mid 2000s 4chan janitor

all right so essentially uh Tom Cruise went on stage uh or he went on for an interview and he mentioned the Church of Scientology after that there was more and more scrutiny put on the Church of Scientology there was also borderline criminal things that they were engaging in and like their history in the past with sketchy political connections um I don't want this to get like taken down by the church Scientology or anything but there's some really sketchy stuff in their past and uh Fortune kind of basically there was this whole like campaign on 4chan where people would fax um black pieces of paper to their workplace and like any office building that was connected with the Church of Scientology until their printer ink was completely out uh wipe out their tone or people would send the pizza boxes or they would order all types of deliveries straight to the Scientology like headquarters in the areas it was a mess and it was all organized on 4chan there was like a whole mean campaign that was when Anonymous became like a big thing he was the guy Fox mask from V for Vendetta started a movement and uh that was the start of the internet hacking stuff that you see in like the media nowadays where it's always some like faceless organization in reality it was like a group of maybe like four or 500 people on 4chan that were just really bored and really wanted to Stick it to the Man and the man happened to be Tom Cruise because he got really upset at South Park what do you think your favorite early moment spent on the internet were in terms of a personal thing it was probably uh the first time that I successfully pirated an album in full I believe it was Minutes to Midnight by Linkin Park I was really into Lincoln Park because my cousins had shown me it uh they got into it because of like Dragon Ball Z or something like it was in every AMV at the time I remember calling my uh my cousins on like the landline and being like Oh my God you won't believe what I just did I downloaded the entire album they were like that's great we've been doing this for years do you want like a cookie or something in terms of like real standout moments of like actually using the internet and connecting with people it was probably the first time I like direct messaged someone and I realized that there was like wow I'm talking to someone that is in a completely different place than me like a pen pal but this is happening instantaneously and it's not charging the house anything because it's not like a text I don't want to sound like an internet Boomer even though I'm very Young on the scale but um nowadays it's like oh yeah I just send that a text that's normal but like when I was a kid I the only frame of reference I had was like oh I can send an email but this isn't an email this is like a letter but it's in their phone but it's not their phone it's their laptop like it was just it was wild to me this is Miles Ahead of what I thought I would be doing I'm here right now I am I look like a Droid from Star Wars and I am standing on a balcony if you told me that this would be my experience like I'm moving my hand and it's actually doing something in 2006 when I like first stumbled on the new grounds I would think that you were smoking crack there's no way that I would believe you when I was really young I was given a computer and uh my dad basically walked me through how to use it um really early 2000s I think we were still using dial up at that point so you'd have to hear that horrible whining noise and someone picked up the phone it would kill the internet took about like two minutes to load a web page I was basically just given complete unrestricted internet access yeah that was the start of a horrible horrible thing I was about uh four or five somewhere around there I was given the don't talk to any strangers online stay out of weird groups of people but at this time it was also like my parents were old they didn't really know how the internet works I started getting into memes at the time they were called like macros no one really used memes so I was just browsing like meme sharing websites but at that time it was like demotivational posters the startings of advice animals like that type of like really really old impact top text bottom text like that type of like Meme and it was mainly like just me going through there laughing at photos of cats and stuff that I thought was funny showing to kids at school and then slowly the the gap between me and my class and they started getting wider and wider as I went deeper in and and they were no longer laughing at the jokes because they couldn't get them and I was slowly realizing that I was becoming very weird I still remember the first time that I I heard the word meme used in real life and it threw me off guard I still remember the day that my dad used the word meme he pronounced it wrong and I was like oh that doesn't sound good in real life he said maybe me and I was like oh that sounds horrible it's crazy seeing how like something that at the time I would only consider like oh yeah the cool kids are talking about memes online and they're part of like this underground culture like fighting back against the Gmail and like Yahoo news nowadays it's just like a normal thing back in the day it was like a dorky nerdy thing that if you mentioned it was you just got weird looks I used to use you're the man now dude uh there was also e-bombs World messing around the new grounds and uh there's another one for oh something awful for us definitely not the the best way to like get introduced to 4chan