Opinions on 4chan and chan culture

SomaSpice

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Its pretty obvious that many users here, me included, come originally from some sort of chan culture. I was wondering what's the opinion of the members of the agora regarding the infamous site, its Japanese parent, and their many offspring.

By this point in my life I view chan culture with a bit of contempt, I by no means consider it "The cesspool of the internet", but I believe it has lost its cool and that continuously exposing oneself to the misanthropic edge it seeks to maintain is generally harmful to one's personal character, regardless of political views.

By now 4chan has degraded into this weird culture war "psyop" central. One can not browse a simingly innocuous board about crypto or art without stumbling onto sexual imagery with accompanying comments about race-mixing, transgenderism, and cuckoldry specifically. Its always sexual imagery of an asian or white woman followed by slogans like "Made for BBC", or "That's a man". I have no strong opinions about any of these fetishes, but its kind of creepy and very annoying nonetheless.

Its a shame that it has degraded to this point because there's a lot of good resources being passed around the chans, however I think participating and consuming too much of its content stifles one's ability to form your own opinions, and breeds a pessimistic outlook on life that quells one's own inner fire and ambitions.

To put it plainly, its not much of a fun or interesting website anymore.

What are your thoughts and experiences?
 
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zalaz alaza

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tis a dwindling resource for interesting information.

never really got into /pol/ but i remember /b/ being rad when i first got a computer again. it reminded me of my days pre internet and bbs culture. curiously, i am not a fan of anime but have always been a fan of anime fans and their output. In any regard /b/ deteriorated rapidly. it seems the whole kit and kaboodle is on its way out now.
 
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LostintheCycle

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It's a starting point of what I call the Independent Internet, where kids learn that the Internet can be so much more. For me it was an introduction to Internet anonymity and a more bare user experience. It got me into torrenting and P2P filesharing on slsk, and those antiquated chatrooms, but it's definitely a foul place. It's all worthless if you don't grow out of the place, and to do that you just gotta be lucky enough to find the diamonds in the rough, and maybe you eventually realize that you love good discussion and start to see how 4chan is an example of Internet usage gone wrong... but the freedom principle is there at least. I dunno if that makes sense, hope it does. It's 2.30 AM, so I should get in bed.
I think the chans are hit or miss. I found decent stuff on 7ch and rarely but sometimes on 8kun's esoteric/paranormal board. But then there was nanochan which seemed okay for a day, but next thing you know it's overrun by pedophiles. Haven't gone back since.
Now I mainly just use /wg/ to get good looking wallpapers, and browse a neat hobby board like ck, diy, etc... but not ones like g, his, sci, lit, or mu, those places suck. All I ever got was 'patrician' bookand music recommendations that I'll never get around to.
 
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consonant

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My opinion on 4chan is that it doesn't feel much different to other social medias nowadays to me. You go on there to make shitposts that'll get you (You)s just like how you go on Twitter or whatever and say insane shit to get likes, which is pretty disappointing, it doesn't seem like anonymity makes people want to whore themselves out for attention any less. I understand people might want a site where they can just shitpost but it's not something I'm really interested in. It does seem like board generals help this issue out a bit though and people will actually care about topics in them.

I've always stayed away from /pol/ and /b/ because I knew they'd be shitholes and tried to stay in the more hobby focused boards and it seems like people still just try and post whatever gets some quick reactions. One of the main boards I'd go to is /g/ and if I looked there now there'd probably be a "transgender in mah tech" thread, a "zoomers can't use file systems" thread, etc. It did have good generals though.

I'll also say that the shitposts can be pretty funny, and the snarkiness of people on there can crack me up but it can get repetitive as fuck.
 
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SomaSpice

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I'll also say that the shitposts can be pretty funny, and the snarkiness of people on there can crack me up but it can get repetitive as fuck.
Ah yeah dude, there's some legendary greentexts, shitposts, and stories that have me busting a gut whenever I read them. But actively using the site vs watching the highlight reels are things that are worlds apart. Though there's a nice rush in seeing an epic thread unfold live.
 
