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A 4chan user declared war today against Tumblr, a blogging platform favored by the young and net savvy. And by 4chan of course we mean /b/, the site's anarchic no-rules subforum famous for trolling and "raiding" websites and organizations.

Because Tumblr users (like many other sites) constantly post memes that often originate on /b/ without giving credit, the people behind this movement feel that Tumblr needs to be punished. "These hipsters constantly steal our memes and claim them as their own," says the angry poster.

So what are they going to do about it? For starters, they (and again, "they" simply means anyone who agrees with the guy posting this on /b/) plan to set up dummy accounts, attempt to garner a ton of followers, and then surprise them by flooding their dashboards with gory photos, bizarre fetish porn and other unsavory images.

Now, they insist this is only phase one, but it's a pathetic start to a half-baked idea. First, memes belong to everyone and /b/ is full of content reposted from elsewhere. But more practically, Tumblr is built so that if you don't like what someone is posting, you can "unfollow" them immediately. So, the worst these trolls will do is expose a few bloggers to one or two gross photos before they get unfollowed.

[UPDATE: 4channers planned a denial-of-service attack and Tumblr users planned their own raid. Sunday night, they both struck and Tumblr seemed to win, but 4chan exposed some information.]

The angry /b/ users also plan to hack into the accounts of popular Tumblr users, which would be way more effective a troll but of course more difficult to pull off. I'll believe it when I see it.

Another user suggests pointing their LOIC's at Tumblr. LOIC stands for Lower Orbit Ion Cannon, the nickname of a program that will DoS (Denial of Service) attack a targeted site.

Here is a screencap of some 4chan discussion I saw this morning:



And here is a big version of the Operation Overlord Tumblr Poster:



And here's some discussion on Reddit. This movement doesn't have a lot of traction on 4chan yet. I've only seen the one thread, and half of the discussion found there consisted of people talking about what a stupid idea it is.

Tumblr has not yet replied to a request for comment.