>>10593092>4chan was nichewut? Maybe in its first year, but by 2005, it was anything but niche. Every fucking internet person knew about 4chan and there were so many new-chans popping up every minute.
It really wasn't until the time when captcha system popped up when you started noticing a change with just bots and astroturfing trying to take over, but that started happening on many other sites too.
You can blame /pol/ and stormfags, but all this shit started happening around the same time.
pic enraged a lot of fanboys and trolling got worse from there on.