What was Jow Forums like before 2010?

Seems like people usually blame the downfall on the 2016 election.

Jow Forums changed when the place was linked in almost all Nazi communities a few years before Gamergate. Thank God the place has become so popular that today they are basically ignored, but until the Trump campaign Jow Forums was pretty much turning to shit because so many Nazis.
I remember a Nazi neet on IRC in 2014 explaining that he was banned more than 100 times a day for Racism outside of /b/ but always came back with his VPN. Imagine a few hundred Nazis doing that everyday for years and years. Virtually all threads on Jow Forums for example concerned Jews and blacks. Even on boards such as Jow Forums, /a/, /v/ most of the posts were Nazis who said things like "my kike boss" or "the nigger at work".
Before that pretty much nobody cared about racial politics on Jow Forums. People would say "nigger" & "faggot" for the transgression not to humiliate black and gay people and signaling Nazi virtue. The place was full of nerds talking about nerd shit Warhammer 40k, anime, video games, SF & Fantasy, programming, pokemon, comics... Things the Nazis don't care about or even hate.
Once again thank God the Nazisification wave of Jow Forums is over.

>Used to be simpler. Memes were simpler. Much less toxic all around. Jow Forums and /new/ really did a number on this site
Yeah Jow Forums killed this site with the great normie invasion of 2016.

so much more toxicity Jow Forums was light fun in the 00s

It was a very OwO and UwU place~! :3

imagine being this triggered by germans

Less porn and more random discussion, sometimes actually meaningful.

like a edgy reddit

When I first went on /b/ in around 2011 it was mostly YLYL and stupid funny shit. Basically an edgy version of 9gag but with the potential to actually see something original, but for the most part it was dumb trash.
Then around 2013 or so I started coming to Jow Forums and it was similar to 2011 /b/ it was mostly just greentext and discussion about random topics. Like /b/ but slightly more mature and more effort put into posts. Then slowly a culture developed of people being robots and to be a robot you have to be a loser like them and whatever and that whole thing took off. Lots of legitimate racism and nazi shit started popping up around here too. Before it was just fucking around but these new guys were serious so shit changed a bit and Jow Forums was super serious business where everyone was telling others they weren't real robuts and how niggers and jews were keeping them down. Things got weird. Then in 2015 before the election everything got hyper political, then after the election everything was even more political, and now things are subsiding a bit. Shit's been weird the past few years with all the srs bsns and politicking and race bait shit. Jow Forums pre 2014 or so was a lot less serious.

make Jow Forums great again nobodies

Nostalgiafags never change. Ten years from now everyone will recall today lovingly.

Kek you are so full of shit. OP don't listen to this faggot.

The actual downfall had nothing to do with 2016 or pol. /b/ had the fappening and a bunch of retards ended up here and rapidly fucked up the whole website.
>le
>imagine doing x
There's more newfag lingo but this is my first shit of the day.

I've been here on/off since the start. My gf showed me the site around 2003/2004 because she was into lolicon, and there was a dedicated board to it.

Hello original expert on Jow Forums. Too bad you weren't able to document the zeitgeist of Jow Forums in the beginning because you were more focused on early 2000s anime jailbait. You are a real hero.

I don't even like loli. Nor Jow Forums. I don't know why I'm here.

I came here in 2006, it was really edgy and off-the-wall. I also felt like I was in a secret club. the sense of humor of Jow Forums around that time seemed to be "everyone pretends they're retarded" (/s4s/ reminds me of that time)

the worst thing I remember is the early 2010s when those shitty comics started appearing that had rage-face, troll-face, and all the other meme-faces as characters... you know what I'm talking about

at that point I decided that the internet was dead and had nothing left to offer me. I took a big hiatus from internet culture and now I'm back. compared to the early 2010's, it's much better now

Absolutely agreed. I'm this guy and 2010-2012 was absolute cancer. I think I came back around 2014-2015.

2008fag here, chanology was the cringe of the day and there weren't any polfags except for hitler memes on /b/.