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MorphedSnowman

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Its always sexual imagery of an asian or white woman followed by slogans like "Made for BBC"
Don't judge me, but I sometimes used to do that. There were even discord groups organized for spamming that. Some guys seriously seemed to be obsessed about these fetishes beyond just a joke. At least that's the vibe I got from them. It's one thing to spam words to annoys others, and an other to have full lists of hentai collections with the fetishes you post.

No, I'm not proud of my actions.

I agree though that Chans mostly suck. It's 90% shit, 7% mediocre, and sometimes you find amazing things, but they are pretty rare and nowdays it seems to be just soyjack edits and racism. I certainly was happier when I stopped using them since they seem to attract very negative and nihilistic people. I kinda wonder if it's because people who are left there are those who thought it was "the edgy degenerate site", so they just try to act what they think chans have to be instead of were or could be.
 
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SolidStateSurvivor

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I still go on /v/ and /tv/ just to laugh at the garbage the entertainment industry is putting out these days. Seriously I got more enjoyment out of the threads and 4chan memes about the new Star Wars trilogy than I did from the actual movies. /vr/ is the only board I earnestly browse, I'll occasionally lurk /x/ when I'm bored and /pol/ if there's some major happening. I didn't use 4chan in it's heyday so I don't really have a point of reference for the site's quality. The only alt-chan I go on from time to time is Lainchan.

By now 4chan has degraded into this weird culture war "psyop" central.
The culture war aspect I get, it's definitely become more pronounced on the site since I started using it but I think that's a consequence of all the mainstream social media banning/shadow banning dissenters. Where else can they go? At that point they're probably disgruntled and that's why it can get so nasty. The psyop shit is tiresome, it's well known outside agencies (universities and most likely some government) actively try to rile people up on there and push an agenda.
There were even discord groups organized for spamming that.
That shit is real? I thought the people posting about that were just schizo what the hell.

sneed
 
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MorphedSnowman

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That shit is real? I thought the people posting about that were just schizo what the hell.
I think it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. People made up the ideas that there were some people from discord who spammed the site, so they actually came true. It's not really hard to get in too. I just saw the spam and replied "Send me the link to discord" and got the invite.
 
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SomaSpice

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saintdinnah

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I have a bad 4chan addiction. It only started after I broke my foot (retard moment). Ever since then I've been on there pretty much everyday browsing mostly /a/, /co/, /tv/, and sometimes /x/, /int/, and /lit/. Half the time it's the same shit you've mentioned on your post. Sometimes if I'm retarded enough I browse /gif/. But usually I keep myself away from there since it's usually the same shit posted over and over again.

Now what do I think of 4chan? I think its shit (ay mao). It's a great time waster and sometimes has its good moments, but usually it's not worth the time to browse endless shit threads to find it.
Anyways, I need to break the cycle of retardation that I'm currently in. It'll take some effort, but it'll pay off in the end.
 
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SomaSpice

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I have a bad 4chan addiction. It only started after I broke my foot (retard moment). Ever since then I've been on there pretty much everyday browsing mostly /a/, /co/, /tv/, and sometimes /x/, /int/, and /lit/. Half the time it's the same shit you've mentioned on your post. Sometimes if I'm retarded enough I browse /gif/. But usually I keep myself away from there since it's usually the same shit posted over and over again.

Now what do I think of 4chan? I think its shit (ay mao). It's a great time waster and sometimes has its good moments, but usually it's not worth the time to browse endless shit threads to find it.
Anyways, I need to break the cycle of retardation that I'm currently in. It'll take some effort, but it'll pay off in the end.
Block the website dude, you deserve better. You're gonna feel a void in the spaces where you used to fill dull moments with it, but coming to terms with boredom and silence is something I consider very important. These moments of emptyness are the times where you get to mull over things, which leads to better a understanding of oneself or to strikes of inspiration.
 
