It seem that a meme war brought down a popular cesspool of human depravity. Many normal people probably don’t know what a “4chan” is, but it has a lot of commonality for the whole MAGA/QAnon bullshit we have been dealing with since 2016. However, that changed in the following years. A splinter site, 8chan, formed, but before that there was Soyjak. According to 404, they were the ones behind the takedown.
“Soyjak is a popular meme you’ve probably seen before,” 404 explains. “It’s a balding man with glasses and shaggy beard, his mouth agape in docile joy. He is now the name of a rival imageboard.”
Apparently, five years ago, users spammed their /qa/ boards with soyjaks. While 4chan wasn’t able to keep them off, they simply shutdown the /qa/ boards. This allowed many of these soyjak to form their own version of 4chan called “soyjak.party.
According to the report, soyjak hacked the 4chan site and resurrected the /qa/ on April 14. “/QA/ RETURNS SOYJAK.PARTY WON” read a banner image at the top of the board.
“Tonight has been a very special night for many of us at the soyjak party,” soyjak.st posted in a thread. “Today, April 14, 2025, a hacker who has been in 4cuck’s system for over a year, executed the true operation soyclipse, reopening /qa/, exposing personal information of various 4cuck staff, and leaking code from the site.”
Now, it appears that the hack wasn’t anything from the first Mission Impossible movie. As posted in the tweet below, 4chan was using an out-of-date version of PHP. When you do that, it leaves you open to a lot of exploits and it’s easier for someone to take over your site. Working on WordPress self-hosted sites before, you learn very quickly about those.
If you think Reddit is bad, just check out 4 or 8chan. That will scar you for life. I am enjoying that it was taken down, but given how they let their basic internet protection lapse, makes me think there is really do one taking care of it. Much less anyone that gives a shit about.