[For a little bit now, I have been collecting philosophy about 4chan from various boards (mostly /b/ and /qa/), mostly about why 4chan is cancer nowadays and how the old days were also bad but better than now. I'm sorry if anything seems out of place, some of these may have been answering different posts that I didn't save. The vast majority of this is the same as I first found it, albeit with a few spellchecks. I'll update this page every few weeks.]
Subverting the collective consciousness of the west. 4chan has impressive resonance across individuals. You can kind of think of spamming psyops and subversion as adding poison through the steam vent hole in the lid over a very large pot of soup, wherein the soup is metaphorically the collective consciousness, and in this instance, a very masculine element of that consciousness. I know this sound like mumbo-jumbo, but hear me out. By slowly trickling ideas into a place like this, they spread outwards even to places and people that don't come here.
4chan is an amazingly powerful medium by which to keep your finger on the proverbial pulse of a certain portion of that collective conscious, and consequently due to the nature of how media is disseminated here, is a very powerful mechanism to inject thoughts and ideas in a very concentrated way that diffuses outwards into the rest of the "soup".
really good way of undermining a society is by oversexualizing them but also sexually repressing them. I could make some specific examples that are present on /b/ alone, but if you have any sense to you at all, you can tell what I'm referring to. Additionally, if you instill a sense of resentment towards women in young men, you can use that as a foundation to build resentment toward much larger ideas.
There is a lot of racial, political, and sexual subversion occurring here, you just kinda have to step back and observe things on a more global scale to see them.
Literally this. This place became an ideological battleground. Stormfront raids and the subsequent formation of pol is probably the start of the downward spiral. Eventually left wing groups started counter raiding and stormfront seems to have given up. Both recruitment campaigns were extremely successful. This website is a breeding ground for degenerate radicalism. Trump, BBC, sissies, loli, even stupid shit like the Swedish environmentalist girl. All bait intended to get the reader angry and pent up.
People say early Chan was still a cesspool. Only oldfags understand. It was a cesspool, but it was an innocent retarded cesspool. Now it’s jaded cesspool.
Also, I agree with you on this website being a place to feel ideological pulse. Said this to my friends years ago and was scoffed at. This place is a proving ground for viral campaigns. Many ideas and movements I’ve seen here that later made it to the mainstream.
I think when moot abandoned this place it was the final nail in the coffin. Dad saw it was and didn’t want it to be his problem anymore. Hideki matsui basically left this place to rot.
Lolikon was literally always here. 4chan was created in 2003 by a user of SomethingAwful, and the site was thought of for a good year or so as just a branch of that website. In 2004, SA started to purge pedophiles and many other groups as they usually did with people they deemed as undesirable. What did 4chan do? Moot kept his lolikon board up and began hosting a shotakon board, a straight/shota board, and a loli torrenting board. These would stay online until legal issues amounted in 2005, where they just moved more onto /b/. Loli isn't new, and seeing how CP is how CP is, it makes complete sense that a legal version would be widespread here.
The difference is in context and motivations now vs then. Edgy shit on the internet in early 2000s isn’t a big deal when the barrier to entry excludes normies from participation. That is no longer the case. Truly anybody could be on the opposite of the conversation now. This is very valuable to people looking to influence.
One loli thread per day in 2005 Is not the same is three loli threads at the same time in 2020. Like I said, it was a cesspool but it was organic. That is no longer the case.
Long time visitors are feeling disenfranchised, that is undeniable. Why is that?
It worries me that what happened to this website is a prophecy of the future of the world. Special interest infiltration to the point that there is no longer organic interaction resulting in a collapse of common identity. In search of identity people turn to populist ideologues that they can devote that lost energy towards.
Many populations are vulnerable to this right now but lack proper leadership. The right wing already submitted years ago. Trump is a populist but is too retarded to make real use of the influence afforded to him by devoted followers. 2024 should be very interesting should the right wing actually catch on to the vulnerability of its followers. If they can support Trump, they can support fucking anything - a western Putin figure is probably in the works.
The left is still stuck in the 80s. Populist left movements are gaining momentum. Historically when the left gets fed up, widespread violence follows.
Now it’s my turn to scoff at my friends when they tell me they’ve got 30k in stock, like that’s some kind of permanent measure of wealth. Spend it now faggot - there’s a decent chance that in 10 years that money will be worth a fraction of what it is worth now.
>My guess is you just don't like seeing so much porn on /b/.
it's more about the content, in particular BBC spam and race fetishization. I think it's a chicken/egg situation of subverting racism and resentment. You're right in that I can't really prove it tangibly, and I wouldn't go so far as to make the claim that everyone that is participating in this meme is a constituent of the subversion, but I just see too many thinks that are indicative of some type of psychological warfare through a very vulnerable avenue of sexuality.
>where did it all go wrong b? When poltards and stormfags found the clown racism in /b/ and decided to bring their real racism in here. Now there are serious edgelords and politifags up in here all the damn time. Most of the legit smart, funny, and degenerate people from old /b/ just pop in once in a while for nostalgia's sake. Everyone knows /b/ was always terrible, but sometimes it didn't suck too. Im not denying that you can have a real individual truth in the face of special interest propaganda. Being mad about BLM or Greta or trannies or whatever can be something you honestly feel.
The problem arises (for me at least) when somewhere in a lab contracted by a super PAC, they focus group test phrases and images down to the exact wording and details in search of finding the most aggravating and incising content in an effort to radicalize whoever sees it. It’s not like you see one pic of Greta photoshopped to look like she has downs and all of sudden you hate liberal. It’s designed to wear you down over time to the point that it feels like you came up with yourself.
You’ve been exposed to these things. Every time you come here. Are you so narcissistic and egotistical to the think you are immune?
If 4chan belongs so much to your sikrit group then simply ban the outsiders. Oh, wait, you can't, because the owners actually want 4chan to become a mainstream site and have as many people on it as possible. Sounds like you don't belong here any more than the other hundred retards posting here every day. Maybe you'd be more comfortable posting in your little VPS hosted imageboard that has maybe 5 people posting per week on it?
4chan is an anime site because it was born when anime and japanese culture was "in" with nerdy high school teenagers. If you want to be stuck with the same mentality and interests you had on highschool then that's on you, but anime isn't edgy anymore, and if 4chan didn't focus on new content (like the nazi politics shit in /pol/) then the ad revenue would dry up (which is all hiroshima cares about). So don't expect it to get any better for you.
Anons weren't obsessed with identity politics. There was a plausible sense of irony when people were racist. And back then all the tired threads now were fresh and hadn’t been done on the scale that 4chan became That scale was the cancer that killed /b/ in the end
Newfag from 2010, people just used to post things for fun and to talk about things instead of pretend posts for cool guy points on the internet, people also knew when not to feed the trolls and just stopped responding, even flaming was more authentic back then. Talking about porn was actually fun and people took shit lightly about it, we could post porn on /v/ and /a/ too, politics were very few and far between, people weren't obsessed with anything, /pol/ used to be a massive joke, watching /co/ streams on justin.tv and talking on the chat used to be so comfy too. What really killed this site is that we got flanderized to fuck, everyone wanted to be a part of the cool kids club and just flooded the place with all kinds of retarded shit.
There was a brotherhood too. Hard to describe but you could argue and call someone a tard but theeee was still a sense that we were all /b/ros. We teamed up when there were lolz to be had and there were legit feels threads. Do you think there could ever be a Pool's Closed raid today? Not a fucking chance. Everyone too busy taking one fucking side or another of insert random political bullshit here. The difference between now and then? We used to find common ground even when we argued and we put fun above all else, now we look to point score off each other. There was still cancer and there was still weapons grade autism and there was still rampant gayness, but we were /b/ and it was us VS everyone else. Now.... not so much.
/b/ros used to stick together and legit work together. you could call someone a nigger faggot and still have their back in any team effort. /b/ros used to work together to achieve awesome funny fucked up shit. i remember /b/ros used to talk about Moot all day, solve and create crimes n sheet. leak exclusive info. and for some reason where obsessed with knocking down a post card rack somewhere near times square. That was a whole lot of fun. That was the original umbrella man. Also when that Australian guy jumped off the moon...
This reminds me, there haven't been any hivemind occurences in the few weeks since I came back. Used to be in every other thread. Otherwise, yeah, the sense that we were all fucked up jaded people with a sense of humor. Not having one, taking yourself too seriously or being any kind of normal was ruthlessly shamed.
raids that got b together: shoe on head, pools closed, and sometimes random other sites that someone would post and call everyone to join and we would all just go inside and organize something really dumb on the fly. sometimes some really crazy OC shit would be posted like on the fly. Sometimes some guy would post pictures of him being in the woods and seeing some shit and deciding to investigate it or just some really crazy in the moment stuff that you can't really see these days without thinking someone is LARPing.
Just generally felt more genuine to be honest and was overall less porn, less politics, less people bitching about stupid shit, and more just memes, WAY more inside jokes that you could only understand if you were a /b/tard, and more people not trying to be "random" or whatever.
It was because Anon *was* legion that we achieved some shit that made 4chan leave a mark on tons of Internet historical events Nowdays, no one gives a damn anymore and any potentially big event is replied with "NYPA xD"
Also the level of computer literacy was way higher, which helped a lot. Maybe in part because browsing was harder. Without noko the site was a bitch to use, and you had to lurk a while to learn how to noko.
Then why dont we raid something?? like obviously some of us want those lols like in the jesus chatline days and sheit so why dont we why do we just sit around like some old faggots reminiscencing our glory days in highschool?
It wasn't just 4chan The whole internet was generally more fun This meant a lot of funny things to be done or shared Now internet is 90% social media and PC sanitized
at first it was computer culture people started getting computers and if you had one that made you a certified Btard then came along the internet and then all the btards where herded onto 4chan and now idk where they pretty much disappeared to. some say to the Marianas web others say to reddit
Because now a faggot will tweet the internet police and everyone with access to Google will know what's happening in thirty seconds. Also those of us still lurking look like pic related. Also also you need actual skills to be disruptive now, the Internet is not the Far West anymore, security is way better overall.
No oldfags left. They left during the great forum rift. I used /b/ pretty much religiously from 2006 to mid-2009. The appeal for me was the unpredictability and the chaos. Sure some memes were spammed to death, but the intentions were different. The humour was both sardonic and immature. But it was fun, mostly. It was essentially intelligent people pretending to be retarded. It's now retards being unapologetically retarded. But that's true for the internet as a whole, I guess
There were many threads of a goddess of the feline variety that made many anons uncomfortable. Also the times before the catalog and auto-noko were great fun. 99% of internet traffic is on 5 websites. The age of raids is dead friendo No more forums fucking with each other. Websites are locked up tight as shit. Best we can do is mess around with some online survey or public webcam
I got here in 2008 and it felt like old /b/ was in its death throes, or maybe had already died. For me, it's never been "good," but it's most assuredly gotten way fucking worse. Translation: you wish someone else would do shit while you sit around and shout "put me in the screencap." The people with skillz either got busted, or aren't going to risk talking about or trying to coordinate something here. This place is too heavily watched and too well known. Used to visit /b/ regularly from 2005 until around 2010, then off and on since then.
Like others have said there was a novelty factor to it. Besides that though, it was basically the epicenter of internet culture during that time. Social media was still pretty much in its infancy. There was still porn and other fucked up shit that got posted here, but it was also just generally a place to come hang out online. A fuckton of memes. When I think back to memes from that time period, most of them either started on /b/ or 4chan in general, or else we helped popularize them. Now all of that kind of stuff has moved to shit like twitter and even reddit.
Eh, I definitely remember there still being politics, especially around 2008. I DISTINCTLY remember arguments about Obama and Ron Paul. I think a lot of it was just balanced by there being a lot more memes and in-jokes and stuff. Plus the political culture was very different.
We we're young and there would be people somewhat intelligent trying to outdo each other by trolling in more subtle ways and posting OC... Raids and there was no cancerous reddt and Facebook memes.
This. You could steal a meme here and your friends would be like "where do you find these fucked up pictures????"
/b/ was never good was a 2006 meme. /b/ was actually good and we just don't want you to know about it. t. 2003
Yeah, plus you had more benign stuff like rickrolling start here on 4chan.
It felt almost more exclusive somehow too. Nowadays new memes emerge on twitter/tumblr/reddit/tiktok and sometimes they're funny but idk. When a meme started on /b/ and you would post it on your OG facebook wall it felt different from sharing memes now. And there was definitely a sense of awareness you were part of the internet zeitgeist.
Politic were on a much lower scale than now. There was more variety of threads, there was a shit ton of porn but it didnt take up the whole catalog like it did recently. Also moot was allot more fun than gook moot.
It had no rules. It gave a middle finger to rules. CP because you could. Doxing because you could. Raids and hacking collectives because you could. It wasn't the threads, they generally sucked. It was the attitude, it was the ethos. You fucked the world because you could. Overtime, folks have found /b/ and have wanted to make it nice. To the point where we are today that /b/ is for all purposes a dead, soulless lingering wisp of itself. Fuck all the moralfags and fuck all the pleddit transfers. They all should be lined up and shot. That's /b/'s own fault. If ED didn't exist, and people didn't show their power levels, the memes would never have become mainstream and turned into a source of profit and ruined by advertising. The problem with /b/ today is that this commercialisation is so commonplace that it's built into the very fabric of the board. "Go back to website" might as well be an ironic statement at this point, given that the two sites are used by the vast majority of the site's userbase. Most of the other websites like p*rtyv*n are gone, and all worthwhile conversation is relegated to discord. What happened /b/ is what happened The Simpsons. it became well-known, and then became the very thing it always made fun of.
My friend from school introduced me to this board specifically mid 2007 and for the first few years, the YLYL threads were remarkable. Sometimes I look back and wonder if 4chan was the actual birthplace of the "meme". To be fair the nypa is a thing because 4chan is on a radar now, just trying to discuss about mild pranks, the feds are already running backround checks on IPs.
Been browsing since '07 and posting since '09. I'm older now and I have more to lose, so I'm more careful with what I post knowing that there's literally fedposters that browse the chans (at least for /pol/, not sure for /b/ anymore). Basically, think of all the memes and mainstream internet humour you enjoy today on your fb walls and your instant grammys and your imgrrs. It was all brand new, then. Like family guy was as weird twisted and edgy and different as you could get, so it was a big leap.
4chan is where it all came from, and the only place you could get it. 4chan birthed what is mainstream humour today. And honestly, thats what was so good. It was laugh out loud even alone jokes because no one had seen such approach to lols. Now people use it for porn and bitching about politics. Even your best ylyl board is just memes weve all seen.
To be fair, it was a smaller community, with more lax rules, and much more brutally offensive content. but on the plus side, we had a thing brewing that stuck. & really, if you're posting here, you have to at least respect our elders for their contributions to the first world's right to speech of any sort. Or whatever. I don't know all of the words, but I used to read a lot, and there are people who will cautiously call the classic /b/ a bit of an echo chamber for the memes of our time.
I like to compare it to the Old West. The early internet in general was a place with way more lax rules, but /b/ was virtually lawless. I definitely saw CP and other fucked up shit without even looking for it, it was just here. Then Facebook got big and it's like they built the railroad around us, then when we were a ghost town came back and added a whistle stop to bring the law. /b/ is still more lax than a lot of other sites, but it's not the same.
Annoys me so much how there were literally no archives during the heyday. The earliest archives go back to 2013 I think. Unfortunately I didn't take any from when I was first here (2006), and I wish that at least anyone would have archives, but it seems noone does. I think it's been imploded since then but I remember seeing one that archived around 2011ish
This. Politics is so god damn retarded.
People actually had a personality and sense of humor back then, good oc was made. Newfags really killed this site Just because you didn't know of their existence doesn't mean they never existed at all. They have since died, however. Imo the decline really set in with the fappening.
I mean it was already going downhill a bit, but there was still a sense of the good old days to it. Then suddenly everyone and their brother comes here looking for JLaw titties and it was never the same. >not much funny shit Zoomers are incapable of having a sense of humor or personality. They're literal low iq social media drones that are only here to fit in. They don't contribute anything to boards.
This. All the unironic nazi newfags must be on the autism spectrum, they literally can't tell satire. It's like the saying "act like retards, attract actual retards who think they're in good company". Remember when /b/ literally ended a retarded unironic nazi's radio show host career? Good times. Nigger (and sandnigger) was used very freely, and I don't doubt some of it was genuine, but yeah there was definitely a sense of just being edgy. You said it because you could. A regular forum would ban you for calling someone a nigger.
I still see some of that on /b/ but there's definitely genuine hate behind more of it, plus the even more overt Nazi shit Funny pictures. That's really it. It was so simple but so relaxing to have a good laugh after school or work. You've no fucking idea what the old /b/ was. You sound like a 12 year old trying to be a big boy. If it were the old /b/, there'd be CP. If it were the old /b/, you'd have been banned at this point for being such a dipshit.
Old /b/ was like being part of a family. It was the place where all the broken children would go to and enjoy a little bit their lives, they raided and lol'd but most importantly, they belonged. I remember how when you met people on other websites who knew about /b/, they'd remind you of rule 1&2. Since it was all anonymous, you couldn't be judged on your appearance or anything, you were just accepted, you were just one in the mass. It brought a lot of people enjoyment. Now it's over, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. It may just shows that people have moved on and have now found that place where the could belong to /b/ was a need back then, for all the broken children and social outcasts from our generation. Today it might be less needed as things have gotten better for people, overall. /b/ is resilient, it will naturally give birth to something else for those permanently or temporarily at the bottom of society. I'll add that it was also a place where they could be their messed up or different selves and meet other like minded people. It was a place to be yourself and share your shit and be laughed at or not.
People could be kind with you and that still happens. It kind of went to filled the void for people back then. - B was full of pedophiles - Every second or third post was about incest - Half of the people that used to post here have been wiped out by the Big Cartels,(Yakuza, Sineloa, Mafia, Russian Mob, ect) they come here to feed on all the grossest and most easily compromised people. - Anonymous and Nazi's coincided peacfully on this sub for a very long time - Doxing was still a hobby, this is before hackers were "incorporated" into various government and non government professional organizations. - Anonymity was real and not a fucknig joke like it is now. - Anonymity was not a lie - This was back in the day that hackers still relied on bit torrent and "Free music and Movie Downloads" and "Free porn" were required by criminal organization to spread malware. - Clean forchan and front end forchan did not exist - r/weapons was a good place, and was had a lot of fun fantasy warfare and home defence word games (before the kidnappers cracked down on the "personal self defence community" and turned /k/ into a fascitst / nazi revolutionary sub. - A lot of chick with dick porn in the Anime porn community - /fit/ Was super gay In a nut shell, every single fucking thing onlibe now is some weird fake illusion, all thanks to the normalization of removals of internet privacy. The world today is a fucking horror show of insane canibals baked to fuck and bragging and beefing about the various civilians they have fucked, raped, and eaten.
True the decline started in 2008 but things didn't truly started to go downhill until 2009/2010 until smartphones became common place and by 2011/2012 it went to complete shit and the real internet was dead.
Tard threads. nothing like a good tard story.
traps were dudes with tits, not 'chicks'
gallons of sperm everywhere. i never said it killed it. it was just an event that had lost more people. as i said, over time things have gotten worse and it was no exception. great reading comprehension. also that shit technically started in 2013 with anita but i bet you weren't here during that time/don't remember and just searched that shit up
Creativity.
4chan died as soon as the e-celeb worship culture began. In fact the entire internet did Why make oc when YOU can be the oc It's all fucked
>explain operation chanology then A bunch of anons from /b/ trolling Scientology for LULZ but later changed anonymous and imageboard culture forever anonymous from 2004-early 2008 was the troll army of /b/ that fucked with people for fun just because they could and they were the final boss of the internet and feared and respected but after chanology anonymous turned into a moralfag movement set out to only do good thing and normalfags and the feds took over and it got too big. and yet there were still big hacks with their name behind it. people still got fucked with and still do. they're still around but the internet has grown a lot since then so they aren't as big of news unless they do something big to match it. hasn't happened a lot but there's been signs
Younger old fag here. Really surprised to hear about the porn situation. Were you here at the pages inception? keep in mind that the whole internet has become a CIA (project paper clip) Cult of the owl run death camp as of a few years ago.
Nah, 4chan in particular died on No More Grey But I guess you wouldn't know that Things have not gotten better at all. America is being actively invaded at the moment. There are several cults from various ideological groups which openly discuss the necessity of genocide for "population control", and a number of other "Christian" cults that thought crimes (CHAOS) and causing the apocalypse via global warming in order to ensure biblical accuracy through direct human intervention.
Just look for more then two milasecnds at what COVID actually is and how fucked the news and policy surounding COVID is. Literally everything is fucked.
I am not sure how to use the archive to find but it must be there somewhere, but she got fat as fuck with stretch marks and floppy tits and her hair is dyed purple or some shit, and she was posting and reminiscing about her old days, it was weird seeing someone iconic from the old days posting during these times and telling everyone what she has been doing since then, but yeah she looks like shit now
The /b/-day in mid-2006 The day that 4chan was shattered
4chan- and particularly /b/- was always shit. The main thing which was better in days of yore, however, was OC. There was a constant wave of original content, or original takes on derivative content.
Regardless my point still stands newfag most of what the Vfags do is for political or moral reasons not LULZ. You must be one of those 2003fags who think /b/ died in 06 no it didn't it just evolved 2008/2009 was when it went to shit. Anyone remember how newfags would sometimes namefag and it was hilarious? You must be one of those 2006fags who think /b/ died in 13 no it didn't it just evolved 2013/2014 was when it went to shit. You must be one of those 2014fags who think /b/ died in 16 no it didn't it just evolved 2015/2016 was when it went to shit. Yeah i know 4chan going to shit and when it did is a generational thing what else is new? Originalfags left in 2006, then there was only newfags to greet the waves of newer newfags that came after scientology this is why i want to make a website where you need to write out your posts in HTML and use a command line interface to guarantee a minimum standard of intelligence me and some /b/ tards rigged that stupid snapple poll, not very epic compared to what you oldfags have done but as a newfag it was fucking magical
This seems very plausible im sure after 4chan trolled the entire country with that frog and the hand thing everyone wanted to come here and just "turn on the autist" for whatever they wanted or thought was funny to them Anyway after all I only became more then a lurker after the Shia thing that was only like 2 years ago There was mainly just loads of CP. That’s what these lying perverts really miss. It was funny and internet-focused. Community was different. Nothing. And any faggot here that has an ego so great they can't admit that it's just nostalgia is a liar
4chan itself used to be unknown to anyone who wasn't online a lot then /b/ users started doing more and more funny shit and getting notoriety eventually 4chan would be mentioned on the news and every edgy faggot wanted to see what it was about what made it different years ago was the fact that it consisted of a bunch of weird motherfuckers but now it's just a bunch of faggots it used to be a place for like minded retards, now I really don't know. Now it's a bunch of like minded retards smothered by a minority of useless faggots. Let /b/ bloom again.
useless faggots is a good point people used to actually do shit here organize irl fuckery, stick their dicks in cursed skulls all I see now is degenerate porn and shitty teenage humor So it's 4chan's lack of capability to adapt to a new era of the internet? there's no adapting 4chan can't exist in the state that it used to that era of the internet is done I can see that. From around gamergate until now, the world has changed considerably. 2016 was the breaking point, and now we're stuck with what's left. I think I agree with you that the old era is over, and there's no "going back," but it's really a depressing thought.
I used to post threads of my chick for fun. Talk with the folks, even requests. Now the 12yr olds cant contain themselves. rather annoying. Kind of glad /b/ is getting a clean up.
>Thread about how things used to be >All of the disgruntled BBC porn posting lefties get in >We wuz old fags n shiiiiet >We wuz neva raycist >Fucc da right n fuck politics Even though they are spouting about politics and how they hate the right every second. I assume that the coombrain effect wore off from all of the porn and now they are back to typical leftist mentality, subversion, don't fall for it.
remember when we all used to call each other nigger faggots and no one cried about it?
It was almost like a huge inside joke. I remember having no idea what anyone was talking about when I first came here.
The sidebar. DESU.
Concealing your pathological need for a rigid, unending stream of predictable and repetitive pornography behind a flimsy veil of faux-jaded edgefaggotry is still faggotry, champ.
The meaning of Anon is as vague and ephemeral as the identity of the man of who assumes the title for his posting. An Anon does not merely abandon their self when they take on the name of "Anon", he does not become no one, but becomes one who you never know or see beyond the title of "Anon." His self is filtered through this title, delivered to his peers in contracted form, with priority given to that part of him that is usually withdrawn and stifled. Anon is Man masked, free to indulge but also free to bare the most neglected corners of his psyche. But Anon is not a single being. Each instance of Anon leaves a mark, some indelible and many immediately forgotten, but even the intention is enough to effect a change. Each instance adds to a growing consciousness that morphs with an almost lifelike force, one that touches each Anon to come, and, in certain cases, touches even the Anons that have long since gone. Anon evokes a multitude of beings insofar as he submits to the collective consciousness and becomes one with it. The meaning found here is like the perpetually tumultuous consciousness itself, forever on the precipice of certainty but never to fall in. Anon denies a strict phenomenology, cannot amount to anything concrete, but rather sways back and forth between a self and a non-self.
>How is so often true that a board dedicated to a subject sucks at said subject? This is because 4chan's communities are all based upon a much lower barrier of entry than virtually any other site of note*. And while most community-oriented websites are popular for appealing to people's desire to avoid Sturgeon's Law (pic related), 4chan's moderation only consistently skims the most egregious bullshit, like spambots and US law violations. So you get the trend of: 1. People who wouldn't pass the filter on other sites, either for lack of decorum or substance, often find 4chan appealing for discussion around some topic. 2. People who would pass the filter usually find those other sites more appealing for discussion. They are specifically rewarded with engagement, often exponentially, due to curation/upvotes/retweets/etc., and are subject to less wanton deprecation and trolling than they would be on 4chan. This leads to 4chan boards being best suited for themes that are highly consumption-oriented, and where societal norms and standards of discourse are mostly irrelevant. If the theme fails the former, discussion largely concerns tangential topic that orient it towards consumption. If it fails the latter, discussion is frequently made tangential both by trolls and the posters who feed them (intentional or not). /ck/ and /mu/ are pretty symptomatic of the former, /k/ is pretty symptomatic of both but primarily the latter. */vip/ has an unusually high barrier even over other websites: having to pay to post in it. Unsurprisingly, it is the least used board.
Raids and OC every night around this time
old b faded away once 12chan got the party van /b/ as you know it was all porn, which means you came after 2015, if you came after 2015, you're probably a tumblr exodite, or a plebbit refugee. Old /b/ wasn't good, but it was better than this, and you could have a discussion thread without it getting pushed off by nigger spam racebait, discord tranny troll threads, stormnigger psyops, or having the thread nuked by off topic porn request.
To be clear it's not that b or any other part of 4ch is or was flooded with porn. It's that people constantly reply or contribute to it which means all the whining and complaining is actually setting a precident that random means whatever the jannies and loudest crybabies decide it is.
