The Truth About The Tumblr vs 4chan War 

Based on this recount 4chan sounds like a little boy pulling the pigtails of a girl he has a crush on

my brother was a 4 chan guy, I was a tumblr girl I feel like I should write a formal apology to my poor parents. Those poor people

"You can't troll 4chan, it's like pissing into an ocean of piss!" *proceeds to attempt to troll the gay porn and gore website by flooding it with gay porn and gore* I guess what the raid really did is prove that Tumblr too, is an ocean of piss.

I once heard someone describe Tumblr as 'leftist 4chan" and I've yet to recovery. I've never heard a more concise description of Tumblr in my life

I still vividly remember telling one of my tumblr mutuals who had never heard of 4chan and was relatively sheltered to just ignore the drama, but they insisted on immediately delving into /b/ of all boards. It was like watching someone rushing onto the battlefield armed with only a pool noodle and then immediately stepping on a landmine.

It genuinely boggles my mind that both sites are still alive. They're both past their primes. Neither is profitable. It's an enigma.

2014-2015 internet culture feels so alien and isolated from the rest of history. That lull moment in the pre-Trump/late-Obama era before everyone went insane.

Me angrily writing a scroll to send to the wizards guild "they have KILLED people with TROLLS"

its kinda weird that tumblr has a reputation of being "soft" when the only settings for tumblr users are "regular person who is on for fandom/oc stuff" or "battle hardened war veteran shaped by years of discourse and homophobic anon hate mail"

tumblr x 4chan feels very comphet of tumblr

seeing the word "4chumblr" shaved 10 years off my life

Two household, both alike in dignity(In that both lack any)

My favorite cultural artifact was the gif of Troy from Community bringing a pizza box into a burning room and Troy is labeled "4chan", the pizza box is labeled "g*re p*rn" (asterisked in case of youtube algorithm), the room is labeled "Tumblr" and the fire is also labeled "g*re p*rn"

I absolutely loved the anthropomorphized 4chan x Tumblr ship as a middle schooler, and I still do to this day

...WAS FREEBLEEDING A 4CHAN PSYOP?

Also I’m gonna say this now, I’m starting to think Internet Historian wasn’t good at his job.

4-chan had gore that they glorified as cool and edgy and hard-core. Tumblr had gore that they glorified as sexy, dangerous, and alluring. They are just 2 sides of the same fuckin coin.

It’s kinda ironic that 4chan spouted anti-authoritarian ideas, but have gone on to reinforce the cultural hegemony in their attack of minority groups that deviate from the norm.

I feel like the ship dynamic of the later years of 4chumblr would be like Grusk (Grimes x musk)

So 4 Chan instigated a fight, got mad their own members pretended to be part of said fight, then attacked tumblr for the fight they caused and also pretended to participate in? Then blamed tumblr for it? Guess you can’t take the logic of incels and internet idiots as solid, but Jesus lmao

"extremely online teenage girls who think lizard should be a gender and extremely online teenage boys who think it's cool to say slurs." and they were kissing!!!!!

“you wanna kiss me so bad it makes you look stupid.” - tumblr and 4chan to me

The year is 2015 and my girlfriend and I attend Comic Con dressed as the 4chan and Tumblr girl avatars. 🤣

The whole "recapture our glory days" mentality but in the 2010s is throwing me for a loop. I was an active 4channer from 2007-2009 and EVERYONE was constantly trying to recapture the glory days of the "epic" July 2007 raids of Habbo Hotel and Second Life, declaring that 4chan was dead now that the halcyon 2006-2007 days had past, etc. I'm so fucking old

But what you don't know is that his real name is Strange Aeons....

I staffed Dashcon's volunteer security, and leading up to the event, we expected a potential irl 4Chan raid was the worst thing that would happen at that convention... Heh... 😅

watching this video made me realize how poorly researched IH’s video on it back in the day was. Bro didn’t even realize the 2014 raid was completely instigated by 4chan

I do find it hilarious that anonymous social media users pride themselves on being absolutely terrible people… anonymously online… Like they know they couldn’t handle the backlash from general society for being purposefully horrible in real life where people know who they are, so they’ll just send anonymous hate as though that makes them some sort of big bad supervillain while they imagine that literally anyone cares about their existence.

