Opinions on 4chan and chan culture

[Deleted member 4436]

If you've been online in the past 10 years, chances are you have been influenced by 4chan and its' sphere of influence. 4chan is nothing but irony. Hell, much of the internet is.

If I have anything else to add to this topic, it's basically this. Despite what the average anon may try to convince you, 4chan isn't that much different from mainstream social media, such as twitter, instagram or >reddit. There's a reason why every trend always ends up reaching these places; I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of the most active users on these sites also frequented imageboards. I say so because I believe anyone who integrates with internet culture nowadays can recognize what a greentext is. It's not currently a secret club, or some high-culture gathering site, but merely another overlap of the same userbase as the places that anons tend to mock in their posts.

I think that youtube can in no small part be attributed to this. Take the channel, "Internet Historian" as an example. I don't necessarily dislike the content, but I think it's likely that his earlier videos attracted much of the attention onto the post-election culture. Based off of their view counts, these videos have reached far enough that they even supass the sphere of influence that most trends do.

 

[Deleted member 3373]

If I have anything else to add to this topic, it's basically this. Despite what the average anon may try to convince you, 4chan isn't that much different from mainstream social media, such as twitter, instagram or >reddit. There's a reason why every trend always ends up reaching these places; I wouldn't be surprised if a significant portion of the most active users on these sites also frequented imageboards. I say so because I believe anyone who integrates with internet culture nowadays can recognize what a greentext is. It's not currently a secret club, or some high-culture gathering site, but merely another overlap of the same userbase as the places that anons tend to mock in their posts.

I think that youtube can in no small part be attributed to this. Take the channel, "Internet Historian" as an example. I don't necessarily dislike the content, but I think it's likely that his earlier videos attracted much of the attention onto the post-election culture. Based off of their view counts, these videos have reached far enough that they even supass the sphere of influence that most trends do.

Internet historian is a channel I first watched about five years ago now. I can no longer stomach his videos and it's not because they are bad or because he is bad. It's simply a case of boredom with the subject matter. Even he seems to have tired of it. He took a year off and comes back with a video about area 51. A massive shift away from the typical stories of what anon did this week. Much of what was enjoyable about 4chan was the whole online prank culture. They invented Rick Rolling and also did more edgy stuff like the purple republic and pools' closed. The creativity seems to be gone now and they just focus on their own little community. But even then I just don't care about memes anymore. It's something you can concern yourself with, when you're an adolescent. But now I just see it as a waste of time.

 

[slowdive]

4chan has always been shit
but there were times where it was more like explosive diarrhea
the site sucks now, i only go on /sp/ for memes and /adv/ to see people bitch about their problems that are easily fixable or the 50 thousand suicide threads

 

[ZinRicky]

Seeing this much casual porn mustn't be good for the brain

The problem is every major public platform is full of that shit. I can't stand it anymore

 

[Jessica3cho雪血⊜青意]

A fellow /vt/ reader. Who's your oshi?

Woah, more /vt/ peeps. I just browse occasionally, but I enjoy watching Snuffy streams now and then.

 

[Bogdonovich]

The racist loser euro pouting gets old, but sometimes late at night in the dopamine doldrums it's the only place to find a modicum of stimulating content.

too hot to sleep:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7pVd49HQU0&t=14s

 

[Mamisu]

4chan and something awful were my go to's but they stopped being fun around 2016

 

[Deleted member 4579]

I stopped using 4chan late last year after browsing and posting regularly for nearly a decade. The list of usable boards shrank every year. /pol/ was one of the first to go from 2015-2017, since it was a giant target for NGOs and subreddits to unleash bots and spam on. Now it's all astroturfed neo-nazism and cuck porn with no possibility of discussing current events. Then the other boards like /ck/, /g/ and others that served niche skills or interests got flooded with corporate spam adverts.

At the end of the day it's just another reddit. All the large subforums get constantly bombarded with fake posts that are trying to push a partisan political agenda or sell you crap. 90% of the users probably couldn't pass a Turing test, tbh.

 

[RisingThumb]

Some boards are okay, like /tg/ and /vr/ since they're slower moving and serve specific interests and aren't really too possible to spam with adverts. /g/ is garbage. In general I think there's a good point in a chan where it has enough users for decent discussions and so on, but not enough users that the discussions degrade

 

[WALFTEAM]

I was on the internet for a few years before 4chan or any other English-language imageboard even existed and the thing I can't shake about them is how totally unmoderateable they are. The discussion is insanely hard to even control and the jannies of an imageboard have to work much harder than regular forum moderators and deal with really nasty forms of attack that are impractical on early, more conventional forums.

On a forum your bad actors are slowed down by the time it takes to make and maintain an account and the damage done is traceable. On an imageboard a bad actor (or more likely, group of bad actors) can just drive-by shit things up. In theory the anonymity is great for being able to safely spread stuff that would be harder to spread with an email and username attached, in practice it's a shitstorm.

I have practically no 4chan experience but plenty of Something Awful experience, and make absolutely no mistake - that place was astroturfed too. One of the mods of the political forum founded Bellingcat, another died in Benghazi, and at least one of the LF ultraleftists (Slashie/Tiny Brontosaurus) glowed very, very brightly. But at least you could see them coming. They can't just switch off their IFF beacons and fuck with stuff. With 4chan in contrast it seemed like an impossible uphill battle to keep the Stormfront people (themselves often referred to as "stormfags" in the pre-/pol/ times) out. With actual fed resources it's just fish in a barrel - you don't even have to create a legend as you would need to do when infiltrating a forum or other higher-trust community.