but I was young and I was curious and I was exploring the internet and someone linked a Newgrounds Flash animation by a prolific artist uh uh it was very popular with a type of explicit work environment there's someone in the comments of the posts posted like a 4chan link it was like 4chan slash F slash it was the full thing and I was like whoa no way and then I don't need to pay for their weird subscription in early 2000s internet where everything is sketchy as hell so I clicked on it I went on the website and I so you have that link to my Internet Explorer bookmarks and I'll go back there over and over again uh to the page just to be clear it was porn yes it was it was 100 porn I clicked and I was like whoa this is weird this is a different layout it's all words and it's not a dark theme it's really really bright reddish yellow theme I think I spent like a week trying to figure out how this site worked then once I started to get the hang of it I just lurked there for a few years just browsing through threads going through whenever eventually I kind of found a place there just kind of pretended to be pretended to fit in until I did every week I would I would go on the website and I would be like what is the rest of this web like I would I would click on it the link had already 404 because I think it got taken down but the rest of the website was like a wild west for me like I was like wow what are all these different boards and like features and so I started going on other ones and I un unbookmarked the first one because it did not look good in the search history uh I started bookmarking the rest of like every one of my interests like music so I got really deep into like what music was being listed and like infographs on like hey if you like this you like this and my taste got really Niche I was like the only kid and Middle School listening to heavy um industrial and like to this day I opened Spotify and I like go to make a playlist and the first thing I recommends to me is in the airplane over the sea to add to my playlist that's like essential like Mew core and it was just like the start of a bunch of different things I was playing obscure video games I were like only available in Japan because some somebody recommended it to me after I started like Silent Hill I was really edgy so board channel is the only place that could tolerate me I just like the idea of having like no username to connect me to my random [ __ ] posting battle or like you know the whole lack of a name was really a big thing for me and it was just a lot of [ __ ] posting and banter but it's kind of different now in the earlier days of the internet uh before social media really got into the Beast that it currently is forums were like the way that the internet interacted and they were early ways to communicate 4chan was one of the image boards that sprung up uh inspired by Japanese Forum culture there were only a few like topics in the beginning the different boards had different basically like different genres of stuff that you could go on and as time went on the website expanded there were all different types of topics I was a really bored kid um and I had a lot of free time I was at home what wasn't really in touch with friends because I was busy after school with other responsibilities I sat behind the computer tweedled my thumbs and fingers typing yelling insults at people online I keep seeing the banner ads that are saying like hey we could use a janitor to or janitor applications are going out I was like oh I might as well do this right I might as well like make the website that I'm browsing better with my presence and then I found out that you had to be like legally 18 that I was very much not legally 18 at all so I hey um faked my uh credentials I pretended to be my dad sent then all fake paperwork like all of my information was my father's they were like yeah you're you're good to go I guess this was before they had like way more stringent rules around the whole janitor process they didn't check to see if you were like a criminal or anything which now that I think about they probably should have I would I 100 would imagine that they do that nowadays especially because of like the sentiment the 4chan gets on the internet especially with like history and like the the cultural significance of 4chan always being like this Lawless place where illegal stuff goes on janitors are basically unpaid moderators that have nothing better to do so they call them janitors on 4chan because they kind of sanitize the website and keep it from like getting filled with Spam and people that post [ __ ] that's not related to threads or just stuff that's typically not accepted on the board it's like the first layer of Defense besides like the users that report content on the website you could also see stuff that's like rule uh terms and service breaking like uh you have to report this to the authorities because this was just posted on the website and it is super illegal but I submitted an application I got accepted and uh We messaged through a messaging client um it would jump in between like Skype groups uh like really really old chat clients and like IRC think of like AOL like that type of oh I don't know if that's too dated um what's a what's a good compare thing it's like Proto Discord like pre-team speak without the gaming part they sort of give me like a URL and I go on the URL put in some credentials and then I can flag stuff for people that are spamming people that are avoiding bans I still remember like finding out that hyper Zoom which is like that thing