About chanalyse.
chanalyse is a continuous discourse-monitoring and narrative-analysis engine that watches 4chan's /pol/, /biz/ and /g/ boards — roughly 1,800 threads a day — and turns what it observes into research output. It is built and operated by qalarc.
How it works, in plain language
- Scrape. Public threads and posts are captured around the clock from the public 4chan API and archives. Nothing is collected from private or logged-in spaces — 4chan has none for our purposes; the corpus is public speech.
- Classify. Large language models (Z.AI GLM plus locally-run models) label each thread's narrative, sentiment and stance, and moderate-inappropriate material is filtered.
- Cluster into stories. Posts across boards are grouped into recurring stories and themes, each tracked over time with mention counts.
- Detect spikes. Attention velocity is compared against each story's own baseline; statistically significant accelerations become attention spikes.
- Publish. Significant spikes become multi-perspective articles — critical, neutral and supportive readings of the same story — plus market-signal call tracking from /biz/ narratives, and a daily analysis dashboard. Everything is baked to static HTML and JSON.
Part of qalarc
chanalyse is a qalarc research project. qalarc (operator Alexei Brown, Australia) builds observability and analysis tools for online systems; you can read more at qalarc.com. Questions, corrections and research collaboration: team@qalarc.com.
Editorial stance: documented, not endorsed
4chan hosts a wide spectrum of speech, including material that is offensive, extreme or deliberately misleading. chanalyse documents that discourse because understanding it — its spread, its narratives, its market chatter — is a legitimate research goal. Documenting a view is not endorsing it. Articles summarise what a community is saying, not what we believe, and the appearance of a claim in our corpus or coverage is never an endorsement of that claim by qalarc. Analysis is machine-generated under human supervision of the pipeline, not of every sentence; where we get something wrong, we want to hear about it.
chanalyse.org · a qalarc research project · qalarc.com · team@qalarc.com