What is 4chan, and is it safe to use?
Following its recent near-death experience, bulletin board 4chan continues to fascinate and horrify in equal measure
Earlier this year, something remarkable happened.
One of the world’s most well-known and widely visited websites simply vanished.
For the best part of two weeks, the bulletin board 4chan was inaccessible – apparently forced offline by hackers from a rival message board.
In truth, it’s unclear exactly why 4chan vanished, although there are some people who would have preferred it not to have come back online at all after its unscheduled sabbatical.
It is not easy to find via the Bing search engine, which instead displays news stories relating to the site, whereas Google and DuckDuckGo make it their first result when searching for ‘4chan’.
So what is this website, and is it safe to visit?
Board senseless
At its heart, 4chan is an imageboard – a bulletin board where anonymous users can post photographs, memes, cartoons or other visual content.
The word ‘anonymous’ is key here, since 4chan requests no user accounts or login credentials. New users simply have to stay on the site for 15 minutes prior to posting.
It’s the sort of barely regulated forum you’d expect to find on the dark web, yet it attracts almost 100 million visitors each month and is the world’s 372nd most visited website.
Moderators need to log in, but otherwise, its boards resemble a digital free-for-all.
To answer the second part of this article’s title, that’s why it isn’t safe to visit – especially if you’re in public, have children nearby or haven’t set up parental controls on your home broadband.
The site’s Global Rules are brief and encompass only basic transgressions like impersonating a moderator or posting gibberish text.
Cartoons and pornographic images are required to be “of age”, but although it’s stated that “racist remarks…are not welcome”, they’re ubiquitous.
Content and commentary reflects the site’s American-dominated user base, albeit with a very strong Japanese influence.
This platform was inspired by a famous Japanese imageboard, known in the early Noughties as 2chan.
Indeed, the first list of boards on the 4chan homepage relates to Japanese culture – anime, cosplay and so forth.
Much of the content is benign, but the lines quickly blur, while the less said about boards like Politically Incorrect, the better.
It’s good to talk
Most of 4chan’s content comprises comments in response to posts, the vast majority of which are articulate and considered.
However, because of the light-touch moderation, you need to be fairly unflappable to read through a typical thread and not be startled by at least some content.
This is particularly true when it comes to graphic descriptions of topics like drug use or mental health, while abusive or offensive posts appear almost randomly.
There is far less reason to fear scrolling down the page on more mainstream topic boards, of which 4chan hosts many – literature, retro gaming, cooking and dozens of others.
Having said that, even travel or fashion boards occasionally contain highly offensive posts, in the midst of detailed discussions on eminently sensible topics.
Yet if you approach 4chan as an anything-goes discussion board where nobody gets to impose their worldview or sensibilities on anyone else, it can be highly entertaining.
The Advice threads are particularly worth investigating.
A mystery wrapped up in an enigma
You’ll find very little information about 4chan on its own website. Until last April’s hack, the blog hadn’t been updated since 2016, while the News page has no content of any value.
When tested in mid-October, the Search function was offline, with a 404 File Not Found error displaying instead of any functionality allowing you to search.
The site relies heavily on technical terminology likely to confuse the unwary – capcodes, sage, thread bumps – and content routinely disappears a few hours after posting.
This makes 4chan a site that benefits from user familiarity.
Yet a site with highly variable content and everyone posting anonymously is better suited to occasional use, which is perhaps why average visits last just over ten minutes.
It’s surely only a matter of time before 4chan gets caught in the ever-expanding dragnet of the Online Safety Act, but in the meantime, it remains a rare example of a largely uncensored surface website.
