[MattDemers]

I think people also don't acknowledge how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there. When it breaches into Twitter (usually through funposters) people kind of ignore the unsavoury origin and rewrite the history. The anonymous nature kind of provides that petri dish of "if it's strong culture, it'll survive or be modified."

[hotfist]

This absolutely was the case for a long time. It was the cultural center of the internet where nearly all memes sprang from or gained traction and context before leaving orbit for the greater internet.

That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms.

But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.

[packetlost]

I think it's less the case now, but 4chan is absolutely still the source of new slang. It's just less concentrated on that one platform these days.

[corimaith]

People were using "Based" and Gigachad in the late 2010s for years before the mainstream picked it up in the 20s.

Also for indie video games, many do find their attention and early fanbases on /v/ before they spread out to twitter. Largely because /v/ is very information sensitive and will pick up primary news usually minutes after they arrive.

[YurgenJurgensen]

‘Slop’ was a 2024 Oxford Dictionary word-of-the-year candidate, and what most of the people using it probably don’t realise is that it originated on 4chan as an abbreviation of ‘goyslop’.

[el_cujo]

I think this was true at one point but not for the past 5-10 years. Based off of using the site I feel like now a lot of things start on other sites (particularly smaller accounts on twitter), get aggregated and popularized on 4chan, and then get picked up on other sites (often regurgitated back to twitter). Knowyourmeme shows this for a lot of things that people typically attribute as original to 4chan. There was definitely a time when a ton of stuff originated on 4chan but these days everything is so interconnected with the same people posting on twitter, reddit, and 4chan that I think 4chan gets a lot of unearned credit

[giancarlostoro]

Don't forget the slurs. They have some unique slurs in there that have backstories too.

[thih9]

> how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there

Could you give some examples? The more unexpected, the better.

Preferably with sources, because tracing word origin is difficult enough on its own.

[dmonitor]

Wiktionary has a surprisingly robust list

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_4chan_slang

[boyesm]

Moot lists some examples in this video:

https://youtu.be/a_1UEAGCo30?si=JMVO5ox3K2AhxrMY&t=97

[52-6F-62]

I thought culture was a “solved problem” now that we have AI.

I can’t keep up anymore.

[52-6F-62]

Well either people thought my comment was to be taken literally, or they believe 4chan is culture and other hurting cultural gatherings like midsize live music venues were not.