Opinions on 4chan and chan culture

[vale-aroma]

The apex of "chan culture" as of now is soyjak.party. The site itself is just the shadow-play of that noumena.

 

[no_chill]

I like how unhinged you can be. And how you can truly express yourself. But schizos rule there and the most extremist views possible are the norm.

 

[kimochiidango]

/b was never good

 

[greyetch]

/b was never good

It was a good intro to shock sites back in the early 00's. And was a sort of shock site itself. But yeah, you're right.

 

[Vetusomaru]

4chan used to be cool until moot went full SJW mode during Gamergate for the sake of Zoe Quinn's vagina. And with the passing of years got worse and worse, turning into >reddit 2. I still visit it though since it's a much better option comparing to most sites. Also anonymity is a huge plus to post and write whatever you want without being cancelled or something.

 

[Vetusomaru]

Take a break from getting psyoped by big tech algorithms on twitter/boomerbook to get psyoped by discordfags on 4chan.
The site is too full of pornography to be anything but brain melting. Even on blue boards like /int/ it's softcore coomer bait non stop. Seeing this much casual porn mustn't be good for the brain.
/qa/ was my favourite board for a while. It was a 4chan board about posting soyjaks. It got invaded by a shitty discord (one of the mods even has a fucking shota image lmao) and psyoped hard with trans stuff. After months of non stop trans threads being pushed down our throat in lieu of harmless wojak shitposting the userbase raided /lgbt/ and the board has been taken down ever since. Was fucked to see a relatively small and pretty innocent board get annihilated by discord trannies. Soyjak.party is more or less the same thing as /qa/ and part of the agora's webring but it's just not the same.
/r9k/ even had a discord that literally blackmailed and groomed it's users in to becoming trannies. Shuaby a man known for being a robot who livestreamed his suicide was apparently a victim of it.

And you know what's the irony? That there are already lots of boards at 4chan solely for porn and yet these braindead coomers have to spam their shitty porn stuff at all NSFW non-porn boards. Yet the moment you post some images that are slightly sexual (but still sexual) at boards like /v/ and /co/ you get banned for "posting porn".

 

[remember_summer_days]

Newfag here. Started using 4chan... On 2021 lmao. I only go to /x/ /lit/ and /an/, /pol/ when there is big news happening. Even if most of pol is schizo/fed/porn posting, they can have some great sources for breaking news, and it's honestly funny to see their crazy conspiracy theories. Used to browse /mlp/ but holy shit where people in /mlp/ unfriendly lmao. You could probably say a lot about /mlp/ alone, like how the board feels like a decadent and gothic 'cathedral' of what it used to be. Or at least that's what I'm told. My little pony has been associated with New Sincerity. And I think that NEW sincerity is what also drives them to have active pony-r8pe fetish threads going. I also watch the 4cc when it's on.

I think most people on this thread have touched upon the problems of modern 4chan, and I wish I was there for good and old 4chan. I'd also like to know more about the 4chan mod conspiracies lol. The only thing I know is that most of them hate the 4chan cup, which has lead to a really big decrease in viewership. But if I could say one good thing, make it a ´good thing´ that I've felt about 4chan is how sincere they are.

If you say something stupid, or just because they feel like it, most 4channer will call you a slur. In a way someone telling me that they openly hate me, or at least see something fundamentally wrong with why I am is... It makes me feel like more of a human person compared to the weird, passive aggressive PR nonsense you get told on >reddit or discord. There's few things that annoy me more than when someone tells me my ideas are problematic, or that they are worried about me, or that they want to help me improve when it's clear they don't give a shit about me. Like just tell me you think I'm disgusting or whatever, at least then you are recognizing me as a person who merits to be hated, as an individual and not some nameless npc that needs to be fixed for the good of society. I find that sort of behavior, quite frankly, disgusting. It's the old meme about the progressive sublimating their racism into PC 'I would've voted Obama for a third term' fake concern. A racist, as horrible as they are, are recognizing something about the person they are racist against, while the online progressive feels like they only care about making themselves look better by scoring moral-crusade points against you.

It's like, if someone punches you it means they care a bit about you to hit you.

I'm not saying 4channers are more virtuous than your average online progressive, but if I had to pick my poison, it would be getting insulted on 4chan than the moral platitudes of the online left.

 

[remember_summer_days]

/b was never good

Idk what /b/ used to be. But nowdays it's like 90% porn. When I first got into 4chan, I legit thought it was like the misc porn board or something lol

 

[SomaSpice]

It's like, if someone punches you it means they care a bit about you to hit you.

Banger line.