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saintdinnah

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Block the website dude, you deserve better. You're gonna feel a void in the spaces where you used to fill dull moments with it, but coming to terms with boredom and silence is something I consider very important. These moments of emptyness are the times where you get to mull over things, which leads to better a understanding of oneself or to strikes of inspiration.
I'll consider the block, thanks for the advice.
 
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Andy Kaufman

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I'm 27, I first visited 4chan when I was 15 or 16 in 2009 or so. I saw rage comics online and litrally just googled my way back to their origin and found /b/,
It was a unique feel. I have very vivid memories from my first few weeks on /b/. Everything was new, I only knew old bulletin board style forums before that. The interface was wierd, everything was super hectic and language was cryptic. I felt like an explorer discovering a hidden tribe, deep in the jungle with their own language and customs, I was genuinly intrigued what all of this meant.
Rolling quads to defeat ULTRA GIGA NIGGA? Wtf was a baaww thread? Why is everyone afraid of a shovel dog? Why was everyone taken out by candlejack? What's a roody poo and what's a candy ass? Why are we watching a webcam stream of a card stand in New York City and what was "oh-pee" (whoever that was) going to "deliver" there?
It was like a sensory overload and I felt like I just discovered a paralell dimension, far, faaar away from my rural German small town life, where the internet was still seen with scepsis by most.
In the following weeks I took a deep dive, just absorbing everything I could. I just had a lot of fun figuring stuff out. What seemed like an unsolvable mystery at first could be cracked by just lurking enough. The old vs. newfag dichotomy was extremely intense and rigid back then and people actually cared about not sounding like an utter newfag and I remember being actually nervous before making my first post ever. Oh the thrill! The edge and feel of it being "secret" and "forbidden" played a big role.
My sense for discovery dragged me deeper though. It didn't take long for me to find out that 4chan was just the biggest of the imageboards and that there's dozens if not hundreds of smaller ones. Some were just 4chan offshoots like 4chon.net, 7chan or 420chan but there were the many many national equivalents. sosach, Yliauta, karachan, dejimachan, britfa.gs, krautchan, brchan etc. etc. I visited them all and there, to my surprise and utter delight I had the same experience of early 4chan /b/ again: Completely different meme culture and lingo, their own insiders which took weeks if not months to finally uncover. I was basically high on internet culture and finding/learning about these secluded, underground communities filled me with happiness for some reason, it was my way to explore the world and feel like going on an adventure. being able to easily switch my demeanor to hide among the locals after just a few hours of lurking helped in my exploration.

I quickly ditched 4chan as my "homeboard" and went over to KC, the German equivalent. When 4chan scoffed at redditors being the uneducated, lowly outsiders and newfags, 4channers were seen as exactly that on these "deeper" boards. If you arrived there with 4chan lingo and habits, you'd immediately be outed as a filthy, childish 4channer who needs to go back ASAP. And thus my sense of conquering was triggered again. KC became the place of my fondest of memories of imageboard culture (between 2009 and ~2014). /b/ is really hard to explain because it really was strictly German only and the humour and community was a lightning in a bottle. /int/ was even better. A cultural juggernaut, considering gigantic sites like 4chan, >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk and today twitter are shaping most memes but the little international wing of the German 4chan copy birthed many a meme including wojak, countryballs, apu, spurdo, gondola and more. To this day some of these memes float around everywhere on the net and most don't even know what KC/int/ was.
Granted, Yliauta had a hand in many of these but the relationship between Yliauta and KC is another one of those deeply obscure bits of lore from the time back then. I couldn't really describe the dynamic between the two, you just needed to be there at the time.
I could tell many a stories about my adventures. Legendary threads people saved screenshots from for years to come, board raids and special events by the admins/staff, stuff like this.
But also just the every day 24/7 lurking was fun, there'd always be a surprise, a laugh, an insightful post. /int/ really brought people from all places of the world and all slices of life together. I kid you not that I got genuinely good life advice as a teenager there from some 30yo dudes that just shared their life stories and talked to us yunngins.