The thing I remember best from that time was that the Homestuck tag was so goddamn weird already that the 4chan raiders abandoned even trying to spam it

The funny thing about the 2014 4chan raid was that it was almost entirely 4chan users fighting themselves via sockpuppets. Very Ms. Scribe of them.

Tumblr is the origin of half the memes, 4chan is the origin of the other half. Tumblr tells long probably fake stories, greentexts exist. The one major difference is that Tumblr banned porn.

I’m convinced every major conflict in the West right now is an outgrowth of the 4chan vs. Tumblr war.

Easily the biggest shift in 4chan culture came from the Hal Turner raids, which put a site full of anonymous, edgy anime fans and nerds on the radar of Stormfront users and other white supremacist types. Using the relative anonymity the site provides, they managed to "How do you do, fellow kids?" their propaganda into the overall zeitgeist of the forum. The site's userbase is probably still about as proportionately left and right wing as the rest of society, but it's hard to shake a reputation when the most newsworthy shit to come from the site in the past decade has been Gamergate and a series of murderers.

4chan's use of the f-slur is because edgey homophobia, tumblr users the f-slur because it's reclaimed but also it's one of the last parts of the queer community that's not monetizable.

4Chan is hilarious to me cuz sure it IS a hellscape of just the most decrepit things, it simultaneously is home to some of the funniest damn posts/events I have ever seen. The Little Man Cam saga is really funny, the Shrek DVD orc that lived in a rented basement of some elderly couple, ugh some damn classics I tell ya

DARLINGGGGGG GUESS WHO’S BACK FROM JAILLLLLLLLLL!!!!!?

FINALLY! Someone talking about what actually happened! I only ever see people talk about this from a 4chan user perspective! I remember the warning posts on my tumblr dash because of the invasion and finding 4chan's actions really immature and dumb.

Oh I remember the 2014 'raids'. Never bothered me none cus I didn't use the tags, but I remember reading people talking about how 4Chan was going to make gore art of HS characters and just thinking. How could it possibly be worse than canon. I mean. Eridan. Wildly upsetting? I'll do a dramatic fucking pirouette off the handle for you. It was all very "we'll take the brunt of it, for they can't hurt us in any way that matters". But it's nice to have a bit more context for where that all came from

I remember messaging one girl who wrote what board on 4chan she was from on her arm, and she had posted something like, “I’m thin, white, and cis, triggered yet tumblr?” With her boobs more or less out and we got talking. I think I had started with something along the lines of, “oh that’s a cute cardigan you have on” and she replied to that, and after a bit of back and forth, I just asked and I was like, “so… like, what have you gotten out of this? Like has this been a successful raid? Or trolling or whatever? Like admittedly I just don’t mess around with 4chan because I’m just not interested in a lot of the stuff popular on the site and my friends are here but like, I don’t quite get the goal ‘cause isn’t the point that we’ve got spaces we can carve out to our interests? Not that you can’t be here you’re totally welcome to be. It’s the internet do whatever but like, why waste time on us if you think we’re losers?” She ended up saying most people were actually being really nice and if anything just saying if they need any support with anything that they would help them find resources since she had some old scaring. The troll was in fact not satisfactory and she was going back to 4chan, but with a slightly different view of tumblr. We actually did stay messaging for a few days after that. Hope she kept growing and is doing all good now. I know I had a lot of growing to do at that point and I’ve had scars come and fade since then too.

As someone who was on both 4chan and tumblr during the 2010 raid, it was something so uniquely 2010 that it could never be repeated.

my memory of the 2014 raid is seeing a whole lot of “4CHAN IS RAIDING US” and “HERES HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF” posts but never actually seeing any gore lol

I was VERY on Tumblr in 2014, and I somehow completely ducked this whole event.

Internet historian has been a disaster for internet history

Oh my god I remember being like 16 and thinking of myself as some sort of internet vigilante bc i discovered areas of 4chan where they talked about raids (i was on there out of curiosity, bad idea overall) and I would make note of a bunch of tumblr blogs they planned to raid and then go on tumblr and message those people to warn them lmaoo

My favorite thing about the "war" when 4chan publicly announced which tags they were going to raid, so we just avoided those tags, then they got upset that the raid wasn't working.

Literally this entire "war" is just 4chan being awful and Tumblr just kind of ignoring them until they stop.

