Most of the sites discussed here, particularly those associated with soyjak.party, are extremely NSFW. Do NOT visit them at work or in public (or at all, honestly). Much of the information below is pulled from various online wikis, imageboard posts, and imageboard posts about imageboard posts. I have flagged unverified information as such wherever possible. A lot of what I’ve written here could even be wrong, as these spaces are rife with hearsay and attempts to dupe outsiders. Take everything with a grain of salt. Unmitigated irony is a hell of a drug. — G. B.

--dfda

It’s April 14th, 2025. All is quiet on the Western front of 4chan: furry hentai, obscure slurs, overcomplicated racial conspiracy theories, and obsessive pornographic shitposts are populating the site’s forums without a hitch. Around 7:00 PM ET, however, all board titles are suddenly tagged with “/QA/ FUCKING WON.” The site’s banner flips to a flashing trio of dancing Hatsune Miku gifs (a singing vocaloid girl and virtual personality) and a playable song file from Touhou Project (a long-running Japanese video game series). “SOYJAK.PARTY WON” is proclaimed at the top of the site in all red, and a “U GOT HACKED XD” post is stickied on /qa/. Below another stickied thread asking for “any last words,” a final reply is posted — the last thing to go up on 4chan before the site went down completely: “CHICKEN JOCKEY,” it screams, a heavily run-through and brain-rotted meme from the recent Minecraft movie.

This hack resulted in an 11-day outage of one of the most popular and longest-standing sites on the internet. It caused catastrophic backend damage to 4chan and threatened its continued existence, with Wired even preemptively publishing a piece with “4chan Is Dead” in the title. Nobody knew for certain if the site, a crude bastion of internet culture and source of countless filtered-to-the-mainstream memes, would ever return.

Soon after the initial hack, 4chan devs took the site offline to try and contain the damage. A thread appeared on Soyjak.party, a smaller imageboard obsessed with “Soyjak” memes, containing screenshots of 4chan’s backend — including admin panels, moderator-only views, and PHP source code. The poster is anonymous, as all posters are on the Soyjak.party imageboard; he’s labeled only as “Chud.” At the time, all usernames on the site were “Chud,” a generic signifier with deep memetic history (later), though the imageboard now appears to cycle through a number of randomized meme- and slur-based Soyjak pseudonyms when displaying posts (Cobson, Meximutt, Jartycuck, Sneed, Tyrone, Rapeson, N****r, and God knows what else).

A separate celebratory post on Soyjak.party commemorating the incident canonized the hacker, who was reportedly “in 4cuck’s system for over a year,” and dubbed the takedown “Operation Soyclipse.” Leaked IPs and email addresses from 4chan’s moderators — pejoratively referred to as “jannies,” an old internet slang term for forum volunteers — were met with rabid doxxing encouragements. The last confirmed post by the hacker included an additional screenshot of /j/, a 4chan board only accessible to janitors and admins, as well as his personal contact email (hosted on the “cock.li” domain).

Naturally, out of journalistic motivation and morbid curiosity, I visited the cock.li website. I was greeted by a story of the previously offered “hitler.rocks” domain being “donated” to “two intelligence agencies” after it was gifted to the cock.li admins by adversaries as a sort of “poison fruit.” (The “n****.rs” and “horsefucker.org” domains are also mentioned, URLs I saw used by numerous email accounts affiliated with Soyjak.party during my unpleasant virtual spelunkings.) While it’s unclear if any of this is true, cock.li has had prior run-ins with feds: in late 2015, German authorities seized one of its email servers after a bomb threat was sent to Los Angeles public schools. This 2016 phone call (which was taken down by SoundCloud) is allegedly between Vincent Canfield, the founder and operator of cock.li, and an FBI agent attempting to issue a gag order. The cock.li servers were moved to Romania, though more raids reportedly occurred in 2018 and 2019. A 2021 report by the FBI, DHS, and CISA states that “a number of SVR [Russian CIA] cyber personas use e-mail services hosted on cock[.]li or related domains.” All of which seems completely insane.