Omegle threads and tinychat threads. I have a whole folder of robot faces. Those robots are cute and I miss those days

>newfriends don't know chanology

that's a big yikes from me, chief
what's the world come to

>Talks himself up for knowing the history of Jow Forums
>yikesposter and chiefposter
Off yourself.

>the worst thing I remember is the early 2010s when those shitty comics started appearing that had rage-face, troll-face, and all the other meme-faces as characters... you know what I'm talking about

I started going on Jow Forums around the early 2010s myself, I mainly went on /v/, and I remember that board getting mad because of how other sites like Reddit and 9gag were spamming rage comics. I also remember that there were "ironic rage face" versions of /v/ memes from the time, like "le monkey face" and "le voldemort face".

So there was a good mixture of legitimate and ironic racism in the beginning? I keep getting conflicting responses about this.

There was essentially no racism at all. It was just liberating that there was a place that was "free" enough to say nigger or post shitty Hitler memes. Edgy, you know. Actual Jow Forums type of racism didn't really start showing up until 4-5 years ago from what I recall.

Even by 2010 Jow Forums had fallen from grace and newfags from reddit and elsewhere were flooding the site. The oldest old fags who were here when the site started insist the fall started in 2005 as the site gained notoriety for its antics on places like Digg, which brought lots of underaged kids to /b/ looking for "epic raids" and the like.

I admit I was part of that wave, I became a regular poster on the site in 2006, so that's as far back as I can tell you about.

I guess first, leetspeak and other internet-isms that now seem really cringy were extremely common on Jow Forums in the early - mid 00s. I feel like by 2007 or 8 stuff like "WINRAR" and "long cat is long" was already passe and considered dead memes. I remember when I first found /b/ in late 2005 and through early 2006, the big thing was wars over "forced memes", a concept that is now basically dead since it virtually encompasses all memes that come out of social media, in fact what most reddit users and facebookers think of as "memes" are what /b/tards in 2006 called "forced memes".

The overall attitude back then was also mainly based on irreverence. At the time I started using the site you could win basically any argument by going "u mad?" or accusing somebody of taking things too seriously, of trying to make the internet "srs bsns".

I'm not sure if this is an ethos central to Jow Forums at its inception but it definitely was when I joined the site. There was this idea that Jow Forums, and the internet at large, was a separate space with its own rules (hence the "rules of the internet" joke). Basically everything Jow Forums got up to was ironic or a mockery of taking the internet too seriously.

This irony was lost on the next wave of newfags that came in 2007-8, the ones who started the online activism shit with Chanology. From there it was all downhill.

>the big thing was wars over "forced memes", a concept that is now basically dead since it virtually encompasses all memes that come out of social media
Aren't a lot of memes here forced as well? Give an example of a forced meme and a non-forced (organic, maybe?) meme.

I don't recall it being really better. There were a few cool threads sure, and you lot weren't as pathetic with the board culture replies (based cringe, implying, kys, all that crap). But also tons of greentext and muh loneliness stories, not different to the low quality greentexts, pepes and wojaks we have now.

have a trap picture from 2007
the memes were different around then and no polfags i guess

Attached: trapkun.jpg (640x480, 27K)

A forced meme from back when I first joined was Gaston, don't know if any memory of that survived the newfag invasions. For recent examples, look at pretty anything circulating social media. The best examples though have the qualities of being short-lived, bland and having no particular joke or catch to them, and extremely low-effort to participate in. You know you're looking at a forced meme when it feels astroturfed, like somebody is trying to "make this a thing" even though there's no explicable reason for anybody to be posting it.

Another category of shitty meme that reddit does is template memes, which is actually a very old tradition that started on Jow Forums but fell out of use until reddit reintroduced it. The main reason it fell out of use is because it lends itself to some of the same negative qualities that forced memes have: if the person using the template is a boring, unfunny drudge they will produce bland, unfunny, overly literal pseudo-memes using the template. Probably the most infamous example of an early template meme are Demotivational posters, which became so terrible and unfunny that Jow Forums as a whole nearly swore off template-based memes after it just to avoid the cancer, only for redditors to bring it back with rage comics.

