The Nobody Threads Appear on 4Chan Paranormal Board.

In mid 2018 I decided to take a year off all forum activity to concentrate on other areas of my life and the people in it. My last post at this time was at AE making a particularly challenge over whether or how the Trump administration could or would do a thing about the area where I live, and to see what would happen in a year. Shortly before Summer in 2019, when doing some google searches, I came across what were Nobody Threads being posted on 4chan of all places. I myself had never been a 4chan user, but I knew some people who had been as far back as 2003, and had already heard plenty about their reputation.

The threads appeared on the paranormal board, and The Nobody was introduced there as a paranormal topic. Curiously there are some posts going back to 2013 that come from someone who claims to have started the threads as an inebriated mishap and warning people not to get sucked into them but they didn't elaborate that much and it wasn't clear what became of them. Fast forward and it's 2019 and these threads were appearing more until they became a "general", a continuous thread series, and it also quickly developed into one of the more persistent and active general threads among all 4chan. 

This development happened not long after I arrived. The replies in a thread went from being several hundred at best to several hundred at a minimum and up to 1,000+ with up to three or more threads made per day. The threads in 4chan have what are called image limits, which put a capacity on the images shared in a thread, something that seems to be quite the norm there. So what happens is that a thread runs for a time until it is archived and new ones begin, and sometimes these new threads begin before the old one ends. This is unusual given that many threads can run for days before being archived but these particular threads run so voluminous and fast that they don't even run for a whole day before being archived.

I decided to stop by and ask some questions and it became clear that 4chan mods and users were not largely aware of the history of the threads or the sites they were originally located at. My concern was to inform people so they knew what they were getting involved with. My presence there was very brief in 2019, 2020, and 2021, appearing handfuls of times in those years with lengthy breaks in between, just to take some notes and share some information about the threads.

Strangely, the threads began to take on a much more political tone, even though they were mostly confined to the paranormal board, although they occasionally reached the infamous /pol/ board as well only to be repelled by the users there. The political tone also happened to match a lot of propaganda and rhetoric that was used by Russians in their interference operations, and this began to grow up to, during, and especially after, the start of the invasion of Ukraine. It was after this that I thought back to the things I noticed years before at the other sites and it led me to be more active during 2022 in terms of discussing the history of the threads in the 4chan versions.

It happens to be that the 4chan versions are very different from those found at GLP and the other sites. In the latter, separate threads may begin with an attention grabbing OP but something specific in content and may run for dozens or hundreds of pages, and carried a greater appeal to viewers who might have spiritual or religious interests, in short they tried harder to portray themselves as something good for others. In the 4chan versions, the sequence of generals featured pre-written OP posts that varied from time to time in attempt to explain what The Nobody is, usually in reference to a figure or person. But in accordance with 4chan's reputation, the threads can get very antagonistic, or graphic, and downright misleading. If it was all fun and games, that's one thing, but there is a history behind these and it's not pleasant and I had been trying to make the point of that to them on and off the past year.

In attempting to determine how the threads reached 4chan in the first place, to develop into a general thread, it seemed to me that the greatest likelihood was that it was former GLP users or splinter forums, possibly that of BM and/or COP and others. It may have been an attempt to get back at GLP, which became largely derided in the 4chan threads.

There is a lot of very terrible content and activity there, and I will be going to into greater detail of that in future posts.