The cock.li anecdote may appear tangential, but it’s an important point of orientation. These sorts of nonsensical rabbit holes are everywhere in the world of imageboards, and they’re a core characteristic of Soyjak.party and the ostracized online space it occupies. Everything here is culturally impenetrable by design, and there’s little surface-level differentiation between ironic nonsense and substantive information.

Telling the story of the Soyjak.party hack — and how it almost permanently destroyed 4chan — requires navigating through years-thick entanglements of self-referential memetics and niche dialects of online slop-speak. What was /qa/, and why does it appear to be the central motivating factor behind the hack? What the hell is a Soyjak, anyway? Where did Soyjak.party come from, who’s behind it, and how big of a mark has it made on internet history? Why were the so-called “‘jakkers” and “soyteens” not siloed to “4cuck” alongside the rest of their brethren?

These questions prove somewhat difficult to answer — sincerity in these spaces is hard to come across, and anything resembling truth is always obscured by trolling and cynicism. This is a story about the dark engine of meme generation that feeds mainstream culture, the deployment of child pornography as online-feud weaponry, endless troves of shitposts, constant bot raids, coordinated doxxing campaigns, mass shootings, and the use of irony as a tool to strip reality of its meaning. The lore underlying Soyjak.party and the events leading up to its takedown of 4chan are in equal parts fascinating, imaginative, empty, and desolately depressing.

IN THE BEGINNING…

4chan was founded in October of 2003 by Christopher “moot” Poole. For the unaware, it’s an anonymous forum where users post text and images on various “boards.” The most popular boards are /b/ (random; porn, slurs) and /pol/ (politically incorrect; porn, slurs, racist schizoposts), though boards like /a/ (anime; anime, fan service) and /v/ (video games) are also active. Poole stepped away from 4chan in early 2015, citing stress from the site’s controversial nature and the Gamergate scandal in particular. In January of that year, moot hosted a farewell livestream, and a board called /qa/ was opened for users to ask him questions (i.e. Q&A). After the livestream, /qa/ was left open for reasons unknown, and it became a de-facto place for meta discussions (talking about 4chan on 4chan).

But, as the saying goes, idle hands are the devil’s workshop; /qa/’s lack of raison d’être created a vacuum ripe for chaos. The board transformed into a breeding ground for spam, bot scripts, and disallowed material, eventually becoming the battleground for a war between two emerging factions: the Frogposters and the Soyjakkers.

The relationship between Frogposters and Soyjakkers was not always strained. There was harmony in /qa/ for a time, with the contemporaneous lore track “Home Board” by “lil ‘jakkin” referencing frogfans in a positive light. The official /qa/ anthem also painted a picture of peaceful coexistence (to the tune of “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong):

Hostility grew, however, as competition for board space increased. Frogposters obsessively spammed /qa/ with Pepe and Apu variants, anthropomorphic green frogs that have been a prominent feature of online culture for years, while Soyjakkers developed variants of “Soyjaks,” crude and often open-mouthed Wojaks, to counter-spam. “Soyboys” and “frog cucks” traded blows in the form of slurs (e.g. “frogn****r”), spam-happy scripts and bots, doxxing, and other generalized harassment.

4chan moderators grew increasingly displeased with the state of /qa/, particularly when the Frogjak wars began spilling out onto the rest of the site. The final straw was in November 2021, now referred to as “Operation Clean Stable,” when the Soyjak faction conducted a raid on 4chan’s /lgbt/ board. The board was flooded with so-called “hanging tranny” variants of the “Bernd” Soyjak meme, an image that has become widely known in edgier corners of mainstream internet discourse on X and Reddit. It depicts a caricatured transgender person hanging from a noose, tongue lolling.

THE SOYJAK EXODUS

Thus, on November 3rd, 2021, 4chan moderators locked /qa/ indefinitely, a moment soyteens now refer to as the Great Soyset. This ushered in a mass exile of users whose primary existences had been on /qa/ as ‘jakkers. Fortuitously, more than a year prior in September 2020, a user named “Soot” (a combination of Soyjak and “moot”) had spun up the Soyjak.party site so people could, in his words, “spam soyjaks to [their] heart’s content.” The closing of /qa/ drove thousands of refugees to the Sharty (the commonly used Soyjak.party nickname) and cemented anti-4chan grievance as part of the community’s founding lore. Very little is known about Soot’s identity; circumstantial WHOIS evidence and his own posts suggest that he was a college student somewhere in North Carolina during the Sharty’s inception.