You can see this pattern is everywhere on Jow Forums today, especially on boards heavily infested with reddit (Jow Forums, /v/, Jow Forums, /tv/, etc), however the nature of Jow Forums means that original content is still extremely common and there's a constant generation of new memes on this site. Most of the memes are so insular to a particular board they don't escape to the larger internet. In general, only a tiny percentage of memes this site creates waft up to reddit and facebook, generally only the blandest, most easily template-able memes.

>however the nature of Jow Forums means that original content is still extremely common and there's a constant generation of new memes on this site
Are you 13? what kind of hilariously childish opinion is this

4chans early period was really 2004-2006. 2007-2008 was when it started mainstreaming more. I only got to the side around '07

In the first newfaggot wave /b/ was the nerve center of the site, there was a lot more shock humor, there are a TON of forced ultrarepetitive memes every day, spam everywhere, and no captchas. At the same time /b/ would just randomly do the craziest shit like decide to protest scientology en-masse because they were "lulzkillers" for taking down funny videos of tom cruise. People who Jow Forums now hates like Stephen Colbert were fucking gods and heroes. The site was primarily anarchist-left with a bit of libertarian-right and Jow Forums didn't exist yet. Cringey atheists were in full swing and got regularly baited.

People have been saying the site has gone to shit since day 1.

Honestly I think the two funnest times the site has had was Jow Forums during Trumps candidacy and /b/ during the Chanology protests simply because the most dumb entertaining shit happened during those two events.

Oh yeah also CP would get posted regularly and the mods would keep the threads up and save it.

Attached: chanology010.jpg (500x331, 61K)

Other early memories was Jow Forums regularly raiding people. Taking over Habbo Hotel they still do. However somebody literally wrote an application called low orbit ion cannon which was just a script that sent a bunch of requests to a website, had everybody on Jow Forums download it, and everybody on Jow Forums voluntarily participated in a ddos. There was the campaign to spoil the 6th harry potter book with Jow Forums users lining up early, gettin gthe first copy of the book, flipping to the back, and screaming "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE" to a bunch of crying children. Everybody who announced they were a woman would get told promptly to provide tits or gtfo. When furries posted threads people would use bots to sagebomb the thread.

It was based. Jow Forums was even dumber than it is now which is actually impressive.

It hasn't changed much since I first found it in 2007. The memes obviously changed but they were always shit. One of the first one I remember was "Tony Stark built this in a cave with a box of scraps" from the Iron Man movie.
It was always shit.

Jow Forums never swore off template memes... advice animals came around the same time as rage comics starting with advice dog... then doge came near the turn of the decade.

God demotivational posters were cancer though because people would ruin perfectly good images to add a shitty caption.

R9k really started tumbling when reddit incels invaded. That and the Oregon incident.

Yeah 2008 is the exact moment the irreverance ethos on Jow Forums died. All the same I did enjoy seeing a bunch of retards in guy fawkes masks take to the street and get into shouting matches with cult members.

I think that irreverance ethos is what Jow Forums needs back more than ever. The site would be so much better if threads weren't all so internet serious. I think the difference now is that people actually do read shit on the internet and get in a truck and run people down. So maybe that ethos will never come back because the internet turned out to be srs bznz.

Man it's more than 10 years ago. Most of the people who used Jow Forums back then have moved on. Those who haven't moved on use it less. How old do you think the people who use this site mostly are?

If anyone of you could go back and experience an era of Jow Forums, what point in time would you choose?

>Probably the most infamous example of an early template meme are Demotivational posters, which became so terrible and unfunny that Jow Forums as a whole nearly swore off template-based memes after it just to avoid the cancer,
>God demotivational posters were cancer though because people would ruin perfectly good images to add a shitty caption.
I thought demotivational posters were funny as hell when I was in third through fifth grade. It bugs me when the caption adds nothing to the image, though, but people do that all the time nowadays.