You want NSFW gif to be next, cool. But first take all the reporting babies and shithole jannies from b and make a non porn b with your own rules and then make a non porn NSFW gif and a sfw s and so on. I'm tired of having less reasons to check in on what 4ch is doing and hearing crying about spammers and logposting and why someone's sister makes Mac everyday. So what. It's random. Fuck off to Reddit where everything is an organized circlejerk with shitloads of rules. That's not b, never has been. CP was indeed around back then, but it wasnt being taken down a second after being posted as it is now. So maybe old /b/ wasnt filled with endless CP threads, but there were for sure threads with CP left in the open until a thread died. /gif/ is for porn, says so right here >>834265221 but yeah I guess a "random gif" would be neat.
as for the shit on there, don't care. I fap there all the time and there are plenty of threads for every liking. if you get baited then too bad. You know what the cure when you get sick of /b/ is? Migrating to a more relevant board. /b/ isn't all of 4chan, kt's meant to be a mixed bag of all topics, not all porn and spamming logs. /b/ IS flooded with porn, and like the other anons said, it's all so systematic that it pushes the organic threads off of the board. The mods are literally pruning the trash threads so that old /b/ (at least the perception of what old bee was) will regrow
I can never tell how serious people are being when they post questions like this. I want to give the benefit of the doubt and assume it's bait but this board is stuffed so full of newfags and tourists I can actually believe many of you don't even know there's an entire website here outside of /b/. Which is fine with me, because the rest of us don't want you.
I get what you say but calling for gif to be free of porn as well is fucking stupid if they want an old b make a classic and then prune there the fact is the old threads were still being posted but people didn't replay or contribute as much to them as the porn threads. Duplicates should be removed but all of it at the same time no longer makes it random and do the same to gif and it's fucking worthless to even come here when other sites have the same shit and you will just see crosspost worthless garbage and reposts with very little oc the community will shrink and the influx of new blood will make 4ch a legit community but one that never grows or changes. Removing something like porn from 4chan changes 4chan and that's what the person I replied to is basically suggesting. I really don't care but I hate rules and oversight and when shit starts feeling categorized on a random board and see the same shit to a lesser degree on the other no random boards like gif I wonder what the fucking point is to even call this random if it isn't really allowed to be and why NSFW gif is now being targeted for porn as well I'm not asking all the coolers to go back to fortnight but I'm also not asking random to be categorized and heavily moderated against specific posts. At that point its no better than Reddit. Porn goes in porn subreddits and whites can't post in blackpeopletwitter.
>which blows my mind they dont have a furry board because of 2 reasons: 1. 4chan was/is never about money and/or having a niche spot for everyone 2. NOBODY likes furfags. They are despised even more on the internet. Yeah, but now NewFags think they can remake the old /b/ /trash/ Only because of a technical loophole. I don’t even know why they come here in the first place, there are tons of chans with boards deficated to them. They even have the extra gay u-18 chan. Why do they come here, is it just out of spite?
Saltdog detected. I fear lurking would've been a better choice. Can't get involved in anything these days without some angering some rabid fuckstick anymore. Not even for nostalgia.
The most annoying thing about the internet/smartphone shit is that everyone tries hard for clout. I don't come here as often as I used to be I remember in the mid 2010s there were faces of /b/ threads daily. And 90% of them were young little "depressed" fags who needed a compliments. /soc/ is full of em now thankfully. Even corner of the internet is full of watermarked images or people using their real names as usernames, all hoping that their content gets recognized and traced back to them. I've had sports memes I've made go viral (across Bleacher Report for ex) and friends send them back to me not knowing I made them. Why the fuck do I care? There's no more anonymity anymore. As we see in this thread, there's a bunch of normies and zoomers larping as oldfags or trying too hard to remember whatever they can about the late 2000s when they weren't even 10 years old yet. Remember trolling 15-20 years ago? It would drive people nuts because at that point, they were the outliers. Coming into online games or serious discussion forums (before plebbit sucked everything up) and ruining everyone's time. Now we encounter millions of trolls daily everywhere that try to trigger people but their short attention span kicks and they move on to something else.
I really don't understand the volume complaints about the new /v/ boards. What is the problem these new boards create?
The only one I will probably ever use is /vmg/ from time-to-time, but the mere existence of /vrpg/ and /vst/ doesn't provoke any sort of response in me. They're just new boards I probably won't use and probably won't effect me, like the majority of other boards.
Why is this anything worse than a neutral change from the last three years, which was no new boards at all?
Never said it was something that should be crutched on, only something that has its uses; namely as a way to cut the shit for older/obscure titles with no seeds, get only a notable quality hit, and with it being the easiest of the streaming pack to circumnavigate the ads on - with 4chimp itself not exactly far behind how scummy it is/was with ads without adblock. Both the people who exclusively used it and have been cut off from anime as a whole and the people who simply write it off in some vainglorious attempt at preserving ePeen on an Anonymous imageboard are equally retarded in the situation.
But don't forget it 'went down' last time because 'all the rights holders gave them a call' last time, as in their servers were melting so they just took it offline for a few weeks and reinstated it later like fuck all had happened. And, even if they're not making up excuses, like a fucking hydra, something with take its place.
Given it's not directly Anime & Manga related (>as if that matters on nu-/a/ with the not-fetish threads and the not-tfwnogf threads polluting a third of a catalog on a given day), the mods are probably doing it for free on overdrive, like when eHen went down; there'll probably be shit in the offsite archives if you look for it.
Because there are boards that people have been begging for for over a decade at this point, and the mods are off making boards which are dead in under a week. It's a testament to how out of touch they are more than anything, especially when you consider the no-generals rule on /vmg/, when a containment for /vg/'s gachapon threads has been one of the most consistant and highly requested threads for a while now. Essentially it's a let them eat cake moment.
My theory is that the impatient dopamine addicts cant believe that a slow, specialized board can be found appealing by anyone. The only addition they'd find actually worthy is a new fast board for an extremely general and popular topic (like e-celebs), where they'd be able to shitpost like mad and speedrun getting (You)s all day long.
The people who are expected to do their job are still not doing their job as per usual. The new boards should be and will be treated as a warm-up boards for newfags before coming into /v/ Come on you faggots, is this all you got?
We're both correct. This isn't a hivemind/leddit; some people are irritated by the fact that there are boards much higher on the 'request/priority list', some see it as evidence that the moderation team is out of touch with the userbase (especially as >>3381197 hints, these new boards are being put in the legacy group of the board header, not the gimmick group or the 'new' group), others see it as 'useless boards' being made which are just a waste of everyones time and killing good discussion on /v/ (which is being left for dead, pun intended).
It's like taking a long, hard shit. Some laid back people may like the extra time afforded by a long stool, but dislike the excessive force required to push the sturdiness of the turdiness in passing; others may have a hurried and stressful life and in turn appreciate the small burst of euphoria of a steely shit finally plopping while being consciously annoyed at the time taken out of their busy day to have it. Two completely opposing opniions reaching the same general level of satisfaction regarding the same general event.
>I'm going to assume you're not someone from a non-gacha general who doesn't like having to compete with something even more obnoxious and popular That's precisely who I am. Gacha threads accelerate the pace of a board by very significant amounts. It leads to slower boards stagnating and dying.
kissanime dying brings up a very important topic to talk about on /a/ tho and that is japan is reforming its copywrite laws the future could be rather grim its possible fan translated anime/manga can die
I want to kill the cunt mod who issues that warning. Smash his putrid little manchild face into the ground until all of my knuckles are broken. Every single power tripping faget who hides behind a computer screen needs to be thrown against the wall, without exception. These are all examples of spoil t middle class parasites that drifted effortlessly through life, being handed everything and told they were special, only to reach adulthood and realise they offer nothing of value to humanity and thus cling onto an abuse any position of power they happen to chance upon. These are little more than cochroaches hiding from the light. I hope moot gets an aggressive cancer and dies before reaching 40. He is a perfect example of one of these filthy scavenger insects. Because its just splitting up the userbase, you're a fool if you think mods are just gonna stop with just RPGs, mobile games, and fucking Strategy games. Its just drip-feeding boards until /v/ essentially becomes Video Games/Random and everyone goes into their genre's exclusion zone.
The other mods may be extremely gay but the /g/ one actual Autism. >Public bans so people give good boy points >Way too retarded to make his own sticky, but doesn't want to taint his perfect board so he decides to flood /qa/ >has to be told to make a sticky for his funny anime character like a good boy and he does it obediently no you stupid fuck a public b& is a reminder to fucking mass report said cancer spam post every time some faggot makes the same thread because mods/jannies normally do not use the catalog looking for shit to delete and b& they are fucking lazy and just check the report cue however those few times they do browse the board and notice X bait/cancer thread reposted for the 6th millionth time has no reports a public ban is given as a hopeful reminder to anons that the big red text OP receives means this thread is aids report it the next time its made plus threads normally get locked/deleted rather quickly
>nig/g/er thinking /g/ has anywhere NEAR the amount of self-made praisebait public b&s as /a/. Criticise them for being indecisive about their sticky, but /g/ is easily one of the better moderated boards for its relative size on the site (for context, /gif/ is only two places below it). Using public b&s the correct way (indicating or reminding what is against the rules) isn't a flaw, retard. So let me summise what I'm almost certain happened at this point; >you got banned for making a post doing nothing but complaining about an anime character (/a/) on the technology board (/g/) with nothing else related to whatever topic was at hand (offtopic) >instead of an ounce of introspection, you see this as an affront of moderative power, the institution keepin' you down, because clearly it's because the mod (singluar, indicating how new you are) is being protective of their ebin wai-fu; and not because you were posting offtopic while also doing nothing but attacking the obvious general culture of the board (which, by not lurking, you failed to grasp) >you immediately avoid your ban, and head straight to the /qa/ and see nothing but a slew of soijacks, sneed and fellow complainers >with nowhere esle you think you'll be heard, you enter the happenings thread to complain about the fact you got banned (offtopic, again), which you skirt around to attempt to imply that you're arguing on behalf of somebody else (which nobody buys, given how invested you are) and how everybody needs to come to your side to fight against this moderative threat - when the immediate response is that the mods are indeed, usually in the right in this case - causing you to continue to bitch and whine, fueled by everyone elses ignorance of your complaining Literal nigger behavior. You might see unfairly banned; I see an issue that you can't be reported under multiple rule infringements at once (Offtopic, Ban Evasion, Extremely Low Quality and possibly Call to Raid and Underage). Kill yourself faggot; people like you are how genuine shitmods can slip under the radar (TN: ABIB) as people just assume it's faggots such as yourself whining over nothing.
>Its just drip-feeding boards until /v/ essentially becomes Video Games/Random and everyone goes into their genre's exclusion zone Considering I can actually hold a multi-day discussion on /vr/ with longform posts, I really don't see this as a bad thing. Sure beats killing /v/ by beating probably-underage anons over the head for posting famous internet people they want to post about. It's like getting blood from a stone, except the stone will just leave and then everyone will complain about how /v/ is dead.
>Interesting fact that I just learned: Between March 7 and March 10, 2016, /pol/, /sp/ and /tv/ all had post numbers in the 66 millions. I don't think there's been any closer convergence of three boards like this in a while. Now /pol/ has twice as many posts as /tv/, and /sp/ only recently cracked 100 million.
the real happening is that /vst/ has turned out to be a good board so far and over the weekend it was finally possible to have discussions about city builders that were pretty much impossible before :)
Teenagers who grew up only consuming entertainment and social media can not tolerate the idea that others choose to create meaningful content simply because they genuinely enjoy it. They are addict to dopamine and the only way to get it is either with smug cynicism or anger-fueled mental breakdown, so they only know how to be passive-aggressive bitches of mindlessly destructive drones. We can see it here too when the one or other sperg off his meds shows up and has a seizure because his garbage thread was deleted. On /tg/ this kind of users have been growing in number for a while, especially since the last 2 years, but the prelude was gamergate and the elections. As traditional games get turned from a niche hobby into a social media event, live streams, trendy celebrities, drama and economical/personal interests grow and spread, newcomers stop engaging with on-topic activities such as reading/discussing books and games, producing content, or even playing TTRPGs, and instead focus on following the current bandwagon, going after self-professed VIPs and drama, and mixing in external and unrelated things such as politics and agendas of whichever side they happen to be on. That's why critical role threads reach bump limit within an hour, even though most of the discussion is complaining they are reading from a script, drooling after this or that streamer, and fighting over american politics. That's also why the board gets regularly flooded with meaningless low effort thread, why brutal but constructive criticism turned into spiteful antagonism and doxxing, why threads depopulate and the newcomers, who do not care about the board's actual topic, turn it into a circlejerk of politics and personalty worship. >tl;dr Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.
It's quintessential rules of the internet: the more people you attract to a board/forum/site, the lower the quality of discussion as the demographics trend towards lowest common denominator. The abrasiveness also used to serve a purpose to keep people away. Newfags need to go back to gaia and lurk the fuck more. It raised the barrier to entry in a way. The scientology protests and Time Magazine's coverage of the 4chan when /b/ fucked their person of the year polls to get moot to the top brought the site into the public eye more than it ever had been before. There's pretty mich always been a decline, but the speed of it has only accelerated exponentially sinve then. Fuck, anyone remember being able to have actual discussions on /b/?
Even pass users won't be able to compregend the experience of a 4chan where every single function of 4chan did not require a captcha including the report function. 4chan felt more alive then, like a gigantic mass of internet ants or internet bees swarming every second, unhindered by any captcha. You could image dump without time restriction back then as well so whenever a popular anime character had their birthday, a board could be swarmed with fanart and it would not be considered spamming at all. Maybe moot might come back to 4chan after all since Google said they are permanently shutting down Google Plus and moot was supposedly hired to help Google with social communities.
They don't want the controlled opposition counter-culture to be opposed, I guess. Face it, 4chan is dead. People that use the site now are kids who do art, wanna get attention or just use it because its so mainstream. 4chan is turning into Reddit, that is a fact. It's bullshit, it's filled with shills, glows and mostly feds fighting other feds all the time to the point that just asking about the site can get you permanently banned. I remember around 2012 you could ask the jannies and mods about the site and they would make it better. Now if you ask about it, you just get shot and killed, and the site gets worse and worse to use. There is nothing but shitposts where you challenge other anons to see who can make the worst thread then another. Nobody is interested in argument or engaging each other on key points anymore, everyone would rather fling shit to get their fleeting momentary fix of superiority. But the point is dead, 4chan is dying and loosing influence, and they cannot admit it because it will ruin their ego. Mostly all of them will be traced by FEMA or arrested if they start anything on there by a undercover glow or agent, or even better, they would be doxxed by transgender people and they will whine about tendies and shitpost when their SSN gets found.
>Why are you still here when it’s devolved this much? Moot abandoned us. Not that person, but I was here from 2005-2012 ish, left, and only recently came back thanks to corona making my life boring Things that offend me: -this is just edgey reddit now. Memes from reddit and memes from 4chan are cross-posted constantly. Back in the day, internet communities were more islands, and there wasn't really any crosstalk at all (and Digg was still the thing) -the amount of anti-women teenagers: Everyone here used to post shit for fun and being offensive, and would cry over having no GF. Now its evolved into "I don't NEED a GF because women are WHORES" and live in a beta fantasy world that doesn't match reality. Basically the male teenagers of this generation are even more cucked than my generation was -the lack of real substance and lack of people making things Back on old /b/, people would constantly make new shit all the time. Nowadays, everyone just waits and reposts whatever they find, I don't think anyone makes anything anymore. Things like the LOIC for DDOS attacks were awesome, I still have that shit downloaded on an old computer somewhere. Tools made for the lulz. I used to make a lot of OC, and so did everyone. Now its all one person/a few people making a lot of things, and everyone else just looking for stuff to take, rather than trying to be creative. Finally, goddamn 40% of threads are russian shill political threads. Like its obnoxious. It's so obvious too, they all speak the same, use the same phrases as a 40 yo facebook poster ("Lyin' Joe!"), and the thread is filled with shills that all talk the same. I don't know how its all still up, its literally on the front page 24/7. This place is a dumpster fire now, and its people arguing with russian posters in half the threads.
/a/ should have a high barrier of entry, and I would argue that it used to. The mods don't allow us to preserve any oldfag culture outside of monthly (if that) nostalgia threads and yearly traditions like these. It is actively lowering the barrier of entry and making the board more newfag friendly. If I had to guess why, it's probably because /a/ is the most profitable board for gookmoot considering how popular anime is nowadays, and how it is next to impossible for him to make any money from the faster boards on the site.
it's /b/. it's fundamentally dogshit to start with, and it just kinda goes downhill from there. /b/ is like the meat of 4chan that has been left out in the yard for a week and is a bit green with flys on it, but you still think, "well, maybe it's ok" and you take a bite and then spit it out. but you are really stupid so you take another bite and swallow that one. then you end up sick for a week. then you get fired for laying out of work for a week, so you have to live in mom's basement from then on. so then you just sit around surfing /b/ and molesting your neighbors alpaca with a football bat. then things start to go downhill....
/b/ is a shithole for low life rejects of society. It's also full of larpers who pretend they've amounted to anything in life despite anyone with a job higher than flipping burgers wouldn't be on 4Chan. It's for people to use as a crutch, as their social interactions become less and less their dependency on 4Chan becomes more and more. It's an aggressive circle of self-hate, sloth and procrastination. This is why 90% of people who are 4Chan commit suicide by 25
But why is /b/ so uniquely dogshit compared to every other board? I don't even mean the threads themselves, I mean the comments and the posters. The best way I can describe it, is despite differences in board culture, every board from /a/ to /x/ is on the same "wavelength," even /pol/ arguing with /co/ is on the same frame of reality but /b/...it's like the rest of 4chan is on wavelength A, and /b/ is on wavelength Q, the posters there are legitimately retarded, like the 40+ year olds you see trying to use facebook
Get this. I actually have a pretty decent life. Good job, good long term relationship with someone I find attractive and actually care about, I look after myself and don't have many particularly destructive habits (I did used to though) But I still come to this fucking shithole everyday. I've been coming here since I about 2007 and I cannot for the fucking life of me work out why. I've tried to stop, even managed to succeed for some relatively long periods (6 months here or there) but I always end up back here. I agree with other anons, it started of shit and has got shitter and shitter over time. It doesn't make any sense to me.
It's because you want things to work out. It's because you've experienced the tide of progressive deterioration, and you're enamored with the false sense of things, just maybe, going back a step. We've passed that point. There will no longer be a pretense of it getting better. It's going to get worse, and the people who made it worth your while are all but gone. The internet is forfeit.
I always think it's interesting how early 4chan really didn't give a fuck about namefags, there was no principle that staying anonymous was intrinsically preferable to giving yourself a name, that you SHOULD stay anonymous and if you didn't you should be reviled for that mere fact alone regardless of what you posted. Early 4chan just didn't care. You see tons of namefags in a lot of early screencaps and nobody comments on that fact. Everyone back then came from forums where having a handle was necessary and a lot of people enjoyed that sense of community, that you could have an ongoing correspondence with posters across the board.
Now if you dare to give yourself a name there are innumerable posters that will pitch a fit, like having a name is antithetical to 4chan itself and not an idea that only started many years after 4chan was created.
Probably because back in the day even people on forums or any other site with usernames were still more or less anonymous. Almost nobody was associating their real identity with their internet activity.
Now that that's changing I think many 4chan users felt greater pressure to avoid the change and demand hardcore anonymity.
It's sort of similar to how "lol" fell out of use for a while. It's more accepted again today but there was a period in our history where you'd be called a normalfag for using "lol" and it's because the rise of cellphones made it a commonly used thing. Now that most phones use auto correction your average person isn't using many accronyms anymore
I always found it a bit sad, but it seems 4chan does like to change itself just to be different from the mainstream. I guess in some ways it's a good thing and some ways it's not
Tripfag and tripcode user were different things back then. We hated tripfags just as much back then as we do now. Most people used names or trips. This is a fact. What is not a fact is most of them were tripfags. Most of them were normal average people that came from forums to here and put names or trips on eventually. A small minority of them were the attention-whoring cunts out to make a name for themselves.
Trip-cracking was a regular fun thread we had that cracked peoples trips, which made tripfags especially mad when it happened.
They eventually started transitioning over to secure tripcodes, which is where the banner "secure tripcodes are for jerks" came from.
Also, Forced Anon on /b/ was the beginning of the end of this sites actual community and transition to the shitty meme content site that it is today. Equally the permanent removal of snacks, the one ballsy enough to tell moot to get fucked with his silly rules. snacks banned weebs, attention whores, gaiafags, raid fags and so on. Without him at the helm and the anonymous hivemind raid faggots from FYAD, the whole site dropped 40 IQ points in half a year. Fuck you menchi, weeb cunt. Fuck you as well moot for listening to him. Anonymous Discussion isn't even used on Japanese boards, both the major ones have forced IDs globally. (well, one uses 3 IP octets last I checked, which is more like /int/ flag tier identity)
In the early days Moot was basically another user, a tripfag with special honors, back then 4chan was small and hadn't really solidified it's identity, I wouldn't count that era.
But then, as you can probably see from some of the later screenshots, he was still a relatively active member. Even after the site grew too large for him to tripfag (due to his mere presence derailing threads), he still tried to communicate and discuss issues with the userbase using events, and tried to be as transparent as possible when it came to things like moderation, board issues, etc. During this very approximate era, from, say, 2007-2011, Moot was generally well beloved.
If you want to pin specific dates to this very vaguely defined era, I suggest Project Chanology as the start, when 4chan exploded into mass-media the first time and it's userbase rapidly grew, and Moot deleting /r9k/ in January 2011 as the end, because "he didn't like the community".
Over the years after that, Moot grew more distant towards 4chan, in part at least due to real life taking up more and more of his time, and he started to enforce more ill-advised and aggressive policies with no or extremely little transparency. For most users he was eroding the good-will he had built up over the years, and that continued until he eventually sold the site and moved on.
Hiro/Mootwo isn't perfect, and I honestly don't trust him to not have ulterior motives, but for the time he's been in charge (which, let's face it, has to be like herding millions of cats) he's done a better job than Moot did towards the end. Where late Moot would have drawn a hard line and enforced it at the cost of the community and site as a whole, Hiro is more compromising and willing to see eye-to-eye. A good recent example is /v/ and NeoGAF, if you go to /v/ Hiro has put up a sticky stating they're making a temporary exception when it comes to politics, because NeoGAF is so closely tied to videogames.
I think we're just some kind of experiment for some SA user's master's thesis in psychology. They develop all the original content there and then force it upon us. And we eat it.
Nope. /b/ is actually better than it has been in years, just a lot more porn and fap threads and shit. All the hardcore memers/shitposters left for /s4s/, and the retards jumped ship to other boards. If it wasn't for the speed and shit getting pushed off so easily, /b/ would be better for discussing anime, video games, and half of the content on the bigger boards. I've even seen better /x/ threads on /b/ than on /x/.
/b/ once again has to carry 4chan on their backs as the rest of the boards descend into shitposting, madness, and flaming autism. Because unlike you fags, we're trained as newfags to not take the internet seriously. So, if someone invades? We don't give a shit. If someone invades /a/ or /v/ or /pol/? They give them reactions out the ass and give people incentive to keep poking at them.
We don't cry when people disagree with our politics and blame /pol/, we don't whine about how our board was a bastion of pure golden content that is now somehow lost. We make fun of it. We're here to discuss whatever we want, whenever we want, and have fun doing it.
And THAT is why /b/ is still alive and kicking, and why nearly every imageboard has a /b/, and even some textboards. Check out other random boards. /s4s/ went from irony and descended into shitposting. /r9k/ went from gentlemen into feels faggots. /b/ alone stands eternally the same in its randomness. Stay mad, you're the architects of your own shitposting madness for breaking the rules of the internet and taking it too seriously for your own good.
It's not "important" in that it's impossible to run one without it, but there's always been that trend online and imageboards particularly. Each site that forms a userbase that can last (like 4chan) seeks to set itself apart from the rest. That's human nature for the most part. The whole imageboard culture and the anonymity textboards/imageboards provided allowed them to be far more open and only things that broke board rules/was illegal will typically get banned. That gives us a lot more freedom than most other forums. But you do get some sites that are more laidback and smaller that aren't hostile, but odds are you'll see a distaste for registration forums there. That's been around since the beginning.
So, there's always been that and it's why people shit on Gaia, Reddit, Tumblr, and all these other sites. These sites aren't risks. Imageboards (at least Japanese ones and such) were around long before those sites and will outlast them as well because they're just "trendy". There's never not going to be a market for people who want to speak their mind anonymously and avoid upvotes/downvotes. It lets us do what we want to do in a more free way, so even if 4chan died these sites would still live on.
And as another guy said before, it is pretty bad that we know much about the mods/janitors. They're meant to be anonymous for a reason, and if they don't have a "reputation" to keep up, they won't fall to the same pitfalls other mods and admins do when they act like raging spergs and ban any and all dissent/shit talking. When a mod is anonymous, he can take the criticism a little easier than if he knows the users know who he is and shit on him for it.
So, mods/janitors being anonymous is equally important and us being able to find their reddits and tumblrs is a double edged sword. Good in that we can see if they're faggots, but bad in that they have a reputation to keep up now after not being anonymous and that makes them more likely to just be utter cunts.
The problem isn't just faggotry, it's inorganic faggotry. They spam this shit out of spite to troll people in straight threads but when in their own threads they're all a bunch of blogposting tumblr users who don't just wank and go, they live in those fucking threads to discuss how to be the most flaming faggot possible. The kind of self important attention seeking blogposting only found on Tumblr. As much as I hate to admit, GG started it. As a prelude to this, the mod team took our ability to fight back by banning anything that can be considered organized "raiding" including good old /b/ blogtalkradio host trolling. Admin team got exposed for being filled with SJWs. /v/ and /pol/ and basically any board that should allow for free expression on relevant topics got fucked in the ass hardest so a ton of organic users fled to 8ch. Traffic dipped hard, moot sold the site to gookmoot while sucking anita sarkeesian's cock, blue board separation happened. Anyone who stayed on /v/ in 2014 was basically SJW because everyone else got banned for talking about the topic. The new rules for blue boards reflect that fact. Then the tumblr porn purge and coomer exodus brought tons of non organic users to this place who will scream and shout desperately about how they are actually oldfags who "matured" into "reasonable" people with decent ideas and opinions so that's why they are basically copies of 2012 era SJWs. With blue board rules against trolling they are basically shielded from any word they see as triggering and the splitting of big boards into smaller more circlejerk friendly boards like all the "general" boards further isolate users from opposing viewpoints.
Encyclopedia Dramatica has a detailed article about the downfall of this place including the leaked modteam IRC logs where they talk about 4chan users like we're vermin they had to get rid of as quickly as possible so that moot could save face.
yes. this board is designed to emulate japanese culture by deemphasising the individual.
rapeape/alt have both the admin/manager capcodes the dev is MVB and I call bs that dude doesn't get some funds to keep the servers up and running hell moot himself also use to give jannies/mods amazon giftcards for xmass (even on birthdays too allegedly)
THINK about why staff would say that everyone does it for free with all the shady sketchy borderline illegal ads ever since Hiro took over invsibro aka gingermod aka le palm tree man aka king of /bant/ aka swaglord works in (((adverting))) Alt also works in the field rapeape works in some sort of call management in IT advertising too its not just hiro pushing 4chan to the max to make money its imfuckingpossible some staff do not get a salarythe OPsec and skills needed are not something you can easily find without them 4chan would die and Hiro would be fucked with his investment
Moot kept 4chan running with minimal ads granted even with based ones like jlist he himself wasn't rolling in money from 4chan it wasn't his fulltime job for many years remember his failed startup companies I doubt staff received much money if any at all since moot was running everything and the servers were in NYC but in a post-moot 4chan in order for Hiro to keep 4chan open he would have to keep staff happy any slip ups would be instant doom for the site paying staff also keeps the whole work load and culture i doubt he even understands off his shoulders Hiro knows what happens when you piss off your users or staff either people move or your website is usurped from your very hands I doubt he wants a repeat of this especially after paying millions for 4chan also do you really think staff would be cool with hiro patching all these sketchy ads raking in money when he does no work here fuck no
tl;dr Hiro pays people to keep his company running just like any other buisness owner does its basic fucking logic its just an open skrt that no one talks about because it makes the staff look really bad gigachadscitzooldfags knows all
Immeasurable value is lost. It's a repository of the central Internet cultural force for the past 20 years.