I had a 4chan user friend in like 7th grade and that man was absolutely destroyed by that website. I am convinced that’s why he turned out the way he is

As soon as you called them kindred spirits my brain went "ah yes, 4Chanpulet and Tumblotague, two houses alike in dignity (none)"

I never understood this "war" because at the time I was using tumblr (prior to knowing much about 4chan), a lot of people I followed on tumblr were also 4chan users and they seemed pretty fine and not ooo spooky internet boogeyman.

Great video, I have one correction due to my wasted youth. The reason behind hating 4chan memes being popular on other sites, be it tumblr or reddit or whatever you want, was always more based on a notion that the users of those sites were then going to come to 4chan because of those memes and stink up the place. It likely does happen in some cases (especially greentexts) but I'm not sure if this has ever actually been a real and common thing. Ironically for how thick-skinned 4chan likes to pretend it is, the idea of people coming in and not getting the culture always really stuck in their craw. Likely because they saw that as being a threat to change it if not fought. It's fine if you come and piss in the piss ocean, but if you come dump your drink in it, we're going to scream and cry about it. The one thing you can really do to upset me is to shift the atmosphere of my safe hatebox, no matter how slightly.

As someone who was (unfortunately) on both sites, I just remember this all being so stupid lol. The spam was so annoying, but also it was funny how sheltered 4chan seemed to think Tumblr users were, because the stuff I used to see on that hell site still haunt me to this day. I could just avoid the threads I didn't want to see on 4chan and just go for the memes but on Tumblr the crazy shit would be tagged something like "poetry" or "aesthetic" and would pop up unannounced. Ah, the wild west of the early Internet.

"I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago"

Tumblr: *Goes on 4chan to say "hey guys don't be so mean and be more inclusive" 4chan: *spams gore and cheese pizza* lol guys we trolled them tumblr landwhales!!!!

If only they united, think if how quickly Facebook and Twitter would have fell to their power?

NO I REMEMBER GETTING SO UPSET ABOUT THIS THAT I TOLD MY PARENTS ABOUT IT

4chan was kind of shit in 2014, some boards were ok but a lot of threads were just people trying to ragebait each other for no real reason other than boredom, and other boards like /pol/ were absolute garbage all around and infested with "edgy" 13 yo kids

4chan v Tumblr fights remind me of the Crusades in that the people doing it think they're righting some grand injustice, but everyone not involved can plainly see it's just a group of easily manipulated people getting into fights for made-up reasons. And it keeps happening, because even though the stated goal NEVER HAPPENS they can pretend some inconsequential victory is actually progress to their ultimate success.

I remember this time. I ignored all of it. Because i was in my 20's and i absolutely refused to be involved. It was 2014, couldn't we just agree that we both hated Reddit? Back before we needed Reddit to get any answers from Google.

_”Whoever wins, we lose.”_

God I remember this time during college and it felt like a war where tumblr picked the absolute WRONG enemy. Here for the lore video

One thing that I feel is good to mention is that, 4chan post 2013 was not the site for anti sjws. I was big into anti sjw personalities and spaces online, the overall consensus of the majority was that tumblr was crazy whereas 4chan was almost not spoken about in a way that showed a genuine understanding that 4chan users beliefs were a lot less agreeable and a lot more actually dangerous. The reason why 4chan very rarely got criticism was because it was just well known as a horrible place to look, akin to the incel forum, it wasn't as fun to mock something so serious when you could make a shitty meme about Big Red, or cringe compilations or talking about ace/pan discourse. So basically even in the anti sjw crowd, the greater numbers weren't users or supporters of 4chan, not to say that 4chan weren't anti sjw, just that alot of the beliefs are a lot more extreme then most anti sjws were

This is going to be an academic resource one day. Probably tomorrow, but that's one day!

they are like those two koi fishes in that avatar episode

Ive seen the personanifed 4chan and tumbler Personally id just like to imagine those two are like the two friends you had in highschool who absolutely hated eachother that now are just living together in a small apartment in contempt

I remember this so well because my older sister told her friend who was an avid 4-chan user my blog URL and he proceeded to send me images of brutalised cats. I was 14

Speaking as someone who was on the 4chan side of the war, this was a trip. This was a very weird time to be a terminally online 16 year old. Also fuck /pol/, I remember when they were the most hated board on the site.