 

[ETierhuman]

Went on once and found something about mlp rape. Never again.

 

[nakadashi]

I like to think that the Internet is some sort of cosmic entity that we somehow have manage to communicate with through computers. Sites like 4chan are part of its subconscious, a place for self-discovery. When Jesus went to the desert he didn't do so because he was expecting to gain some greater knowledge from the rocks or the sand, he did it because he knew that was where he could encounter himself. And he did so in the form of Satan who confronted him with his own thoughts (human, after all).
The same thing goes for 4chan. When you go there you are confronted with your own ideas and, in the best of cases, consequences you had never even considered. In the worst cases, with consequences you knew and choose to ignore.

 

[SolidStateSurvivor]

The discussion is insanely hard to even control and the jannies of an imageboard have to work much harder than regular forum moderators and deal with really nasty forms of attack that are impractical on early, more conventional forums.

>Imagine defending 4chan jannies
But I do understand what you're getting at, in an idealized environment one off accounts for posting anonymously would allow both venting and secrets to gain public appeal, but sadly gay-ops can go on either without accountability or with passive acceptance from the nu-jannies. The site's lack of moderation makes it very susceptible to subversion, hence why many have learned to move on elsewhere. The type of 4chan many of us knew, even if it was an exaggerated propaganda, is a bygone relic. There is no anonymity on modern 4chan, if the feds want to know who you are, they will get it. You're honestly better off on the type of sites that know how to tell feds to fuck off these days. Find some shit hosted in Russia if you're really feeling really spicy.

 

[NeverTheSameColor]

i started on it in 2009 and thought it was interesting and a good place for anime discussion (back when there were no official websites and you had to wait days or weeks for a bilingual student to sub airing shows in their free time so you could torrent it or get it on IRC). in those days you had to lurk forever before you worked up the nerve to post, it was much more like a "secret club" and you would be told to go "back to gaia" if people detected the scent of noob on your post
i visited it pretty much every day and have frequented so many of the different boards at various times, even though it has totally sucked for years and i haven't actively watched anime for a long time. there are still amusing threads and some good information on there, but it's only a tiny percentage and not really worth going through unless there's just been a mass shooting somewhere and you want to find the footage.
i believe the main issue is that when an initially niche website gets big and popular enough, everyone ends up having the same sense of humour and the same taste in media since they're trying to appeal to the stereotype of that site. it's kind of like how every youtuber has the same jokes in their videos regardless of topic. or how every post on >reddit is made by a template person. when you can exactly predict what the replies to your post are going to say, it loses its appeal.

 

[Andy Kaufman]

hello kaycee swede

additional info: some swede on gaysee found my post and reposted it there.

 

[RustedZaku]

I'm ok with using /tg/, /vg/ as a resource, and I sometimes browse /m/ as I have kind of found it to be a more tolerable board than /a/ although not by a long shot. /x/ occasionally has a good thread, but it goes overshadowed by obvious bait threads, divisive threads, and the usual annoying generals like /succubus/ which I have kind of entertained to be the cause of so much widespread fetishes.

 

[wot]

I'm about tired of it. Found 4chan back in like 06, and while I was initially just there for the edgeposting and porn dumps, pretty soon I realized how free and open it made discussions compared to forums of the day. You could say something without it being associated with your identity, which I'd use to ask embarrassing questions, or play devil's advocate to get people to refute ideas that I couldn't. But as any oldfag can attest, it's gotten worse for reasons that have been stated time and time again.

Now it's gotten to where I don't even use 4chan directly anymore, just the archivers for links to guides and downloads and such. One big problem for me personally is trying to find interesting discussions among all the shitposts. It's a time-waster both looking for a decent thread and trying to keep it alive. Sometimes I would be afraid to step away for even a minute, lest the thread 404 in the meantime.

But I still need my imageboard fix, so I've turned to small chans. All of the anonymity, none of the bullshit. To me they're a happy medium between large imageboards and small forums, lacking the former's stupidity and the latter's potential for cliqueyness. Being able to put effort into your posts is also a plus.

There's a part of me that feels like the "/pol/ification" of imageboards was deliberate, not to promote far-right beliefs but to provide a boogeyman for the establishment while leaving the sane, moderate opposition without a proper place to go. Then again, maybe I just feel this way because I remember the GG days, when game journos were scrambling for any reason to call their enemies nazis, only for them to conveniently get one once /pol/ Harbor and the subsequent exodus to 8chan happened.

 

[IlluminatiPirate]

hello kaycee swede

additional info: some swede on gaysee found my post and reposted it there.

Do you have a link?

 

[greyetch]

Idk, 4chan is still the most "free" place that feels like the old forums. But the amount of hate towards blacks and jews is too much to casually sort through. If anyone were to see what I'm looking at I'd be a freak. I still go on /his/ /lit/ /sp/ and /x/, but they are a shadow of what they used to be.

The other chans all suffer from the same problems. They have too few users, or they end up being devoted to some very specific niche of porn. Often illegal. This place seems to be the best extension of chan culture. Hyper stylized retro themes, old school forums, schitzoposting, anime, etc.

Lets hope this doesn't die out or get overrun by degenerates

 

[Andy Kaufman]

Do you have a link?

yeah, that thread has looong 404d