Obviously there are shitposters, fedposters, and general retards all over 4chan. Forget those for a moment, and while you're at it, forget the really incredible and informative posts too.
Instead, focus on what 4chan means for the Internet.
Internet culture IS 4chan. Virtually every organic Internet movement has a home on 4chan. This extends beyond memes (of which, naturally, almost all organic memes you see anywhere on the Internet originate from 4chan) but to true movements. True schools of thought.
Try talking about FOSS somewhere that is't /g/. You will find yourself surrounded by transexual retards.
Try talking about anime outside of /a/. You'll see absolutely nothing but a plebbit-tier, Star Wars-tier fanbase for whatever is running at the moment.
Try talking about politics outside of /pol/. HA! You fucking can't talk about politics outside of /pol/. It's impossible.
Try talking about music outside of /mu/, film outside of /tv, sports outside of /sp/, vidya outside of /v/ (well, there is one place, but I dare not name it lest it get ruined too)... YOU CAN'T!
This place is an oasis. Nowhere else has the traffic, and nowhere else has the freedom.
Dumbasses and shitposters aplenty, but freedom of thought and general fun and youthful exuberance all around. There is nothing else like 4chan on the internet. So yeah, something of value was lost. Otherwise, you wouldn't even be on here.
>søyjakshit
You'll never be oldfags. You have never lurked, you have no experience on this site, you have no culture. You're underage newfags twisted by søyjak spamming trannies & Twitter into a crude mockery of this site.
All the “validation” you get is two-faced and half-hearted. Behind your back people mock you the way you mock others with søyjaks. Your parents are tired of you & want you to grow up, your “friends” laugh at your ghoulish appearance behind you despite also being trannies.
Most Anons are utterly repulsed by you. 19 years of this site's existence have allowed Anons to sniff out faggots and underages with incredible accuracy. Even Søyjak spammers who “aren't mentally ill” look uncanny & unnatural to the average oldfag. The way you type & act hostile is a dead giveaway. And even if you manage to get a Anon to join your /qa/ raid Discord or søyparty, he’ll turn tail and bolt the second he gets a whiff of your diseased, infected community of schizos, trannies, and underages.
You'll never be happy. You put out a fake smile every single day and tell yourself "This next post is gonna be a heckin 'emmy 'n 'e 'catty 'n my 'jakfrens will give me HRT!", but deep inside you feel the depression creeping up like a weed.
Eventually it’ll be too much to bear - you’ll buy a rope, tie a noose, put it around your neck, & plunge into the cold abyss. Your parents will find you, heartbroken but relieved that they no longer have to live with the unbearable disappointment. They’ll bury you with a headstone marked with your birth name, & every passerby for the rest of eternity will know a underage fag was buried there. Your body will decay, go back to dust, and all that will remain of your legacy is a skeleton of a autist that people on a mongolian basketweaving fourm hated. Your meme will become nothing but a small laughing stock of internet history.
This is your fate. This is what you chose. There is no turning back.
Archives go against the entire point of 4chan. The primary "selling points" of 4chan (and imageboard-style websites in general) are that you can be completely anonymous and that, after a relatively short period of time, the threads are gone forever. What happens in the past stays in the past, you don't have to fear anyone snooping up on past post history.
In fact, another problem with archiving threads is that they can be used to deanonymize posters through writing pattern recognition. This weakens the anonymity guarantee that people expect from imageboards.
I understand the purpose of archival for historical preservation, but this is one website which is NOT meant to be archived. You have plenty of places on the internet to go if you want a permanent posting record.
>Archives go against the entire point of 4chan. The primary "selling points" of 4chan (and imageboard-style websites in general) are that you can be completely anonymous
This is the only selling point from which many advantages can be inferred. Japanese boards are anonymous, incidentally, simply because they were based off the guestbook format.
>and that, after a relatively short period of time, the threads are gone forever.
Incorrect and headcanon. 4chan boards had no external archives for years because Moot was a poorfag and nobody considered archiving to be practical until more people started posting genuine quality content and shared direct download links.
>What happens in the past stays in the past, you don't have to fear anyone snooping up on past post history.
Averted by not being a tripfagging buffoon.
>In fact, another problem with archiving threads is that they can be used to deanonymize posters through writing pattern recognition. This weakens the anonymity guarantee that people expect from imageboards.
This is a fair point, but there's nothing to say the glowbois don't do this actively anyway.
>this is one website which is NOT meant to be archived.
Again, you're an idiot. Archives are only considered a "threat" because they catch posts that aren't deleted quickly enough.
Everyone knows /out/ has the most intelligent posters on the site. Yes /sci/ without a doubt has the most "intelligent" posters. But those autis lack any life skills,wisdom,creativity and etc etc. Compared to sc/out/s for clearly obvious reasons(need I really go into detail). Your average sc/out/ can survive anywhere with minimal necessities. Plus many hold the sacred text of Uncle Ted dearly. Politics and philosophy on /sci/ is rather embarrassing. /out/ is the best hobby board and in the top 3 boards in general overall it has the best userbase the more chill/friendly userbase the most helpful userbase the userbase that has managed to fight off the shartydiscordtrannies and all other subhuman shitposting spammer, rather well shartytroons hold no power nor get attention on /out/. /out/ has the cutest board-tan and best parents of said board-tans. /out/ has the most handsome and /fit/ users. Tl;dr sc/out/s are based and a pillar of old imageboard culture, etiquette, passion, creativity and most important of all even tho this sound extremely cringe
the Aussie incident showed that admins (and some or all mods) get a checkbox that makes their post get processed as actual HTML. What they do is use < img> or < video> tags and CSS styling to change where they show up on the page. This is what that mod actually put in the post box, if you or me tried it would be rendered as text. Being able to post HTML that will be run by anyone could be heavily abused for nefarious purposes so it's probably limited to just a few people. Like the leaf said they probably test it on /j/ or /test/. they often post on /vip/ or /wsg/ anonymously with the images/videos they're embedding because trying to use an external image host like catbox would be blocked by a lot of people's browsers.
its old spaghetti code no one understands because it has been edited so much by many cooks. Its like an Admech looking at some old object no one understands how it works. They just know that it works and can keep it working by adding more too it.
you can easily find old imageboard software ie futaba and look at it yourself. Yostuba at first was just translated and edited, god knows how it looks now. Also moot hardly did much it was MBV and snacks plus another dude that did most the editing at first moot was only 17 after all.
As I've said the fact 4chan happened is amazing yes someone else would have done it. But the fact moot was so young and was learning how to do shit on his own helped 4chan stay alive. Imagine it was some dude in his late 20's or early 30's who created 4chan.
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I feel like 4chan is currently experiencing it's very own Kali Yuga of sorts, it's last form before the re-incarnation. Hindus believe that the universe rotates between 4 eras, our Yugas.The first being Satya Yuga, being the "purest" era, then continuing on to Treta Yuga and Dvapara Yuga, and finally Kali Yuga, the "vilest" era. Here's a more detailed explanation. >Hindus believe that human civilization degenerates spiritually during the Kali Yuga, which is referred to as the Dark Age because in it people are as far away as possible from God. Hinduism often symbolically represents morality (dharma) as an Indian bull. In Satya Yuga, the first stage of development, the bull has four legs, but in each age morality is reduced by one quarter. By the age of Kali, morality is reduced to only a quarter of that of the golden age, so that the bull of Dharma has only one leg. Satya Yuga, for 4chan, would be the pre 2010 era. Simplicity characterized this era. Treta and Dvapara would be 2010-2015. The rise of phoneposting, Gamergate, and the Fappening begin to spell the decline of posting quality. Kali Yuga is 2016-Onward, when trumpians flooded in and /pol/ overtook /b/ as the "newfag board" and flooded out into the rest of the site, bringing their shitty ideology with them. This was 4chan's moral degradation. When Trump leaves office, whether that be in 2020 or 2024, the trumpian zealotry will eventually fizzle out, and they will either leave or integrate into 4chan. This will mark the site's "re-incarnation" and bring in a new era of Satya Yuga.
Counterargument:
That post was saying that I DON'T think [that the narrative you've decided on is particularly apt to 4chan itself or will be predictive of the future]. The whole attempt at fitting 4chan into that Yuga narrative is facile. It works for only as far as you are predisposed to see the picture that way. If you think SA follows the same pattern and god knows how many other websites you'd find to apply it to as well it just highlights the superficial nature of your thesis. It isn't a comparison about 4chan and the Yuga cycle anymore, it's your half-baked ill-fitting overwrought theory of the life-cycle of online communities, a cycle which you've offered no example of actually happening or given any evidence for why you think its certain. And again, why even include the Yuga aspect since the only thing you take from it is the cyclical nature and the (extraordinarily subjective) lamentations about 'moral degradation'? Just look in your opening post at the categories you came up with. You couldn't even find 4 distinct categories for 4chan's 'cycle' and just threw your hands up with 2010-2015 as being two all at once, and you decisions at when those categories begin and end is totally arbitrary. Why does the 'Satya Yuga' end in 2010 for instance when the change in 4chan from '05 and '08 was way more substantial than '08 to '10? Again it comes back to my ultimate point of your thesis being totally unnecessary, unsubstantiated and ill-fitting.
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You're taking the Yuga part of my theory far to literally. I thought it would be an interesting way to illustrate my point, being that 4chan is currently experiencing an era of cultural degradation. What I am trying to say is that the site has reached (or is reaching) it's zenith, brought on by the influx of new users from Gamergate, the Fappening, and the 2016 Election, who essentially hijacked site's culture. Boards like /tv/, /v/ and /pol/ are basically overrun with these new posters. Kali Yuga is peak 4chan. Obviously 4chan will not remain at it's current level of popularity for ever, it is simply unsustainable. Eventually the popularity of the site will wane, and 4chan will return to a similar state as which it has started.
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> I thought it would be an interesting way to illustrate my point Ok and we're back to what I said at the beginning (>>1946147) that by fettering your thesis to the Yuga stuff you've allowed it to drag you to its own conclusion of an eventual 'reincarnation'. Your argument does not follow, specifically this: >4chan will return to a similar state as which it has started. The posters who still inhabit 4chan in 2020 or 2024 (if its still around) will NOT somehow revert back to pre-smartphone, pre-chanology, budding internet culture just because the site gets less popular (if it even does). The 4chan that existed in 2006 or even 2010 was the result of particular people with particular technology living during a particular time. It wasn't just that they had less posters. If you want to see what 4chan looks like with less people hop on over to infinitychan. If 4chan starts to bleed users that's what it'll look like. Dead boards, more generals, more e-drama, more bickering, more refusal to let go of their 'glory days', and more of the ideological diehards who don't have anywhere else to go. Those 'newfags' become the 'oldfags' and merely entrench themselves further in what brought them here in the first place. The "cultural degradation" you decry isn't something happening in a vacuum like once those 'cancerous newfags' leave it'll all go back to how it used to be. The things you're railing at are symptoms. The cause is the irrevocable assimilation of 4chan into general web2.0 culture. 4chan can no more go back to its web1.0 roots than you can turn back the clock. Ultimately, the course of 4chan will end up being more like a star whose rapid expansion causes it to go supernova and leaves behind a small, dull, cold, dwarf of what it once was.
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It's pretty sad that anons had this misplaced hope that moot would be here forever, even when signs of other projects like canv.as and his blog showed that his time was significantly focused elsewhere. Forget the fact that he stopped browsing or posting here like a fellow manchild for the most part even well before he left. It's the same with most of the talented users we had here, whether it be OC in the form of music, art, programming, etc. or translators. Most of them realized there's nothing to achieve from doing it for free for a bunch of anons outside of maybe a temporary high from being praised by people on the internet, or a screencap or product that gets posted every now and again. Instead, almost all of them pursued actual careers with their talents they cultivated here or in relation to groups from here and didn't come back. There's a few anomalies to this but for the vast majority, you could see their github, pixiv, tumblr, so on and tell that they went on to bigger and better things. "You're here forever" is a joke, the only people that are here forever are the ones that are too lazy to better themselves and even some of them get tired of being lazy.
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That existed in the early 00s too. Entire reason why I came to 4chan in the first place, was that you could unleash your id completely here without consequences. You had no name and everything you posted was not archived and could not be tracked since it disappeared after a few hours. It was immediate gratification without regards to consequences, without needing to pretend that you are a social creature. You could be an inane racist asshole if it was fun for five minutes, and then make serious contributions to bigger projects or discussions in the next thread. Nobody judged you for the opinion of your previous post, unless you chose so by using name/email/tripcode. On todays social media, most people don't even use pseudonyms, they use real names, so of course they can be fucked over for a remark they made ten years ago that became racist as times changed. But even 4chan lost all this spark, with all posts being archived, and post times purposely slowed down to increase thread times, funposting being explicitly banned, etc....
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I would guess that easily 90% of the current 4chan userbase were at least casual reddit users beforehand. Their ostentatious anti-reddit attitudes are an effort to demonstrate their credibility as 'true' 4channers. As if harshly rebuking reddit and all things they associate with reddit absolves them of the 'sin' of having been a redditor. At this point though, people have been blabbering about 'reddit spacing' for so long that it actually pre-dates the average user. I first noticed people talking about 'reddit spacing' in maybe 2013-2014. The average user is so new that they conceive of everything under moot as ancient history. Anybody who was using 4chan prior to reddit's explosion in popularity around 2011 or so knows that 'reddit spacing' is a bullshit criticism, but at this point that's probably less than 5% of the userbase, and on most of the larger boards it's probably less than 1%.
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Yeah I can agree with that. Gamergate type fags or whoever are these edgy newfags these days seem to want mod involvement to be invisible, I miss the days when we had funny wordfilters, fortunes, (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST) visible, bans made for lols, that kind of stuff. I don't know wtf people are expecting these days like 4chan has to be some noble pillar of free speech, to me that's a seed of activist anonymous is legion cancer that began around 2006 when all of that anti-scientology stuff was starting up and then got inflamed worse by redpill shit of /r9k/ and /pol/ fags. I tried to go on a voice chat made by some kids here recently, I could only stand it for a few minutes, one was a tripfag and they were complaining about some janitor drama, something like that...such circlejerking faggotry, it made me realize that most of the userbase is barely in their 20's or under and are seriously popularityfagging and in some kind of ego war with any type of mod. when people go somewhere and start commenting that its like "old 4chan" its because its anonymous and people arent being edgy, they're just being silly. I miss that. /s4s/ seems slighty like that although i dont go to that board
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I first visited 4chan in my freshmen year, when /b/ was the only important board and everyone still did habbo hotel raids. It felt like the wild west. The old men up in Government didn't understand how the Internet worked. You could just prank people. Anyone. No one over our age understood how any of this technology functioned, just that it was important and they needed to get on it. This made a lot of vulnerable people. Child pornography was funny because it was so risque. One of the only things mods would delete. People would find it and post it just because of that taboo. Moot had no idea how to mitigate spam and spam was everywhere. The board moved fast. Very, very fast. I don't know if it moves faster or slower. Modern /b/ probably moves slower. You'd f5 and the thread you had just made would be on page 7. It was like every highschooler in the country was posting there instead of Facebook. Encyclopedia Dramatica was super relevant and people needed it to catch up on any memes they missed. Memes did not have a name, they were just funny injokes that people did. The standardization, mass production, corporation of memes ruined them in my opinion. Things like KYM represent the monetization of the Internet and its culture. Things made out of love, like 4chan and ED, no longer exist. 4chan is now also a tightly moderated product which cooperates directly with the government to report crime as quickly as possible. ED is a husk, meaningless and useless. Things were fun. People were naive. The rules did not exist. A bunch of kids pretending to be hackers became a federally recognized terrorist organization and after Project Chanology, the fun was over. I firmly believe the CIA has co-opted the public identity "anonymous" now. /pol/ is what became of my generation of 4chan uses. A bunch of hyperliberal kids became conservative-leaning libertarians who desire a white country and white family.
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I joined 4chan early, and I would never have guessed that things would have turned out this way. Moot was always a faggot, but he was our faggot. No one liked us in real life, and no one liked us on the internet, and we liked it that way. I don't think anyone would have ever guessed at the time that one day, 4chan would be completely fucking overrun with normalfags, and make no mistake, /pol/, in its current incarnation, on 4chan and infinitychan both, are the most normal of normalfags. They're the sort of normalfag scum that 4chan in its hayday would have trolled into the ground. These fucking retards think that because they're social pariahs or whatever that they're not the "normies" that they fucking despise. 4chan's always had a reputation for being full of fucked up people, but being fucked up wasn't the essential element. It was full of fucked up people, but they were all fucked up in their own unique ways and that wasn't just okay, but expected, even celebrated. We were all fucked up, broken people, but in our incongruities we found a sort of solidarity. anonymous itself wasn't an identity, it was an escape from it. We finally had a place to be who we were and who we wanted to be without some normalfag piece of shit telling us how we were supposed to be. I imagine that's what did /pol/ and eventually 4chan in. I guess we assumed that anyone that would come there would be fucked up like us and add their distinctiveness to our own, become a part of the hivemind. We never expected someone would try, let alone be able, to take over "the hivemind." Gradually the individuality that gave 4chan life was expunged. You got namefags like Redwood on /co/ that tried to make the forum what they wanted it rather than what the users made it. In retrospect, maybe he wasn't wrong, because when Stormfront found 4chan, you no longer had users that wanted to make a community, you had proselytizing cocksuckers that also wanted to make it what they wanted.
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/pol/ now is exactly the sort of fucking piece of shit worthless normalfag scum that 4chan would have hated, and one of their most insufferably characteristics is that they're oblivious to this fact. "Normalfag" doesn't just mean "someone that behaves according to convention." Everyone fucking does that to some degree or another. It's unavoidable. No, the hallmark, the essential element of the normalfag is that they want everyone else to conform to their way. It might be their way of thinking, their tastes, their habits, their views, whatever, but ultimately they want how they are or perceive themselves to be the norm. Every time these fucking retards waffle on about "degeneracy," they're being massive fucking normalfags. They aren't content to be individuals, they want to be accepted. Even more than that, they want to be praised for their stupid fucking bullshit, because they crave recognition and validation. "The Chad" would have been a figure of ridicule on 4chan, but on /pol/ its an aspiration. Through their own faggoty egalitarianism, they'd force everyone to be Chad just so they could be too. They're not strong enough to become Chad, and they're not strong enough to be anonymous, so they take refuge in their faggot Kekistani/pol/cuck bullshit. I don't know when the tipping point came or what caused it, but I do know that the creative force driving 4chan is inversely correlated with the arrival and eventual dominance of normalfags. You can see it even now, with every /ourguy/ post and worthless fucking meme shat out by the current gaggle of fucking retards. Thought and creation have fallen away for idiotic call-and-response unity signalling shit. moot tried to remedy this crap with r9k, but he failed to keep the cancer in check by not enforcing that shit with the utmost prejudice.
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You do know its getting rarer and rarer to find actual oldfags right? I can't see much people wasting away 13 years of their life and reply to everything with massive detail. Heck, moot started losing his cool and his patience around 2012~ (look at moot's posts around that time), and he left because (i assume) he's tired of this shit, so i don't think the average anon can survive this. Then you have RPers doing their own alternative story/conspiracy theories that moot wanted this to become a (non-meme) anime imageboard, shit linked to the FBI, well guess what, he's gone now. All we have is some random guy we don't even know who fucked over the jap imageboard community (look it up) Many blame the /pol/ boogeyman for good reasons but i'm pretty sure it's (thankfully) honeypotted. If you want to find stuff on oldfags, look up archives.
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/b/ was slower but people made new threads more often, so threads disappeared faster as a result, unlike now where it's just a handful of general porn threads that always reach the image limit before someone remakes them. s4s is closer to """old /b/""" in that respect, but it tries very hard to be the opposite in demeanor. Old /b/'s tone was edgy beyond the point of what it would now consider "cringey," s4s parodies that by being "nice" >/pol/ is what became of my generation of 4chan uses. A bunch of hyperliberal kids became conservative-leaning libertarians who desire a white country and white family. Speak for yourself, tard, and quit injecting your shitty political opinion into everything.
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Wrong. /pol/ came from the causefags of 2008 and chanology. Habbo Hotel raids were launched because the site was racially profiling. How many people on 4chan will raid a site because it's too racist in this day and age? Fucking nobody. The raiders fucked off to 7chan. The Chanologyfags remained behind and grew progressively more autistic and more esoteric until they hijacked /n/. Then they started to take in furfags and ponytards and all the other cancers of the site because that's how you grow numbers on 4chan, let in the cancer. Then, you started to take in Redditors, and the cancer was terminal.
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Anyone who browses the site long enough realizes the majority of the userbase changes completely in a few years, the average age of a board remains a constant because old users go and new ones come, it's ridiculous to think /pol/ are just 2008 people "grown up", most of current /pol/ was still in elementary school a decade ago, neither were they somehow recruited or led by anyone from back then. Chanology moved on to their own sites and grew independently of 4chan, /n/ was never hijacked by chanology because it was deleted early the same year it took off for unrelated reasons. /n/, /new/ and /pol/ were almost completely different crowds and you could say the same about any board. I really am short of words to describe how wrong your theory is. How do even come up with something like that?
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anti-/pol/ is not a political opinion, dumbass. I'm sick of the infection appearing every topic on every board. Almost all topic-specific internet forums have a dedicated subsection for political bullshit, because they don't want the shit it inevitably generates flung all over the rest of the site. >>1757500 >I think it's a valid comparison but that doesn't mean they must be connected to them. Not him, but I don't disagree with him entirely. They don't have to be directly connected to be the same brand of retarded. The only difference between 2008 and 2016 is that the supposed "establishment" the faggots want to rebel against changed parties. And you can bet your sweet ass it's going to swing back again. "old /b/" didn't raid habbo hotel or hal turner because they were racist, they raided them because it was funny to fuck with them and watch them squirm, and yet at the same time nobody else was any worse off as a result. That's not what chanology was about, and it's not what /pol/ is about. They've got banal, shallow "real-life" agendas that make them tools to the powers they think they are fighting.
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The large raids are pretty well chronicled, but there were numerous smaller raids that slipped through the cracks. The crushing majority of these raids were personal army requests and overall mistakes, and though I realize now that it was killing the site, at the time it was kind of fun. I remember that we once hit NBC's forums so hard that their servers went down for a while, a couple hours I think. All because some morning show host decided to rickroll his audience and a couple dozen people thought he was infringing on our turf. But to answer your question, there was a pervasive feeling of...I can't think of a good way to put it. Non-seriousness? Everything felt more sarcastic. I don't know, maybe it's still like that to some of you and I just became accustomed to it, but it feels like people take the internet too seriously now. Crap, /gif/ and the other porn boards paint depressing pictures over the modern community. Can't even fap to what you want without multiple posts about degeneracy or racebaiting or someone spamming the new word that's being spammed out of style. Oh, there's another one of the big shifts, there was a heck of a lot less moral crusading. That's a product of the last couple years and I can't even fathom how something like that gained a foothold in 4chan, the site renowned for being a collection of freaky porn, gore pics, bad manners, and general debauchery. Also, once upon a time, /c/ had the fastest moderation on the entire site. You post off topic garbage and it was usually gone in the next five minutes.
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>It felt like the wild west This is what people say about the internet in general. But they never talk about eternal september or USENET anymore. I'm already having a hardtime believing you're an oldfag. >The standardization, mass production, corporation of memes ruined them in my opinion. Things like KYM represent the monetization of the Internet and its culture. Again, very generic thing to say but quite true. >/pol/ is what became of my generation of 4chan uses. I find that hard to believe, /pol/ has become absolute garbage. >A bunch of hyperliberal kids became conservative-leaning libertarians who desire a white country and white family. This in itself is good but >lolbertarian
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>It felt like the wild west. Man, the entire internet felt like that. And yeah, most of your post sums up everything. I remember pre-4chan, when ezboard was all the rage, some 10 year old kid made a forum and tried inviting others from other sites... of course, people volunteered to help administer it, which of course meant that they instantly locked out the kid and turned the forum skin into goatse.cx. Good times. 4chan being not only anonymous, but without archives, and running extremely fast too. A good topic lasted a few hours at most, now one can last for over a week; on /i/ you even have 2 year old threads (or older). Since anything you posted would disappear instantaneously, this gave you true anonymity, and it is what allowed everyone to be truly free in regards of what they say. I could discuss anything that I would not be allowed to say, either due to contractual obligations or due to being extremely private details, because it would be gone in an hour with no logs and no names associated to it, ever. With archives, now I have such discussion permanently lodged into google. Not good. >/pol/ is what became of my generation of 4chan uses. A bunch of hyperliberal kids became conservative-leaning libertarians who desire a white country and white family. This is a longer point of discussion, but I personally think that /pol/ is a natural result of our current culture becoming aggressively political. You have presidents making memes or getting impeached because of tweets. 4chan has always been counter culture, so the more common it is for celebrities to discuss immigration, race mixing, gay pride, whatever., the more common it is for the opposite opinion to be made here - resulting in the need for an entire board for it. >>1756026 it boggles my mind that those would be considered spam, but they are. I tried posting archive.org links to them once, for some old 2006-7 topics and had to deal with that shit so much.
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>That's a product of the last couple years and I can't even fathom how something like that gained a foothold in 4chan, the site renowned for being a collection of freaky porn, gore pics, bad manners, and general debauchery. I attribute that too to the board becoming a lot slower and well archived. Because of this, we have more "intellectual" discussions encouraged, trolling and flaming is a rule violation, and the site is simply more normie friendly. Back before of that, the place moved so fast that you didn't even understood half the topics because memes were basically a language, hence why lurking was necessary. It moved so fast, that if you tried making a longer post, the thread would be deleted by the time you finish composing it. As so, you had to make quick and on the point messages that nonetheless reflected your opinion, but as things were so fast, courtesy could not be afforded. As a result, old 4chan was a product built entirely by the id of the posters, it was the first functional human hivemind I have ever witnessed. Old 4chan was the id. current 4chan is the super-ego. moot and hiro would be the ego, mediating between the id and the super-ego, but they are both gone and the site is currently built to comfort the super-ego, explaining it's current state.
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I was here in 2003. RPG group on my normal forums went to Gaia online when it opened, I followed eventually but as I reached Gaia like new cliques had been made, the RPG group wasn't really what it was. So pretty much stayed shitposting on Gaia for a few months, saw someone link 4chan as something to do with a breakoff from SomethingAwful and went to 4chan. Yes, I am an original Gaiafag. Pic related and proof. Would have been 15-16 when I first started posting here. (30 now) Old 4chan was very different from modern 4chan. It was very liberal and mostly made up by the same sort of people you saw at anime conventions and that's basically what 4chan felt like, a community of people that went to anime conventions. Lots of Otaku humour on /a/ and /b/, lots of irony and satire, lots of edgy teenage humour. Since this was pre-social media/Youtube, any time a girl showed herself she became a worshipped "Chan girl" even if she wasn't that good looking. (though Giselle was 100% fucking SMOKING) on /a/ we used to actually stream anime straight from Japan and watch it live without subtitles or anything. The biggest difference as well was mostly A-political but leaned towards liberal and very anti-racist. Old "racist" 4chan humour was done in satire to show how ridiculous racist viewpoints were. "The pool has aids" or "KFC and Watermelon" for example, it was just so absurd that racists actually believed shit like that, so 4chan had a fieldday with it trolling the shit out of racists and fox news and AM conservative talkback radio etc. That said, 4chan was overall a-political. The Anthem of 4chan was the Soviet anthem and people used to circlejerk raw over Soviet aesthetics, on one April Fools I believe, Moot changed the background to a giant image of Stalin and the Soviet anthem blared out. Bringing /new/ back was the biggest mistake moot ever made, 4chan has going downhill ever since 2007/2008 but /new/ then /pol/ just killed the quality.
