He wasn't just looking at a collection of jokes. He was looking at the raw, unfiltered subconscious of a generation. The Archive contained everything: the birth of memes that now adorned corporate billboards, political movements that toppled governments, and tragedies captured in real-time by bystanders.
Because 4chan does not provide a native search function for expired threads, independent developers created archives to index and store posts permanently. These sites use "scrapers" to copy data from 4chan’s API in real-time. archives 4chan
Archiving 4chan is not without controversy or technical difficulty. He wasn't just looking at a collection of jokes