Then, slowly, change happened. As 4chan got more and more attention, the newfags trickled down to the deeper level of imageboards and they slowly but surely lost their own identity. By 2015, it didn't matter which altchan you vistited, the sheer mass of newcomers almost completely eroded the local cultures and everything read and felt like 4chan. 4chan coining the word cancer for people spreading the word about the place and drawing in too many newfags that diluted the culture was exactly that for the smaller boards. A giant tumor that smothered the identity of alternative imageboards. 4chan was the cancer.
By 2016 with the presidential election in the USA, the final nail was hammered into the coffin. 4chan was overrun by newfags, more than ever before and this wave hit the altchans as well. I can' speak for all of them but KC was basically culturally devastated. 4chan above all. The general tone shifted, too. Politics suddenly became a huge talking point everywhere and now there was no coherent community anymore but just the same fractured americanised politcal lense on the topic like everywhere else in the web. "Shills" were now suspected around every corner and after the election everyone suddenly was a /pol/tard. While I would consider the election and Trump's campaign a gigantic highlight of chan culture because - let's be real - all the memes were big fun and the atmosphere, mood, yes even aura on the day Trump won was magical. It was the last time we did something "FOR THE LULZ!"

Then I kinda just grew up. Not only was I bored from what I saw every day on the chans but I just didn't have the time to mash F5 all day on 3-4 different boards anymore. I also became disenfranchised. By 2017 I felt like barely anyone even remembered the "good old days" (or what I considered them to be). If the statistics could be trusted, among 1000 anons, maybe 1 started lurking 2009 or before. All these people were essentially strangers to me who didn't appreciate the same things, didn't remember the same things, didn't want the same things and whose "good old days" were times were when I already started to miss my "good old days".
2018 KC went offline. Admin just didn't care anymore. It was replaced by Kohlchan, a very cheap copy made by people who came long after KC's glory days and couldn't even try to imitate the glory of KC because they weren't even there to witness it. Both /b/ and /Int/ today are entirely worthless.
4chan's /b/ at this point is also completely dead, reanimated as some eerie zombie. /b/ Wasn't the cultural hub of 4chan anymore. For me, 4chan/b/ was THE entryway to imageboard culture. Now it's just a place where horny idiots dump nudes of their ex gf.
Themed boards like /v/ and /tg/ are a story for another time but in short, they got hit by the same waves.

Today, I just check by now and then, mainly when something big happens like the Ukraine war or an election or something, just because imageboards were always very quick with everything so it just became habit. Especially back then it took the legacy media an hour to even report an event while you could already see unedited photos/videos of everyhting that happened on the imageborads.
Culutrally I feel 100% disconnected from the current, average chan user. They're like little children to me, I can't make sense of what they're saying but I also don't even care.
In 2009 I was the child and the "adults" were talking in too complicated words for me to understand and I wanted to be one of the cool grown ups and thus adapted and learned. Now, I just don't care what the kiddos are babbling about this time. I've seen it all, it's all just repeating cycles, even the memes just fill the same niches every time, they just get a differnt coat of paint.
There is also absolutetely 0 sense of community. It just has gotten way too big. What once was an "us outsiders and lowlifes vs. the world" is now "me vs. you"
It was cool while it lasted. Defintely a unique time that already today some people can't even imagine. Since barely any archives exist from back then if at all, it's also more or less completely lost and word of mouth like mine is the only way to even learn about most of this stuff.

My biggest regret is that I never kept a good and organised folder. In the last 13 years I lurked from several PCs, laptops and later phones and rarely even bothered to transfer my lurk folders so unfortunately there isn't one giant archive of memes and screenshots from the last 13 years of chan experience.