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it's entirely possible for two people to get two entirely different views of /b/, given the ephemeral nature of the site. Unless we're talking about the VERY early days of /b/, threads would be flushed in and out in a matter of hours. It's not like you'd be enough of a loser to spend enough time browsing /b/ to make sure you see EVERY SINGLE thread, right? Descartes Syndrome has a hand in it, too, I'd bet. What if all the racist humor was completely serious and you just THOUGHT it was ironic? What if it was, in fact, ironic and you took it seriously? It's been proven in controlled double-blind psychological studies that perception of present events is already extremely biased by your current mental state; applying nostalgic "corrections" that are also heavily biased only compounds the issue.
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It used to be a nihilistic den of degeneracy. This place was full of legitimate pedos and insane people, even around the fox news report on 4chan I remember a thread where some girl killed her flatmates rat, put it through a blender, and spread out the disemboweled rat over her tits. CP threads would get so many replies, I think moot had to start banning people who replied to them with "is dat sum cp" memes at one point? 4chan existed in a certain period of time where the internet didn't feel real. That period where 4chan was messing with the "real world" inevitably brought them closer but since twitter is constantly on television now people have no reference point. Youtube didn't really exist, there was "television" and the internet. Getting Opera to say "Over 9000 penises" was exciting, everyone was posting about it on all the forums. The internet was smaller in a way. I don't think I'd even want to go back, I couldn't enjoy it now. Things are too different. I haven't regularly posted to 4chan since like 2008(?) so that's nearly a decade since I found it interesting. When I left /fit/ had been created so the bodybuilding.com userbase had basically moved here, /r9k/ was just crying about girlfriends and that's what it got deleted. When I saw /soc/ had been created when I visited a few years ago I was a bit confused, didn't really expect that to ever happen. Hard to explain why really.
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>Bringing /new/ back was the biggest mistake Don't tell me. You were one of those people who thought a news board would be all srs bsns with nothing in between. /b/tards left them alone. The news anons had their own sense of community that was different from /b/'s. /b/ also had its own community in the beginning that made it great. They both attracted different crowds. The same can be said for other boards. I doubt any of the new boards can be the old /b/. Their biggest flaw is trying to not be /pol/ (either the 'we're not as racist' mentality or 'we're not as political') or only picking up the good /b/ qualities like memes and lolrandumhumorz xD. /b/ was never good.
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>/pol/ came from the causefags of 2008 and chanology /pol/'s original incarnation appeared in 2006. Not that you're actually interested in history. You're just a newfag intent on demonizing that board in any way possible even if it doesn't make sense. And if I had to guess, it's because you came here for the latest dank maymays. You came here to brag to your off-site e-friends about how you're "in" with 4chan. But you can't do that, because that means being associated with the meanies on /pol/. So you bitch and cry about them 24/7, oblivious to the fact that they're one of the last boards that still has that chaotic touch which made this site so creative and infamous in the first place.
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Reddit is a state of mind, a state of being It's the little things, the condescending little jabs, the "lmao"s at the end of each sentence, the cheap lame oneshot jokes nobody actually laughs at but everybody joins in on, the guilt and self failure combined with that smug slightly higher than average intelligence manifesting itself into something truly ugly The essay posting, the bullet point argument posting, the slang, the ridiculous emotional outbursts, the easily offended, the cold but uninspired and sheeplike attempt to display rationalism and righteousness, the idea that freedom comes from stifling your opponents right to speak and live, the grab at political power and the truly hateful anti-nihilism that drives people into weird excesses and moral fervor over absolutely nothing Reddit is a parasite, a virus, it is the antithesis of 4chan and probably life itself. It condemns anyone who engages with it into a cycle of eternal pain and regret and consumes everything. Even this very post is reddit, as well as this thread, this board, possibly this site Not even death will help you escape
.FROM WT SNACKS:
I wasn't even here at the beginning either, but it was maybe half and half back in early 2004, maybe a slight lean towards anonymous, including a sizable amount of people who used names but didn't use tripcodes. It's mostly a percentages thing of user counts, but also depended on the board. Some boards were more accepting to namefagging, same as today. It wasn't until maybe 2005 that people started the whole anonymous vs tripfag shit as it is now, though. The majority of people who gave people with names shit back in the day are the ooooldschoolers, people who came from like world2ch and shit
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>i think cause the internet isnt for nerds now so everything is more stupid It's because the internet used to be mostly americans/canadians and western euros. when 3rd worlders started to get online it dramatically lowered the quality of online discussions because they only have a basic understanding of english. any sentence that was even slightly nuanced in any way would be interpreted literally, which is why you started to get asshurt reactions to obvious jokes. A lot of the classic 4chan thread screencaps from way back have some kind of absurd OP, that the replies pick up on and play along for laughs, that type of thread is almost extinct now because the majority of people online have such a poor command of english they are incapable of understanding them.
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I consider 2012 to be the second death of the internet after 2007. The SOPA shit happened, s4s/reddit started coming to this place constantly, people stopped telling others to go back to gaia, shit like streamers and let's players started becoming popular and youtube as a whole became a lot more commercial, edgy stuff was suddenly looked down upon here. That year was pretty fucking awful but it gets overlooked for shit like GG and the election.
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I don't know how anyone can enjoy discussing anything here aside from the very rare good thread, or nostalgia threads like this. It blows my mind how, on an anonymous imageboard, people still care about other anonymous strangers will think of their opinion on something, so they have to keep up some anti-Reddit facade to everything they post. I come here precisely because I DON'T have to worry about keeping my online persona a certain way. Surely the first death should be eternal September. So 2012 is the 3rd official death. Although I think 2007 and 2012 are the same phenomenon: smartphones. 2012 is kind of the critical mass point where enough people were using them regularly on the new app based paradigm of the internet.
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GooberGate basically paved the way for the /pol/ skiddie invasion, pretty much derailing every thread ever since then with identity politics bullshit. If GooberGate never happened and normalized 'redpill/incel' think, then I sincerely doubt Trump would have got elected thanks to waves of cringe internet memes and alt-righters. I wish we could go back to the good old days when 4chan was Obama supporters.
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/v/ likes to scapegoat GG but if anything, the fappening associated with r9k and lit style humor was the real finishing blow. >Reddit style Pepe and Wojak humor >Absolute virgins being validated which is extra ironic when they call each other incel years later >Taking racism and sexism on /v/ very seriously >Bring up political stuff in games, not journalists. >Everyone wants to shitpost like a fucking moron over the conversation >GG didn't even really affect conversation of other games, but Facebookfrog and StrawmanFeel did while people admitted they came from reddit constantly .
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I followed GG at the start because I too felt gaming journalism was corrupt as fuck. By the end of GG I no longer thought so. I thought GG wold uncover so much. There were so many people working on it, and they found absolutely fucking nothing. >but GJP! GJP actually proved how clean the journalists were. We uncovered the entirety of a secret list where game journalists could communicate... and what was there? Nothing. Absolutely fucking nothing. To this day I haven't heard of a single thing uncovered by GG that amounted to anything. One of the GG drones will throw some wiki at you, tell you to educate yourself, or just start posting about fucking Zoe Quinn for the billionth time. Name three things GG uncovered that proved videogame journalism was corrupt. No wikis, no bullshit infographs, just tell me. Should be easy, right? I mean, GG wasn't WRONG and the game journalists were SO corrupt so there must be a million things you could reply with. Just three will do, I'll be waiting. Oh, and just so you don't waste your time, a journalist having a left wing opinion isn't corruption. I'm talking about an actual breach of ethics. I'm all ears.
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I also want to address the point that "4chan was always racist, bro". No. 4chan supported Obama and was overwhelmingly left-wing, it's only been in the past 5 years that racist incels started invading and posting their idiotic rants on race, antisemitism and making nonsense connections when there clearly is none. Stop trying to re-write the narrative and say 4chan was anything but leftist, we hated the Westboro Baptist Church, nazis and prank called cake shops that wouldn't make cakes for homosexuals.
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I don't think that paints a fair picture either, though. 4chan has always been a mixed bag, but at its core, its userbase is largely anti-authoritarian. Back in the 2000's when the biggest whiny, moralizing, oppressive influences to free expression were largely rightwing, 4chan held strong "anti-right" positions. As people stopped burning harry potter books and pokemon cards, and jack thompson fell out of the limelight, that position was slowly replaced by the current left with identity politics, hate speech, representation, etc. To younger audiences, that's the only authoritarian influence they've seen on pop-culture, and they're reacting the same way in turn. As much as I hate how much the term "reactionary" is thrown around, it's a fair descriptor for a lot of /pol/ stuff. It's edgy for the sake of edginess, breaking taboos because they hate that there are such strong taboos to begin with. At least that's why it's so common on the site. Of course there are more earnest hard-rightwing movements couched within it as well. But to me, the spread of memes and phrases that are considered to be in the /pol/-spectrum is just the userbase continuing as it's always done. If it gets out of hand and people generally feel like "right-leaning" thought has too much authoritarian influence, then expect the site to go "left" again like you remember.
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At this point it's incredibly clear that the people defending gamergate are either part of the tiny amount of sad retards who are still supporting attentionwhore faggots like Milo, Sommars, mombot, that panda idiot, etc Or they're just refusing to accept that they supported a cringe crusade that achieved nothing and was built on bullshit I have respect for anyone who supported it but can admit it was dumb, but too many people have too much pride and will still be fuming about zoe quinn on their deathbeds.
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You know the way you can tell the general atmosphere in this place is reactionary even if you don't know exactly what percentage of the users believes what? You know, the casual anti-Semitism, the Trump support, the fringe right-wing conspiracy theories that crop up all the time? Yeah, 4chan used to have a left-libertarian atmosphere in the same way. I can't prove everyone here was left-wing ten years ago, but I do know that video games could have black people in them without /v/ sperging out.
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4chan was always contrarian. In fact, when gamergate took off in /v/, it only took less than a day for the contrarian niggers to hate it. Unfortunately, SA, Kotaku, Tumblr, NeoFAG faggots took that as a sign it's okay to push /v/ further. It was then made worse when moot and the mods shut down all discussion and literally REDIRECTED EVERYONE ON FUCKING /pol/. SO FUCKING THANKS MOOT, YOU FUCKING FAGGOT. ALL YOU AND YOUR SHIT MODS HAD TO DO WAS RIDE THAT SHIT OUT FOR A WEEK. GOOD JOB ON MAKING /pol/ THE BIGGEST BOARD ON 4chan.
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Anon, do you know what a claim is to begin with? It's literally a objectively minded statement with zero evidence before elaboration but denial/acceptance. You made like 6 of them right now. >You're totally a significant fanatic of GG >They have absolute zero wrongdoing in that entire fiasco, including their writers >Quinn is a total martyr who even remotely suffered any more than the usual celebrity instead of passing drinks with friends the day after >Cracked is absolute morally sound for doing that >I didn't claim shit (while being too retarded to understand that in itself is a claim that you have to prove) >It totally debunked claims with sourceless words with no dates, quotes, or anything else.
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>In fact, when gamergate took off in /v/, it only took less than a day for the contrarian niggers to hate it. Yes, of course, because it was fucking bullshit, not because I'm a contrarian, you moron. It was the contrarians who kept gamergate going, despite the mods telling them to shit up the board, despite the evidence telling them they were wrong, despite the media pointing out they were harassing people, gamergate just had to prove they were right and the whole world was crazy.
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I think we can all agree that we are trying to turn over a new leaf by separating 4channel from the shitshow 4chan has become. /pol/ completely poisoned the well and allowed incels to thrive and completely ruin boards that had absolutely nothing to do with race, sexual orientation, politics, etc. The best thing to do from here on out is to simply not talk about /pol/ and they lose their power, the 'forbidden fruit' quality; don't say it, don't think it, don't post it.
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>Guilty by association and same opinion There's no membership card, you twat. Believing gamergate conspiracy theories is literally all there is to being a gamergater. >No U No, you. You fucking sophist. You made the claim that Kotaku lied about a conflict of interest. That means you fucking know which statement we're both talking about. You also provided zero evidence for your claim. I pointed out that there was no review. My evidence: the complete lack of review. You can't try to shift the burden of proof onto me and say I made several claims by not only saying that Kotaku didn't publish any fucking review but also that I then implied that Kotaku did nothing wrong, which, again, would imply that you are claiming they did, which you also never proved. My only claim is you have no evidence, and so far I'm right.
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>people question the GG narrative >faGGots just strawman harder to dodge questions Do you really think nobody can see what you're doing? Why do you think people are asking questions and mocking GG? Why do you think people point at vivian james art that was made in earnest and rightfully call it an embarrassment? You can't just KEEP deflecting by accusing anyone who asks questions of being an SJW, tranny, ghazi, numale, cuck, feminazi, zoe, anita, gawker etc etc You got away with this tactic for way too long but now that the dust has settled and you can't win just by sheer numbers shutting down pesky questions. If someone asks "what did GG uncover?" and the response is "lol resetera tranny" you might trick some 12 year old browsing /v/, or yourself, but everyone else can see clear as day that you're just admitting you haven't got jack shit.
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reactionary is a better word its disengenuous to say "4chan was left" when 4chan as a general pop just takes a stance against the prevailing oppressive culture of the time just like saying 4chan is right wing is disengenuous now there was always rampant racism though you cant deny that without looking like a fucking doofus
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I've been kicking around these thoughts for a while and I want to get them written down. This thread concerns the overall quality of 4chan and the way that conversation usually plays out. This started as a single post and ended up something like an essay so I humbly ask for your patience.
The first step to articulating an accurate appraisal of the quality of 4chan must come from moving past the pithy truisms of '4chan was always shit' or 'people were saying 4chan was bad when -I- got here'. So much of the conversation gets hung up here, but no meaningful discussion of where 4chan is at and where it came from can ever come from these cop outs. They serve only to cut the discussion off at the head. To lay down an ostensibly definitive answer without actually doing any thinking. These sayings aren't based on an examination of the changes that 4chan has undergone over the years, it's a reflexive response & a cheap way to flaunt meaningless pseudo-cred (and more often than not the people spouting them are just aping other posters)
If we throw away these worthless platitudes and acknowledge that change in quality on 4chan DOES happen; that old users leave and new users arrive, that moot has fiddled with the site, that the prevailing culture shifts (not only on 4chan itself but the entire internet), that moderators have influenced content with their actions, that boards CAN and DO organically experience periods of intense activity and creativity which eventually slows down, solidifies and disappears (i offer /a/, /b/, /sp/ and even /r9k/ as examples of this) and these are all responsible for fluctuations in quality, then we can start to have a substantial discussion on where 4chan is, has been and where it's headed. (Cont 1/?)
One of the most common arguments that I've seen advanced and wish to preempt is that 4chan doesn't 'decline' as much as it 'evolves'. That 4chan in effect goes through distinct and identifiable periods that can be distinguished from each other, but that none of them represent a change in quality so much as they amount to a simple costume change. I fail to see this as anything other than an attempt to deny the concept of 'quality' altogether. It's an opinion that doesn't reflect an examination of what those changes actually meant, but simply claims that 'for my own concern, they are interchangeable' which speaks more or less to an agreeable and uncritical attitude in the individual than a serious attempt examine the issue. I hope that my arguments will put this notion to rest or at least encourage someone to rethink that idea.
I want to firstly try to engage the notion that quality on 4chan does not change: that it is 'zero-sum'. That as one board declines its creative energy is spread totally undiminished to other boards and the quality of 4chan doesn't change even as boards get worse. I do not think this is the case. I believe that more realistically the creative energy of a board is a unique configuration of particular posters to particular board. Someone who generates amusing OC on /sp/, for example, cannot simply be transplanted to another board and produce the same level of content. For one he might not even want to. His impetus might be entirely limited to that one board and he might not have anything to say on a different board. There are structural conditions unique to boards as well which dictate what posters can actually post. Boards with strict moderation are generally going to have less free-wheeling OC than more relaxed boards. Turning a lightly-modded board into a highly-modded board (like /sp/'s experience) diminishes the overall creative capacity of 4chan itself. It doesn't simply just shift it from one board to another (Cont 2/?)
Secondly the addition of new boards disperses the efforts of posters, even if quality was zero-sum across the whole of 4chan, it can't all go to the same board. The addition of new boards means that 'quality' is dissipated by being spread thin across a host of hitherto nonexistent boards, which has the effect of diminishing quality on individual boards (some of these new boards have unique interactions with the quality of others when their subject matter overlap /qst/ for example had a substantial impact on /tg/, /asp/ on /sp/ etc..).
The idea that quality on 4chan is zero-sum becomes even more ridiculous when you elaborate what it actually means. That 4chan in 2003 is the same as 4chan in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008...2017. That in the entire evolution of 4chan from a niche community of SA weebs to its vertiginous rise to 'last boss of the internet' and onto today with the changes that entailed, 4chan was qualitatively unchanged. I propose that quality on 4chan instead resembles an organic life-cycle with fertile periods of intense activity brought about by unique conditions which attract new users, eventually reach maturity, and then exhaust themselves and become pale imitations of those high times (paradoxically, more users and more activity do not equal greater creativity which is the lifeblood of quality, since only a tiny minority of posters are actually responsible for content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) , more users can actually have the opposite effect and drown or drive out the content creators under heaps of worthless shitposts). Quality then is not simply users posting but it is the right kind of user in the right environment.
All posters are not created equal. It's common sense but its an idea that's worth exploring. Not all posters are able or willing to make the same contributions in their posts. Not only does intelligence and articulation vary wildly, but so does their effort and experience. Broadly speaking a 15 year old highschooler on his first week is not going to provide the same level of maturity and thoughtfulness as a 25 year old whose been here for 10 years (ironically in this regard, a NEET might be a better poster than a high-functioning adult because of the level of commitment they can invest in their posting). 4chan is the sum of its users and what they see fit to post so it stands to reason that changes in its users or their attitudes towards posting have a substantial impact on the general quality of the site.
So what makes a 'good' 4chan poster? This is something that can vary greatly depending on opinion, but there are a number of things that I think we can generally agree on make for better posters: intelligence, wit, creativity (e.g. creating OC rather than being a passive spectator), commitment (someone who invests more time and effort in their posts is preferable to someone who spends as little time as possible), familiarity & respect for the respective culture (nobody wants posters who treat their boards no different than they would 9gag). Too little of these respective qualities wreck havoc on a board and if we examine the change in 4chan activity over the last years we see signs that indicate legions of new users who exhibit a staggering lack of these qualities.
If we look at the activity of 4chan in the last 7 years, we cannot fail to see the explosive increase of new posters in the last several years. From 2010 to 2017 the number of unique visitors has more than trebled (with a bulk of that increase in the staggeringly short time of the last two years). For each poster who was here as recent as 2010 there's more than 2 posters who only STARTED posting on 4chan in 2015 (if we set our benchmark further back to 'conventional oldfag' territory the displacement becomes even more extreme). From here we ask ourselves, does this matter? A new poster might be just as good or even better than a old one right? Seniority on an anonymous image board doesn't matter, but the issue is more important than arbitrary years spent on 4chan. If we associate 'quality' with old posters, not simply because of their seniority, but because of their familiarity with 'board culture' and their ability to self-moderate the question we have to ask is: have the new users been assimilated to take up these values? If new posters have a fundamentally different conception of their relationship with 4chan and the boards they post on, can that fail to have a profound impact on the quality of the site? Is it even possible for older posters to assimilate a new generation that outnumbers them more than 2 to 1?
It's not a stretch to say that a poster on his first day is going to be less savvy with the board culture to provide the same level of quality as someone who has been there for many years ('lurk more' was not a common saying for no reason). While the original users of 4chan came from a background of internet forums where community was an important and endearing feature (which is why namefags were extremely common in the early years on 4chan, there was no stigma in identifying yourself because you were part of a tight-knit group), newer users totally lack this experience. Coming from twitter, or reddit, or facebook--They see 4chan not as a community but as a roiling arena of all-against-all where the only object is to extract the maximum amount of dopamine in the form of (You)s with the least amount of effort. They lack the communal experience of growing alongside a board where one has so many brushes with like-minded souls that fosters endearment and respect for the board and its users. They interpret 'belonging' to a board as license to post whatever comes to mind. They claim the rights of being one of the community, without the responsibility of upholding board quality. They abuse this privilege by routinely crossposting material to and from other boards and other websites (they are dumbfounded why someone would even care if their pictures came from reddit). They confuse attention with quality. They prefer the constant stimulation of a fast moving board to the intimate space of a genuine community. They see no difference between posting from a phone or a desktop. They care little for the subtle art of affixing just the right picture to their posts (the same few all-purpose reaction images are sufficient for them wherever they go). In short they treat 4chan as a communal piss trough and ridicule the idea that it was or could be any different.
Now this is not to say that all new users are categorically terrible and that after a certain arbitrary time period they become good. We were all new users are one point. What is different is the change in what assimilation meant in 2007 to 2017. In 2007 there was no autonoko, there was no catalog, the FAQ was tucked away, knowyourmeme didn't exist, smartphones were still on the horizon, 4chan 'culture' hadn't merged with the general internet culture (indeed 4chan was practically incomprehensible to a layperson on his first visit), the site was generally only found through internet forums, the standard entry point, /b/, was extraordinarily hostile to newfags and it was difficult to not reveal yourself as one. Frankly 4chan was intimidating and there was nothing to hold your hand and the only way to integrate into 4chan was to 'lurk more'. Contrast this to present day, the site is streamlined to make it easy for new users to navigate on their first experience, 4chan 'culture' has become so ubiquitous and stale that they're not uncommonly found on the most popular sites in the entire world, there exist a plethora of guide material for one to learn anything about the site, 4chan is commonly referenced in the most visible of places, 4chan memes are no longer so inexplicable or esoteric that they confuse or repel people--they're basically advertisements to the site. Wherever the new user arrives, it's unlikely he'll even be recognize as such unless he just comes out and admits it. No longer does a new user have to 'lurk more'. That period of trepidation and awe which lead to a feeling of accomplishment and belonging(to finally earn your place) has been replaced by an express pass that entitles anyone to access and turns 4chan into an open and willing receptacle for common trash.
While this part is purely my own musings, I think that when in times past those moments when a kind poster would graciously provide new users with a general guide of how to post on 4chan (how noko works, how sage works etc...) inspired a sense of goodwill and connection to the site. It was a rite of passage, an acknowledgement by a senior that bestowed a certain sense of obligation and responsibility. Assimilation was a delicate balance of hostility and generosity, oldfags jealously guarding the secrets of operating on 4chan which was their privilege while offering occasional moments of leniency and attention that strengthened the bond between the new user and the site. That moments like this which used to be routine are totally gone from the site is nothing but detrimental in my eyes.
What all this amounts to is an obliteration of 4chan's ability to self-moderate. Visible sages were taken from the users for being 'improperly used' (a change made alongside other changes in streamlining it seems as though moot felt this tool was perhaps too unwelcoming to new users), mods started handing out bans for 'boogeyman posting' (though nobody could deny the encroaching overlap in users between 4chan and the rest of web2.0, the trouble it seems was users treating this change as unwelcome). With new users streaming in, old users powerless to exert influence and mods firmly in the camp of the new arrivals, 4chan's metaphorical immune system was annihiliated--4chan was now figuratively dying of AIDS.
Another important change in 4chan which I think nobody will deny is that growing resemblance of both 4chan boards to each other and 4chan as a whole to the rest of the internet: a unmistakable trend towards homogeneity. Where many 4chan boards used to have unique standards of conduct, unique reaction images, unique tripculture, unique memes, a general sense of independence and community that differentiated boards from each other (board-tans were the most obvious expression of this), boards on 4chan today, especially the fast moving ones, have long started to blend together. Where /a/ used to pride itself on its elitism and impenetrability, it has given way to the same lame-brained regurgitated phrases and images that are found not just on /tv/, /v/, /pol/, /r9k/ but on reddit, twitter, youtube comments, imagur, etc...Where before the internet 'stole' its memes and lingo from 4chan, now many 4chan users freely borrow from the most mainstream parts of the internet and have no qualms with dumping them on 4chan. 4chan has become so porous to cultural transmission that it is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from the rest of the internet. Where once 4chan stood as one of the last bastion of web1.0: independent, hostile to outside influence, creators not spectators, mischievous, a pervading sense of elitism--it can hardly lay claim to those attributes today. 4chan in 2017 bears more resemblance in content to reddit than it does with 4chan in 2006, and there is no doubt it has more users that frequent reddit than were around in 2006. The now common practice of attacking posters with 'reddit' does less to repel reddit than it solidifies and highlights the link between the sites, a routine of the pot and the kettle. To me this represents a long slide towards mediocrity. The only resistance to this swell of complacency that new 4chan offers is a cynical sneer as the ship sinks. (2nd to last post)
Now as users weened on web2.0 displace the old users for good and 4chan faces its most formidable challenge yet--assimilation into generic webculture & a growing lucrativeness to commercialization -- there lies the danger of the past being rewritten. Pernicious truisms taken for fact. Limited perspectives presented as the whole story. Activity mistaken for health. All restraints loosed. That the sheer weight of the 'new' might overbear the value of the 'old'. The last thing I want is for this effort to be summarily dismissed as simply a crotchety fit, an 'attack of nostalgia'. I didn't write this to simply 'damn the newfags' or to prophesize doom. What I wanted to do was to get past the puddles and eddies this conversation always gets stuck in, address those concerns and hopefully move the conversation forward. We like to believe that anonymity allows us to be brutally honest, but if we can't appraise ourselves then how do we uphold the things that hold value to us here? (end)
>Turning a lightly-modded board into a highly-modded board (like /sp/'s experience) diminishes the overall creative capacity of 4chan itself. This especially caught my attention, because I've always believed that truly good moderation is heavily based in moral, level headed choices, and not a simple matter of Yes/No. That's not to say I think staying on-topic is unimportant, but that keeping things honest and true are the keys to happiness and quality. It's more than keeping a board or community in order, it's about helping to make people genuinely happy. All in all, I'm glad someone could put my thoughts into words I couldn't find. Thank you.
Im currently writing an essay on 4chan and in my reading came across Lee Knuttila's concept of 'contingency' in regards to 4chan.
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They define contingency as 'that which is neither necessary, nor impossible', then go on to say that 'to "dwell-in" 4chan is to dwell within contingency'. The term is unpacked a little as the 'complete absence of certainty'. It is that permanent uncertainty and limitless possibility which 4chan has at any moment. This is a true aspect of virtuality, one with the real world lacks, even an anonymous stranger is embodied. (In an anonymous crowd you will soon start to pick up ques of individuality, notice patterns and identity markers, the crowd becomes less and less anonymous. But 4chan may have moments of clarity which then disappear entirely when the thread dies.) Knuttila actually goes on to say 'Contingency through anonymity becomes the wellspring through which the expected repost, the variable non-meme and the unexpected meme emerge' The point IS, that mayhaps this concept of '4chan was always shit' is an example of this contingency coupled with self-denigration. That by resisting any sort of analysis of where it 'is, has been and where its headed' the user is merely dwelling within contingency. Within the 'now' and all the potential it holds. Thisis what I would see as 4chans strength, its now-minded ephemerlity. This is what keeps it lithe and interesting. If 4chan has always been shit then I am at liberty to post anything without feeling like I risk stepping outside of the bounds of expected content. Perhaps it is important for 4chan to always be shit.