 

[Vetusomaru]

One of my biggest complains about the current 4chan is that it's full with bots, feds, shills, normies and predditors.

 

[Deleted member 4436]

Returning to the 4ch thread since I've been browsing it again recently, so I have some more thoughts on it.

It's like 1 am as I write this and I am like super tired right naow, so my apologies of I write something that acts as the gun which will shoot me in the foot later

I have concluded that exposure to /v/ has measurably ruined my ability to enjoy video games. Every time I try to get into a game, I begin to reflect on the endless amount of garbage threads on that board, which is associated with vidya, so that I begin feel guilty about it. I suppose this is not just an imageboard problem, but an issue of "gamer" ""culture"" as a whole, although I still think that /v/ is the nadir of this type of discussion. In the past, I had negative conotations surrounding anoyne who used either if those words, 'gamer' and 'culture', yet I have begun to start using such parlance, myself; I guess I've started to become the very thing which I despised. It shouldn't be this way. I don't want to believe these things. /vr/ has plenty of fine discussion, but its mere relation to the hobby of games has made me begin to view it with reproach, as well. Now, I know that I'm not supposed to base my enjoyment of things on the actions of others. I want to believe that, but my heart is unswayed, no matter how many thoughts I throw at it. I have begun to believe that video games are 'cringe', even though I don't want to believe that labeling things as 'cringe' is ever justified.

Unrelated from that, I would also like to mention that it's obvious that some of the users here still post on 4chan from time to time. I have been exposed to the regulars around here for long enough to be able to distinguish their various writing styles. It could just be me schizoiding out, but I believe I have been able to recognize some of the users here out in the wild. Your topics of discussion, opinions, and grammatical formating are all noticable. That, or everyone here has an identical twin who posts on imageboards often. Perhaps most of the posts on 4chan are made by bots, and the few made by recognizably real people just so happen to be the same few who frequent here. Dead internet theory, right?
I know you're out there.
You can't remain anonymous from me forever.

 

[Shantotto]

It's like, if someone punches you it means they care a bit about you to hit you.

Tell that to my wife

 

[Lonely_Ghost]

4chan is extremely gay
I don't mean that as an insult either, there's just so much obsession into traps and futa shit there that it can't not be extremely gay.

 

[JihyoParkXX]

it's obvious that some of the users here still post on 4chan from time to time.

People who start threads on /v/ kinda have this assertive tone to them, and you also get a lot of the usual crap like "why did it flop", "play her game", "why haven't you played x" so you're not imagining it that's just how it is; this is coming from a newfag who only started browsing 4chan earlier this year. I never really posted anything, and the people who do most of the times would pretend to ask a question but just want to have their ego stroked. Though replying to people on 4chan can be fun since you can actually disagree and have a different opinion, or troll anonymously without worrying about karma points unlike rebbit that buries your comment.

I have begun to believe that video games are 'cringe', even though I don't want to believe that labeling things as 'cringe' is ever justified.

Unironic gamer culture is cringe. It doesn't matter if it's justified or not; everything is cringe to a certain degree but the most based thing you can do is to ignore everyone else and decide what's cool and what's not yourself.

 

[JamBrain]

I've used 4chan on and off for about 11 years, my feelings about the site are... mixed to say the least. What other people have said in this thread rings true, 2015-2016 /pol/ flood was irreparably damaging to the culture on the large and medium sized boards. I genuinely believe that the mass influx of people to the site triggered long-term disinfo and sliding organizations to exist on the site in perpetuity. Whether they are gov. Funded or not is up in the air. Matters little ultimately.

Not all is lost however. Niche boards and generals have literally the same quality they've had for a decade now, and it seems unlikely to change. Even a dedicated shill group will find no use in sliding a mahjong thread, or a thread on gameboy advance games on /vr/. They tend to be oldfag havens since the unboarding process for new posters is just as gatekeeping and insular as it was in 2010. Which is a good thing.

If I had to pick a few boards worth paying attention too still: /vr/, /cgl/, /vt/, and /k/ stay on topic the most.

Don't believe the oldfags, /b/ was always shit.

 

[cuneicorn]

I started using 4chan in around 2013 so I suppose I'm an eternal summerfag. Back then Nazi threads would still get laughed off /pol/, which had more of a right libertarian edgelord bent. The Trumptards ruined everything. The place has been an unusable den of psyops for a few years at least, which makes sense considering most normies I meet have heard of it at this point.

8/leftypol/ was okay before, well, Tarrant and everything but COVID ruined Bunkerchan. 16chan was full of seejtards and Christcucks but its religion threads still managed to be interesting. It got b& too, and now there's only Frenschan (probably a glowop but at least they don't allow porn), /mlpol/, and a bunch of even smaller, deader imageboards like 8kun, 8chan.moe, 9chan, etc.