With /qa/ gone, the Frogjak skirmishes spread beyond 4chan and onto splinter sites like the Sharty. Soyteens canonically refer to these collections of major Sharty-era skirmish events as the “Soy-Frog War” and “Frog War.” In early 2022, a rogue frog allegedly falseflagged Soyjak.party using Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) — that is, posted CSAM to the Sharty while posing as a Soyjakker — resulting in the Sharty being temporarily taken down. (Note that soyteens refer to CSAM as “‘p,” e.g. “cp” without the c, as part of the apostrophisation conventions of Soyspeak: ‘ox, ‘ape, and ‘ill are also common truncations.) Users would allegedly report competing imageboards to the pertinent domain registrars after spamming CSAM, or orchestrate DDoS attacks in order to get them shut down. Frogsters had a number of sites come and go, including “The Frog Pond” and “The Ribbit Rally,” none of which were as popular as the Sharty, and all of which appear to have since been taken down by a combination of soy operatives and internal entropic forces.

SHARTY POWER STRUGGLES

The troubles plaguing Soyjak.party, likewise, were not just external. The site initially functioned without much trouble under Soot’s administration: Users posted freely, deeming good things “gems / gemeralds” and bad things “coal / brimstone.” But with the influx of members after /qa/’s demise, the situation grew more complicated. On July 16th, 2022, in an event now known as the Great Purchase, Soot sold the site to Yuri “Kuz” Kuznetsov for (ostensibly) $2,000 — a paltry sum that reflects the imageboard’s lack of monetizability, potential liabilities, and general pain-in-the-ass nature for admins.

There is much speculation about the identity of Kuz, all of it unconfirmed and somewhat difficult to follow. Yuri “Kuz” Kuznetsov presented himself as a Russian businessman and used pictures of someone named Eduardo Foltz to represent himself online. (The real Eduardo Foltz has since privated all his online profiles). Kuz claimed to have been born in Omsk, Russia, in 1988, to have started an early imageboard called 9channel in 2005, and to have created KolymaNET, a now-defunct hosting outfit for fringe imageboards. Leaked IP information gathered by Sharty members, however, has allegedly placed “Kuz” in Tennessee. 9channel was purportedly shut down in late 2017 due to Russian legal pressure, and later “rebuilt” in 2019, though it seems likely that neither 9channel nor KolymaNET were created prior to their so-called “rebuilding.” (9channel was only Tor-accessible, and I could not even find any evidence of it ever having existed). Unconfirmed rumors, widely repeated in the soy community, claim that Kuz’s name is actually “Carter,” that all of this was just childish LARPing, and that he is far younger than he has claimed.

Kuz was embroiled in a number of major controversies during his time as Soyjak.party owner and admin. His tenure unraveled in 2023 after months of jannie walk-outs, IP-logging and datamining accusations (attempts to collect information on and algorithmically identify users), on-board psyop allegations (manipulation of site dynamics via bots and sockpuppet accounts), the emergence of the short-lived “Jakparty.soy” competitor (birthing the pejorative term “Jartycucks”), and a wave of CSAM spam. During Kuz’s reign, a user known as “Goth” embedded CSAM within a common meme video called the “Dancing Swede.” The normal video is harmless, depicting a Soyjak variant dancing to the ending theme from Super Mario World. Goth created a clip which was visually identical to the anodyne file before playback, spammed it on the site, and exposed all unsuspecting ‘teens who clicked it to indescribably repulsive (and highly illegal) content. Goth was a known Kuz fan and affiliate, further soiling reputation of the latter. Kuz’s direct or indirect involvement in the distribution of any CSAM is unconfirmed.