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You have some really interesting and good points, Id love to discuss them more. Especially your last sentence, as well as your point about the old generation of forum-users vs. the new generation of users. I dont largely agree with your fears for where 4chan is headed however. I think that an appraisal of its history would evidence its extreme flexibility and ever-changing ways. Im sure youre aware of this and I would say it is precisely this flux that will keep 4chan -4chan. It has the capacity to deal with this new world, this new internet. But of course youre right to point out how an increased casual userbase could dilute this ability to change, and you might be right. You really might be, im half-convinced myself. BUT I believe that the genesis of this flexibility is not necessarily a result of its user base but a product of the culture that ANONYMITY itself inspires. So 4chan is not built necessarily on the shoulders of its oldfags but is rather engineered by 'A-culture ('Anonymous-culture', Auerbachs term). This sort of goes with my point about contingency, that it is rather the state that 4chan is in and the affordances of anonymous communication which makes possible its culture. New users may come, new cross-internet culture may develop. We may be uncomfortable with this just becasue it is unfamilar, it may not infact spell doom. Becasue as long 4chan remains anonymous it will be the 4chan that we dont-know and love.
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Great read OP. You've tied down some contentious points that no doubt many users, including myself, have pondered over in a very succint way. One thing that I often wonder is the matter of personal perspective. As 4chan is inherently an everchanging beast with threads and the contained interactions having only a limited lifespan (I'm going to use my experience with /a/ - being a relatively fast board - as a sort of basis for this point) it can be difficult to observe change over a long period of time. What I mean is that as a board regular with a certain amount of time spent browsing each day; individual cases are easily spotted but a gradual shift can be more elusive. For example a post with a Facebook filenamed image attached garners an immediate reaction and is immediately observable whereas the gradual disappearance of a style of thread or group of posters is something that may go entirely unnoticed until pointed out. This gradual change is something that the user may not notice consciously but will have a feeling of; and I'm sure you've experienced it yourself. The feeling that you as an individual have changed and that just maybe you've outgrown the community you once so fondly called home. This inward reflection is the result of the outside pressures of the current observable 4chan in the instance that the individual begins to feel this way. What I mean is that having come to this realisation the once familiar boards might start to feel alien, eventually leading to the individual ceasing to visit (or at least participate) altogether. While the archive exists and can be used to hold the same board or type of thread side by side for close comparison I feel as if this clinical method will always fail to capture an essence of the board or thread as it lives and breathes - call me a romantic but this sort of "4chan spirit" that is so hard to define.
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Of course a change in a board and a change in an individual can occur simultaneously and I wonder how many posters have put it down to one without realising the other. I don't really have a statement to sum this up and it is very much a personal musing. To tie it in I suppose this feeling of change and the loss of a sense of belonging happens when population displacement happens and a poster's contemparies move on. Do they move on because of the feelings expressed above? If that is the case then perhaps an entire aspect of the nature of a board's change is born of self doubt on behalf of the poster. tl;dr have you changed or has the board? Is it possible to observe one without the other?
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>If 4chan has always been shit then I am at liberty to post anything without feeling like I risk stepping outside of the bounds of expected content. The trouble I see with this is that a surfeit of freedom for everyone to post whatever one wants paradoxically constrains the actual breadth of discussion and thought, and that's something that I think can be observed on many boards. Take /tv/ for instance. It's at its most active period in its entire history yet it is now less equipped than ever to intellectually discuss its subject matter, and it's a great example of the kind of inverse relationship between activity and health that is seen across the entirety of 4chan. Logically we might think that: new posters->new activity->greater capacity for creativity and fresh opinions but it doesn't work like that. An endless barrage of one line threads shot off by the OP 20 seconds or less place an irresistible downward pressure on everything that doesn't receive immediate and sustained attention. So what does receive attention like that? Generals, inflammatory bait and flavor of the month memes. The board gets buried by its most popular elements. So much attention to given to FREEDOM TO POST that we ignore the RESPONSIBILITY that comes with posting which gives PURPOSE to that freedom of speech. The obligation to treat the board with respect. To weed out or ignore invasive or detrimental elements. To make the board a place where people WANT to invest effort. Without these elements 'discourse' becomes worthless, only the loudest and most garish posts make themselves seen. Posters who might have something worthwhile to see are turned off by want of an audience equipped to receive them. This marks a huge difference to me in the outlook of older internet forum users and new users. The conception of being responsible for your own quality without needing a mod to pick up after you.
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>we ignore the RESPONSIBILITY that comes with posting which gives PURPOSE to that freedom of speech. Too bad people don't understand that doing things without a real and honest purpose makes them depressed. There comes a point where you're posting just for the sake of posting, and nobody worth more than $10 cares about what you posted. Leading to zero satisfaction. The lack of satisfaction leads to misery as much as any other self-destructive act.
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There must be self-imposed boundaries on style, content and form or else the board devolves into a mirror image of generic internet culture. You may think this sounds like censorship, or an infringement on free speech, but more or less it's asking 4chan to live up to its own self-image. Going back to holding itself as a place for disaffected, intelligent, forward-thinking, independent, mischievous and ELITE individuals to dispense with the superficial bullshit the permeates the rest of the internet. It's holding ourselves and others to the standards conducive to utilizing that freedom of speech which anonymity makes possible. For me the displacement of web1.0 holdovers and new arrivals matters most for this very reason. Someone who fundamentally conceives of 4chan as a 'peeing in an ocean of piss' is incapable of holding themselves or others to a basic standard of conduct which makes worthwhile speech possible. A site made up of these users turns the site into a receptacle of the most attention-grabbing content.
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>There must be self-imposed boundaries on style, content and form The rules on 4chan are good, astonishingly good, and the FAQ page is also extremely well done and thought out. A quick look at the first 6 rules show that the website is meant to be a somewhat quality place to be, and the rest of the rules all reinforce that. Aside from poor self-control encouraged by relatively easy ban evasion, I think a serious issue is the lack of appropriate rule enforcement from mods and janitors, as well as the poor mod/janitor-to-user ratio. Moderation is needed because it's completely unrealistic to expect every single individual to be able to practice proper self-control. Maybe it's the inherent lack of trust I have for most people, but I don't always trust them to do the right thing because I think constant contact with the worst of the userbase has eroded their morals and ability to think straight over the years. Hard examples that support my train of thought are /jp/ and the attitude that at least some of the mods have towards /qa
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More enforcement of those rules is NEVER going to give you the 4chan you want, despite the fact that it might appear higher quality on the surface. You're looking at a certain aspect of our past through a modern day filter without realizing it. It goes back to the notion of "community". Older internet communities were very different entities back then. They would have been better described as federations of individuals than as "communal". In my opinion it was the absolute obliteration of the federation mentality which directly caused the slow decay of internet culture. The alternative to being a federation of individuals with individual opinions, is one in which we fight over community opinions and influence, day in and day out. Old 4chan most definitely still carried that early internet federation attitude which is also why it had so many tripfags and its attitude toward arguing was a complete 180 from today. Early 4chan had this overwhelming attitude that although we all had differing opinions the different sides had a superiority complex which didn't need to explain shit to anyone, and that actually engaging in argument was more of a weakness than a strength, while ignoring things or responding with a joke to avoid actual debate was respected and more funny/humiliating to the other person. THAT was the environment that made people want to fit in and lurk. Because it was a much more interesting way of fighting, it encouraged wit rather than memes, it made each individual an impervious fortress not so easily roped into taking bait from people who obviously have no intention of being rational, and made not knowing inside jokes personally humiliating (which in turn encouraged the creation of more inside jokes), it encouraged having an actual spine of your own and a thick skin to take an insult without breaking your own composure, and made people bold enough to do their own thing leading to unique culture and colorful posters.
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Adding: 4chan was just an awesome coincidence that took advantage of the federation mentality of the time period. It was a synthesis of the individualistic "ain't gotta explain shit" mentality and a community one that led to the "final boss". But it would never last. 4chan itself is not equipped to sustain the federation mentality which was a large part of what made it so great. It's format is obviously completely communal and that's why we've become what we are today. That's not to say we can't still have anonymity and imageboards that have more of that old federation feel, it's just saying that something NEEDS to change other than forcing more "ideal community approved behavior" by adding more rules and moderation. That might lead to a certain quality, but it won't be the quality of old 4chan that's for sure. The format of anonymous imageboards just needs a completely innovative rethink. We need to be moving back toward that federation as much as possible. Reduced moderation, remove any semblance of an overarching "community opinion" which only serves to make people fight over it, we need to move toward posting systems that make it a _priviledge_ to receive a reply rather than a right. Sort of like the days when trolls had to blend in acting sincere to bait replies (this is where the name "trolling" comes from, trolling is a fishing method where your lure is designed to blend in with the other fishes and the boat "trolls" along slowly to seem like your lure is swimming. The original meaning of trolling was literally to blend in to get replies. "trolling" today is more like fishing with dynamite and is nowhere near as creative, funny, or even rewarding because the communal atmosphere of the modern internet is so easy to exploit and attack group identity)
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I don't think adding more rules is even necessary. Federations need governing leaders. The mod and janitor disconnection from a boards intentions and rules is what causes many problems. The sheer number of current users, and the change to the entire internet outside of 4chan makes the old way of doing things impossible. 4chan does need to change, and it really needs to adapt as well. What is 4chan. Not the topics and the memes, but why does 4chan exist? Why should it continue to exist? What purpose does it serve? Look for reason why the rules are there, and not simply the fact that they are there. Things will not simply revert to a time where you were younger, because the rest of the world is already beyond that. A modern 4chan need not be as drastically different as you might think.
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Considering 4chan is 14yrs old I think instead of defining what it is it might be better to ask why it needs defining now (e.g. what went wrong with this place that's making users want to rethink things) The problem here is the same as with all modern discussion sites. Exploitability. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always been under the impression that the real reason people always complain about 4chan is not because someone made a low quality post. It's because someone comes to your board spamming something which they believe is having an effect on your users (even if it isn't) so much so that everyone begins to actually believe that said material is a big deal on your board. Stuff like that is why people are so fed up and frustrated with newfags. Not because they bring shitty stuff here but because they think we care. Take /pol/ for example, the reason they're so annoying is because 4chan never had a problem with being non-PC, racist, sexist, whatever until /pol/ newfags started implying that everyone on other 4chan boards was an SJW or some shit. What can you do about that besides just sit back and watch as the whole community's image is slowly warped over time into something it never was and never should have been. In my opinion that completely sums up everything most people view as "wrong" with 4chan. But how do you solve something like that? The whole federation thing is my best attempt
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That is one thing that will make people upset. How do we solve the problems facing 4chan? Both moderation and the more dedicated users should demand higher standards via warning, banning, reporting, ignoring, and sometimes by injecting a bit of knowledge where it might just be useful. After all, wouldn't complete nonsense only be disruptive on a board with a topic? Of course, we have to keep open minds and be lenient where it won't be destructive, but there are some lines that simply should not be crossed, and most of them are very bold lines to a mature and intelligent person. I only want sincerity. OP's satire is exemplifying the problem... no one wants a dialogue. It's a social website where the loudest people that aren't completely stupid talk to themselves and make asinine assumptions of how a conservsation will go based on archetypal schizophrenic expectations. It's self-centered and neurotic.
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yes, i've had this experience as well. i'm not asking for serious debate, but it's easy to tell when someone is having fun posting on 4chan and when someone is being aggressively contrarian—or worse, repeating an opinion they believe to be consensus—because they think that's how they'll fit in
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I'm not asking for hyper serious discussion either, I just want to talk to people who are genuinely interested in the things I like, without being worried about being surrounded by drooling morons and people smearing their feces on the things I like because they're bored and craving attention. And because of the rules, I don't feel out of place. I feel like I should be allowed to go somewhere I can enjoy, a place I can leave at the end of the day without wanting to shoot some random idiot in the back of the head. But no, the state of 4chan is dominated by people who don't want to try with even the smallest of things, and people who want to make things worse.
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>I just want to talk to people who are genuinely interested in the things I like, without being worried about being surrounded by drooling morons and people smearing their feces on the things I like because they're bored and craving attention. Okay, you want that, but you're trying to make that happen in a place that is pretty much perfect for all of those things. I don't see how you could retain the current format of 4chan and also get rid of those things unless the entire world's population were to suddenly become more mature. All most people have to do to post here is complete a captcha, so because of this low barrier of entry, you're going to get those that would normally not even put the effort into registering for an account. You can't keep 4chan the way it is and ever expect it to be anything different than what it is.
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Now we're getting to the meat and potatoes of it. That low barrier of entry is something that does attract low quality posters, but I believe that ease of ban evasion is what solidifies 4chan's reputation as a shitpost website. A person could post trash and get banned, and they wouldn't be around to make nearly as many bad posts. If there aren't as many bad posts, then new people won't think 4chan is just for shitposting quite as often. Now what methods could be used to help curb ban evasion?
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I think bans and ban evasion are actually part of what makes 4chan fun, and wouldn't want to get rid of either. it's nice to have real discussions, but it's also nice to have dumb threads and deliberate rule-breaking and punishment for aforementioned and avoidance of said punishment and it all makes the whole thing a little bit like a big game. the problem comes when both users and mods stop having fun and the users start being rude and mean instead of funny
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Limited intelligent silliness is great, but most of it isn't, and is just a waste of time. The ban evasion is a huge part of why we can't have nice things consistently. Some things are so bad that you can't even discuss them without people barging in and making a mess of the place.
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basically you want to hang out with cool people but cool people won't hang out where the moderation isnt relaxed enough to have fun. but if the moderation is relaxed, idiots will post bad and theres way more idiots than cool people on the internet so they'll all gather together and jack their dicks and call cool people who say they suck newf*gs. its a problem but moderation wont fix it especially sinc ethe moderators of 4chan.org are dumb homos
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The problem is that nothing has consequences for anyone anymore. The mods used to be held as accountable to the rules as the anons did, and as WTSnacks showed moot wasn't afraid to B& a mod if they were misbehaving and it was easier for them to get banned as well since they didn't have the luxury of dynamic IPs. Now that dyna-IPs are widespread and hiro doesn't care what the mods do so long as 4chan is running in the green, neither side has any obligation to acknowledge the rules other than when it's personally convenient. The only thing the rules denote is that a rule breaking thread might be deleted without further notice, but to the people making those threads it's no problem as they can always swap IPs and repost it the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, which can be seen in /bant/ where stubborn goreposters and spammers get hammered to no effect.
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There's a line that needs to be drawn somewhere between what's cool and what's not. I don't know what I would call the mods. Bind and seemingly uncaring, I guess? It feels like they don't care enough, or something. I don't know. To me at least, 4chan feels a bit better now than it did a few years ago. Still, I see some things last longer than they should, and can't figure out why such bad habits are allowed to stay. Something might seem much like another on the surface, but that doesn't mean people will receive those two things the same way. Maybe I just understand the psychological impact of some things better than some people.
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>Now what methods could be used to help curb ban evasion? Email registration. Of course posts are still anonymous so the accounts would only be a sub-system just to permit posting and allow mods to make more solid bans. This is what all the major sites rely on, because instead of IP-range banning you could just issue domain bans for certain email providers. Eventually it would probably be limited to only the major email providers and those are quite difficult barriers for ban evaders to cross, like google's requirement that you link your account to a cellphone number. So those major email providers would take care of spammer detection for free. However, if you're going to make bans more heavy hitting I would say we REALLY need to almost just nuke our mods/janitors. Some of them are ok I guess but there are absolutely some very corrupt, biased, clueless (almost bona fide newfags in some cases), people in charge of this site who absolutely will use any opportunity to force culture to change in ways they personally desire. That shit needs to go.
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Email registration would be an effective way, but what about other ways? I've heard people talk about something to do with the website detecting whether an IP has accessed the website or not before, and if it hasn't, there should be a waiting period placed on that IP before you can post with it. I might agree with you about the mods and janitors. I frequently see things stay up where they really shouldn't. It happens so often that it feels sketchy. Maybe there are fewer mods and janitor than I think? Either way, I seriously doubt that there isn't a single corrupt or ill-suited mod or janitor on team 4chan right now.
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>If we associate 'quality' with old posters, not simply because of their seniority, but because of their familiarity with 'board culture' and their ability to self-moderate the question we have to ask is: have the new users been assimilated to take up these values? The more time I spend on this site the less I care about the retarded concept of "board culture". >>1537372 The vast majority of users have dynamic IPs. Just make passes mandatory for posting, adopting the highly successful SA business model.
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That's the kind of the thing I was talking about when I said I think it would make the website worse. We can't fully trust the mods or janitors to do the right things, even if they are trying, the things they miss and the slow response times make the website not worth paying for. For 4chan to have mandatory paid access, the moderation of this website would have to be top notch to be really worth it. When money comes into the equation, you really can't slack or else people with money AND brains will leave, and you'll be stuck with people with money and without brains. I don't think Hiro has it in him to go that far.
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What /qa/tards will never understand is that OC and quality attracts newcomers. We have observed this in the 2016 electoral cycle and Trump's candidacy (And if you think the tons of high-effort memes made in the name of Trump aren't "quality content" - NOTHING IS. You are chasing fancy.) That's what brought many of the newfags to the site. 4chan naturally regulates itself. Quality increases > Traffic increases > Quality slumps > Traffic decreases. If we find some means of purging the casual browsers of the website, we will remain with the inveterate shitposters, the kind that ban evades to make /pol/ bait threads on /tv/ 24/7, and even if content were to magically manifest from a void, it would eventually attract more newfags
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In that case I would agree to a curtailment on /pol/s current attraction policy. But to suggest a fee for posting on 4chan is bafflingly naive. But it's a risk to change the balance of power in favor of these autistics that want to strip 4chan of it's chaotic character in favor of highly regimented moderation and limited access. I'd much rather get a kick out of off-topic shitposting than visit a forum of fops that smell their mutual farts. The internet already brims with them.
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>And if you think the tons of high-effort memes made in the name of Trump aren't "quality content" - NOTHING IS. You are chasing fancy. Such as?... The vast majority of the "memes" /pol/ produced during the election were low-effort edits, typically out of spite for other boards by placing a MAGA hat on a fairly well known anime character. The other memes which /pol/ _coopted_ included pepe and wojak, most of which were only simple photoshop effect or filter edits. Those things may be OC, but they were neither high-quality nor effort intensive and to state otherwise is to overestimate the difficulty of image-manipulation. Image-manipulation requires little time to become proficient at, however it does require that one cares to some degree about what they're creating; /pol/ simply cared more than other boards to create OC and as such their signal-to-noise ratio made them a more visible and pronounced facet of 4chan "culture". Quantity beats quality every time when a higher quantity correlates to a higher visibility.
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>discredit yourselves by advocating the removal of (You)s and /pol/ before the board metastasized >now that /pol/ actually harms the website nobody takes your valid request seriously Cried wolf, played yourselves >>1537638 Indeed a small portion of the content was good, but such a volume of memes was created that even that portion is dazzling viewed absolutely. Pic related. I might dump more HQ maymays > typically out of spite for other boards by placing a MAGA hat on a fairly well known anime character. That wasn't spite, that was appreciation for the character.
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> I just want to talk to people who are genuinely interested in the things I like, without being worried about being surrounded by drooling morons and people smearing their feces on the things I like because they're bored and craving attention Amen to that. I still think you can see that in pockets here and there, however. As always the "be retarded in retarded threads and be smart in smart threads" thing is a basic tenet to follow. >>1537347 I'd say it's more that the mods themselves are disconnected from the community and don't really have a good gauge of anything any more. There's a large team of janitors monitoring the boards, constantly getting replaced, and I'm not sure how recent any of them have been promoted to mod. The community balloons and balloons but the mod numbers stay the same, and they're people that have jobs and other real life obligations and as such don't spend much time on 4chan itself.
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I'm curious what all your thoughts would be on an email-like system. Because I've had pretty much those exact same thoughts and for some reason I keep getting the idea that email is perfectly suited to it. I don't like email though because it always feels so clunky and difficult to navigate or view everything at once. But still when you get right down to it it's kind of perfect. As far as I can tell mailing list archives have "namespaces" which would act like boards, they have threads, you can effectively "mute" anyone at any time by filtering them in your inbox, you can also just privately send an email to individuals, cut someone out of your CC list, and even "fork" threads for sub-discussions or just to continue discussion among those actually interested rather than continually being subjected to trolls and spam I just wish they had simpler interfaces and that I could find a sort of all-purpose mail archive sort of like a 4chan equivalent. I mean you could easily imagine sort of "recreating" the email paradigm for anonymity, or at least just masking the addresses in the archive and only presenting ID's or something
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>4chan naturally regulates itself Except that absolutely isn't the case. Boards change permanently and so does the whole of 4chan. A look at the graph of 4chan traffic is enough to disprove this idiotic notion. We see an inexorable trend towards more and more traffic, not any kind of 'self regulation'. Since quality is a unique configuration of certain posters, on a certain board with certain conditions, it's something that can utterly ruined and never recover. /b/ obviously is a board that was at one point the 'cultural epicenter' of 4chan, a place with the most active and creative energy for a time, but that period ended--the creators on the board were entirely replaced with spectators, passive consumers and low-effort posters so that the board is a gross exaggeration of all its dullest elements. That's not a 'natural regulation'. That's a life-cycle. /sp/ is another board who experienced a similar fate. /r9k/ went from being a small community to a fast-moving shitpost heap. These aren't regulatory processes. They're the stages of life with the conclusion being the valuable aspects of a board being extinguished.
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I think the best period of 4chan was when the majority of the community was comprised of people who were tired of the shitty, standard internet forums. Pointless rules enforced with permabans, no freedom of speech, sterile posts, reputation and epeen, socializing mattering over content, all that shit. People came here and they would speak their mind, post porn every now and then, and have a good time. Mods had a good time, they didn't autistically ban someone for posting a nipple or a few nsfw pictures as long as they were related to the thread at hand. OP mentioned something about honesty and I feel this was it, people were finally able to express themselves honestly. And when outsiders showed up, they'd promptly leave if they didn't like how things were run. And that's why I feel generals are the worst cancer to ever touch the site. Generals provide the sterile, old forum experience, and a place for people who like that to find a safe haven here. Next thing you know all of 4chan is filled with this type of people who care more about feeling like they have are in a hangout than the actual content being discussed. Then comes the excessive shitposting as means to force activity to satiate their urges of socializing. It's just a disgusting mess. I'm not gonna start yelling out solutions or the like, but honestly /a/'s quality has gone up a considerable amount since the sticky a few days ago.
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I swear, some people think something was good in the past because they were young and naive. Striving for the past and ignoring the fact that many of the things they reminisce are the same things that are happening now, they're just on a larger and more obvious scale now, and they don't like it in the present because they're more mature. They're more aware of all the crap being flung everywhere now. I'm so glad to be who I am, and to not have bothered posting on 4chan before I was 18. I don't have to worry about the way I perceive life because I wasn't raised by equally clueless teenagers in a shitpost hugbox without adult supervision when I was a teen.
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Let me guess you've been here what? Maybe a year? A few months? Got tired of your initial little chuckle rush? Listen here, and I'm saying this for your benefit, I singlehandedly create about 40-70% of the original content on this board on any given day. I'm 5 different namefigs, and I'm maintaining over a dozen different unique /qa/ content projects at the current moment I type this. Meanwhile you probably came to this board for a couple of cheap laughs, have never created an original joke in your life, and now that you've run out of laughs, and being a person with no creativity, you've decided the board is sh*t. So were you an avatarfig hoping you'd get some attention? Maybe you spammed a copypasta or image a few times hoping it'd catch on but gave up when no one would indulge your stupid little non-joke? Have you even ever created an original post yourself or is everything you've ever done already created by someone else and you're just posting it again and again? Honestly, I'm being nice here and saying this for your sake. The difference between you and me is you come to this board to get a laugh and I come to this board to have fun. You will never ever contribute a single memorable thing here. Literally every poster here is aware of at least one of my OC or one of my names or even just a phrase I created. I've been 4 years and this board hasn't changed one bit other than improved because of my great contributions. You're not getting anything else out of this board, your few months of "fun" here are up. The only thing left for you now is to constantly complain, but believe me I've seen you over a hundred maybe a thousand times. Posters like you are a dime a dozen. Get bored, complain, leave. Nothing ever changes with you newfigs. The worst part is you probably unironically believe you're accomplishing something here. TL:DR; Just leave you f*cking newfig
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Fun. There is a line between entertainment, and posting like a jackass and ruining the fun of others because you're bored. What might be fun you, might not be fun to other people. In fact, your idea of fun might just ruin someone's day. Defend that, and you admit to being part of what actually makes 4chan worse. Balance. Middle. Moderate. Moderation. What do you think they're here for? >>1538731 >Your opinion definitely isn't just a reflexive pseudo-thought that doesn't actually say anything of substance but assumes an unqualified posture of authority. That reminds me of something I recently read: >>1538713 How about you take your false posture and really put some thought into what you say. Considering your destructive/self-destructive posting mannerisms you chose to defend, it will require time and a reevaluation of what it is to be a decent person to be around.
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You deny the reality of the situation in favor of your own opinion. This goes for every conversation, that I know for certain I've ever had with you: You really are an awful person to talk to whether you're serious or not. Every time I provide you with valid points, you look in the other direction for one reason or another and you ignore basic facts. You aren't fun, you aren't entertaining, and you only serve to make the website more miserable fr me than it would be otherwise. You know who you are. You know what you're doing. Stop making life worse for everyone either through incompetence or willingness. Do what you need to do without acting like an insufferable, contrarian, nostalgia-riddled child raised by /b/. If people like you are around, then it's no wonder moot left. TL;DR: To appease your affinity for the past: ur a fagit. Is that what you wanted to hear? To finally feel right about something because you're bored and can't accept someone can actually challenge your opinion? PS: With your nearly copy paste response, the lack of effort shows I know something that you know is true about yourself.
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A simple model can be used to describe the cultural shift on 4chan: Any poster is assigned a 'point' that describes the style and content of what he posts. The 'culture of 4chan' is weighted average of all 'points' of all posters; posters who post more frequently are weighted heavier. 'Board culture' can be calculated similarly. The frequency of a poster is determined by the difference between his 'point' and 'culture of 4chan'. The less the difference is, the more frequent the poster posts. Lurking causes the difference between the poster's 'point' and 4chan/board culture.
Based on this model, it is easy to explain the cultural shift of 4chan: Originally, 4chan culture was very different from the rest of the internet, and thus newfags had a hard time to post on 4chan, because unfamiliarity produced fearfulness. As a result newfaggotory had limited impact on 4chan culture and board culture. Every time 4chan got media attention, the rest of the internet was partly introduced of 4chan culture and reduced the difference between 4chan culture and the rest of the internet. Because of the sheer number of newfags, although they didn't post frequently because cultural difference still existed, the amount of new posters, with their 'points' introduced in 4chan culture calculation, slowly caused 4chan culture to be more similar to the rest of the internet. At this point the cultural change towards the rest of the internet was irreversible as the posters with original value were not able to pull back the change through self-moderation. As the cultural difference becomes smaller, newfags were more likely to post, which caused newfags of newer generation easier to post. Oldfags were driven out by the self-moderation of newfags, accelerating the cultural shift. 4chan is on its way of becoming a more aggressive version of the rest of the internet. When the culture that makes 4chan unique dies, 4chan is spiritually dead.