P.S.:
moot leaving 4chan also plays a role I forgot to mention. Admin/Staff involvement was a 4chan staple. 4chan/b/ had so many goofs and special events where moot or the mods decided to do something fun and you'd actually SEE moot and mods post now and then, I remember moot just casually replying to one of my posts one time.
4chan's staff today is like a black box. They have no face, no interaction, no community events, no public bans with funny ban messages anymore. You have this giant imageboard with huge cultural influence (that's waning btw) and you don't even know who runs it anymore. Hiro is like a ghost, the IRC is now hidden and /qa/... well. it's getting late.
 
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SomaSpice

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@Andy Kaufman Awesome writeup. The rise and fall of internet cultures is such an interesting topic. Feels similar to reading about people's experiences from dead MMOs.
 
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LostintheCycle

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I'm 27, I first visited 4chan when I was 15 or 16 in 2009 or so. I saw rage comics online and litrally just googled my way back to their origin and found /b/,
It was a unique feel. I have very vivid memories from my first few weeks on /b/. Everything was new, I only knew old bulletin board style forums before that. The interface was wierd, everything was super hectic and language was cryptic. I felt like an explorer discovering a hidden tribe, deep in the jungle with their own language and customs, I was genuinly intrigued what all of this meant.
Rolling quads to defeat ULTRA GIGA NIGGA? Wtf was a baaww thread? Why is everyone afraid of a shovel dog? Why was everyone taken out by candlejack? What's a roody poo and what's a candy ass? Why are we watching a webcam stream of a card stand in New York City and what was "oh-pee" (whoever that was) going to "deliver" there?
It was like a sensory overload and I felt like I just discovered a paralell dimension, far, faaar away from my rural German small town life, where the internet was still seen with scepsis by most.
In the following weeks I took a deep dive, just absorbing everything I could. I just had a lot of fun figuring stuff out. What seemed like an unsolvable mystery at first could be cracked by just lurking enough. The old vs. newfag dichotomy was extremely intense and rigid back then and people actually cared about not sounding like an utter newfag and I remember being actually nervous before making my first post ever. Oh the thrill! The edge and feel of it being "secret" and "forbidden" played a big role.
My sense for discovery dragged me deeper though. It didn't take long for me to find out that 4chan was just the biggest of the imageboards and that there's dozens if not hundreds of smaller ones. Some were just 4chan offshoots like 4chon.net, 7chan or 420chan but there were the many many national equivalents. sosach, Yliauta, karachan, dejimachan, britfa.gs, krautchan, brchan etc. etc. I visited them all and there, to my surprise and utter delight I had the same experience of early 4chan /b/ again: Completely different meme culture and lingo, their own insiders which took weeks if not months to finally uncover. I was basically high on internet culture and finding/learning about these secluded, underground communities filled me with happiness for some reason, it was my way to explore the world and feel like going on an adventure. being able to easily switch my demeanor to hide among the locals after just a few hours of lurking helped in my exploration.

I quickly ditched 4chan as my "homeboard" and went over to KC, the German equivalent. When 4chan scoffed at redditors being the uneducated, lowly outsiders and newfags, 4channers were seen as exactly that on these "deeper" boards. If you arrived there with 4chan lingo and habits, you'd immediately be outed as a filthy, childish 4channer who needs to go back ASAP. And thus my sense of conquering was triggered again. KC became the place of my fondest of memories of imageboard culture (between 2009 and ~2014). /b/ is really hard to explain because it really was strictly German only and the humour and community was a lightning in a bottle. /int/ was even better. A cultural juggernaut, considering gigantic sites like 4chan, >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk and today twitter are shaping most memes but the little international wing of the German 4chan copy birthed many a meme including wojak, countryballs, apu, spurdo, gondola and more. To this day some of these memes float around everywhere on the net and most don't even know what KC/int/ was.
Granted, Yliauta had a hand in many of these but the relationship between Yliauta and KC is another one of those deeply obscure bits of lore from the time back then. I couldn't really describe the dynamic between the two, you just needed to be there at the time.
I could tell many a stories about my adventures. Legendary threads people saved screenshots from for years to come, board raids and special events by the admins/staff, stuff like this.
But also just the every day 24/7 lurking was fun, there'd always be a surprise, a laugh, an insightful post. /int/ really brought people from all places of the world and all slices of life together. I kid you not that I got genuinely good life advice as a teenager there from some 30yo dudes that just shared their life stories and talked to us yunngins.