4Chumbler has always been my favorite enemies to lovers representation. No one could have done it better. 4chan literally having to stage a reason to leave the relationship is what keeps me. A true 2000s love story. Beautiful.

From my experience on tumblr, we are way scarier than 4chan users. They post shock images to shock, Tumblr has cute little aesthetical gore blogs

oh my god…. I was active on tumblr during one of the smaller raids (the one in late 2014) and it absolutely DECIMATED my irl friend group in a way that I can’t even begin to explain 😭😭 I mostly remember that 4chan members were allegedly using secret codes?? and everyone started communicating through Omegle and I tried going undercover???? anyway this video brought me BACK ty Strange

As an old ..."4chan User" I can tell you by the time the first "tumblr war" happened, /b/ had been overrun with redditors. Prior to "Project Chanology" the "slenderman looking green guy" was the representation of Anonymous, and anonymous wasn't a hacktivist group. Reddit was our first platform that we hated, because they'd run all of our image macro memes(Because reddit is the one that came in and didn't understand what a meme was and thought image macro's were it) in to the ground and then try to be cool on our site and get us to be their personal army any time they had a beef with anyone. Back in the old times, we'd do raids on other sites because it was funny not anti-authority. Anyone who tells you we had a beef with authority, is only half right. We didn't pick fights with authority figures, some of the fights we picked were just because we thought it was funny to mess with people.Tom Green for one, Ghost(an old white supremacist talk show host, who /b/ later found out because his websites backend didn't have a password and archived correspondence was an FBI plant.) for another, etc. It wasn't until Reddit, who I'll consider 4chan's annoying little brother at the time, started noticing us that we started getting floods of people wanting to DO something with invasions and be elite hackers. They'd make a reddit thread on whatever sub they frequented, a mod would be like "hey don't do that on our subreddit" then run to /b/ because no one would stop them, ad nauseam. A majority of the original userbase stopped using /b/ by 2010, and were on /v/ and /a/ mostly (I migrated to /co/ and /tg/ personally)

when youre trynna beat the weird kid allegations but you know the inner lore to this topic specifically

I've gone from the Siege of Terra to the trenches of the Tumblr/4chan conflict. War never changes. 🚬😮‍💨

i love how your barcode bangs move when you move your head

this is going to be the first time I am engaging with a video only for the engagement because I will be too triggered by the content material. Not because this is any genuine trauma or problem but because I might actually see myself in this video and I genuinely cannot grapple with that fact.

"bait tumblr users into staging a real invasion of 4chan so that 4chan would have a reason to retaliate" sounds like a common tactic of our "allies" in the middle east

you have VERY jiggly bangs in this video. I hadn't noticed at first but it is now consuming my entire existence

As someone who used both sites extensively in the early 2010, there was absolutely a huge shift in culture around 2014. Before, 4chan knew they were the bad guys and kind of revelled in that fact. Now, the think theyre some underdog heroes on a righteous crusade. They obtained values where before they had none.

"She was fearless and crazier than him. She was his queen, and God help anyone who dared to disrespect his queen."

The other fascinating thing about more modern tumblr 4chan interactions is how the 4chan greentext storytelling format has kinda dribbled over to tumblr (and lowkey youtube comments sections for some reason) as a meme format. Also how somehow despite EVERYTHING these two webbed sites will still post the same anime girl reaction images in response to things that do not matter

As someone who spent most of their time on 4chan as a kid in the 2000s, its equally delightful and depressing to learn about the wonderful world of tumblr

I had totally bought the 4chan narrative about this old internet legend, it’s cool to hear the full story cuz it really makes it apparent how much 4chan and tumblr mirror each other. The cringe and based exist on all sides

Dispite their size, both sites aren't commercially viable... I've literally never thought of that.

Now that I think about it 4chan and Tumblr form this weird yin yang duo in the internet. At first they seem like polar opposites but when you look closer they both have big similarities.

This just unlocked repressed memories of MCM expo conventions where a load of people came in that exact green bodysuit and my friends and I just assumed they were from a weird fandom we didn't know. Thanks for solving that mystery for me.