Look at Jow Forums history from the beginning it is similar
Now Jow Forums is almost gone filled with shit from Jow Forums with a few people to clean it by bumpcults make it sure that good threads remain for months

09/09/2019 Jow Forums will be

When Goddess Brooke interacted with us peasants.

magical but there was always shit here
/b/ and /v/ were never good boards, better but never good
but people always went to those places because of the shit there

03-05: all about the /b/ the other boards were just there if you like something more specific
05-09: /b/ distance itself from the path of weeaboo, starts invading people they don't like. Gives an infamy that attracted the faggots to the board. This kills the /b/
09-11: refugees flees /b/ and goes to other boards, hilarity ensues
11-15: moot creates a bunch of shitty new boards, most notable being /new/ that attracted all the stormfags, got deleted by moot then rebuilt as Jow Forums when they started flooding into other boards
15-now: /v/ participates in gamergate and Jow Forums participates in the election repeating the "invasion era" of Jow Forums, now there's no other boards to flee to

moral: if Jow Forums wanted to keep away the normalfags they shouldn't have interacted with IRL at all. Wanting influence IRL an anyway destroys the site.

this, cheesy random/bizzare humour a la Aqua Teen Hunger Force, high effort, original shitposting which sometimes caught on. Now the tone is slanted towards confessions and negativity instead since people use it like social-media more than a space to be creative and exchange ideas. It was more left-wing, people who felt out of place on other parts of the internet because of attractions towards teenagers and trannies during the G.W Bush era. Much smarter userbase believe it or not. Look up "Hal Turner raids".

they were usually references to things like this story and making the funnies with misspellings was quite new and unexplored at the time.

Attached: original_mudkipz.jpg (680x561, 78K)

Jow Forums used to be WAYYYY more left-leaning in practice; calling people faggots and niggers was a means to be edgy for shock value rather than a genuine belief of hatred. This changed wildly around the days of Gamergate leading into Trump's election as those who actually believed those things saw the shitposting and felt at home.

Most of the internet was moderated by individuals/server admins completely arbitrarily at the time, you could get b& for any conceivable drama and be expected to suck up to older members, what appealed to people was promising to not ban anyone for any reason from the getgo, rebbit and w/e is the same though so now it's mostly about being anonymous

>The hatred for Reddit
Reddit wasn't mentioned at all.

Come join this based and fun Jow Forums discord!!

discord
.gg/Txu5pZs

Attached: 8d53ed48485d0ab5e9e455085eabd882.png (999x1372, 1.53M)

Wow I never knew that I was part of Sa from basically the begining. I stopped going there when I found Jow Forums in 2013. I had also checked out Jow Forums in 2004 briefly with my Japanese friends, but I was scared off it (being too young) and the way it looked, (like a super shitty imageboard)

Don't fall for the retards who will tell you that anyone cared about original content back then, every other post was the hot new meme from a few months ago repeated ad infinitum.
I vividly remember when umad was the hot new thing and every single post was umad or various troll faces.

There was never a golden age on Jow Forums and I've been here for 12 years. This place is full with people who don't know shit about nothing and that applies for every single board.

Memes lasted a lot longer. People were always looking to troll each other, people took WAY less bait then they do now (seriously do people not understand that theyre getting baited now?). The humor was much more shock value than depressing. /b/ was pretty left/libertarian, but maybe because Bush was president and above all /b/ just loved being contrarian. Jow Forums was genuinely hated by the majority of the site and announcing you were from Jow Forums basically got you shit on or ignored. moot interacted with the community sometimes which was fun. /v/ was actually worse than it is now if you can believe that, like holy shit it was so bad. Gore was a lot more prominent, I think it got spammed so much that it just lost its flavor. Again though the humor changed, from random/bizarre to depression. I feel like Jow Forums as a whole was more rebellious and unique, now a lot of boards are kind of Jow Forums lite.

>t came to here around 2016.
>making a thread
lurk moar

The mechanics of browsing were a bit different because you didn't have all these features you have now. There was no thread hover, so you were easily able to duck roll people etc.

There was less constant porn across the NSFW boards to be honest. It tends to be the main topic these days.