its all incestual.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Reminder: the extremely original SA userbase of 2000 came from PlanetQuake and that culture.

 

[Sperghetti]

I find this stuff fascinating, too, because so much shit can be traced back to the same roots, but it seems like barely anyone knows these roots even exist. It's a whole hidden or lost history. Which is especially strange considering that stuff that spawned from all of this has actually started effecting the world at large. It's why it's so frustrating when some smug journalist tries to give a lecture on anything related internet culture, 99% of the time they have no idea where it came from or what actually happened to cause it.

SomethingAwful itself is a sort of primordial spawning ground of Internet culture, giving rise to several communities such as "Weird Twitter" through FYAD, the "SJW" clique as we know it through Helldump and Laissez’s Fair, as well as r/SRS, which is rumored to have been a goon-led campaign to take over the moderation of popular subreddits through threats and blackmailing.

I seem to remember that about r/SRS as well, at least the rumors that most of the original posters and mods there were goons. I know many r/SRS members did get moderation powers on many large subreddits at one point. I was never quote sure why it started, though, if they were just fucking with Reddit as a joke or if there was actual malicious intent.

 

[PCSXROMS]

I seem to remember that about r/SRS as well, at least the rumors that most of the original posters and mods there were goons. I know many r/SRS members did get moderation powers on many large subreddits at one point. I was never quote sure why it started, though, if they were just fucking with Reddit as a joke or if there was actual malicious intent.

The story that I heard was that it was originally an at least semi-ironic trolling campaign that was gradually taken over by genuine turbo-feminists and troons.

 

[Maurice Caine]

Reminder: the extremely original SA userbase of 2000 came from PlanetQuake and that culture.

Why does it always go back to John Carmack?

 

[Pissmaster]

The story that I heard was that it was originally an at least semi-ironic trolling campaign that was gradually taken over by genuine turbo-feminists and troons.

I found out about it on SA when it was brand new, and it seemed like the intent at the time was just to rip on retarded posts, kinda like we do here. But as SA got increasingly pozzed, so did SRS.

Though I do remember them setting up a ton of other subs covering all sorts of topics, all named something like SRSGaming or whatever, right out of the gate, and calling it the SRS Fempire. So maybe it was troons all along. At the time, I figured it was just named that to mock all the incels at the time, before "incel" was even a word.

 

[seri0us]

all named something like SRSGaming or whatever

Reminds me of George Floyd's gaming channel that the racists at YouTube took down

 

[Enig]

There's some bizarre kind of karmic justice in how Hiro came to own the bastard western ripoff of his own site in the end. Moot quit to be a cog in the Google machine while Hiro just chills as Rome burns as usual, everything slotting back together in the cycle.

 

[Blamo]

Umm... On has to wonder how do 4chan survives while being so edgy for years? I doubt the bootleg pokemon porn ads and 4chan gold passes support the insane traffic the site has.
Of course due to lack of transparency we may never know.

 

[Jimboree]

Umm... On has to wonder how do 4chan survives while being so edgy for years? I doubt the bootleg pokemon porn ads and 4chan gold passes support the insane traffic the site has.
Of course due to lack of transparency we may never know.

If I remember right the company that owns 4chan now is fairly well known for Big Data shit (datamining and so forth). Make of that what you will

 

[Blamo]

If I remember right the company that owns 4chan now is fairly well known for Big Data shit (datamining and so forth). Make of that what you will

That explains it all too well.