But how does the cultural shift implies the deterioration of quality? Because old 4chan newfags came from forums while 4chan newfags nowadays come from social media. The format of social media determines their contents are of low quality. What, you expect anything good and original comes from a format of 140 character limit, or an extension of real-life social interaction (a.k.a. bluffing and attention-whoring)?
From the model above, if the moderation does not directly address board culture, there is no turning back for 4chan, even with the strictest enforcement of current rules, unless, the 'quality' in GR6 is defined explicitly to conform what it was for oldfags. Without this, the currant userbase will not report low-quality posts because in their social media standard they are not low-quality posts so that they will never get the attention of moderation team (remember how report queue works, posts reported by most ips are prioritized).
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The idea that online culture has become interlinked over time, to the point where sometimes it can be almost impossible to pinpoint where something "originated", is pretty fascinating. In the beginning, while there absolutely were communities, they were minuscule and far apart, right? It mimics real life but the stages progressed much, much faster than they have over the ~1.8-1.3 million years modern humans have been on this planet (or if we start from the idea of communities forming/sharing spaces together with others, approx. 800k years ago). I can't help but wonder just how online community culture will evolve from here. Will it evolve at all? Will we mimic it in real life due to being used to the changes online? If we follow the idea that bubbles inevitably burst, will the online bubble burst first and possibly foreshadow what happens to us in real life next? /p>
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That would make perfect sense if I could actually imagine there is any group at all on 4chan today who is completely enjoying themselves I tend to side with whoever is the most carefree or just having fun, which is why I tend to favor shitposters. But even though there are some individuals having some fun occasionally, it seems that by far the largest and most vocal demographics on 4chan are not having fun at all. I don't think it's a generational thing and I'm just being old fashioned while they're having fun, because as best I can tell what seems to actually be happening is they put in effort to look like they're having fun but in reality are angry or just trying hard to influence something.
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Believe me, I've read the thread day one (1) and contemplated all week like many of you, with a potential input. However, there stayed this one thought in mind and you might noticed, a glimmer of said truth is already in my initial post, as I can harldly contain it myself. "I'd rather not say," I should rather say. I respect each and every one's input and the discussion for what I would consider as Family History. The line is more of a Question, a question that asks everyone here and their experience of the subject and the incentive to pass on the message.
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After /new/ was gone, there was just less arguing in general. I remember there just being a lot more argument-ending memes (not that they actually put the argument to bed, but people just seemed to prefer to get their punch in and the just let it go). Things like "no u", "0/10", sage, and a big one that's easy to forget is image macros which used to be everywhere. Usually people just respond to image macros with another image. It generally felt like most people knew on the internet you're going to run into differing opinions and although they still liked to insult each other at every turn there was MUCH less of an impression that anons were actually trying to change other anons. Now the fighting just seems to be endless and I get a real vibe that there is actual concern for being convincing, swaying the majority opinion, and "winning". It's pretty annoying and sad. Fucking /pol/.
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I think the problem is how polarized Americans have become. Everyone could sit around and laugh at George W. Bush acting like a doofus and take that for what it is: joking around. Nowadays, politics have become so divisive that people personally identify with their party to the point where any joke about any politician is automatically an attack on their party and by extension the people who are part of that party as well.
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What I love about this /3/ is the unfiltered conversation. I come from the days of old 3dtotal forums now defunct and what I hated about those boards is that people easily confuse constructive criticism with blind praise. I think that/3/ is the only 3dcg board on the net that goes in depth on the psychology of people that do 3dcg as a hobby or professionally. You have to admit that this profession/hobby is one of the least rewarding and you have to be a little bit mad to love the process. I know someone that worked at Weta and let me tell you they are degenarate monsters in there as a 3d artist would be and he assures that industry heavyweights lurk this board on a daily basis. /3/ is not dead as long as it stays weird.
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its an anonymous board, so monkey brained shit heads risk nothing for flinging some poo because there's no accountability for bad actors, and an anonymous poo fling that makes somebody else feel bad activates those primordial subconscious almonds in the monkey brain that are the same kind that get activated from a group of kids kicking the shit out of a loser at school or spitting on someones head from a balcony there's some part of the human psyche that enjoys malicious, spiteful mischief and makingo ther people feel bad, and anonymous forums allow people to indulge in that without any consequences. add to it that this board is SLOOOOOW and has bad self moderation from its community, and its just asking for pain. if you want to actually learn, get actionable feedback, tips, and improve as an artist, unironically go to reddit, polycount, 11 second club. any of the 3D forums that are reasonably moderated where people have account names and can be held accountable for just being poo flinger
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the reason discord sucks for art posting and critique has nothing to do with hatespeech, racism, or sexism, and the fact that you go there right away says more about you than me. the reason it sucks is because its fast. its a fucking fast scrolling narrow chat. on a server with anything resembling an active population, you post a render and its fucking 100 posts up in the chat feed in anywhere from minutes to hours, with no good way to go back or isolate someones portfolio or their progress log without linking to an external site, which no one is going to fucking click on. discord is a fine format for very quick tips or help with very specific problems, or general feature discussion, but for portfolio critiques or work in progress logs its a terrible format and the technology is actively working against you. this is where "boomer shit" forums and reddit and even this site succeed where discord fails. the format is long form enough, the threads live for long enough, that you can get actual detailed feedback and your work isnt swept out of sight out of mind within seconds of posting it (this is maybe a bit less true for reddit, which can be faster depending on the subreddit). the only discords that are slow enough to function like this are the discords with extremely low populations, and at that point you might as well just use one of the forums.
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Eh, I think it's just a shit argument. 90% of the time it's used in spite during an argument, so 99% of the time even if someone does post work, it doesn't matter. The dude could be a super fucking pro, but no matter what, to the other party it'll be complete dogshit because they're in the sense of mind that the other person is wrong and they're right. So naturally the other person's work MUST be shit. Even if it isn't. Because it's an argument on 4chan and everyone but you is automatically a retard and wrong, and things must be antagonistic without actually considering the other viewpoint. It's just a bad argument, and as soon as someone pulls that out as a response, they've lost. If you've been arguing a point with someone and putting forth valid statements without flinging shit, and someone throws that at you, you've won. Stop responding. There's nothing more that can be added to the discussion. The other person has completely given up trying to defend their own viewpoint, and they never were going to consider yours.
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It's a matter of context. We're fine with it in say WIP where people are civil and helpful, but not in the format of flamewar where the other guy just want you to cuckishly serve him a means of ad hominem on request, and doesn't even address your arguments. He'll just keep shifting goal posts or ignoring inconvenient posts that do post work. Shit posters are more often than not social media tourists looking to score points in their head and show as an anonymous stranger to other anon how hot shit they are. Another problem is nobody wants to self-doxx or leave behind a digital foot print by showing their portfolio work or any already shared work period. Clever or not, If you're not a complete normalfag who was around for the old internet you should be able to understand why. And some of us remember how the he will not divide us flag was found, smoking out that Keffals by analyzing blanket patterns. or how random strangers were obsessed over, doxxed and fucked/swatted with by cow stalkers who get families involved and people fired. You don't need to be of fame or importance to be a celebrity in a snow globe of pernicious losers. /3/ sometimes but especially /ic/ love to shill gay ops central otherwise known as discord. All you need is one guy or few with a dumb tribal drama grudge. Or even better how about Merc WIP spammed into a meme by one overexcited or spiteful anon. To summarize: you're just acquiescing to a cunt that wants the power to crab the shit out of you. You probably do this to not make the crab's stupidity be taken seriously and you undermined in the eyes of lurkers. But all you've done is empowered the crustacean over an assumption, and cross-referenced yourself for today's snoopy bosses (yes even in trades) or whoever else to spooky toxic white supremacists pedo site probably saying "your turn nigger." Please proceed to ignore my point that it's not a winning move to play argument-wise
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That's true. It's why I've always preferred 4chan over reddit, or pretty much any forum where you have a name tied to you. When you're anonymous people are much more honest, it's no different to how the "silent X" voter base works. Being confronted on the street by someone asking how you're going to vote isn't anonymous. Putting an X on a ballot is anonymous, and this is when they give their honest opinion and when the forecasters start coping that they didn't get it correct. Your right that there are a lot of begs on /3/ too. I think their heart is in the right place but an amateur giving advice to another amateur rarely works out. I mean I'm an amateur, that's why when I give advice it's only something completely basic and I only do that if I'm 100% sure I know I'm right. Even then, like I said before, I still tell them to get a second opinion. I couldn't imagine doing anything like 3D on a phone btw. I bet September can't come soon enough for you. I like your attitude anon and I try to do the same. I know I'm making slower progress than I should be and I know I've left it way too late in my life to ever make it. But I enjoy modeling, it's fun. Every day you practice you're one step closer than yesterday to achieving what you want to achieve. That's all that matters. Sorry for the lengthy posts, I have tendency to ramble. That apology stretches to everyone in the rest of the thread too. I waffle instead of posting something I'm working on. I don't mean to shit the thread up.
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You seem genuine, so I'll explain your reception. You posted on an anonymous image board that you've clearly not spent much, if any, time on and broke basically every unspoken rule. You should avoid making yourself identifiable by anything but your work, it should speak for itself, that's kinda the whole point. You also need to understand each board's culture. This board move very slowly, so making a thread for trivial things, as opposed to posting in existing general threads is viewed as bad form. That being said, if you're genuinely new at this, and that's your art work you posted, then you're on a good track. But you should consider deleting this thread and posing in the WIP thread as that's this board general discussion thread (though it should also include updates on your projects preferably).
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Ultimately it's up to each individual to try and gather useful criticism among the garbage. If you go on 4chan of all places and post your work hoping for a polite echo chamber of support or every post to be a wall of well reasoned text then you only have yourself to blame. Post your work here if you want honesty with a sizeable portion of jealousy and shitposting. If you are unable to filter the wheat from the chaff in the responses you get then that's on you. Trouble with that methodology is some people get butthurt and start shitposting out of anger and spite and other brainlets just jump on the bandwagon of shitposting because they think that's what the "board culture" is. At least that's my view on it.
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I hold a specific reply to my work very close to me, ever since posting it on /vr/, In a thread that related to the project I had going. The anon's reply was along the lines of "what a massive waste of time- Pretty easy to do and you got x, y , etc all wrong. Waste of time." That really stuck with me because it got me thinking... Then why don't I see this scope of the concept being done? Why can't I find anything quite like what I aim to achieve? Why haven't YOU created this if it is so easy/ This was like the great filter for me, and on anonymous criticism in general. I realized: To never let an attitude like that anon stop me from making what I want, and never let other's opinions sway my desire to create the things I want to see and achieve. Because this "get after it" attitude alone will take me to where I want to be. Far past the anon who replied to me with a condescending and depressed attitude of apathy and discontent. Something that gets my fire roaring is the inaction of saps like that. I'll make the thing twice as good if it upsets someone who chooses to project insecurity and fear I'm gona make the things I want and im gona make it as best I can and fuck everyone else and artstation and twitter and reddit and hivemind A shift back to creative intent with no purpose other than internal
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The encouragement of wit part is a fucking joke since people use memes as a social crutch because they had nothing interesting or funny to say. I'm not sure why people say you needed thick skin to browse 4chan when anonymity, focus on memes, and stuff like sagebombing was perfect for individuals who felt the need to lash out at any offense real or imagined while giving them multiple ways to save face ("I was only pretending", samefagging, making frivolous accusations to derail things, and being anonymous they didn't have to worry about what they said hurting their rep).
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I don't doubt many come here just for that, but the problem is that the guy's giving a characterization of old 4chan that's radically different from other stuff I've read. In suptg there's the thread moot made after Jim Profit was banned, where he wrote that /tg/ was much more easygoing than other boards, most anons replying agreed and this was lauded (I should note that thread did seem very different from modern 4chan and it was very interesting). Another case would be that last time I took a peek at 8/k/, there was a thread shaming 4/k/ for not actually discussing guns and the only replies that could be considered "memey" were shitting on 4/k/ and agreeing with OP. 8ch likes to act indignant towards 4chan though. Point being, there's discrepancies. >>2216123 >The encouragement of wit part is a fucking joke since people use memes as a social crutch because they had nothing interesting or funny to say. When referring to one-liners and such I would be inclined to agree, because of how grating they can get. But twists on these or (as much as it may contradict what I just said) Kornheisers and Costanzas can be funny. If you look at >>2216462 you'll see the former in the first reply and somewhat the latter in the fourth. >I'm not sure why people say you needed thick skin to browse 4chan More of an initial shock, calling someone a retarded nigger is banal here. The part about mechanisms to save face is all true, though the more autistic cases of lashing out also have to do with the ease of ban evasion. What I'm interested in is the fine line between >>2216463 and >>2216583 , it has to do with the question >>2211669 raises. Something with "positive", silly shitposting and "negative" shitposting.
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Globalization is not something you can stop. The internet will probably merge into one single blob where information will be available to anyone at any one time. There won't anymore be websites as a whole but rather clusters of media centres each with a specific function. All controlled by big corporations such as Google, Apple and others. I know it sounds crazy and sci-fi'ish but you can already see this is where it's going. Acquisition, mergers and takeovers. It's all here.
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I'm aware of the fact that where there used to be thousands of different sites with their own userbase there are now a handful of enormous sites with different cancerous mechanisms stifling conversation, as well as other places documenting memes with a slew of consequences. That's why I wrote inside jokes with quotation marks, you can't quite call them that. But I'd like to focus more on how Anonymous' attitute was back in the day, the different narratives that exist about it and to compare yesterday's culture with today's. The first link in the OP, desuarchive.org/qa/thread/1536413 starts with an anon trying to explain quality, what it is and what affects it. It kind of mentions what you've written.
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>all comes down to the generation shift I strongly disagree, this is too simple. Unless you consider a couple of years a generation to account for /b/day, the /a/ split, Habbo raids, Chanology and the Palin email scandal, Sandy Hook, the changes in /sp/, Fappening, GG and the 2016 election, it's one of the same truisms the guy speaks against. Especially since some say 2012 was a worse time than nowadays. But I wasn't around for any of these things, that's why I made this thread. Tanasinn and Bibanon aren't enough to understand this place
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Frankly neither did I. I just assumed it was the cause as it was with the flagship board in my mother tongue. Also I believe 4chan today is more of an international board rather than it was back in those days. I mean it's still almost 60% but no doubts it used to be higher. That might have something to do with the overall quality or culture of posts. Integration can take a while and perhaps it couldn't keep up with the influx of new posters.
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There will never be one crowning opinion but mine is swayed more towards what you greentexted OP. I was in my late 20s when I started lurking and by then my sense of humor was well established so this isn't me saying things were better because I was a kid and stupid. People were far more prone to snark and wit using images to insult idiots and trolls. Memetic images were used all the time but the way they were used was much funnier imo. Key word being funny. Things were funnier and although 4chan is the internet hate machine there was more of a unified understanding to lurk moar and contribute OC. I firmly believe this site has gotten lazier, stupider, and traded snark for ironic shitposting. This wasnt a hundred years ago, it was only 10. I remember laughing my ass off till I was red in the face, now I barely manage a chuckle. It's sad honestly and there is no one to blame it is just how it became overtime.
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I want to say something about all this, but I feel I've already stated my piece so many times before in the past somewhat aligning themselves to this great analysis that I feel I'd just be redundant. What can be said has likely already been said. But yeah, these are the thoughts that have been on my mind extremely particularly as of recently with boards going down the shitter at an almost unprecedented rate of acceleration, so much so that it's frankly depressing. I've essentially found myself at the point now that I'm no longer fighting against the new culture overtaking the old, reminding newfags to lurk moar and trying to contribute quality posts and even OC at times, and have made the almost unconscious decision to become a part of the tide. The amount of people who don't care and are creating their own culture in this cultural "vacuum" are too overwhelming for any of the "old guard" to do anything meaningful about. The only thing left to do is to let go and become a part of the new culture, whether you like it or not. That, or break off entirely and get a real life. But for most of us that's an impossibility. We are here forever, after all. It's only in these rare moments in threads like these that I'm able to voice a meaningful opinion. Pic related. The most depressingly accurate depiction of the absolute state of the site (and my mind)..
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this and it is frustrating to find oneself bending to the will of a tide you no longer wish to be swept by. We're no longer peeing in an ocean of piss but swimming in it. I'm nowhere as articulate as the OP of the archived thread (that was an incredible read) but my thoughts remain on the style of posting that has changed for the worst not necessarily the community itself. Gone are the days where even a typo would earn you ridicule. Or when long posts such as these were replied to with earnest inside of tl;dr. I think there are swaths of users here both old and new who want better interactions with each other but get repelled from each other because of endless streams of poor posting etiquette. You can be both a trolling shitflinger AND an invested contributor without ruining the overall experience of the many. I find it more concerning not that 4chan is different but that so many are fine with ruinous posting shenanigans rather than pride of their chosen boards and topics. That is not a 4chan thing but a social zeitgeist sort of issue.
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>Something with "positive", silly shitposting and "negative" shitposting. The line between positive and negative shitposting was extremely thin. Furthermore the former helped reinforce the latter because people either try to imitate it but lack the wit/timing to make a meme funny or think it all about meme posting because how many meme replies there are. Memes based around things like politics fucked things up more because they don't have to be funny able to run off partisan feelings, have numerous way to deflect criticism that other jokes don't have like stating the only reason they don't like the joke is it triggered them, can be pushed by ideologues under the "I'm just joking" pretense, and can make great bait.
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>with boards going down the shitter at an almost unprecedented rate of acceleration 4chan fucked itself. Telling new people to lurk more does nothing because the old culture played a part in creating the present fostering a culture of low quality posting on many boards. An environment where ironic shitposting, posting things for no reason than to piss someone off, and easy bake memes were to be expected was extremely favorable to shitters. For that reason I do not think that all problems can be blamed on newcomers.
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>I remember laughing my ass off till I was red in the face, now I barely manage a chuckle. I'd like to know which places you frequent, 'cause there's still a lot of good stuff. I laughed my ass off reading about different ways to pat your loli in 8/a/, had a lot of fun yesterday in a necromancer thread in /v/, had incredible fun reading Dwarf Fortress stories in /dfg/ this morning, have had fun the last 8 or so months going to /ps2g/ up until it died and I made a few people laugh by parodying I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream in a great Pannenkoek thread. And while I appreciate you giving input there isn't much analysis going on, for example, what do you consider fun, where did you use to find it and what is different today? I like absurd seriousness, as in pic.
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>The amount of people who don't care and are creating their own culture in this cultural "vacuum" are too overwhelming for any of the "old guard" to do anything meaningful about. I don't trust the old guard. I believe most of them were just in the right place at the right time and that many did as you say, either fucked off or started shitposting with the rest. I've seen people with 12- or 13- filenames making milquetoast comments, imagedumping or shitposting in /s4s/ or /tv/, these are not the expected oldfag quality posts and we cannot simply assume they all took their pics from archives.
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>Gone are the days where even a typo would earn you ridicule. They're still around, but in "serious" discussion it gets mocked for being an ad hominem. I would strongly disagree about blaming etiquette if by it we mean orthography, I normally write without periods and capital letters because I feel like it better mimics real dialogue. What we could also refer to as etiquette is attitute, and I do feel too many focus on clashing against others rather than working towards building something, this heavily affecting OC production. The impression I get going through old /b/ memes is that of cooperation, looking at stuff such as 2008 compilations, the End of /b/ gif and Zone's or NCH's animations. An attempt to have fun together, different from trying to epically BTFO one another. This also applies to things like /v/'s Ed, Edd and Eddy Online, which last time I was in one around ten people chimed in to call it R*ddit, cr*nge or exclaim y*kes. We could perhaps extend the "clashing", "aggresive" attitude to stuff that has historically been used to derail threads en masse, like furries, bronies, dubs and politics. It seems to be the case that the ones who did the derailing remember them much more fondly than those who got derailed, and those writing bot-tier mass-quoting replies in >>2217649 will probably also look back on it fondly.
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I wholeheartedly agree with you on politics, and like your point on shitposting. We could differentiate between memetic shitposting and non-memetic shitposting, I consider the latter to contribute at least a bit more than the former. The reason why I quoted >>2216463 and >>2216583 is that they both have the same message ("lol I'm not telling you"), and we can assume both authors had fun writing them, but post is just a memetic phrase while the other one linked an appropiate song accompanied by a spooky skeleton. Board quality is radically different depending on whether the former or the latter is the average. Your point about 4chan fucking itself is interesting but I can't comment on it. I don't know how generalized ironic posting came into being.
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Feel free to elaborate. What I meant by "everything wrong with the site" was ironic shitposting, dabbing, calling each other Reddit without making a point (which only normalizes Reddit and possibly validates the "4chan is for shitposting, Reddit is for big boys" mentality), Hiro wanting to further milk the site and users trusting the shady faggot. Other stuff too, but rereading the thread threatens to make tumors spontaneusly grow all over my body. And I haven't watched Osomatsu, I just scrolled the folder and found that pic.
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>I don't trust the old guard. I wouldn't. I'm skeptical of posts idealizing old 4chan because I was there. I would agree that old 4chan was better not because the post quality was higher but because the amount of cancerous things were fewer. Going back to "old 4chan" is impossible and fails to realized that many of the new cancerous things evolved from the old stuff. > these are not the expected oldfag quality posts Comments like this seriously make me wonder what did people think old 4chan was like.
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>Board quality is radically different depending on whether the former or the latter is the average I somewhat agree. The problem with memes is after you understand how a certain meme works it becomes too predicable as you already know the punchline. Modifying a meme to subvert certain expectations (the problem with /pol/ memes or other types political memes is they can't do that without undermining the ideology being pushed by the meme which is why they tend to be far more stagnant) can breath fresh life into a meme but that requires wit/effort and the strength of memes is they're an amazing crutch for shitters. At the same time shitposting that isn't based on memes can be both worse and better then memeposting. For an example of how low it can go without using memes see the Starcraft 2 General on /vg/. It may have changed but a while ago I would say it was one of the worst parts of 4chan.
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>I would agree that old 4chan was better not because the post quality was higher but because the amount of cancerous things were fewer. This makes sense. >Comments like this seriously make me wonder what did people think old 4chan was like. I made the comment to point out that I do realize oldfags aren't internet sages, you can see in desuarchive 2008 Rei vs Asuka threads repeating things that were probably already worn out by then, they look identical to today's red vs blue. >The problem with memes is after you understand how a certain meme works it becomes too predicable as you already know the punchline. Modifying a meme to subvert certain expectations (the problem with /pol/ memes or other types political memes is they can't do that without undermining the ideology being pushed by the meme which is why they tend to be far more stagnant) can breath fresh life into a meme but that requires wit/effort and the strength of memes is they're an amazing crutch for shitters. This is a great point. >Starcraft 2 General Those are some very weird and short lived threads, some even got deleted. They remind of tragsg, I don't know how to describe them. Is "ironic" an appropiate word at that point? And I'd like to add, going back to the first post, is there anything you could comment about old 4chan's general attitude?
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> Also I believe 4chan today is more of an international board rather than it was back in those days. I mean it's still almost 60% but no doubts it used to be higher. That might have something to do with the overall quality or culture of posts. 4chan used to be way more international, at least subjectively. Half of /a/'s tripfags were eurofags. "How your country is presented in anime" threads revealed that there were people from virtually everywhere on the board. Occasionally discussions in their native languages broke out. Still do. Bad grammar was never welcome, but most internationals posting on 4chan did not have this problem. Occasional awkward posts were almost always ignored. Back in the day people did not assume you're American just because you're speaking good English online. Global network was still perceived as global. No one had any clue where their anonymous peers were from. I have no idea how the traffic is distributed now, but I'm fairly certain that the board has become significantly more American as a result of the 2016 election and the processes that preceded it.
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>perfectly illustrates how memes have been completely bastardized as a concept. I disagree only because I'm am skeptical any process of bastardization occurred, some memes meant to do nothing more than push an ideology. Making a good political meme that escapes becoming a mere partisan weapon takes more effort then creating a good non political meme especially since the former can become dated much easier. Combined with defense mechanisms some political memes have ("you only hate it because your (insert political ideology here)") they are the worst type of memes on 4chan.
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>I'm am skeptical any process of bastardization occurred How? It's plainly obvious that there's a fundamental misunderstanding of a what a meme is that permeates the public consciousness; people will label anything down from image macros to videos they watch as a "meme". This misunderstanding therefore also affects traditional memes insofar as how they'll be run into the ground and reused so many times that they no longer convey any meaning whatsoever. Moreover, the bastardization has gone so far as to include buzzwords into the umbrella of what a meme is, and no doubt do I not have to give any examples thereof.
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2007 active here, spent most of 06 lurking /b/ and /a/ Cant speak for ancient fags, but the passive form of arguing that was told in your greentext was very uncommon then on those boards at least. If you said something stupid, or had a moronic stance on an argument, you were justly told to fuck off, or were called a faggot/doublenigger/nigger/[fillintheblank]fag.
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So what you're saying there still might be some hope left. With there being less time for the development of new memes and old memes being overused to a point of mindless post & repeat (hey frogs) cancerous userbase might eventually find this place obsolete and leave it for good since it can no longer keep up with their awesome appetite for degeneracy. A bit optimistic I know.
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Sucks now because it feels like most of the guys coming here only want to see the same stupid shit because its familiar to them. Its like there's now a limited amount of things to be said or pictures to be posted and anything outside of that unsettles them or is ignored. Its legit like autism where there's a rigid habit/routine that must followed otherwise it results in autistic screeching. I quit making stuff and posting anything creative here because it just falls on deaf ears and I see the same with other anons posting oc. Meanwhile threads on the same old topics have shitloads of replies with the most predictable reposts. Its like there's a bunch of anons just lying in wait to respond to some comment or idea theyve seen before with the same pic or webm, much like how on reddit every post is a mad dash for karma whores to reply with the same joke. >FPH thread? I better get in there asap and post the same webm of the two fatties on tiktok
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ometimes internet trolls are the higher ups using you as some sort of stress relief. Think of this situation: you are using paypal, the paypal administration anonymously contacts you "we know how much money and we will hack you" You get schizophrenic since you only got 1$ there and get scared they are bullying you. You either feel sick to death or sad. Or and add extra steps to secure your money which costs you more money (if you have money) Here is another situation: 4chan moderator stalking your post and says your country's name or continent when he replies to you(you might think it's coincidence because you don't expect it.) Here is another situation: Your ISP / Google look through the xxx sites you visit and suggest you how to stop fapping a lot. Your best friend knows your girlfriend/Crush phone and starts snitching on you. Sometimes You're always trolled by someone closer to you
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i think the reason you might think this is a type of bias. the majority of high quality comics like this are from many years ago. however, that itself doesn't actually prove that "they don't get made anymore". one explanation might simply be that "the past" is much longer than "the present", and so the majority of the comics you see are from "the past". for example, if comics like these are made only twice a year from the time 4chan was created until now, there would be a total of 18 years * 2 comics/year = 36 comics. however, almost 75% of the comics would be from before 2016! therefore, it would seem that most of the comics are from a long time ago, and very few are from recent times, but that's simply because of the passage of time. even if the comics are being created at the same rate, more seem to be older. also, as time passes, we tend to forget the specifics year-by-year and generalize years together. for example, people here on /qa/ say that 2019/2020/2021 /qa/ are all very different. but if you ask someone about the difference between 2010/2011/2012 /a/, it would be harder for them to remember the specifics, and these years might get grouped together in memories. these are two arguments to explain why it might seem that "these high quality comics don't get made anymore". more data and research is required to really definitively say whether comics like these are becoming less common.