Then, slowly, change happened. As 4chan got more and more attention, the newfags trickled down to the deeper level of imageboards and they slowly but surely lost their own identity. By 2015, it didn't matter which altchan you vistited, the sheer mass of newcomers almost completely eroded the local cultures and everything read and felt like 4chan. 4chan coining the word cancer for people spreading the word about the place and drawing in too many newfags that diluted the culture was exactly that for the smaller boards. A giant tumor that smothered the identity of alternative imageboards. 4chan was the cancer.
By 2016 with the presidential election in the USA, the final nail was hammered into the coffin. 4chan was overrun by newfags, more than ever before and this wave hit the altchans as well. I can' speak for all of them but KC was basically culturally devastated. 4chan above all. The general tone shifted, too. Politics suddenly became a huge talking point everywhere and now there was no coherent community anymore but just the same fractured americanised politcal lense on the topic like everywhere else in the web. "Shills" were now suspected around every corner and after the election everyone suddenly was a /pol/tard. While I would consider the election and Trump's campaign a gigantic highlight of chan culture because - let's be real - all the memes were big fun and the atmosphere, mood, yes even aura on the day Trump won was magical. It was the last time we did something "FOR THE LULZ!"

Then I kinda just grew up. Not only was I bored from what I saw every day on the chans but I just didn't have the time to mash F5 all day on 3-4 different boards anymore. I also became disenfranchised. By 2017 I felt like barely anyone even remembered the "good old days" (or what I considered them to be). If the statistics could be trusted, among 1000 anons, maybe 1 started lurking 2009 or before. All these people were essentially strangers to me who didn't appreciate the same things, didn't remember the same things, didn't want the same things and whose "good old days" were times were when I already started to miss my "good old days".
2018 KC went offline. Admin just didn't care anymore. It was replaced by Kohlchan, a very cheap copy made by people who came long after KC's glory days and couldn't even try to imitate the glory of KC because they weren't even there to witness it. Both /b/ and /Int/ today are entirely worthless.
4chan's /b/ at this point is also completely dead, reanimated as some eerie zombie. /b/ Wasn't the cultural hub of 4chan anymore. For me, 4chan/b/ was THE entryway to imageboard culture. Now it's just a place where horny idiots dump nudes of their ex gf.
Themed boards like /v/ and /tg/ are a story for another time but in short, they got hit by the same waves.

Today, I just check by now and then, mainly when something big happens like the Ukraine war or an election or something, just because imageboards were always very quick with everything so it just became habit. Especially back then it took the legacy media an hour to even report an event while you could already see unedited photos/videos of everyhting that happened on the imageborads.
Culutrally I feel 100% disconnected from the current, average chan user. They're like little children to me, I can't make sense of what they're saying but I also don't even care.
In 2009 I was the child and the "adults" were talking in too complicated words for me to understand and I wanted to be one of the cool grown ups and thus adapted and learned. Now, I just don't care what the kiddos are babbling about this time. I've seen it all, it's all just repeating cycles, even the memes just fill the same niches every time, they just get a differnt coat of paint.
There is also absolutetely 0 sense of community. It just has gotten way too big. What once was an "us outsiders and lowlifes vs. the world" is now "me vs. you"
It was cool while it lasted. Defintely a unique time that already today some people can't even imagine. Since barely any archives exist from back then if at all, it's also more or less completely lost and word of mouth like mine is the only way to even learn about most of this stuff.