where put your cursor on like in on a photo and it like expands it huge I remember the first time that I like hovered over something that was very very clearly illegal and I did not want to see bigger and it hovered over and it made it massive on my screen and I immediately was like swiping away at the screen screaming um and some of the people there were like genuinely nice but they're also a lot of like I don't want to say weirdos because I was definitely one of the weirdos but there were some weirdos there's illegal stuff being posted on the website there's definitely one of the people in here that's saving it from the website and flagging it and just saving it before they delete it most of those people got phased out usually they made it through like the screening and then like a week into their tenure or whatever uh their position kind of got cut I'm just gonna use like a random example like oh you specifically just keep like downloading photos of stuff that is very very questionable and it keeps flagging that you keep downloading it from your IP we're gonna have to let you go one of the hard Parts about 4chan is because it's completely Anonymous you have people that post stuff that's just illegal if things were operating as as planned they were gone in like minutes of being posted online but sometimes they stuck um but there were definitely some people that were really nice and really not nice or they were also like the really kind of weird people because I'm not gonna lie if you are unpaid moderating 4chan something is very wrong and they ask you like oh how many hours do you do you usually like spend how many hours do you have free they give you a choice of like what board do you want to you know be working on a board is basically you have a forum and in a super generic classification a forum would be like people just talk about whatever a board is a subsection of the website where you can only talk about stuff that has to do with a certain topic going from like random to like super super in-depth stuff like paper craft and like cars and all that stuff stuff that's off topic gets removed from the form on 4chan it's janitors mods or admins that are in charge depending on what gets removed every every topic imaginable you can imagine you've got a board for it they were like what board do you want to moderate and I was like oh you know if I really want to make a difference I'll go on the random board I'll go on B even though I really like the anime board and I really like the weapons board and the comics board which I think at that point was new and I really thought I'd be able to make a difference um I think I did for about two weeks and then it just completely bogged me down and I realized that I was not doing much all right I I never really viewed it as like uh there were opinions that I didn't want to see out or anything like that just because I've always been like a I was always like a free speech absolutist so I was never for like the the stringent like oh I'm going to ban this person because they said something I don't like even though sometimes it was really funny watching someone get banned for like saying that another person's anime character was worse than theirs I was never really of that idea I wanted to like actually sanitize the board because you would see people that would come in and they would spam threads with the same reaction image there would be constant like arguments about the same exact threads five threads of the same thing going on at once and it was just tiring to open up the website one day and just see like nothing has changed it's the same thing the same five people are still arguing about the same five different things and they don't know that they're still arguing with the same people like if you put the same people in a room in real life they would realize like oh we've been arguing for six months and it's literally just us like just us two you would have people that would come in every single day like clockwork and they would argue with each other so if I argue to you like oh cats are better than dogs and you send a message as a response like [ __ ] you no I will kill you and you send it under your your like your main computer and then you send the message from your laptop at like school or something I would think oh there's two people that are saying the same exact thing I wouldn't think like oh it's the same guy I would think like oh there's a there's a group of them out to get me it would snowball into two people completely [ __ ] up a thread because someone mentioned that like Oscar from Evangelion is better than Rey you would you would have that board you'd go on during the hours that you said you'd be free um and you'd flag anything that stuck out as illegal it basically was just a scanning job I think that at this point they've replaced it mostly with machines that just put it through an algorithm back in the day it was like you need did actual people doing it there was no algorithm for sorting out like wiener picks there were there was no algorithm for that I guarantee there's one now running on the website back in the day it was like you needed a person to like sit down and constantly refresh the page looking at new threads flagging them and then a moderator would take care of it or it would get sent up and it would get sent to law enforcement and the person's IP would be sent out as well as what was posted on the website there would be moments of like extreme traffic where the board was moving so fast that you had eight people on the board at the same time refreshing the main