If you lamented the disappearance of the "old internet", well, this was a part of it, and now it may be gone too.

The title is also a fair bit understated.

They're leaking the moderators home addresses and work contact info (for admins, who are(were?) paid moderators)

I think we can lament the old internet and still care nothing for 4chan.

Like it or not, 4chan was a major hub of Internet culture. Especially early on some of the best stuff on the internet happened on 4chan (and a good chunk of the worst, of course)

4chan was founded in 2003. I think reasonable people probably disagree on what constitutes the “early” internet and this is where the argument is. Google had been around for 5 years by this point and I (and I suspect many others) remained blissfully unaware of 4chan for a long time after 2003.

Regardless of date bracketing, I can miss 80's punk and not miss slam dancing.

Maybe someone can list some positive internet culture we got from 4chan that I am overlooking.

I think anything before Frutiger Aero became popular (and it didn't in 2003) can be considered "early" Internet.

I hope you realize the irony of picking an arbitrary OS theme, something that has no correlation to the Internet in any way, as a meaningful point in the history of the Internet.

As I said it’s all arbitrary. I might pick the time around Google’s founding as the early Internet, others might pick Yahoo, others might pick anything before eternal September.

Isn't it a running joke that the Jannies don't get paid?

I'm reliably informed they do it for free.

Is it considered part of it? From my understanding, the culture has changed significantly and post get auto deleted eventually, so it’s not a good archive either. The only thing old about it is it’s web design

the mechanics are old

there's no other online community i know of that still allows fully anonymous posting

the culture changed, but the "environment" causing the culture there to be the way it is still same as the original.

the bump/delete mechanics work well to promote the most controversial, most engaging content, without any advanced statistics or ML.

despite being a shitty place, i don't feel advertised to, spied or in any way abused _by the software itself_ while browsing it

I haven't been there in like a decade but if nobody bumps your thread eventually your post falls off the last page and gets deleted no?

Where do you see info about personal info?

I would presume Anon would which to remain anon.

The initial leaker is most likely not the same parties as the ones tying email addresses and usernames to people's "real identities", if you look at the thread where the leak was announced.

Say what you will about 4chan but I am concerned for the team managing it - them and their close ones are certainly going to be exposed to a whole lot of viciousness soon :(

> them and their close ones are certainly going to be exposed to a whole lot of viciousness soon

Isn't viciousness the notorious bread and butter of 4chan?

Live by the sword, die by the sword I would say. You don't get to enjoy raising leopards and also get to be surprised when you become lunch one day

I'm not up to speed - but isn't that a free-speech absolutist site?

Mostly, but the few restrictions they do have led to even absolutist-er spinoffs like 8chan being founded.

Every website that allows content uploaded by users have moderators, you can be absolutist as you want but you can't allow CP for example, you also need to handle DMCA (unless you live in a country that couldn't care less).

No, it's mostly a cancer survivors support group. Every third post was about cancer, what is causing it, and frank expressions of helplessness in the face of it.

About half the posts were pornography, racist rants, or memes making fun of someone, often for being mentally handicapped.

Five percent was accusing the moderators of sleeping on the job.

Are we gonna lament the death of this den of neonazis basement dwellers that largely contributed to Trump's popularity? I certainly won't.

Maybe now we can have some justice performed on the owners of this trainwreck of online harassment and bullying.

My official association with 4chan ended in 2010, but I still recognise a good third of those names and would wager the leak is legit.

What kind of official association could one have with 4chan? 4chan was formative for my early connection to the internet, and I'm really curious what the organization behind it looked like. Was it professionally driven, or just some random guy mailing checks? stuff like that.

Well... A full dump of the board exclusive to moderators and janitors was leaked too so now you could take a look yourself.

Posted link is a tad vulgar and scarce on information. A bit of a collection forming on The Sun's live blog post:

Thousands of 4Chan users report issues accessing controversial website - https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/34472708/4chan-down-updates-co...

Hosting a copy of phpMyAdmin behind basic HTTP authentication in 2025 really is asking for it.

I was kinda surprised to see that phpMyAdmin is still maintained, albeit only barely. The last release was in January but before that it hadn't been touched for over two years.

This stuff is still packaged with cPanel, which is probably the most common way to manage web servers on the internet.

A tale as old as time

Surprised that the admins have any personal details associated with their 4chan profile.

Wow doxing the Jannies!

I mean, wow, they’re doxing people that helped keep a legacy internet place alive and compliant with the law.

Who would do that?

There's a KnowYourMeme [0] post with additional details and context. Most interesting to me is finding out that there' s a word filer / transformer, so SMH becomes BAKA and TBH becomes DESU, as two examples.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/april-2025-4chan-hack

One of the best websites on the internet. Hopefully not gone forever.

Good.

Always curious to know what kind of speech this kind of complaint refers to.

Free. In practice whatever a given janny doesn't like gets the boot. The moderation can get REALLY schizophrenic depending on time zone, and there are persistent rumors that certain boards are controlled by groups of interest (notably the cesspool known as /pol/ is very astroturfed).

This makes me wonder whether there's anything in there that can point to the identity of the original QAnon. That would be a pretty interesting outcome.

Given the nature of the hackers and their immediate actions, it seems unlikely they would reveal that sort of information.

Aren't we 99% sure that was a Ron Watkins grift now?

4chan will be studied for years for its role in alt-right radicalization as well as being a baroemeter for young male discontent.

For example, QAnon started on 4chan (I believe as a joke?). Nowadays a lot of 4chan users and traffic have since migrated to Twitter for pretty obvious reasons. Pseudo-intellectual racism has a lot of roots in 4chan (eg the popularity of Julius Evola) that's deeply tied to "trad" content, Andrew Tate fandom and the manosphere.

Things like the Bored Ape Yacht Club originated on 4chan and it's full of racist memes. A lot of racist and antisemitic memes originated on 4chan (eg putting "((()))" around things).

Worst of all, it seems like Elon Musk is motivated by a deep desire to be liked by 4chan.

So the point is that 4chan users (and admins) have a lot of real-world influence and that's kinda scary. It also makes them a target for this kind of hack. I suspect a lot of people will be exposed by this and in more than a few cases, you'll find ties to the current administration.