4chan shut all the boards down during their 2025 "april fools". You know, as a joke. Because the best way to have fun with your community is to shut your site down.
The decline of 4chan as i've experienced it over the years.
- 4chan having embedded files in images that were posted in their banner ads. The two I remember were:
3d printed guns with acompanying chinese text that told people to rebel against their government <-probably cia attempting to start a rebellion in china/similar to tactics used in middleast
an entire copy of orwell's 1984
- banning people for mentioning certain names. One I remember was ben fischbein. He was the digital director of hillary clinton's "correct the record" political action comittee
- /gif/ being limited to 5 pages down from 10 (in order to more easily contain the spread of certain information and more easily flood gif with porn and irrelevent slop)
- upload size limit for videos gradually getting smaller to constrict the flow of informative videos. This occured during the height of covid lockdowns.
- 900 second timer for all "new" posters who's ip's haven't been recorded yet
- ip banning people for being anti-war on /pol/
- ai-fueled chatbots aiming to steer conversations across all boards. They occupy the same thread for days and will never stop responding to the posts you make if you reference one of theirs. I did this for more than an hour, asking the same question over and over, and the user on the otherside kept responding no matter how circular the conversation was.
The site being shutdown is probably cover for implementing more forms of surveillance on the site. 4chan has been completely infiltrated and subverted into working as a fed honeypot.
Some retards will argue that they aren't being censored because they are still able to post their shit.
The method of censorship used in 4chan is indirect.
- your posts will be shadowbanned and recieve 0 engagement
- your ip will be put on a watchlist, which will be banned and 4chan's reason will be that it bans entire ip ranges it detects as "spamming"
- the boards are flooded by the same topics repeated over and over, drowning out any other signal. the chat bots used to "engage with the community" never sleep.
- mixed in with chatbots are actual paid shills that astroturf different boards and try to derail topics about anti-war and legitimate conspiracies like operation mockingbird/cointelpro/operation timber sycamore.
Most of the shit I posted was my experience back in 2022. I don't know how much worse it's gotten.
I think kiwifarms is less susceptible to some of these forms of control, simply because there is a record that outs the shills