The death of the old web was not accidental, it was coordinated and intentional. Years ago I was a janny on an altchan, and I saw some strange shenanigans. There would come this wave of posts that were intentionally divisive and rage inducing to the kinds of people who lurk on these corners of the web. Posts that were anti-anime and/or anti-vidya, posts about the morality of loli, posts trying to (excuse my twitterspeak) gaslight you into thinking the old web was this or that, and the list goes on. What I noticed about these posters is they seemingly came in waves, stayed for a few days, then disappeared. As a janny, I was able to see IP addresses, and I would occasionally notice the same IPs making these posts, but I would notice them on both sides of the debate, that is to say, sometimes these IPs would be the ones making an anti-loli thread, and sometimes they would be defending loli in an anti-loli thread. And then of course there was the occasional CP flood. And yep, you guessed it, same deal here. They would come in waves, it was the same IP addresses, basically the same behavior as the ragebait posts. The altchan shut down one day without warning, and when I asked the owner why he shut it down, he told me he found out there were members of the mod team that were literal glowies, and they were intentionally shitting up the boards. All that strangeness that I noticed now suddenly made a lot of sense. It seems we have glowies who target these smaller online communities and shit them up, either with CP or ragebait, to kill them off. Why would they do this? If I had to assume, it's so we go back to the big websites (facebook, tiktok, twitter, etc.) where we can more easily be monitored, manipulated with propaganda, and silenced for wrongthink. This is why it doesn't surprise me one bit to find out the 4chan hacker uncovered .gov email addresses in their mod team. So yes, to all the people who said 4chan was a honeypot, congratulations, you were proven 100% right! But what you may not have known is, the glowies are almost certainly also behind all that petty ragebait and all those attacks against what the old web stood for that I'm sure you've all seen your fair share of.
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