So a minute ago I was looking for some 4chan archive of mspaint comic threads to prove that the "are ya winning son" meme started there, and the VR sex version is not in fact the original. What I found is one of the most significant internet history events that no one's ever heard of. A tale of a modern library of alexandria.
I used to browse 4chan pretty regularly between maybe 2006-2010. After that the alt right was in its infancy and it started to get real bad. but before that, there was a lot of goodhearted fun. One of the fun threads were MS paint comics. This is where trollface and shit like that started, stuff that eventually got stolen by reddit and made into copy-paste rageface shit. "are ya winning son" was one of those. The 4chan mspaint threads were all full of original content or reposts of old popular ones.
Basically the way 4chan works, threads get deleted after they hit the "bump limit". Bump means every time someone posts the thread goes to the top of the board. After a thread hits the bump limit it sticks around at the very end of the board until it gets pushed out by a new post. On very active boards, threads would rarely last a day. Bad threads would be gone within a few hours.
Eventually, people wanted to be able to save some of the good threads for posterity. Christopher poole a.k.a. moot, the creator, had a philosophy about it because he wanted to cultivate a certain type of culture. Things needed to come and go. The idea was that important stuff would get reposted naturally if people liked it and unimportant stuff would be forgotten. It wasn't supposed to be a journal, it was a town square. There is no clout chasing on 4chan. People post stuff for the moment because they want to be part of a conversation. Since nobody remembers you there's much less pressure over not being "cringe". That's why so much content came out of 4chan, because there is no barrier for entry, everyone is on equal footing, and everything everyone posts gets looked at. No good post slips through the cracks in the moment.
But this meant that there were threads where people were posting important original content that was getting lost to the ages. People saved stuff they liked, but if you remembered something you saw a week ago but didn't save it there was no way to get it back unless someone else decided to repost it. So moot decided to create an archive system where if five users voted to, a thread would be archived to a site called 4chanarchive. This ran from 2006 to 2013, and by then it held around 500GB of threads. 4chan always had trouble keeping afloat (for all the same reasons as tumblr honestly) so in 2012 the archive was transferred to a guy who was involved with encyclopedia dramatica. But then he went MIA, and now that entire archive has been lost. There were a couple other archives during that period, but they were all poorly managed and not much survived.
It's crazy to think about the amount of stuff that is gone. The internet was a real wild west until around 2010, and that period still has so much influence on us a decade later. Dumb shit like rickrolling, longcat, tons and tons of copypasta like the "what did you say to me you little shit" thing, SCP came from creepypasta threads on /x/.
Here's a link to the story if you wanna read it for yourself.
4chan is just one example. I think it's really fascinating how people used to say "if you post something on the internet it's there forever" but maaaaan look how things turned out. People trying to archive shit on the internet are struggling all the time. Tumblr is especially bad, I have a hard time finding stuff that I reblogged two months ago. It's really great that heritage posts and certified iconic posts started up because it would be so hard to find that shit otherwise. Maybe it doesn't really matter that much. Maybe moot is right and it's better for things to just come and go and be forgotten.
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