As you probably noticed during the past months, more and more light has been given to 4chan.org, which might be called “root of all evil” by some.

Recently, the Time 100 list contained “moot”, the initiator of 4chan (who gets himself known as “Christopher Poole”. While I cannot affirm anything, “Poole” is most likely a reference to the “Pool is closed” meme, which came from a mistake between poll and pool) because of what looks like a hack. Following this, 4chan got increasingly coverage by medias, especially on the “Porn Day“, when tons of pornographic content was uploaded to YouTube (and which is likely to happen again next year).

4chan is also known to be linked to Anonymous and the war against Scientology.

This site has been around for a long time, and is just a place where people can post messages and pictures. Various “boards” exists (most famous being /b/, the “random” board where everything can be posted) covering many subjects like animes, trains, etc…
What made 4chan become the 4chan it is now is probably the fact that moderation is quite selective. Only a few kinds of posts are getting deleted (mostly pedophilia, and other illegal things of the same kind) and most other statements can exist, including racism, animal cruelty, death threats, etc…

Because of its increased exposure, 4chan is also getting targetted by spammers, with is quite successful on other boards than /b/ (where posts tend to disappear after a few minutes at rush times).

From times to times, someone’s post or something gets elected to the rank of “meme“, and will then exist for eternity, getting ready to get displayed in any situation, related or not. Memes have become an alternate culture, where people not aware of those are outcast (usually “newfags”) and have only two choices: leave or adapt.
While some memes are pretty much innocent, others can be seen as offensive by some people. There is no formal way to make a “meme”, it only depends on how many people will adopt something, and use it (for example, when closing a poll, 4chan administrator moot wrote “pool is closed”, leading to a famous meme).

Sometime someone will even write something like “Today I will take a gun, go there and kill everyone in sight, then kill myself”. This kind of post is common on 4chan, and is sometimes followed by real action, leading the original poster being acclaimed as an “hero”.

To sum it all, 4chan is a place where anyone can anonymously write about what they think, who they want to kill or are about to kill, what they think of various minorities, making contests of most shocking pictures, post tons of pornographic contents or requesting it, initiate DDoS attacks, etc… and getting aclaimed for it by other people, and sometimes even getting support.
This might sound like hell for some, or heaven for others, and while some might think “free speech”, it is not either (a “normal” post will not get any support, and will quickly fall to last page, then get 404′d). This does not give to the world a nice image of America, however any action against the site will most likely result in unforeseen consequences.

All memes must not be thought as bad either, as you can get nice things like some cheezburger (this is unfortunately too commercial now).

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