And then all of this turned into the modern social media landscape... I was one of those 4chan weirdos, but I still had a tumblr, I spouted phobic rhetoric even though i was repressing therianthropic tendencies, In fact I blame 4chan primarily for me discovering my identity as a bisexual furry. This circus show is absolutely astounding...

i was there on tumblr during the "raids" and never saw a damn thing because ive never been someone to browse tags. it's hilariously easy to avoid shock spam on websites that just show you stuff from people you follow and nothing else. i was an early teen and for the most part i just remember thinking it was funny 4chan cared so much about their made-up vision of tumblr users. "guro" gore fetish blogs were pretty commonplace at the time too

A story of the modern-day Icarus, this video chronicles the incels' final opportunity to win the hearts of the manic pixie dream girls before becoming radicalized to the point of unlovability. A tragic yet cautionary tale.

thats how you know these are both terminally online because they do these attacks on July 4th when everyone is out partying at beaches

I don't know if anyone recalls when 4channers tried to overload the servers for Gaia Online when GO added a bunch of meme-based items in 2008. It was pretty wild but the MODs were really stepping it up and banned a lot of accounts to combat the 4channers. I think the servers got overloaded a couple times but it wasn't nearly as bad as it had been during events prior to that. Maybe the GO staff wanted to test the limits of their new servers and knew that adding meme-based items would get them swamped with 4channers (something that had happened to other online games and forums at the time) or maybe they just didn't care. Anyways, it was a wild time.

SCREAMING MY ASS OFF I was there and drew fanart for the 4chumblr stuff 😭😭🤣🤧 and it was the first time I got the experience my art being reposted to 4chan lol

it bothers me just how much of my and my friends’ personalities as teens were shaped by 4chan vs tumbler, the 2 genders. I was 4changender and, just like the 4chan /pol/ user trying to fake a tumbler attack, I would provoke my tumblergender friends by saying edgy stuff for no reason trying to start an argument I could win. We were so diametrically opposed, yet our personalities meshes so well together and we’re still good friends. At the end of the day we were both kids raised on the internet

I remember first becoming truly aware of 4chan when I was a high school junior in 08-09 and I was doing some group therapy sessions. One of the other kids felt the need to inform the group about what was going down in the “asshole of the internet.” Like I’m over in the corner trying to work up the courage to talk about my social anxiety or my grandma’s dementia but I have to listen to the greasiest kid in the room try to teach the therapist what a “trap” is.

Went to a couple of the Project Chanology protests/meets in 09? and at one of them a guy in a Guy Fawkes mask asked what my band T-shirt was and I was like oh (band name) is a band. And he's like "oh, I don't listen to bands" and I'm like ok what are you into, like I was thinking maybe he's a rap guy or a techno guy but then he's like "they might be giants, barenaked ladies" and a group he had to explain was Japanese. I was like oh ok

Now that's good nostalgia. I was sitting on the sidelines during this but was definitely a 4channer who felt all the ways about Tumblr that you say. Now I'm a good and nice NB. I still don't go to Tumblr but I super get it and just wish the few times I tried to get into it I wasn't immediately insulted and harassed for not knowing what superwholock was implicitly just by the title. (I got a "You don't belong here this place is too wacky for someone like you" basically. Like fine sure I'll just go to literally the most insane place on the internet and be a piece of garbage if you think you're so wacky and better than me)

i wasn't even on the internet back then but somehow was surprised by nothing mentioned in this video

A lot of 4chan users thought Tumblr users were soft. They never experienced the absolute depravity and cruelty of a fandom war. 4chan users are like those people who declare they'll gladly go join the military to "fight the terrorists" then do absolutely nothing because they're cowards. Talk big when you've successfully stopped your friends from retaliating over being doxxed and stalked over "problematic ships", when you've acted as mediator between two people who had a horrible disagreement over media literacy, when you've seen your Discord server completely explode over a ship war.

I was sincerely hoping for this video to open immediately on you claming full responsibility for all of it like a supervillain, Vince McMahon style.

I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago.

Early and ready for my Tumblr history lesson

So 4Chan attacked Tumblr, Tumblr retaliated. Then a 4Chan user, told Tumblr users to attack 4Chan for no reason. Then 4Chan attacked itself in an effort to defend against the Tumblr attack… that was actually 4Chan users anyways. And then attacked Tumblr AGAIN for… not attacking 4Chan? And then called them overly sensitive for not doing anything? Yeah that pretty much sums up the average 4Chan user.