page in the summer the majority of the day would be active um after like 12 because I'm going to assume that every high schooler that was edgy was unfortunate at that time because there was no school you were in unpaid mod it's like the a janitor on 4chan has like the same clout as like being a Discord moderator nowadays yeah the connotations were not possible it was it was a very negative I remember the first Chris Chan threads uh that were going around people first discovered like hey there's this one guy he's obsessed with song he has a Sonic webcomic we found that it has a YouTube channel let's all Brigade it I still remember typing some really really mean comments and him responding to them in a YouTube video and that was like a highlight I was like oh my God Chris Chan responded to me after I called him me names on the internet this is a crowning achievement and now I look back on it and I'm like yeah definitely not a proud moment that I don't mention to normal people but it's one I look back on I'm like that happened most of the stuff that I remember and I remember fondly it wasn't stuff that like that I was personally interacting with it was stuff that I was like in the room for like when Slenderman became like a huge cultural phenomenon I was on the ground floor I was like in the something awful threads uh [ __ ] posting adding on to discussion I was interacting with people like who were writing stories about it eventually I knew people that were like making web series I got close with some of them I made very very long lifelong friends from that group of people and eventually it got picked up by like the mainstream media and stuff like that eventually in 2014 some kids like stabbed another person because of it or like blamed that on it and then there was a movie made and I'm like wow I I was there it's kind of like being there when like the the wheel was first invented you're like whoa people are still using that like 2 000 years later and that's how I look at like oh wow that one fifth grader just drew a little sketch of Slenderman and put it up on the fridge there's definitely one thing that I forgot to mention um cryptocurrency I missed out on that by a lot people on the 4chan tech board were raving about it um Bitcoin specifically people were like mentioning cryptocurrency and I was really interested in I was like whoa what it's like the the secret money like black market stuff that you could buy on Silk Road like that type of stuff I found that you could mine it at home so I used my really really bad laptop eventually I had a variable amount I think I had like 30 Bitcoin which I don't want to search up The Exchange amount in US dollars for um and I ended up spending some of it when I went out of the state because I found out that there was a place that was selling pizza and you could buy the pizza with Bitcoin might have been 12 Bitcoin on a pizza slice not my finest moment and then the rest of it got hacked in a massive data breach because I just did not know what was going on I never was interested in compensation and I just never got the money back uh this was also when Bitcoin was like less than a dollar so people were dumping like 500 into Bitcoin and then using that Bitcoin to make a drug purchase you win some you lose some sometimes you you're there for Slenderman being born sometimes you lose a million dollars when I was casually browsing the website I was even to this day I'm pretty desensitized to it I was growing up on like Fest score and like rotten.com I don't know if these are like familiar things the live leak of the late 90s early 2000s like those equivalents because they were like shock sites people would send like a photo of a really gory thing someone else through their email as like a ha gotcha um and that was like considered like the the cool thing to do if you were like an edgelord out of morbid curiosity I would go on the websites and browse through so when I was older by older I mean like maybe three years older than that still very very young and impressionable I was a janitor on 4chan and I was seeing that stuff every day the level at which it kept coming up like the prevalency of wake up go on computer speed decapitated body they ruined turn off computer turn on computer next day repeat it was like that every single day seeing the same stuff it was just like a meat grinder of like crime scene photos and like horrible horrible stuff and um there was a point where I was looking at something which is very very violent nature and I was like I don't feel anything looking at this this is definitely starting to mess with me not only was it violent but it was also breaking sight rules so I was like this is horrible but I just immediately noticed like I have no reaction to this whatsoever emotionally something is definitely wrong I flagged it and the next day I continued to work and I just kept creeping in the back of my mind like I need to stop doing this and find something else to do it was the equivalent of like a touch grass moment where I was like I need to go outside and like pet a dog it definitely brings out some of the worst in people um when you give them a mask and allow them to post whatever they want with a very very limited set of rules even though I love the concept of a complete Wild West even in this day and age of like whatever you post on the Internet is whatever the warning signs of the really really bad stuff that can happen we're definitely there at the beginning um even to this day you see people like I don't want to make this like really uh real and heavy but you see