In April of 2023, Kuz left the site. Full ownership of the Sharty was transferred to an admin called “Doll” in May of that year, ending the Kuz era. (He attempted a return in July 2023, but his account was immediately locked). Kuz is now commemorated with his own Soyjak variant, “Kuzjak,” based on one of the co-opted pictures of Eduardo Foltz.

Doll’s reign was relatively short-lived. He acquired the site, its companion booru (tag-based image archive), and wiki for just under $11k. Doll attempted to ban Discord pedo rings, reverse Kuz-era changes, and crack down on non-Soyjak posts, but was drowned in spiraling CSAM raids and hosting costs for the site. This culminated in one of the defining moments of Doll’s term: the Soypocalypse, an eight-day site outage that led to data vandalism (the deletion or corruption of site data by bad actors) and a forced sale of the Sharty. This triggered the formation of the “Soyumvirate” of Doll, “CZ,” and “Froot,” which acquired the site in August 2023. Froot now has a majority stake and remains the current admin. (A recent Doll livestream claims “CZ” was in fact “Carter,” aka Kuz.)

THE BIRTH OF SOYJAK

As of this writing, there are over 14 million posts on Soyjak.party, despite the site’s boards having reportedly been wiped in various incidents over the years. The Sharty is the source of countless Soyjak variants, a seedy engine of meme generation whose creations leak out into broader cyberspace and spread like viruses. The very first “proper” Soyjak appears to have been created by someone called The Swede in pre-Sharty times, who posted the below image onto the 4chan board /int/ in late 2017. (Note that The Swede became a notable Sharty user and later created Impjak, the variant featured in the aforementioned hijacked “Dancing Swede” video).

The concept of the Soyjak emerged from 4chan threads making observations about so-called “beta males” taking open-mouthed photos (and as a perversion of the preexisting Wojak meme). Below is an image of early IRL “Soyjak” examples aggregated by 4channers, one of which likely spawned The Swede’s initial variant.

This history reveals an important piece of information about Soyjaks: they are often traced or otherwise derived from real images of real people. Bernd, for example — the base meme used in the aforementioned transgender-mocking variant — is based on a trace of Bernd Schmidt, who holds the Guinness World Record for “largest mouth gape.” He is also the source for Gapejak.

Chudjak, one of the most popular Soyjak variants, is featured in various mainstream “nothing ever happens” meme formats. The meme is also eponymous with the “Chud” default username that previously headed all posts on the Sharty. “Chud,” originally Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller (C.H.U.D.), originates from the 1984 American science fiction film of the same name in which sewer monsters kidnap citizens of New York City.

MEMES AND VIOLENCE

The source of the Chudjak character itself, however, is much darker than that of the Bernd variant, and leads us down a disturbing narrative path. Chudjak is based on a photograph of Patrick Crusius, the then 21-year-old shooter who murdered 23 people and injured 22 others at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019. He specifically targeted latinos, driving over 600 miles to the border-proximal location, citing white nationalist motivations. His manifesto was posted on 8Chan, a different imageboard splinter site, that morning. 8Chan largely went offline following the El Paso attack, as Cloudflare withdrew its protection services and rendered the site vulnerable to disruption. The Christchurch shooter had posted his own manifesto on 8Chan earlier that year, prior to a livestreamed attack in which he killed 51 people and injured 89 others at a New Zealand mosque.

In August 2023, Ryan Christopher Palmeter opened fire at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida, killing three people in a racially motivated attack before taking his own life. His manifesto contained a Chudjak image which made explicit reference to the /soy/ board. His gun was adorned with, among other phrases, “-ACK,” an onomatopoeic exclamation that commonly accompanies the Bernd “hanging tranny” variant. Palmeter was reportedly a Soyjak.party user.

January 22nd, 2025, 17-year-old Solomon Henderson opened fire at Antioch High School near Nashville, Tennessee, killing one student and injuring another before committing suicide. He left behind a 51-page manifesto which extensively referenced the Sharty and was riddled with both Soyjak imagery and Soyspeak. Henderson was black and referred to himself as a “N*****CEL,” an expression of self-hatred and the desire to have been born into a different racial category (a variation on “incel”).

