4CHAN
PS DON’T GO LOOK!!!!! SAVE YOUR EYES
WHAT IS 4CHAN??
“A website with no rules”, 4chan was created on October 1 2003 by Christopher Poole, but mostly peaked in 2009-2013
Description: 4chan is an 18+ image board website, originally created as a counterpart to the Japanese anime board 2chan, but quickly grew more fandoms and communities.
The main demographic are young male adults ranking from age 18-25, but of course, much older users would be on the website aswell.
It is a controversial website, because lots of illegal content, such as gore (live leak), underage pornography, real life murders and deaths and more. Due to “Rule B”, so the “rule of lack of rules” and no censorship/filters, anything can pass.
Now why is it important in internet culture? Because it is mostly anonymous, so users would tend to post more. People can just post whatever without getting traced back to them, so they don’t need to be afraid to get in trouble. It is also important because of how controversial it is (which was mentioned earlier but it was also full of different communities (for weird people with weird interests…)
KiwiFarms
KiwiFarms is an online forum dedicated to discussion and harassment of communities or online figures. It was formely known and launched as CWCki Forums in 2013, in order to harass an internet figure I’m sure most of you guys recognize : Christine Weston Chandler, popularized as Chris Chan, an awful person (that we will talk about later).
It is a website for people who get “milked for laughs”, known as “lolcows”.
a controversy this website went through was hosting the video of the Christchurch mosque shooting and being linked to three suicides.
DeviantArt
DeviantArt founded in August 7, 2000, by Angelo Sotira, Scott Jarkoff, and Matthew Stephens, is an art-sharing website for artists to share their work, find communities (they got their own community tabs for that), chat on forums, get jobs, and more… Unlike the previous websites mentioned, it is more than likely that everyone with internet access has seen at least ONE deviantArt post after a little chrome search. From Google, or on the DeviantArt website itself, you can search up fanart of your favourite fictional character… Chances are you’ll see wholesome art from talented artists, most likely from DeviantArt. But if you scroll too far in your search, or if you’re very unlucky, you might be greeted by plain fetish art of the character in question, more often than not from DeviantArt artists.
Because DeviantArt is so accessible, younger children with unsupervised internet access can accidentally stumble on questionable art of their favourite cartoon characters- not porn, as you need an account and verify your age to see that, but rather content that can go under the radar, that kids wouldn’t necessarily KNOW it’s fetish content, and that could really mess up their brains being overexposed to that content, because, well, they don’t know adult content.
Nowadays, DeviantArt isn’t as active as it used to be- it is full of ai generated pictures now. It ultimately killed the “Art” out of DeviantArt.
Amino (SOME OF THE TOP COMMUNITIES)
Amino is super dead now
these are some of the top communities:
https://aminoapps.com/c/furry-amino/home/
https://aminoapps.com/c/anime/home/
https://aminoapps.com/c/art/home
(Storytime…)
Amino, or more precisely, FURRY Amino, is the first art/community website I’ve joined in my early teens. It was a place for me to share my own artwork and connect with other furries (yikes), and also being able to “sell” my art using Amino currency, “amino coins” (absolutely worthless, but it was a good experience/practice), and eventually building my own following. From chatting on public group chats to many people asking to role play, I had a little influence on the site- but it wasn’t all for the best.
One of the reasons I joined Amino as a 14 year old was to meet like-minded people, and I felt protected, because adult and nsfw content was prohibited. But that wouldn’t mean I wouldn’t experience bad things. Many grown adults (like, in their 30s or up) would slide into my direct messages asking for nsfw or fetish art of their characters, wanting to do some adult/intimate role-plays, being invited to adult group chats or outside servers, all while being told it’s okay because “we are friends”, so I’m “an exception”, or “aging up my fursona (yeah, I had one) to become an adult” to be able to engage in intimate role-plays. Luckily, I was (usually) on guard and didn’t engage in any of these activities because I knew at a young age it was wrong- but I know it wasn’t the case for everyone who got the same things as I did.
Anyway, I stopped using the app a year later, at 15, because of the app itself being inactive (from over 5k online users to 500, if on a good day), and because of the overall clingy and weird people in my direct messages spamming me constantly, lots of pressure for me at the time. Also, involuntarily acting as a therapist to a mentally ill 35 year old as a 14 year old isn’t the best thing either… In all, I had an overall okay experience on the app before it died, it really shaped me how I act online today- protecting myself more, being able to recognize weird behaviour and just overall not be weird online- again I was lucky to also be able to recognize when some behaviours were predatory as a young teen, but not everyone had that luck.
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not as weird but it’s an important site to fandoms