like acts of violence like the other day uh in Buffalo or a few years back in New Zealand um and I look at those people and I'm like I recognize where these people are coming from I'm not saying that I empathize but I know they have logged in every single day on a image board where everyone on it is screaming the worst [ __ ] spewing the worst [ __ ] spewing insane conspiracy theories they're painting as like a oh it's meaning you can see like exactly how far it can affect someone to the ACT to the point that they're willing to do extreme acts of violence and at the same time reference like meme videos from like the early 2010s but it's it's really weird seeing stuff that's like soberingly real and like very very negative and being able to like plot it back to I probably got in an argument with that guy at some point I don't know if that's too heavy you you surround yourself with people that are constantly edgy trying to one-up themselves on the scale of edginess it's kind of like that Meme where it's like wait you guys are actually racist I thought you guys were I thought racism was just a joke here people are one-upping themselves to the point that they are um actually engaging and they start drinking the Kool-Aid there's like the whole pose law thing where you make a joke enough times to new people they won't be able to tell and they'll sort of agree complete tonal shift but the same type of message applies people unfortunately started joking about liking My Little Pony as a show like the whole oh we're watching a show for little girls and then it actually got traction people were watching it seriously and they were taking it like a step further the whole fan base formed around it they started making their own threads they got their own board and like a really really weird fan base but back in the day that was crazy stuff like that was a joke that went three steps too far and became a real thing so I can see how people would make extremely edgy jokes pertaining to extreme subject matter and it snowballs into an act of actual violence and them quoting it in like a Manifesto and you see like the same language in meme culture I hate to use the word dog whistle but you see the same dog whistles in it and you're like oh no this is the conversations that I was interacting with when I was younger I could have ended up like down that pipeline if I just kept watching Fringe Youtubers with strange political beliefs yeah I I had a lot of stuff going on in my head when I was younger um especially when I was on Fortune I was a kid like kids were worrying about way different stuff than I was worrying about in my head that age um I I can't imagine what my life would be like without being exposed to that part of the internet it is such a major part of what has affected the way that I not only view the world and interact with the world but me as a person that I don't know if I could even separate it from me because it's just so deeply rooted in me I can't separate who I am now from my interactions with the internet at that early age just because I am who I am now based on that regrets probably getting the janitor position that was really stupid and irresponsible um I have a lot of regrets because of it I saw stuff that I wasn't supposed to do at a very young age I was exposed to a lot of stuff I wasn't supposed to at a very young age in terms of personal regrets um probably some stuff that I said online when I was younger some people I bullied I was mean to a lot of people I know it's it's part of like growing older realizing like the stuff that you did when you were younger is wrong but I was a little bit too harsh to a lot of people just because I wanted to be mean and edgy and like [ __ ] the system you know I'm just gonna be rude because I can be and while the when the [ __ ] posting wears off uh you sort of realize the people that you've pushed away were way closer than you thought like there's a lot of experiences and bridges that I've there's been a lot of bridges that I've burned um because I was a little [ __ ] on the internet and looking back they were completely preventable and I probably would have been better off not burning those ridges I think one time I posted my address online too that was a big bra moment oh wow this is going to be really stupid um I was playing Roblox in 2009 someone said to hit me up on Skype or like hit them up on Skype we had been playing for a while sent them my username my username had my real name linked to it they searched up my real name on Facebook found that where I lived um because of like tagged photos from family and then they went to my account information like about Paige and this during the time period where people would just casually in their Facebook put their actual phone number an actual address I was a complete dumbass who was only using Facebook for family members and friends and I never interacted with like other people on the internet I never connected my real identity to it so I didn't even think that it would happen and they just copied the address and posted it on B I remember for like a week I was like oh my God someone's gonna mail me like a bomb I'm gonna get Anthrax in the mail what actually happened was one person sent me a glitter bomb and that was it and I'm pretty sure that it was a person that docked me I can't even call a docs thing because it was more like they just Googled my name after I sent them my social media but uh definitely something that was preventable if I had the foresight to think I had a little bit I not a rough upbringing I had I had good parents