In the manifesto, Henderson claims to have begun visiting Soyjak.party in 2022 “during Christmas Jackbox raids during the Kuz era.” Kuz is referenced 13 times, alongside other admins. The aforementioned Jacksonville shooter, Ryan Palmeter, is noted as a “Saint.” Near the end of the document, he specifically gives a “special thanks” to “Soyjak.party.” The final line of the manifesto reads, “REMEMBER KEEP JAKKING ‘TEENS.” One user on Kiwi Farms, a fringe imageboard specializing in doxxing and harassment, noted that there are “some theories that his excessive mentioning of the sharty in his manifesto (which was already suspicious) could have been a falseflag” as “leading up to the attack, he seemed to engage more with… groups which HATE the sharty.”

Froot, the current owner and admin of Soyjak.party, was asked in a Q&A about his thoughts on the Antioch shooting. His response? “I don’t care, Americans are disposable.”

A month earlier, on December 16th, 2024, 15-year-old Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow shot and killed three people, including herself, and wounded six others at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. While it’s not confirmed that Rupnow was a Soyjak.party user, two of the thirteen accounts she followed on X belonged to Solomon Henderson, and Henderson specifically cited her in his manifesto as a “Saintress” and an inspiration.

There is something resembling a preponderance of coincidences here, but framing it as anything more “organized” than that would represent a misunderstanding of the nature of these spaces. Imageboards like the Sharty are more chaos than anything else, magnets for young and deeply disaffected people seeking some sort of derealization. The exceptions to this rule of disorganization, accordingly, are activities which are more “hivemind” than “individual”: raids.

RAIDS AND ORGANIZED TROLLING

Even before the /lgbt/ raid on 4chan, which resulted in /qa/’s shutdown and catalyzed the growth of Soyjak.party, the ‘teens were conducting semi-organized harassment across the internet. In mid-2021, leveraging Reddit’s then-new “follow user” feature, Soyjakkers created throwaway accounts with usernames based on various trans slurs. They then mass-followed trans Redditors to spam their accounts with notifications of hostile new followers. Partly in response to this event, Reddit created new username restrictions and modified the follow feature, adding native toggles to turn off in-app and on-site push notifications, remove followers, or opt out of being followed entirely.

Soyjak.party has an active /raid/ board specifically for planning attacks on other users and sites (though it’s no longer linked on the homepage, you can still get there with the URL). Its purview also includes the popular imageboard sport of sniping “GETs,” claiming notable post numbers on competing sites like 4Chan (e.g. the 1,000,000th post in a particular forum) with well-timed Soyjak posts. An unbelievably exhaustive list of Soyjak.party’s successful GETs is hosted on its wiki (actually insane).

In one of the most notable Soyjak.party raids, the group swarmed 4chan’s /his/ (history) board, knocking legitimate discussions off the page and rendering it unusable with Soyjak spam. The latest post on the /raid/ board, as of this writing, was an active doxxing thread of a trans “loli art” creator that included a full dossier (name, address, etc.). Users were encouraged to send pizzas to their house as a form of intimidation.

In late 2022, the Sharty was forced to temporarily shut down its /raid/ board in order to mitigate growing pressure from Namecheap, the site’s domain registrar. Soyjak.party was then temporarily moved to “.st” from “.party,” with the /raid/ board returning in early 2023. The community targeted trans people, smaller imageboards like 711chan, wikis, subreddits, and more. Soyteens successfully raided and shut down (either temporarily or permanently) subreddits including r/Losercity, r/Wordington, r/Ihaveihaveihavereddit, and r/coaxedintoasnafu.

As mentioned in Solomon Henderson’s manifesto, the Sharty also spent a lot of time raiding live Twitch streams of Jackbox party games. Soyjak.party members would join games and flood them with slur-filled soysphere speak, offensive Soyjak content, disguised gore and porn links, and other shocking content in an attempt to get the streamer banned on-air.

The group also undertook various doxxing campaigns, with one of the most notable being internally dubbed “Operation 9/11.” Victims were targeted for being transgender or associated in some way with LGBTQ content, referred to as “groomers,” and doxxed in full. This operation also entailed the escalation of a war on r/196, a chaotic meme subreddit and longtime enemy of the Sharty. Home addresses, contact information, IPs, family members, and work affiliates were often included in these “full dox” dossiers.