My biggest regret is that I never kept a good and organised folder. In the last 13 years I lurked from several PCs, laptops and later phones and rarely even bothered to transfer my lurk folders so unfortunately there isn't one giant archive of memes and screenshots from the last 13 years of chan experience.

P.S.:
moot leaving 4chan also plays a role I forgot to mention. Admin/Staff involvement was a 4chan staple. 4chan/b/ had so many goofs and special events where moot or the mods decided to do something fun and you'd actually SEE moot and mods post now and then, I remember moot just casually replying to one of my posts one time.
4chan's staff today is like a black box. They have no face, no interaction, no community events, no public bans with funny ban messages anymore. You have this giant imageboard with huge cultural influence (that's waning btw) and you don't even know who runs it anymore. Hiro is like a ghost, the IRC is now hidden and /qa/... well. it's getting late.
I don't know this experience because I'm way too young, but I get the feeling this forum comes close, and it's thanks to people like you who care about it that it can what you wrote was interesting and insightful, and I do hope if you get time you could sort through those pictures and maybe share some with us.
 
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Deleted member 4436

I'm going to be honest, even though it means ousting myself, I have to admit that my only time spent on 4chan was lurking during 2020-2021.
In other words, I can more or less see myself being the exact person described here:
Then, slowly, change happened. As 4chan got more and more attention, the newfags trickled down to the deeper level of imageboards and they slowly but surely lost their own identity. By 2015, it didn't matter which altchan you vistited, the sheer mass of newcomers almost completely eroded the local cultures and everything read and felt like 4chan. 4chan coining the word cancer for people spreading the word about the place and drawing in too many newfags that diluted the culture was exactly that for the smaller boards. A giant tumor that smothered the identity of alternative imageboards. 4chan was the cancer.
By 2016 with the presidential election in the USA, the final nail was hammered into the coffin. 4chan was overrun by newfags, more than ever before and this wave hit the altchans as well. I can' speak for all of them but KC was basically culturally devastated. 4chan above all. The general tone shifted, too. Politics suddenly became a huge talking point everywhere and now there was no coherent community anymore but just the same fractured americanised politcal lense on the topic like everywhere else in the web. "Shills" were now suspected around every corner and after the election everyone suddenly was a /pol/tard. While I would consider the election and Trump's campaign a gigantic highlight of chan culture because - let's be real - all the memes were big fun and the atmosphere, mood, yes even aura on the day Trump won was magical. It was the last time we did something "FOR THE LULZ!"
I'm basically the last person one would typically expect on a place such as this.
I have no direct memory of the "good old days", as I was never there; by all means, my perspective SHOULD be different from those among you who were actually there. I suppose that this should give me an opinion contradictory to this, but, although this paints me as a philistine, I think I agree with almost everything said ITT thus far.

As for my stay there, I never once posted until right until the end of my tenure. And, of those posts, I cannot say that they said anything of significance. I could never really relate to any of the anons there, as it always seemed like people were just trying to be edgelords on purpose. I also didn't even pay attention to half of the posts, as most of them seemed to just be "filler", perhaps posted by a bot or falseflag of some sort. My reason for being attracted to the site was basically this:
Today, I just check by now and then, mainly when something big happens like the Ukraine war or an election or something, just because imageboards were always very quick with everything so it just became habit. Especially back then it took the legacy media an hour to even report an event while you could already see unedited photos/videos of everyhting that happened on the imageborads.
Once I stopped trying to keep up with current events, however, my interest in the site faded completely.

As for the modern culture of the site, which is that which I only have experience with, I suppose it's not entirely separate from it's previous culture, at least in its outwards appearance. my reason for believing this is mostly because I feel as though I can more or less understand what people talk about whenever they complain about how much the site as fallen. The most I can say is that I believe that the dialects used are more or less the same, even if the words are different. It's probably the principle which you noticed here:
I've seen it all, it's all just repeating cycles, even the memes just fill the same niches every time, they just get a differnt coat of paint.