TL;DR: The chans were cool while they lasted but they've sadly become a casualty of bots and world politics gone mad.

 

[jaedaen]

I remember 4chan back in the 2000s. It was the birth of most of the early memes, outside of Something Awful I guess, of course 4chan was an offshoot of members from that forum. Before rickrolling was known by everyone in the world, it was duck rolling, and I remember when trolling someone by linking to a video was just people linking to the Captain Picard song from Dark Materia, a much better choice. I remember an old joke about the difference between 4chan and >reddit at the time: >reddit was 13 year olds pretending to act like adults, while 4chan was adults pretending to act like 13 year olds. At 4chan in those days nearly everyone was in on the joke, nearly everyone got the subtlety that was being said, and it was a breeding ground for absolute hilarity. You shut the hell up until you murked loar, and you didn't even know what the hell that was in the beginning.

It eventually became a cancerous and dead husk of itself a very long time before Moot sold it. More and more, you would get people that didn't get the joke. Eventually, these people became the overwhelming majority.

There's an internet law out there that I don't think I've ever seen talked about before, the funniest internet parodies are always the most subtle, as long as you're in on the joke. However, the more subtle the joke, the more people will take it seriously, which is of course more funny to those in the know, but more damaging to society because idiots are being radicalized in to dumb shit. The flat earth society started off as a joke, after all.

Hell, we've even got the onion writing amicus briefs now. The right to parody must absolutely be preserved, but it's not without effects to many morons out there.

I don't really know what chan culture is like nowadays. I stopped by some chan a few years ago, I can't remember which, and it was just god awful. I have no desire to go back there.

 

[handoferis]

I remember 4chan back in the 2000s. It was the birth of most of the early memes, outside of Something Awful I guess, of course 4chan was an offshoot of members from that forum. Before rickrolling was known by everyone in the world, it was duck rolling, and I remember when trolling someone by linking to a video was just people linking to the Captain Picard song from Dark Materia, a much better choice. I remember an old joke about the difference between 4chan and >reddit at the time: >reddit was 13 year olds pretending to act like adults, while 4chan was adults pretending to act like 13 year olds. At 4chan in those days nearly everyone was in on the joke, nearly everyone got the subtlety that was being said, and it was a breeding ground for absolute hilarity. You shut the hell up until you murked loar, and you didn't even know what the hell that was in the beginning.

It eventually became a cancerous and dead husk of itself a very long time before Moot sold it. More and more, you would get people that didn't get the joke. Eventually, these people became the overwhelming majority.

There's an internet law out there that I don't think I've ever seen talked about before, the funniest internet parodies are always the most subtle, as long as you're in on the joke. However, the more subtle the joke, the more people will take it seriously, which is of course more funny to those in the know, but more damaging to society because idiots are being radicalized in to dumb shit. The flat earth society started off as a joke, after all.

Hell, we've even got the onion writing amicus briefs now. The right to parody must absolutely be preserved, but it's not without effects to many morons out there.

I don't really know what chan culture is like nowadays. I stopped by some chan a few years ago, I can't remember which, and it was just god awful. I have no desire to go back there.

Yeah 4chan was basically dead by 2010, which is why I find it incredible some people are nostalgiaposting about 4chan "back in 2010" in this thread. I remember how much of a husk it was then, I really don't want to think about how fucked it is now.

 

[remember_summer_days]

I'll admit I'm a newfag, but I still find 4chan's culture, even the dilapidated version that most around her assure me it is (And I mean, I believe you), to be oddly refreshing albeit a bit too nihilistic or perhaps just a special sort of nihilism. Philosopher Angela Nagle, published by Zero Books, that should tell you how much of a communist she is, admires 4chan for their unmatched creative energy.

I guess I just sort of enjoy 4chan because it feels like one of the last places where you can find sort of genuine and sincere subversion and counter-culture. For all their faults, subversive nihilists or subversives preoccupied with nihilism, have historically driven innovations in the arts, at leasts that what I know about literature.

Of course I don't agree with most that is said on 4chan, but their postmodern or perhaps meta-modern alt-righthisms is a character with a concrete soul one can stare at and study and derive many insights about today's culture, I believe. That is not to say that 4chan is deep in an intellectual sense, rather it encapsulates the zeitgeist of a very important part of the internet.

 

[adoynia]

Seems to be full of bots/paid trolls just shit-flinging and randomly ranting about X, Y, Z group of people these days.