Largely as a result of the Sharty’s raiding and doxxing activities, the Internet Archive has excluded the site from its archival services. It appears that the exclusion occurred on December 13th, 2023, resulting in the loss of over 10,000 archived pages. This meant that content from the Sharty’s earlier eras, which had since been wiped from the site in various attacks and sysop clearings (admins purging site content), was lost to time and digital history. Many other domains, including 4chan.org, are also excluded.

THE HACK (OPERATION SOYCLIPSE)

Unlike these coordinated group movements, the 4chan hack itself appears to have been undertaken by a single user, without any assistance from other Sharty members, acting on behalf of the community. 4chan’s codebase was extremely old and poorly maintained, largely running on deprecated PHP from 2016. Its PDF upload mechanism didn’t validate that files were actually PDFs, allowing the hacker to upload hidden PostScript code. 4chan’s thumbnail generator obediently executed that code while creating a preview image for the post, giving the hacker an in. From here, the attacker was able to access Hiroyuki Nishimura’s account (4chan’s current owner and admin), thus granting him unlimited site privileges.

The hacker downloaded 4chan’s full PHP source code, revealed hidden mod boards, created and leaked a CSV file with all available jannie information, reopened /qa/, defaced the front-end of the site with “SOYJAK.PARTY WON,” and spammed a completely unprintable phrase (even censored) on boards like /v/ and /int/. 4chan devs shut down the site’s MySQL databases and took all servers offline as quickly as possible.

It took 11 days for the 4chan team to patch Ghostscript (a PDF interpreter), upgrade the site’s PHP base, and rotate all relevant credentials. 4channers were left stranded, seeking interim asylum on various alt-chans, subreddits, and even Soyjak.party itself. One Sharty post read, “there has been a flood of refugees from 4cuck onto the sharty, most of whom are not adjusting well to the culture.” While it was initially uncertain whether or not 4chan would recover from the attack, it came back online on April 25th, and near-full functionality was restored a few days later. 4chan has stated that the hacker used a UK IP address and caused “catastrophic” backend damage. The imageboard’s leadership lamented the lack of available funding to maintain and run the site, noting that they’ve been “starved of money for years by advertisers, payment providers, and service providers who had succumbed to external pressure campaigns.” While that plea seems to have garnered minimal sympathy from mainstream culture, 4chan is, for now, back up and operating normally.

NOTHING EVER HAPPENS(?)

So, with the settling of the dust, the ultimate futility of the Soyjak.party-attributed takedown of 4chan has been revealed; a fitting conclusion to this chapter of the Sharty saga. The permanent removal of 4chan from the internet would have been a monumental achievement, a nontrivial change in the composition of the modern web. It would have lent further legitimacy to the digital footprint of the Sharty, forcing an even broader recognition of the community’s impact on base reality.

Ironically — by my read — the point of places like Soyjak.party is to avoid participating in reality; to dissociate from it, to engage in the complete re-creation and inversion of culture. There’s something very creatively dark about this practice: taking the most serious elements of reality, the most horrible things, and rendering them meaningless through repetition and decontextualization. Turning existence into one big inside joke, locked behind an impenetrable defense of meta-irony. If even cruelty and child abuse and mass murder are pedestrian, what can possibly hold meaning? Soyjak.party, and communities like it, are driven by an escapist embrace of nihilism that manifests as an addiction to the hateful and the taboo. A mindless attraction to the unequivocally “unacceptable,” a deathward spiral of uninhibited mimetic behavior that leads to naturally unsatisfying, incoherent, and violent ends.

The whole endeavor desperately wants to be important, and in some ways it is, but in a lot of other ways it simply means nothing at all and is just really, really sad. I wonder, as I conclude this piece, if telling the story of Soyjak.party makes me complicit in providing oxygen to a beast that I would rather not keep alive. Perhaps it would be better never to write about these things at all. An appropriate dose of parting irony, I suppose.

— G. B. Rango