What will happen to these archives in 20 years? Will academic institutions like the Library of Congress or the Internet Archive formally ingest them? Or will they remain in the hands of hobbyists, running on donated server space, one hard drive crash away from erasure?
In 2022, 4chan underwent a major technical overhaul, migrating to a new image hosting system. The result was catastrophic for archives: millions of image links broke overnight. What had been a photograph of a funny cat or a political cartoon became a dead 404 placeholder. The text of a post might remain, but its visual punchline—often the entire point—was lost. archive 4chan