4chan’s ‘cesspool of the internet’ is down after apparently being hacked

Anytime I see a quote from 30 Rock, it gets an upvote.

It’s a little bit of a misnomer. They had tripcodes, which functioned similarly to usernames. It’s basically a password (called a tripcode) that you include when making your comment, and the site does a hash on it. The result of that hash appears as your name. Reversing the hash is computationally difficult, so the only way for another user to steal your “name” is to guess the tripcode you used. So you can essentially “sign” your comments with a username by using your tripcode.

And since reversing the hash is computationally difficult, you know that users with interesting usernames likely devoted a LOT of time into figuring out the tripcode they needed to use. That’s part of why the whole “Musk was on 4chan talking about being a god” thing is so funny. All of the posts had the username “The Antichrist” and the tripcode for it likely took several months to crack; Cracking the letters would be difficult, but doing so with the capitalization likely took a lot longer. So if it was actually Musk, it means he is such a tryhard that he devoted significant resources towards cracking it just to have a “cool” username. Most anonymous users made fun of tripcode users; The nickname for anyone with a trip code on their posts was “tripfag”.