.Niceposting:
I don't think people should be necessarily be nicer, but they should be more genuine and try to put more effort into how they interact with their fellow anons. In other words, if someone is being an aggressive retard, instead of just posting "retard" and then "cope/seethe/dilate" at them, you should really put effort into making them feel bad about what they're doing wrong. Try to bait out personal information to insult them with, criticize their writing style, explain to them that not only is their argument wrong but they don't appear to understand the general concept in the first place. Take one word or wojack replies as a victory and stop replying. Be creative in your insults, try to make your posts entertaining to read for the hypothetical 3rd party - your goal is to encourage others to be more like you. You're not arguing to try and convince the retard to change his mind (he won't) you're arguing to try and convince the people reading the thread that your method of argumentation is better than his. And the reason I say all this is that I'm trying to encourage the death of irony as the catchall 4chan defense. Most anons are (ironically) afraid to really put their opinions out there in a genuine or efficacious way, because they don't want to get shit on. This is the wrong attitude. Getting shit on is how you get better. I do, however, try to focus more on the structure and quality of the post itself than the opinion an anon expresses within it while arguing; I try not to blast people just for having a different opinion than me. If someone is being civil, be civil back to them unless they give you a reason not to be (like lying, strawmanning, or repeated goalpost moving). All that being said, I do agree that generally speaking people should be a bit nicer. I always try to thank people for taking time to make OC or a good post; but there is a place for the pure directed hate that this website is famous for, and it serves to keep us honest.
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I guess. It's less "changing times" and more "the girl changing her dress". It's the same girl, just a different dress. In 4chan existed in 1998 and Britney Spears died, you'd have a nonstop 100+ ppm thread moving for days. An old, 90-year old man, no matter how respected her was, just doesn't compare to fresh girls doing sexy things.
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>the board is single-handedly pulling 4chan's reputation back from being a fucking terrible politics forum I've said before this is just a terrible catch 22 a necessary evil an abyss so unscrupulously corrupting all that gaze into the pit are already doomed for eternity and beyond no salvation no damnation a purgatory of never ending barbarous atrocious inhumane and sadistic infinite loop its users forever mind-broken by ego death perpetually stuck in a false self of nirvana as ones soul is devoured till the end of time this is why we cant have nice things or go back to when this place was loving in its chaotic mess of anarchy
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If I were to kill myself, how would that benefit 4chan? There are many people on this website. My death would not change anything that YOU would notice, other than these threads going to a halt. So the problem is these threads. Why is this? Is it too difficult to hide this thread? Perhaps it is. I want to hear your reasoning. Why would me killing myself, ending these threads would benefit 4chan greatly? Thinking about it, killing myself would have an opposite effect. There are some people, not many, but some people who enjoy these threads. If I were to kill myself, they could no longer enjoy these threads. You could say that there are even more people who do not like these threads. People who go angry, mad, and sad. The solution is easy. Hide the thread. I'm sure it's far easier than typing several comments. On the other hand, the few people enjoying these threads would either have to not have these threads, or make them themselves. What is easier? To hide a thread, or to create one?
.- On a religion board to save /x/:
Fuck yeah, I've suffered enough through so much bullshit here already, I just want those /nobody/ fuckers, wiccans, witches and other shit out of here please do it do it do it do it do it I've left this board and return every coulple of months to see how it is, everytime it's worse than before. Where are the good old threads of cryptids, scary stories and all the other fun stuff that used to be here? Fucking nothing and if someone remembers and gets in here and posts it's drowned in retarded posts that repeat themselves over and over and over by the minute /x/ is losing the original SpookyShidTM people and they're getting replaced by Tumblr tier Witches.
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Religion allows total freedom of mind. You'd have all of 4chan suddenly exposed to threads about reincarnation, and they'd become beyond social control. No priest or scientist elites to tell anyone what reality is. And mockers would have their threads deleted. They want our minds focuses on empty consoomerism. They don't want the common person to know about Abraham and Moses, because even non-Jewish Atheists will become inspired by their ways simply because they're powerful. They don't want trannys, for instance, to remove themselves from secularism and become spiritual. They want people literally playing video games rather than living life. They want you fat, dumb and unhappy. The tranny will never get what they want from secularism, and spirituality offers real hope.
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That's all it is now because you fuckers keep shitting up this board. Do you think we can't just forcefully make the split? Succubus summoning threads are bad too I wouldn't mind that but even then they would probably be kept. You know why? Because your retarded logic doesn't work in the real world. Not everything is from the bible and even if it is we can seperate them. The fact that you don't see the point of it is astonishing me. You christfags always talk about enlightenment and how you should look at something more ways when you can't even look past your own fucking ego on this one, attributing everything here to your own lil thought up community. Do you know what is the point even? Ask yourself that question, look at this board and the arguments and reasons presented in this thread. It's not to make a "lol aliens lmao" board, it's to split the old and the new /x/ into /x/ and /re/ so that oldfags and other people that just actually wanna talk about bigfoot, aliens, ancient structures in antarctica, deep sea, Epstein theories and tell spooky stories from your kind. We complain about you shitting up this board because it's no longer fun to be around here with you. You're the aggressive younglings that came here and changed it to your liking, we want you to leave so we can spooppost in peace. Pull your head out of god's ass and look at what would it be for both parties. The religion community is big enough to be able to work as a single thing and you'd get all your good shit that you want and we'd get our old stuff, filtered from your shitposting. Anyone who'd want to browse both just would, it's not splitting /x/ into twenty different things it would just do two. /x/ is one of the major communities on this shit site and by letting it go like this for even longer you're going to kill the old community. /re/ is pretty much our last hope. Please let me spoop post in peace
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>It's not to make a "lol aliens lmao" board, it's to split the old and the new /x/ into /x/ and /re/ so that oldfags and other people that just actually wanna talk about bigfoot, aliens, ancient structures in antarctica, deep sea, Epstein theories and tell spooky stories I was on 7chan's /x/ before 4chan had an /x/. It was made for creepypasta. It's activity was low for literally a decade, composed almost entirely of creepypasta. It became so stale that /x/ at one point was basically a humor board, mocking stereotypical and poor creepasta. There was no serious alien discussion. Big foot was a joke. It was half spam, a quarter unrelevant subjects. >Pull your head out of god's ass and look at what would it be for both parties You're the one who seems to have a problem with us. I've had discussions here about my own personal madness for years. I have never been bothered by you guys once. What I want is the 'board culture' of a religion board. The entire site could be introduced to the memes of religion, which would then blaze through this site and the internet like a wildfire. No longer would thought be forced into boxes; we could all make up our own beliefs in a context where the mocking crowd of NPCs was literally banned from interupting our discussion. Waifuism would be married to real religion, and the madness would remove the stranglehold materialism has on western society. >The religion community is big enough to be able to work as a single thing and you'd get all your good shit that you want The debates would be the hottest things on the web, not just 4chan. *The* most controversial subject, 24/7/365. Nothing else on the site would be so relevant to the real world while giving people the chance to participate in religion and thus society. >and we'd get our old stuff, filtered from your shitposting
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/re/'s existance would grate on you every day. We would make moral judgements of you, and you'd be banned if you bothered us with something that was not a 'religious' topic.' No longer would secularists be allowed to pretend to be these nice, innocent, eloquent people. The world would see a bunch of religious people using 4chan to organize online prayers and donation drives, while you called for the death of /re/ posters on /x/ and other boards. All neutral observers would see the contrast of the genocidal secularist and the loving religious person. Juxtapose my post to yours. If there was a /re/, you'd never see my caliber of poster here - just legions of people like you, calling for the death of the people you disagree with. Religion is also the ultimate convergence to where the politics of degeneracy functionally can be discussed and liberals and communists would be banned because they couldn't help themselves from trolling in rage at religious people transfering spiritual power to new presidents. Religion has made me very sure of myself, and the elites don't like that. They want me worried about death instead of working on my life with the passion that comes with immortality.
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I don't think those are good examples. Sports and news are normie shit, of course they'd want tons of traffic. Too little traffic can definitely be a bad thing, the various offshoots of 4chan show that, this place used to be a happy medium where you could talk to people essentially in real time or call someone a dumbass in a sword thread and then come back to the same sword thread 3 days later and see their reply. Now everything's constantly rushing towards death. I've been in lively vidya threads and gone to take a shower and come back to dead threads because people posted a million throwaway threads. I agree with the first guy, more people is pretty much always bad. An influx of people means more idiots sharing the same space even if the percentage of idiots remains constant, which it often doesn't.
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The age old question, when a big GET happens on a board, but no one on the board cares for GETs because of how slow the traffic is, is it really a GET?
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Well, GETs could once be awarded without the poster even noticing, so yes... not that it elevates that thread to anything more than plain baiting and counter-baiting (and/or all-around retardation). They probably just don't care, I think the only board that still tries to pretend GETs have any sort of authority is /pol/, and that's only when they can use it to push their agenda.
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Hopefully, this process can be replicated someday on other boards, as it is healthy for us to learn what matters concern you I can't imagine /v/ having a sticky like this asking anons what they want and not be absolutely unreadable shit full of spamming, but I like the hope of mods getting more involved with the boards they love, especially for the smaller vidya boards like /vst/ >>3997427 Rangebans aren't controlled by mods, they're put up by someone higher on the chain, probably the developer or Hiro upon request only, which is really unfortunate because it's notoriously easy to evade bans with phones. Hiro really should force phoneposters to buy passes to post, it would clean up the site a lot. I suffer every time I see a shitpost with a mobile filename (Screenshot_numbers_numbers, IMG_numbers, long-numbers_long-numbers, long-numbers-with-letters_long-numbers-with-letters)
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It has been a while since I used that meme alignment system and I don't remember the exact names. The point is that ponyfags are one of the friendliest boards (at least more than the average) and just want to be left alone with their pony-themed shitposts and erotic fanfics about pony planes, while /pol/ encompasses a wide spectrum of autistic ideologies that makes them relatively tame and a nuisance at worst.
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The other boards became shit because they allowed their cultures to be degraded and be replaced by wojak and pepe spam. Wojak and frogposters are dogged from any thread they post in on /mlp/, and the green Anonymous character is still used everywhere on the board. /mlp/ is basically a time capsule of early Chan culture, though mixed with ponies. Though, the ponies scare away normalfags, which also helps preserve their culture from being degraded. A lot of boards suffered because of unchecked refugee floods, people that never bothered to lurk because they were largely in the company of other refugees that didn't lurk, and that shifts the board culture because the people that didn't lurk are in sizeable enough numbers to not care about what the locals say. /pol/ is completely different because most of locals there were gone when the elections started swinging, /v/ is somewhat interlinked with /pol/ because of Gamergate, /b/ is full of porn because of the Fappening etc. Hell, a lot of threads on /v/ that aren't outright about videogames are full of bait, it's either someone pretending to be american blue side and calling people chuds, or it's the "HAHA WHO CARES IF..." copypasta, or people saying 4chan has always been an american blue side site, or all sorts of flavorful baits that typically involve people biting them hard, dragging the whole thread down into a fiery pit of political shitposting until it reaches bump limit or a janitor mercy-kills it. The board is too fast to have any discussion about more niche games that aren't popular games, yet most of the popular games being talked about are usually shitposted to death, right now there's a trend of shazamposting about Elden Ring and every Harry Potter thread spontaneously combusts. There really is a goldilocks zone where some games aren't too niche to die and not too popular to be full of shitposting but it's not that common.
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I think I've realized the root of all modern major 4chan memes and views, though it didn't take any research, just a little bit of thinking. I was wondering what connected everything, and I realized the answer was so simple: it's women, or rather the reaction to them and the incurred sexual frustration. >soijaks are meant to represent effeminate men, and though they are not outright female in appearance, they represent an avatar for females that hatred and mockery can be projected onto and reflected in a myriad of ways >enby/chuds are all pretty self-explanatory, though it's telling that enby has become feminized, including comically large breasts and projections of her as a caring and loving girlfriend >trannies are also pretty obvious, not just the reaction to a man becoming from his perspective female, but also the horror/revulsion at the perversion of typical female archetypes >racism is largely directed at blacks - not because of niggers burning and killing and shooting or whatever, but because of black man white woman porn and the insecurities/cuckoldry fetishes that arise from it >homophobia is wild and schizophrenic, with people lusting over the concept of females becoming pure through lesbianism, or gay people becoming pure through abstinence of sex with females >look how much every single entertainment board is obsessed with women, virile women, fetishes, death of women, death of trannies, sex, etc. I'm not really quite sure what happened in the past few years to put some massive cap on the boiler of sexual frustration and the increasingly unhinged perspective of women. Janny plants? No, it's been happening in the outside Internet quite a bit. Trump? Perhaps, but why did it center around women, when Trump's actions/dialogue were more suited to provoking racial conflict? Jews? Maybe, but why specifically women? Something else? A man who sometimes exists meets a man who should no longer be. i think we're not going to see the end of this for a while
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Old /b/ grew up. Middle class white kids finished school, got jobs, had kids and moved to the suburbs. No one wants "teh lulz" when the bank's threatening to rape you with a cactus for missing yet another mortgage payment. New /b/ is the shitty mess you get left with, but I'll tell you something really scary...in 10 years, this shitheap is what current users will be nostalgic for. This is what they'll be saying is missed when the new garbage and shitty forced memes come in. I hope that Hiroshimoot nukes this place long before that happens tho.
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As someone who's been around the block during the best and worst of /b/, let me tell you how I witnessed it's devolution into what it is today. It started off simply as a haven of degeneracy but the welcoming sort, genuinely the place where you could be a grade A retard without full criticism except by the few who were equally if not more retarded then you. This was the mutalism that brought /b/ together, everyone hated everyone but in a sort of "who the fuck are you and why do I care what you should say" sort of mentality, as we grew older and inside jokes and memes grew, people outside this spectrum essentially were exposed to second hand shitposting and trolling which introduced a new generation of retards but on a tamer level than what old /b/ was known for, and as the years progressed they spread it and so on and that level of tame only grew while that wild wasteland mentality started to fade. As one example people would deliberately post Cp for the sole reason of triggering people, same with gore threads and the very seldom "Guess your post # and I'll tell you where the body is" Nowadays it's just a hodgepodge of newfags trying to nail that edginess that old /b/ had, but the thing is they did it smartly and got your attention first and foremost and lead you into either a golden thread or set you up to be the butt end of the joke - a factor which is now missing with a lot of wannabes Tl;dr Old /b/ put effort into their jokes, shitposts, and raids - current /b/ doesn't put that effort in to making quality bait or shitposts and expects a quick hurr durr look how edgy/funny this is type response
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How would it "be better"? The problem with CURRENTYEAR 4chan isn't the infrastructure but the people. It's a new generation of people who brought their own language, their own memes, their own feels and moods. There's nothing wrong with that but it's not a "we need a new website" thing. The magic of /b/ isn't the shit we used to say and do, but its ability to morph and become something new as the people inhabiting it change. That's the mark of the anonymous: we are one blob and the blob morphs to become the average of all its components. In that regard, /b/ didn't change. Its shape did.
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you've never been to /pol/? Its literally /b/2.0 turned slightly political. Evreyone calls each other niggers and whiteoids, the jews are secretly behind everything and pol is a Zionists board. It is the most close minded place while being the most diverse place on the internet. pol is like a contradiction. You cant put it to words, to unify it under this way or that, is not possible, there are too many opinions to dissect to unite anyone. You just have to go there your self to experience it. But more than anything, it's a hurtbox. And more than anything pol hates the weak and laughs at those who easily fall for thier memes. Latests being the npc meme. But it's a wonderful place if you already like /b/, the power of the young men who inhabit that board can conquer anything with thier autism, and nothing is beyond our reach
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I think once we all get some measure of financial stability we will see 4chan make a comeback to the old days. Honestly I spend 8 hours a day in front of a computer at work but 4chan is blocked and even if it wasnt it's not a website i would visit at work. We will get some equity. Some savings in the bank. Kids will get old enough that they dont need constant attention. Then we can get back to playing video games and shitposting. Honestly that is what we are all working for, the ability to have free time so we can shitpost, jsckoff, and play video games all day.
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4chan is being killed off because of the relatively recent surge in brainless leftists who have zero imagination. They are like locusts that go from site to site, laying waste, and then moving onto the next site. Think about it. Reddit was good until Digg failed. It wasn't only the site redesign that killed Digg, it was the revelation of manipulation by politically motivated groups. This resulted in the Digg exodus, which would eventually lead to Reddit's downfall (although it took a few years). With the added spotlight on Reddit, SJWs eventually (gradually) took over Reddit staring with Ellen Pao (from which Reddit never recovered). The site is now heavily censored and content is pushed by politically motivated groups. Now that Reddit has been taken over by SJWs, causing the site to fail hard, 4chan has seen a heavy uptick in traffic, at first from Reddit refugees, but now mostly brainless degenerates (because 4chan is now fashionable). This will ultimately lead to the demise of 4chan. 4chan will either become completely homogenized or it will be shut down. The brainless NPCs are already starting to dominate /b/. Evidenced by the repeated trap threads, dick rate posts, feels threads, FB/IG, celeb threads, and all manner of degeneracy...rinsed and repeated. Over and over and over again. This is how they kill sites...with a barrage of low IQ posts. /pol/ is possibly the last holdout, but it won't be long before /pol/ turns completely SJW left At this point, old fags will have already started migrating to the next site. Goodluck finding out where they are going...last thing anyone needs is for you brainless hormonal soykin to follow them to the next site.
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It almost seems like the difference is just that 4chan forgot people actually do things just to be dicks sometimes or just to have fun and see what will happen without really putting much thought into it. The internet has always been that way, but now that I think about it it really seems like most people on 4chan assume everyone is doing things just to fit in or to effect change, rather than to just have a laugh. One thing I personally remember about the older internet in general is that I never felt like I could change people. Trolls were just trolls, they were literally everywhere, in your chatrooms, spamming your email inbox, griefing you in online games and it was just an expected part of the internet that I lived with. Maybe that's just how I remember it when I was younger though I don't know. But it all seems different now, and 4chan seems to have an atmosphere of expectation that even trolls should conform to a certain style of acceptable shitposting. So basically I think all the same elements are still here, the environment just feels different because entitled oldfags or tryhard newfags think there's something sacred about humor here whereas in the past people would just recognize it as a troll and either laugh or move on. It probably doesn't help that there's also a much wider diversity of people on this site than there probably ever was in the past which creates a lot of tension.
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My issue with the current one is more of that current shitposting leans more on normalfaggotry and that '4chan is for le shitpostin', rather than being for the sake of being a fucking dick Its not like 4chan used to be any better, but your right anon, its the environment. And the current environment is worse then the previous one
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>My issue with the current one is [hackneyed, whinging horseshit elided] and that '4chan is for le shitpostin' it always has been, you turbonigger What kind of mental vegetable expects to have serious discussions in an environment where trolls and shitposters cannot be put on ignore lists? Besides you, I mean. And even if we inhabited a parallel universe in which there were no funposters on 4chan, it would still be utterly useless for discussion because the average """""person""""" here is a 15-year-old hikikomori who wastes his pathetic existence holed up in a physical and virtual hugbox. It's futile to discuss anything with these genetic failures because they'll defend their ignorance until they run out of funions. Just to save face. On an anonymous imageboard. What else is there to do but trigger them for keks?
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People will kill me for saying this, but at least for /a/, 2006-2008 was basically a proto-Reddit culture, where people would get into eternal debates, spam mimetic shit, and then sage threads which did not conform. On the other hand, there was also much more lighthearted and easy-posting which was generally enjoyable. When Reddit was created, the culture shifted to be more dedicated, reactionary, and less open. Now, you guys say this would be an improvement, but my point is that 4chan only started to get anal about shitposting after the casual posters left en masse, leaving only those who could not find solace in social media or Reddit.
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4chan got supposedly worse because it grew, got bigger, got popular to a certain extent and it's diluted with many types of people, some compatible with others, others incompatible. 4chan has been at the forefront of the growing internet popularity. 4chan hasn't changed that drastically, in my opinion. It has always been the playground for social outcasts into a hobby, be it nerdy or other. Only there are more people now, some more annoying than others, maybe.
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It's almost comical to think how many arguments all over the boards there are over "was old /_/ better?" or "4chan has gone to shit" especially considering most of the people taking part of in them probably joined sometime in the 2010s. While I may not have been around since the beginning (I joined in Fall of '06), I like to consider myself part of the old breed. Having been here since that time, I can tell you that there has indeed been a drastic difference to the website's culture. However, unlike what some might try to tell you the general memes/jokes and post quality hasn't honestly changed that much.
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No. That was during a time where mods, even moots, were both worse and better, seeing as they weren't as uptight. Everyone's standards were different too. Pretty sure snacks turned into as much of a fag as moot, it just probably doesn't say the on the ED page that everyone probably gets all their info from.
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An old mod who banned lots of people in his time for random reasons (such as for being furries) while allowing the posting of CP. In the end Moot got sick of his shit and demoted and later banned him. Since then people have correlated his demise with the death of old /b/ and the beginning of the cancer, petitioning for his reinstatement. By now all chance of him returning is long gone (although Bring Back Snacks has become a meme) with his legacy remaining only as a symbol of old /b/
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>while allowing the posting of CP. this was a meme, never real. He was not a mod, he was an admin and practically created modern 4chan's code (you owe replying with an image to him) moot and snacks got on an argument over a 4chan project that snacks wasn't doing fast enough and moot got so mad he removed his admin powers, snacks then resigned. it's a shame because judging from the convention pics they were good friends. moot never talked to him again. way to hold a grudge.
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weren't as uptight >2003-2005 moderation. >bans were random and numerous. lol wat. Stop reading that ED you said you never read. Moderation was nazi as FUCK back then, and it was great because it kept the quality above completely-shit-tier. When that moderation died out and became invisible to end-users, the site went to complete shit in the space of a year. Hell, 9 months to be more correct. >>339533 ...just wow lol >>339528 This. The argument was hilarious but also sad because Snacks was terminated in the end. They made up after it, but he still never came back to the site anyway. I don't think they talk as much now. I think they stopped actively "hanging out" a few years back.
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They still banned shitty quality posts and did it consistently until that person either caved or fucked off. Wordfilters were also used to target groups of shitposters, like the anti-japanese crowd by making weeaboo, wapan and other filters. I'm sure I remember wapanese got filtered to something like "i should leave the site" or something like that. On /v/. Even then it was filled with those shit people
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moot (10:31:46 PM): OH NO I WENT THERE moot (10:31:53 PM): this is going nowhere, have fun with your games SQ (10:31:58 PM): What games? SQ (10:32:11 PM): You're the one who isn't providing needed information. SQ (10:32:17 PM): If you want someone to know something, you tell them. SQ (10:32:24 PM): You don't expect them to just "find out" >10 years ago people where still complaining that the mods expect them to know things they never told them about holy shit that said there clearly was bad blood well before this happened
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SQ (10:37:01 PM): Again, sell the site you hate so much. moot (10:37:25 PM): thats something im not willing to do, it will die before it gets sold moot (10:37:29 PM): i dont want the money, ive said it repeatedly SQ (10:37:31 PM): Then kill it! SQ (10:37:41 PM): I'm sure a lot of people will think you'll be better off without it. SQ (10:37:44 PM): I know Alison thinks that. woah. I though moot hating 4chan was a myth, or at least something that happened in 2008, not in 2005 moot (4:20:56 PM): you cant even voice your frustrations in a coherent enough manner without sounding like a raging 16 year old, who is hinging all of his arguments on the basis of "YOU SHOULDNT AND THEREFORE YOU CANT" moot is a dick, but he's not wrong in this. snacks was acting like an idiot. Both where.
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But at least moot wasn't screaming over the phone like, hilariously enough, a 16 year old. There was a recording of some argument between them in voice, not sure if it was that call or not. But I never did get to copy that from my hard drive before it scratched the fuck out of itself. ;-; The chat log is all that I managed to copy to zip drive. I'm still annoyed hard drives won out over zip drives. HDDs are so fucking awful. Zips would have been easy to improve if it had the same effort HDD had put behind it. But nooOOOOoo, let's make them shit, proprietary and non-standard, all with logic boards on them that fail regularly and you need to buy a whole new fucking hard drive to recover your shit or pay some ass to do it. Fuck Seagate especially. I've only ever had failed drives from that company. I have drives older than half the posters on this site that still work today! Fucking Seagate.
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> SQ (6:09:20 PM): That was about me no longer working for the site if I don't do things in a timely manner! moot (6:09:42 PM): i didnt spell it out for you, no, but then again, i shouldnt have needed to SQ (6:09:58 PM): This is a volunteer site. Jesus christ moot
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Honestly 4chan was always shit but if there was any political leaning it was Anarchism. People said nigger ans fag because it was offensive, not because they were racist. It was funny and helped keep the weak away. But the more mainstream it got, the worse it became. I think the Point of no Return was the Fappening. Moot sold out under the pressure and every stupid jackass on the planet started showing up. The fact is that the Alt Right and Antifa both suck a fat cock, gaybashers and racists need to be shot, and in general everyone's a fucking dumb nigger
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>communism >anarchy did i say there weren't? 4chan at its core has always and always will lean conservative and anonymous was relevant for a very, very small window in time before the movement (if you want to call it that) was quickly hi-jacked by retards in the same way the tea party movement was. in fact thats when cancer started
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I've been here since 06 and remember everything from tripfags to 1,000,000 get and the cyber police and roodypoos and all that. That being said, this is an open, anonymous image board. You're retarded if you ever think one group EVER dominated /b. The Nazis were here. They were just mostly jkng for the lols. Then the furfags. Then the pony fags. Then just generalized autism from Far Left SJWism to Far Right "Kill all the colored people." I'm not going to assist your bullshit narrative that this place hosted or formed or fostered the "Alt Right." No one is dominant here and every retard and outcast is welcome. God, I wish sage still worked... You're more Judas than Judas was, Mootles.
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I miss the days where if you got offended, you were the outcast. So many SJWs and butthurt faggots on this board now. Any suicide thread would have 100 replies of "fucking do it" instead of "OP, you have so much to live for!" You'd be careful of doxxing yourself or anyone you knew because anons would find you by researching the far reaches of the internet to ruin your life. Now we have bullshit "faces of 4chan" threads. People were actually funny back then, now it's the same replies to the same threads. I laugh and cry a little when I see someone post a cheese pizza and faggots legit start talking about pizza. This has become 9gag. /b/ was never good, but man, compared to what it is now, /b/ used to be fucking good.
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Look, the thing about 4Chan, it does not have a political affiliation. It never has. At its worst it was a group of pedophiles posting cp. But you have to understand that was just a tiny fraction of the user base. The rest was every teenager to 20 something guy in the 2000's. There were no real rules, people just did. This was before many people actually used the internet for anything. Myspace and facebook came to be at the same time. At first everything was just shit, a place to talk about some anime. Post random things. As the rest of the internet began to develop it made a hard turn. Suddenly all the assholes in the world were pushing what they wanted the internet to be (grandmas, corporations, yuppies). The site took a gleeful turn into trolling these people.
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>before the widespread adoption of far-right/alt right views? There was no before. It's always been full of people saying nigger and stuff. It became an "issue" when there was an experimental stage when /soc/ was created around 2010 and all these outsiders from 9Gag, Reddit, etc. attracted underaged girls, blue-haired hipsters, and the average faggot into Steampunk. Those are the people who began to whine that 4chan is mean and racist. Before that, nobody cared. Essentially, right as the hipster trend became mainstream, you had an influx of girls and losers. In the early days, the average demographics were neckbeards, the twink emo Asian, the bitter metalhead, and the redneck guy who somehow knew to get you anything. In terms of content on /b/ it was loaded with Oekaki, drawn "CP", bestiality, and plenty of things to pirate such as free games, Adobe Photoshop, etc. just by asking someone. Torrents and direct downloads galore.