In other words, it never left much of an impact on me, aside from allowing me to know what the word "kino" means. For these reasons, I doubt as though I can really allow myself to fit in with other posters here, as I only have a superficial understanding of the culture that they come from, although I think I've done a fairly good job of blending in so far; I can probably attribute this to me spending much more time in places with those who have engaged with the former culture. The point which I intend to make is this although chan culture is dead (I think), the current site isn't entirely removed from its former self, at least on a surface level analysis; the cycles which people started in the beginning have been passed onto multiple new generations, although the new bearers don't know why they are doing what they are doing. It is absolutely not culturally active in it's current state. It may very well be that it's stagnant not due to new blood being added to the mix, but an overall lack of growth in spite of a new group of users. They try to adapt to what is perceived as the old culture, even though it no longer exists, as way of trying to fit in -- which I suppose is what I am also doing at the moment, but please ignore that for now -- when they would be much better off trying to actually change what remains of the old guard (or maybe not, again, I wasn't there). As for the actual attitudes that were present previously, I believe that they still exist, although not on larger sites, they may only rarely be encountered out in the wild, but I don't think that the flame has necessarily died out.
 

shinobu

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I'll also say that the shitposts can be pretty funny
I could tell many a stories about my adventures. Legendary threads people saved screenshots from for years to come, board raids and special events by the admins/staff, stuff like this.
But also just the every day 24/7 lurking was fun, there'd always be a surprise, a laugh, an insightful post. /int/ really brought people from all places of the world and all slices of life together. I kid you not that I got genuinely good life advice as a teenager there from some 30yo dudes that just shared their life stories and talked to us yunngins.
Don't forget about the sometimes really good OC that just shows up.
In the past I used to feel a bit of FOMO if I didn't do my daily lurking but even before 2016 I had already stopped visiting the chans. It just wasn't worth it anymore.

Last year I started to go on /vt/ in 4chan and that's basically the only board I spend some time in now (and sometimes going on /ck/ for webms).
no public bans with funny ban messages anymore
Interestingly we had one big public ban in /vt/ when a dude was absurdly BTFO a few months ago.
Also, there are a few small-time regulars like fatcat poster or Ayamefriend. It really feels like the happenings and OC just became smaller in the boards I checked.
(I assume /pol/, /b/, /g/, etc. are hopelessly overrun by politics so I don't go in them)
 
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Iommi Fan 420

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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.
I really wish i was old enough to have witnessed proper early imageboard culture instead of being left with the husk that is post 2016 4chan and alt chans that are generally filled with their own problems.
Funnily enough the first board I posted on was actually wizchan, an irl friend of mine at the time who was also in to obscure shit found the website and our underage minds were blown.
 

№56

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I'm pretty much done with 4chan at this point, but I don't regret all the time I've spent on it. The site is an idiot magnet, but it's also attracted a lot of interesting, intelligent, and funny people over the years. Anonymity doesn't correlate as strongly with nastiness as the legacy media wants you to think. While I'm not going to pretend that 4chan was/is above criticism, I do think the reputation its userbase has for being uniquely terrible is undeserved.
What drove me away from 4chan wasn't the users, but the management, which has been absolutely atrocious since 2015 (@Andy Kaufman hit the nail on the head here.) The people who took over 4chan when moot left have made it abundantly clear that they're not invested in the site and only see it as a source of ad revenue. Either that, or some kind of sinister social engineering project. At this point I'm willing to believe any number of conspiracy theories about the moderators being in league with viral marketers and/or the federal government. There are too many bad posting trends going around (contrast shilling for new movies/games, Discord ERP threads on worksafe boards, spamming certain news events, promoting certain fetishes, etc.) that are obviously the work of a small group of users with an agenda posting the same things over and over again. Either the mods are totally incompetent, or they're deliberately letting these people destroy the site.
curiously, i am not a fan of anime but have always been a fan of anime fans and their output.
This is genuinely the most bizarre opinion I've seen on this forum. Congrats?
 
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