this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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I'd argue that they were co-opted, rather than spawned it. 4chan was an edgy place pre-2016 sure, but the users there were only half into their conspiracy bullshit. The Q stuff came out of seemingly nowhere and instead of being shot down as the usual bullshit, somehow it was being elevated and promoted. That smells like outside interference to me, but I have no data to back it other than my own bullshit theory...
It was the r/the_donald exodus and I will fucking die on this hill. I was there. I saw it.
Reddit banned that sub and many of these boomers migrated to /pol/. Trump posting turned from being ironic to legit. You could spot the ever increasing facebook boomer memes and that was also the point where Twitter screenshot posting became the staple of the board. By being pretending to be retarded, /pol/ attracted and amplified actual retards who took over. 2016 is when that board should have been nuked but no one wanted to release the sewage onto other places.
I think similarly. And 4chan wasn't the only website affected, it happened to reddit and to pretty much all social networks. It was very drastic, like somebody flipped a switch on the internet that year. You could tell astroturfing was way more intense than usual.
I'm not sure if I got used to it, but it feels a little bit more mellow nowadays, with flare-ups in key political moments, but 2016 was a 365 day effort.
It happened here too last US election. I had no idea what was real, and then suddenly - poof - the vocal accounts all quieted down.