Pockets of internet communities shaped internet culture which shapes how society exchanges information online. That's the impact of any large scale forum.

Your question is like asking what the lasting impact of painting is beyond paint on paper.

Well I don't think many paintings are talked about as "having shaped the painting world/art". They are just some nice pictures or whatever.

Sure - some pieces have shaped art - like first real use of perspective, or that one with the weird stretched skull etc (can't remember names, sorry). Those were pioneers that changed how artists and people thought about and created art. That is what I am wondering about - what happened there first that is now ubiquitous across the internet or changed how people do things from that point onwards? I don't feel like just being popular at the time really changed anything of note.

Things like digg and early Reddit for example did introduce some new things like the social voting of stories (although I am sure they were not necessarily pioneers there but helped popularise it). Likewise YouTube made video sharing and consumption super trivial. Wikipedia, Google maps, Facebook, Flickr. Those introduced/popularized ways that shaped how people use (and built) the internet ... SA and 4chan were/are just popular forums and as far as I can tell (just like any of the other popular forums) were popular in their niche but haven't generated anything of note on how people use the internet apart from a few threads or memes that you only know about if you know about them - e.g. what happened on SA that my grandmother now does when using the internet today? Does my grandmother know about a particular thread about 9/11 or some random Donal trump meme on there? Of course not - but she does use slippy-maps (google maps) and social media (Facebook) and instant in-browser online video (YouTube), online photo galleries (Flickr)

I'm not saying they didn't introduce anything noteworthy, I am just wondering what it was they did because I can't work what is different from any other popular forum?

Saying things only have relevance if your grandma knows about them is definitely not a bad faith argument!

I think the Benghazi attacks happened live on the forums. One of the people killed at the embassy was a gamer and posted often because he had a space guild or something.

Notch released beta versions of Minecraft there for people to "check out what I'm working on"

A LOT of stuff happened on the forums. It was nuts.

The Franz Ferdinand meme everyone is going off of (which makes a TON of sense if you witnessed it and even briefly think about it) is that we would have avoided Donald Trump if lowtax had not banned hentai on the forums.

You're talking about vilerat; great guy. There are writeups about him.

The most well-known write-ups of the not great guy vilerat are his racist tirades against African people.

You're confusing "great" with "good". They are not the same.

Genghis Khan was a great man. You cannot unify a nomadic people and conquer a shitload of Asia and not be a great man. Given that under his leadership, the Mongols literally reduced the carbon footprint of the whole planet based upon the amount of people they killed, you could easily claim he was not a "good" man.

> I think the Benghazi attacks happened live on the forums. One of the people killed at the embassy was a gamer and posted often because he had a space guild or something.

Yep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Smith_(diplomat)

It's a community so, you had to be there to understand I guess.

I mean.. something awful was a community and fixture for many. That in itself is special.

Well, one thing is the impact Goons have had on Eve Online. But it sounds like you don't want to be convinced, so...

4chan's influence is not good but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In fact it's so influential that a lot of the garbage on there bleeds into the real world e.g. Pizzagate, QAnon, the OK symbol means 'white power' hoax. Most of the terrible stuff that people blame facebook or twitter for spreading usually comes from there.

4chan hardly had any responsibility for Qanon. Q poster was banned very early after most recognised it as a larp. It is overwhelmingly the legacy of infinity chan.

This is not withstanding who was eventually revealed to be one of the people behind it all, but I hate to overexplain this because the bottom-line is that this whole idea that lowtax was some kind of Gavrilo Princep is over-the-top and kinda dumb. The 4chan-qanon connection is tenuous, only more tenuous than the idea that a "hentai ban" caused 4chan, which only happened much later after 4chan was founded.

4chan was influential in many other ways, from all of Anonymous’s ops, to playing a role at Occupy and other protests. SA led to the rise of the Dirtbag Left, to Brown Moses and bellingcat, to r/wallstreetbets culture.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29185381