In its earliest years /b/ started prank calling the radio show of nazi Hal Turner, then messed with Stomfront as the conflict widened. There was little activist component to this. They just thought it was funny to rile up people who took themselves very seriously.
I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation. 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting word filters that I can't repeat here without my post getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of hate.
I think very little has changed in twenty years really. Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now, when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant contrarianism.
If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call your son gay until he grows out of it.
I lied about my age and was given janitor access in the mid 2000s. There was a special /j/ board to coordinate on, but it broke relatively early, and you mostly had to hang out in the #janiteam channel on Rizon. I think almost everybody else was underage as well. There was a minimal web overlay that let you delete/escalate posts. You couldn't see people's IPs, but you could see how many outstanding ban requests they had. These numbers helped me deduce that many boards' most infamous personalities were all the same guy.
We were all offered the chance to become mods in 2010, but moot wanted to see our faces on a Skype call. I thought that was a step too far and just gradually stopped caring after that. Seems like I made the right choice.
On the whole it was barely held together technically and organisationally, mostly run by moot's personal friends, and fun all around. Things were far less serious then.
I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation. 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting word filters that I can't repeat here without my post getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of hate.
I think very little has changed in twenty years really. Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now, when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant contrarianism.
If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call your son gay until he grows out of it.