The imageboard suffered significantly during massive 2016 DDoS-attack after which it has been hosted by a state-affiliated Russian Mail.Ru Group, leading many users to believe that it was sold to the company.
[1] The "old Dvach", 2ch.ru, was launched in February 2006 by Vikentiy Fesunov and was allegedly administered by Konstantin Grusha, who also co-owned several other Russian websites like Bash.im and anime.ru.
Its userbase was mostly anime fans, influenced by 4chan, 2channel (from which the Dvach name was derived), and Russian communities popular at the time, especially LiveJournal bloggers.
Abu also introduced subscriptions to the site, "passcodes", which allow users who have bought them to avoid captchas and attach up to eight images to their posts instead of the default four.
[2][3] Many Dvach terms have become widespread in Russian Internet slang, such as тян (tyan, "girl") and кун (kun, "guy"), both of which are derived from Japanese honorifics, всратый (vsratyi, "ugly", literally "shitted up"), and expressions like задавайте свои ответы (transl.
Some of them have undergone Russification, like semyon (influenced by a Russian proper name, from English "same person", a poster who pretends to be several different people in a discussion) or sazha (literally "soot", from sage, a Japanese term for replying into a thread without bumping it).
Porn, both real-life and drawn, is generally tolerated and posted freely on all boards, except child pornography or zoophilia, which is forbidden by Russian law.
[12][13] In October 2018, Dvach users disclosed true identity of one of suspects who was allegedly involved in the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal and other British subjects in Salisbury.
After incidents like terrorist attacks or mass shootings, Dvach users prank people on social networks with fake eulogies, featuring the site owner Nariman Namazov or former porn star Sasha Grey as victims or perpetrators, akin to how Sam Hyde is accused of being the perpetrator of various shootings by users on 4chan.
[19] In January 2019, Novaya Gazeta reported that according to its sources, the perpetrator of the 2018 Magnitogorsk gas explosion was "Norimonov Namazjon Wakabliyevich", later refuting this information.
[26][27] In November 2019, Russian Internet regulators demanded that Dvach delete posts degrading state symbols, and threatened the site with blocking.
Representatives said it was due to copyright infringement on the new account, but users speculated that it was related to a conflict with Russian feminist activists.
[31] After the Kerch Polytechnic College massacre, the perpetrator's (Vladislav Roslyakov) accounts were hacked and his direct messages were posted on Dvach making him popular among users.
[37][38] In early 2020, Dvach users doxxed Russian women who participated in a porn-horror video by Till Lindemann, a Rammstein vocalist.
Russian feminist activist Zalina Marshenkulova, who stood up for the women, accused Dvach users of death threats and cyberbullying against her.
In October 2019, Russian comedian Garik Kharlamov was deemed a "cuckold" after his wife Kristina Asmus filmed an erotic scene in Text.
[40][41][42] In March 2020, TV host Andrey Malakhov was called "the chief scavenger" in the official 2ch Twitter for hyping on tragedies and deadly incidents.
[43] In October 2016, Dvach doxxed two teenage girls from Khabarovsk who bragged about torturing animals and offending homeless people in their social networks.
[44][45] In October 2018, Dvach users helped Bellingcat get insights into suspected perpetrators of the Poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.
[46] In February 2020, a 2ch user posted photos from a hospital, claiming to be a male nurse, and said that he "loves disabling the ventilators and watching the agony of dying old (World War II) veterans", saying that he had already killed more than ten people.