but I had some interactions with adults that weren't favorable uh during my formative years and one of the main reasons that I kind of stuck with war channels because I I viewed it as like a community of people that were like depraved and [ __ ] in the head and I was kind of [ __ ] in the head so I was sort of like there was like a camaraderie of like Mutual being [ __ ] in the headedness and I formed a connection off of that and I I thought that it was kind of neat that there were people that were also like dealing with their own demons um as edgy as that sounds but even now sometimes I have self-destructive like times where I'll just shut myself off because of online classes I've just been behind my computer all the time so I'll be on my computer and then when I'm not on my computer I'm sleeping or I'm at work and I just go into that cycle of only doing those things not hanging out with friends not seeing my girlfriend I know that's like a way of like coping with being overwhelmed that started when I was a kid when I was younger it was like uh it was a way of like fighting the being a social outcast being left out of like I was the odd one out because I was dealing with serious things at home so I would sit behind my computer and I would rather interact with people online that were way older than me because I thought I connected with them more than kids at school who were my age but mentally I did not have a rapport with there was no deeper connection besides like hey did you watch that episode of Star Wars the Clone Wars I mean yeah I did you can see that I would sit behind the computer and it would just be dread because there was a disconnect but over time I I started feeling a little bit better and I um I found my own friend group not only that but I went through countless online friend groups I made my own friends experience some stuff I didn't want to experience online I experienced some stuff that was great I kind of found my footing and I think that even though it's probably not the best thing to be on when you're younger um there's a sense of community that forms or used to form I can't say if it's the same now I felt more comfortable sometimes talking to complete strangers which I would argue with them back and forth and they would call me slurs and I would call them slurs I would feel more comfortable talking to them than like people in my life because I didn't want to open up about the things that I was thinking about um especially in my household it was like a I've got older parents they don't really understand the internet and they definitely don't understand what's going on in my head most of the time I was also a dork in real life so most kids were kind of thrown off by that's the computer nerd browsing the internet was a way that I substituted genuine social contact that I would have been completely lacking in sorry if that rambled on for a little bit too long or maybe got a little bit too too deeper anything but I haven't been on it in years like maybe once in a while I'll go on to see what's up but but I'm not going there for my content it's mainly rage bait I'm not going on the website to make myself upset I have Twitter to do that if I really want to make myself angry I go on Twitter I'm trying to make myself like slightly angry not like radicalize myself into a spiral if you could tell everybody in the world one thing what would it be oh that is uh loaded question um it's easy to label people as inferior or less than in whatever way you want to put it um someone that you're arguing with and you hold an opinion contrary to and it's very easy to fall into your own like box of opinions and not change if it's something that you have to do um that I learned over the years is you have to take a step back think about the person that you're interacting with you need to remember that there is a real person behind the text that you're getting and the text that you're sending I um have definitely said things in the past that have hurt other people online and that 100 has affected them in real life we look at someone not as a person with opinions but as a product of a opinion I don't want to pull like the oh well we all just need to get along but you need to remember that there's a face behind everything that you're sending and they can take those things extremely critically I view my interactions like for example with someone like Chris Chan going all the way back it may have been funny when I was in elementary school found the extremely rude messages but years have gone on past that then and I have seen I completely understand how someone can disintegrate personally from that much hate over time I I've known people that have taken their life because of constant hate campaigns being targeted by internet stuff and it definitely hurts to see people go just because a group of people decided to focus a mean joke on them for a little bit too long so as cliche as it might sound um view other people as people especially when you're about to send that message that is just a bunch of insults and slurs and every other horrible thing that you could possibly type just think about the fact that that could be someone that you're affecting on a level Beyond oh haha this is funny or oh [ __ ] you this is edgy I guess that's all I've got for now [Music]

Channel: Syrmor

Views: 109,616

Keywords: vr, syrmor, vrchat, virtual reality, vrchat stories, people in vrchat, guy in vrchat, girl in vrchat, in vr, soldier in vr, military vr

Id: HDkmizGblxk

Length: 34min 15sec (2055 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2022