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I am an oldfag - and while I am not a facist nor racist in any meaningfull sense of the word - I have drifted right along w 4chn. While there certainly are levels and levels of postsarcasm, shilling, posing and whatnot - I'd be carefull about explaining it all away. While under the yoke of cencorship 4chin still is a rebellion against the lies we have been spoonfed our entire lives. Biggest change? It used to be funny as fuck here. Now kys you socialstudies faggot. Not a joke. Kys.
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/b/ was always chaotic neutral. Everyone was a nigger and a faggot; fapped to bridget, brutal baby-rape doujins and bestiality; had an extreme distaste for political correctness, soccer moms, and stuck up bitches; hated niggers but also hated literal racists. /b/ was for the underdog (unless he was a faggot), a collection of jilted, undersexed introverts with nothing but time and bandwidth to burn.
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It made it worse. The "rate me" threads or whatever on /b/ were full of the same people, and the funny thing, the demographics of said threads were all over. Fat people, short people, people into goth, people into emo, ugly people, attractive people, and essentially no different than the people you find in a GameSpy forum. And the funny thing is those people stayed in those threads. Then /soc/ was made and 4chan advertised itself to the outside world. TEN fucking 4chan Facebook pages at the time. There's about 50 now, some with some Reddit-tier cancer. /soc/ started out with the /b/ people being the native posters, then suddenly it became full of people with pink hair, nose rings, hipster beards, pansexual tomboys, Antifa, Israelis, Redditors, traps, and of course, obese women. Here's a fun fact about some of those camwhores you see on /soc/. They're planted there. They were never normal 4chan users. They were ALWAYS whores and always under control by PornHub and friends. Those two redhead girls? Brought together from a Jew in the industry to actually meet each other. That emo girl with the giant purple dildo? Planted there. The place is one giant psyop and full of people involved with sponsorships.
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offensive was always funny, though it was ironic before, 4chan didn't take political causes and was strongly opposed it had rules 1 and 2 and prime directives or somesuch it was apolitical, anarchic, and did it purely for teh lulz they earned monikers such as internet hate machine, really loved mudkips and longcats, raided habbo nonstop, couldn't stop making anime references it was so long ago, I only remember fragments
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yspace was still a thing, Facebook wasn't. Cracky was a thing, Rabbit was a thing, Boxxy wasn't. Stormfags weren't a thing so nobody was really racist. People used the word "nigger" etc. a lot but it was generally used to define anyone who was a retard or in a jocular matey fashion rather than to be an actual venomous and racist insult. Traps weren't really a thing and there was nowhere near the amount of dicks. Linetrap was the only tranny posted here and s/he had a Myspace and was just a regular person. There were fewer Nazis, fewer faggots and fewer edgy self-described psychopaths posting retarded gifs of boiling dogs. Anyone who did harm animals was quickly tracked and fucked over (see Kenny Glenn and the like - cunt). There was no such thing as a "Brony" and all the furfags generally stuck to DeviantArt. There was much less porn on /b/ and what there was often consisted of "younger" girls. It was Ebaums rather than Reddit that the plebs visited from. The atmosphere was nicer and friendlier, the creativity flowed in a way that it hasn't for many years and the humour, while often still crude, was infinitely more high brow than the autistic, flaccid attempts you see posted between the dick rating and tranny worshipping threads now. If you want a taste of it, use the settings in the top right corner to filter out key words. Mine has a long fucking list. Pic related, it's a fraction of my filters but damn is it worth it.
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No, the guy fawks masked fellows were the ones who started the whole "anonymous is legion" thing. This was an interesting period, because when raids started happening, a new sort of /b/tard came around... the hivemind. Originally, /b/ was all about original content, reposts were the worst. Then the hivemind came, and they couldn't produce original content, because they were incapable of creativity, so they shitposted the same thing over and over again. Eventually /b/ found a way to steer the hivemind, marshalling private armies for lulz. When there wasn't a need, they had to invent raids to keep the hivemind busy, lest they lose interest.
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Anime was accepted on every board Most posts were just "LOL", "fail", "win", "winrar", etc, normally responding to the OP There was a heavy emphasis on OC for OPs Generals didn't exist, and people discussed things in multiple threads Overt politics were discouraged, people at most made memes about Bush being goofy There was a clear difference between boards during night and day, a fact which persisted into the early 2010s A lot more tripcode users, but nobody really gave a shit back then Mods and admins would participate with users regularly and discuss things with them
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Anime was accepted on every board It still is, unfortunately. >Most posts were just "LOL", "fail", "win", "winrar", etc, normally responding to the OP Now we have "lol", "cringe", "based", "based and redpilled", etc. I don't see how the old is any better. >There was a heavy emphasis on OC for OPs The screencaps on this thread say otherwise. >Generals didn't exist, and people discussed things in multiple threads Fair point. >Overt politics were discouraged, people at most made memes about Bush being goofy It still is. People always tell me to go back to /pol/. >There was a clear difference between boards during night and day, a fact which persisted into the early 2010s How does this not still exist today? >A lot more tripcode users, but nobody really gave a shit back then That's a negative. >Mods and admins would participate with users regularly and discuss things with them That would just derail threads. That's also a negative.
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>It still is, unfortunately. Now it is forced because of the limiting. >Now we have "lol", "cringe", "based", "based and redpilled", etc. I don't see how the old is any better. Post-irony is more tiring. >The screencaps on this thread say otherwise. There are two screencaps in this thread. >It still is. People always tell me to go back to /pol/. The only reason they say that is because there is a problem. It is a counter-reaction. >That's a negative. This is disingenuous. Tripfags never had any idea of being exalted exactly because it was common. It was just an alternative for people migrating from forums. >That would just derail threads. That's also a negative. Again, disingenuous. The commonplace postings of these mods and admins did not derail threads exactly because it was so common. Also, cracky-chan WAS, in some sense, OC. The whole 4chan cute-girl celebrity thing was pioneered by her.
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>It still is, unfortunately. It absolutely isn't. Try making a straight Azumanga Daioh thread on a board like /co/ and you'd be shitposted to death nowadays. >Now we have "lol", "cringe", "based", "based and redpilled", etc. I don't see how the old is any better. Because it wasn't le epic ironic shitposting >The screencaps on this thread say otherwise. One has OC as the OP, and the other is from 2008. >It still is. People always tell me to go back to /pol/. Overt politics is discouraged, but people will unironically argue political shit nowadays. You'd never have seen people actually getting into political arguments back then. >How does this not still exist today? Go to any board and tell me if there's a significant difference between daytime and nighttime. It used to be common knowledge that some boards completely changed character at night. >That's a negative. Not really, tripfags weren't fags back then because nobody gave a shit, so they weren't constantly attention seeking. >That would just derail threads. That's also a negative. Not at all, it was so common for mods to join threads back then that nobody gave a shit. They might get more replies than the average poster, but they were on-topic and it wasn't just people sperging out about a mod posting.
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>Now it is forced because of the limiting. Not sure what that means. >Post-irony is more tiring. Not a reason. >There are two screencaps in this thread. So the sample is unfair. Try again with another sample. >The only reason they say that is because there is a problem. It is a counter-reaction. Source? >This is disingenuous. Tripfags never had any idea of being exalted exactly because it was common. It was just an alternative for people migrating from forums. That does not imply an omition of the tripfag behavior that is common today. >Again, disingenuous. The commonplace postings of these mods and admins did not derail threads exactly because it was so common. Fair point. >>2608743 >It absolutely isn't. Try making a straight Azumanga Daioh thread on a board like /co/ and you'd be shitposted to death nowadays. That's only because it's offtopic. >Because it wasn't le epic ironic shitposting I disagree that that makes it better, but I respect your opinion. >One has OC as the OP, and the other is from 2008. What I meant was that it is an unfair sample, then. >Overt politics is discouraged, but people will unironically argue political shit nowadays. You'd never have seen people actually getting into political arguments back then. I only see that on boards where it is on topic. >Go to any board and tell me if there's a significant difference between daytime and nighttime. It used to be common knowledge that some boards completely changed character at night. /qa/ is one.
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All of this except people did shit on Bush when he did a dumbass thing. The difference is /n/ didn't have a Bush defense force to fly in and derail everything like /pol/ has for Trump. Actually, if you're wondering how 'golden age' 4chan would handle Trump, they'd do what would get the most laughs. They'd first work to get him elected, then after he became president, immediately turn on him since he is notoriously thinned skin and the idea of being able to troll the President of the United States would be seen as a holy grail. Sadly as time went on, people put their own ideology over what was best for laughs.
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>There was a clear difference between boards during night and day, a fact which persisted into the early 2010s >A lot more tripcode users, but nobody really gave a shit back then >Mods and admins would participate with users regularly and discuss things with them disappearance or change of these three is a direct consequence of this website becoming too big. Sure you can bitch about "not yer sekrit club", but the point still stands. Also, underages are far different in mentality. Mid-2000s underage posters (that were a substantial part of 4chan userbase) weren't as entitled and spoiled as underage posters today, so forming a community was far easier due to fewer clashes. Trolling was a art back then and wasn't as cynical as it is today, again a consequence of a different mentality. Of course nothing in the world will bring back "the good times" since different people are coming to the website. Even if 4chan didn't grow so much, the decrease in posting quality and the change of atmosphere would be noticeable. Lastly, the biggest culprits of all - the smartphone and social media Fuck phoneposters. Not all of them of course since everyone has a phone today. however, omnipresence of devices allowing literally anyone to post anywhere and media exposure brought the lowest common denominator to the door. God help us all in the coming years.
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I started lurk in early 2006, I think, or maybe late 2005. I noticed three major changes in the overall atmosphere on 4chan. The first happened when more templated memes like the advice dog spin-offs started to flood /b/ and there seemed to be more whining about IRL bullshit to go along with them. The second was when greentext and >implications kicked into overdrive. The third was an increase in political content. I think the first was in 2008, then second in 2010-2011 and the final in 2014.
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I met WT Snacks at MagFest last month and we talked about some old chan shit. He was a decent dude (although his music fucking sucks). Back in those days the internet was still relatively new, and the idea of internet "culture" was absolutely new. 4chan was leaps and bounds ahead in terms of being a wellspring of internet culture, just like its japanese predecessors before it. FYAD, ADTRW did not even come close in terms of explosive growth. He said that back then maybe a small handful of people knew about 4chan and people were so fresh that the idea of cancer hadn't had time to develop yet. Admins and mods posted posted in threads regularly and engaged in the conversation because it was such a tightly knit community. They could post in a thread and it wouldn't reach image limit like it would today. The zenith of "old 4chan" was probably somewhere around the time that Zone-tan did her 4chan4ever animation.
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How come there's an animosity against anime? You cannot deny it's becoming more commonplace among boards. Users are beginning to forget this place was modeled after 2ch, and began as an anime image-board. Very strange, I never thought it would reach this point. This doesn't come from an avid watcher too - I've only ever seen Lain & NGE. Could we ever go back to such a point? Do other communities exist which haven't reached this point? Are things only fated to worsen until the point of no return?
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the internet had culture, a modicum of it. The chaotic nature of this site made it a factory for online culture. It went far beyond forum etiquette. >decades old That's irrelevant, it wasn't until the .com boom that computers became ubiquitous. The idea of posting culture was unique to only a few sites, as was nowhere near the hotbed that 4chan became. >Curse the world with advice dog templates Just because low effort cancer exists does not invalidate the fact that 4chan developed board cultures and posting styles
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I guess. I feel like that sweet, sweet balance of "not a normal person but also not an insufferable autist" was lost long ago and I'd kill to have that as the site majority again, even if the only way to get it back is to have the site bleed out its current population. Everything polarizes over time. Young borderline normalfags grow up to become extremely normal. You meet them, and they are embarrassed to have ever had an actual hobby. Weirdos get weirder. If they don't do enough critical thinking, they end up collecting beliefs that are neither likely true nor useful just to show those normalfags. It's a rare person who doesn't fall into these traps. That said, I don't understand the complaint about the supposed "insufferable autists" here. I doubt they are actually a large presence. Most insufferably autistic posts are written not from a position of autism (obsession, nitpicking, missing the point, etc.), but from one of simple ignorance and newfaggotry. An autistic post is usually either plain trolling or some kiddo pretending to be a nitpicky autist to compensate for not having lurked.
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here was a discussion on lainchan a while back about the current state of the internet. You're not going to "fix" this site. There are other imageboards out there, but they're garbage or have only 4 or 5 active users. So what to do? Nothing. Its over. Stop living in nostalgia about shitty flash games and a decentralized internet. As more people enter a hobby, the shittier it gets. Same thing with the internet, its a consumer good now and has been since 2008/9. I've only been here since 2014, but in the 5 years of posting, I can see quality has been on a constant downward trend. Get a hobby that doesn't require internet connection.
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Give up Fuck off. When something gets cancerous you take steps to correct it. If you want to at least make an attempt to fix 4chan here are few steps. 1. Require anyone who uses the mobile version to buy a 4chan pass before they post. 2. Ban clearly cancerous and spammed memes like pepe and wojack. 3. Ban anyone who attempts to post on 4chan who has cookies from reddit or comes to 4chan from a hotlink from reddit. That alone will clear up a bunch of the garbage that shits up 4chan. Also it's not like the mods haven't do #2 recently when they word filtered s@y after it was spammed to hell and back. It's not like it's difficult, take the MD5 of every pepe and wojack posted and create a giant filter so that you can't post them. When people try to bypass it, give them a month global and add the new image to the filter. With #1 engaged, they can't easily avoid bans with their phone since they have to buy a pass. I got other good ideas to help clear out some of the recent newfaggotry, but those 3 points would do the most good.
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The Internet had had a lot of culture and memes for decades before 4chan existed. Don't pretend it didn't exist because you personally weren't there. And 4chan was never the "meme factory" it was made out to be; most of its memes have always been copied from other sites. It has helped to propel certain memes to fame, but that's no different from Reddit or Facebook.
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>take the MD5 of every pepe and wojack posted and create a giant filter so that you can't post them Mods are allegedly deleting frogposts. Pic related. If true, it still comes years too late. I tried making an MD5 filter, but there are many small modifications of pepe and Wojak. The fact that pepe and Wojak-posters are plebs who recompress their JPEGs again and again doesn't help. You need actual image recognition to stomp them out.
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>insufferable autists Nearly everybody I've met "from 4chan" past 2010 or so has fallen into that category. Previously I used to use familiarity with chan culture as a green flag (and was rewarded with friends I still play games with and talk to over a decade later) and I think I'm just ass-blasted I can't do this anymore. No place where I can reliably pull such compatible friends/acquaintances exists in this time. The pool has been diluted too much.
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>most of its memes have always been copied from other sites That has been true of just about every website since forever. The difference is that 4chan, SA and YTMND were reproducible for launching a larger percentage of the memes that were posted there. "Launching" is a more fitting word than "creating". A picture, a video or a short text is not really a meme in the original sense until it starts to replicate. 4chan often added that critical amount of initial OC it took to for an existing thing to acquire meme status.
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>Why not just make mobile session completely unusable? Because they might be cancer, but at least they have to pay for the right to be cancer. Will make it so that you can make money off them. We'd go full circle with Something Awful in that regard. >Get your 20 bucks ready >>2615896 >the problem is that no one with the capability to do so is really doing anything about it. True, Hiro doesn't give a shit and it looks like the mods are politically biased to let all the cancer from /pol/ run wild. We'd need people like modcat back who actually care about the community and are willing to interact with it. >>2615900 For the most part, any Japanese Culture that isn't normalfag stuff (/cgl/ or /n/) have a soft ban on shit like pepe and wojack. Compare any of those boards with normalfag interest boards. >>2615912 >>2615886 To add to this, 4chan was a place of idea so if they took something they tended to modify it to make it better. This isn't the case with places like Reddit which just steals material wholesale and doesn't do anything with it. To make it worse, 4chan is suffering from extreme stagnation where people would rather not risk creating new content and instead opt to make pepe/wojack rehash #104122. It'd gotten so bad that those people have attacked actual OC out of fear they'd be supplanted. A great example was the Bowesette meme when they drew comics of them murdering her.
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>Nearly everybody I've met "from 4chan" past 2010 I was talking about here, not IRL. People who go to meetups or mention 4chan when you've just met them in real life are a self-selecting group. The majority of posters doesn't go to meetups and hopefully has the good sense to not reveal their powerlevel straight away. Outside of cons I haven't actually met anybody who would just bring up imageboards. However, a few times I met an interesting unusual person and then months later found out they posted here.
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>strange how you take a non-answer as yes You don't seem principled. You would have said "no" if you weren't. Incidentally, confessing to going to /biz/ is more evidence you are a habitual frogposter. >which is so pathetic it's not even worth considering Then stop replying. >Go to a board like /biz/ and you'll find that pepe and wojak post are of equal quality to every other post. Yes, a/biz/mal quality. I am not sure you're even right. Maybe you could the least worst threads on /biz/ by looking for threads with the lowest concentration of frogs and Wojaks.
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All these "old 4chan was better" nostalgia threads are always filled to the brim with rose-tinted faggotry.
4chan is what you make of it. I've honestly had more fun in the last three years than I did in my first three back from 2006 to 2009. It's not that 4chan has "gotten worse". It's that you've been here too long and refuse to adjust to a changing culture. Instead of creating new memes, you hate "meme culture", whine about Pepe/Wojak, and don't create anything new to counter it. You whine about how much new 4chan sucks, but you never admit to how much old 4chan also sucked:
- Horrible language like "LOL", "FTW", "epic", "FFFFFFFFFF", "XD", etc. The language isn't much better now, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.
- Samefagging. Why do you think IDs were implemented? Because super autists would sit in their thread for hours talking to themselves, take a screencap, then spend MONTHS spamming that screencap over and over again talking about how epic that thread was. With the implementation of IDs, flags, and the thread IP counter, samefaggotry has been drastically reduced.
- Spam. Why do you think the Captcha was implemented? Because paid agents from reCAPTCHA spammed 4chan so moot would have no choice but to put it on his site? No, it was all the trolls' fault for spamming everything. You literally had programs you could use to dump images in a thread for HOURS with very little effort. You could have legitimate threads imagebombed to death and entire boards unbrowsable. Thanks to the Captcha, spam is virtually non-existent.
- Gore. Who the hell actually likes gore? "lel ur a sensitive fag" Not anymore thanks to the endless gore I've seen spammed on this site in its early days. Being able to see a guy's dick cut off or a cat beheaded and set on fire is not a "badge of glory". Gore is very rarely is seen on 4chan anymore.
It seems like every other week now I'm seeing a "remember when 4chan was good :^)" thread on either /a/ or /qa/. Instead of whining about the past and complaining about how everything sucks, why don't you change it yourself? "lel I can't mods won't do what I want"
Here are some steps that will greatly improve your 4chan experience:
1. Get the HELL off of /pol/. Seriously. /pol/ is basically the "new /b/" only it's more like /b/ combined with Reddit. You need to accept that /b/ is just a porn board now and that old /b/ isn't coming back unless Hiro ever decides he wants it back which is highly unlikely.
2. Get the HELL on the real "new /b/" boards like [s4s] and /bant/. Those boards are filled to the brim with good content but nobody posts there because "it's not fast like /pol/."
3. Stay on /qa/ as /qa/ is basically like old /a/ only a little bit more random. Also visit /jp/ once in a while as that board hasn't really changed much. Yes, they STILL post Flanfly at 2:00 am.
The thing is, it's a good bet that 80% of the people that post in these nostalgia threads are actually "ironic" posters in that they don't actually think 4chan is any worse right now than it was in the past and are just looking for an easy bait thread that draws in attention and nostalgia threads always do the trick. If 4chan was really as bad as these threads make it out to be, there would be Discord groups right now planning massive website-changing raids to shift the "meme landscape." That isn't happening, and it's very clear why: 4chan actually isn't worse than it used to be. In fact, it's MUCH better than it used to be where it ACTUALLY COUNTS and worse in the areas that we WANT it to be worse in for the sake of bait replies and attention grabbing.
Even if you don't want to admit it, you know I'm right.
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it was just as fucking stupid except now more and more people want their involvement to be recognized, like theyre some sort of hilarious meme lord. what made 4chan interesting back in the day is, most of the content wasnt forced meme shit. it was simply funny because it was naive and *mostly* innocently mischievous pranks. not because people demanded or forced it to be "funny." then came the attention whores, not cam whores, the people who started trying to be soooo edgy that theyd be forever remembered (forgotten in a year) for their audacity.
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People actually had conversations, shit posts sure, but there weren't canned responses to everything. People called eachother faggot niggers ironically. Leftist organisations started because of threads on 4chan. High level trolls of Scientology and internet security organisations. Occupy wall Street had if nothing else coverage here. Genuine racists were made fun of incessantly. Memes were born here. It was much like the market place of ideas on the internet. Now it's just the toilet of the internet.
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It was better, but 4chan was never good. It's pretty much 9gag now, with the same stupid responses to the same stupid questions over and over. I'm only here for the occasional ylyl and g/fur threads.
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It was good. Before 9gag, funnyjunk was the watermark to avoid. YTMND was cool and relevant. It was all about pranks and less about personal armies. There were no trap threads. There were 'You Rage You Lose' threads, call GameStop and ask for battletoads, read leader standing by, triforces, gore.. still had dick rate threads.. there was simply more discussion. No one got super butthurt. No one knew what 4chan was. Now it's full of edgelords, political faggots, and cucks jacking off to black dicks in white women. Every other post is about Jews. That used to be ironic posting, but now it's real. I miss the old /b/. I miss moot and his faggotry. The word bans, the duckroll, all of it.
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I miss the days where if you got offended, you were the outcast. So many SJWs and butthurt faggots on this board now. Any suicide thread would have 100 replies of "fucking do it" instead of "OP, you have so much to live for!" You'd be careful of doxxing yourself or anyone you knew because anons would find you by researching the far reaches of the internet to ruin your life. Now we have bullshit "faces of 4chan" threads. People were actually funny back then, now it's the same replies to the same threads. I laugh and cry a little when I see someone post a cheese pizza and faggots legit start talking about pizza. This has become 9gag. /b/ was never good, but man, compared to what it is now, /b/ used to be fucking good.
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Yes, I can tell you. It was contrarian. If you said a dumb thing, someone would say a smart thing opposing you. If you said a smart thing, someone would say a dumb thing opposing you. When Bush was the president, we mocked him for being an an idiot even if he wasn't and when Obama was president we laughed at what a watermelon eater he was even if he wasn't. Anything and everything was fair game, but for a laugh. That's all been replaced with actual real live hate and actual desire for putting each other to death by humorless dicks who are not here for a good time, but to shill for Putin & Bannons apocalyptic wet dream. Everything goes to shit anon. Even /b, which was always shit.
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(Op) yeah, I wondered what happened between the times racists were made fun of and when the word nigger became commonplace or when actions with positive causes like the trolls on Scientology tuned to anti SJW trolling. I realize they aren't necessarily the same group of people, but was there some kind of disillusionment or series of events that led to it? I heard once that gamergate and Tumblr were instrumental in changing the overall beliefs of the users
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your still wrong. 4chan is/was just contrarian by nature. 4chan was considered far left during the bush admin. you should ask why we drew in the alt left as well. the reality is we have no real political affiliation and ideas are held to their own merits. you are from a world where wrong think should cost you your livelyhood and need/are used to a totalitarian nanny to make sure your faggoty feelings dont get hurt. 4chan has always been the place where one thread would be literal CP and the one next would be people posing as 14 year olds to get pedophiles sent to jail. caturday was invented on 4chan, yet animal gore and abuse is posted daily. 4chan organized the first de-centralized multinational protest with over 9000 participants but everyone wants newfags to fuck off. i can already tell that your such a total tool struggling to forced an identity on this place that no matter what you write you are going to be wrong through and through, no matter how many ancient memes get posted.
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(Op) Right so when much of the west was supporting the Iraq war and a security state, 4chan was supporting the opposite, and now that much of the west is supporting shitty left neoliberalism, 4chan goes as far to the right as possible. 4chan is often referred to an alt-right or racist website by non-users like myself. I guess I overestimated the beliefs of the users as monolithic and all encompassing, when those beliefs are often the result of individuals' desire to be contrarian and nihilistic. I wonder how it'll change over the next US presidency and other big political events. Please correct me if I'm wrong
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I always think it's interesting how early 4chan really didn't give a fuck about namefags, there was no principle that staying anonymous was intrinsically preferable to giving yourself a name, that you SHOULD stay anonymous and if you didn't you should be reviled for that mere fact alone regardless of what you posted. Early 4chan just didn't care. You see tons of namefags in a lot of early screencaps and nobody comments on that fact. Everyone back then came from forums where having a handle was necessary and a lot of people enjoyed that sense of community, that you could have an ongoing correspondence with posters across the board. Now if you dare to give yourself a name there are innumerable posters that will pitch a fit, like having a name is antithetical to 4chan itself and not an idea that only started many years after 4chan was created.
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I respectfully disagree. "Forum Culture" with its notable identities whose reputation is an incentive to uphold their posting quality is magnitudes more desirable than "social media culture" where ironic memers have no connection to the board they post on besides what dopamine they can extract in the from of (You)s with the least effort.
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Probably because back in the day even people on forums or any other site with usernames were still more or less anonymous. Almost nobody was associating their real identity with their internet activity. Now that that's changing I think many 4chan users felt greater pressure to avoid the change and demand hardcore anonymity. It's sort of similar to how "lol" fell out of use for a while. It's more accepted again today but there was a period in our history where you'd be called a normalfag for using "lol" and it's because the rise of cellphones made it a commonly used thing. Now that most phones use auto correction your average person isn't using many accronyms anymore I always found it a bit sad, but it seems 4chan does like to change itself just to be different from the mainstream. I guess in some ways it's a good thing and some ways it's not
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That just really isn't true. There were certainly obnoxious personalities who were hated because of their faggotry, but it wasn't like they were hated because they used a name, it was because they used a name and acted like total shitheads. Obviously 4chan isn't one person, but in early 4chan there was a distinct lack of general consensus, like there is today, that 'namefagging' was reprehensible in principle.
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And I would even argue that it wasn't until around 2011/2012 that the constant drumbeat of forced anonymity really took hold of 4chan and fully solidified censure against namefags. Up until that time many boards still had a pretty active community of namefags, many of whom were tolerated, accepted or even seen favorably by a substantial part of the board (thinking of /mu/, /x/, /a/, /r9k/, /v/ and /sp/ around that time in particular).
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Times change. But one thing is pretty clear, they weren't very self-critical back then at all. That's what I think people miss about it. Not because of the content or anything it's just that "roll with the punches" attitude and how laid back it really was, as compared to today where every single post is scanned and judged for how well it fits pre-defined patterns whether for good or bad. I don't even use reddit but I can't help but notice that 4chan's self analytic and judgemental attitudes these days seem pretty similar to the environment I would expect to form around voting systems like karma. Given the two, I think it's pretty obvious why old 4chan was the backbone of internet humor in its day. Things can't grow very well in rigid self analytic communities.
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Tripfag and tripcode user were different things back then. We hated tripfags just as much back then as we do now. Most people used names or trips. This is a fact. What is not a fact is most of them were tripfags. Most of them were normal average people that came from forums to here and put names or trips on eventually. A small minority of them were the attention-whoring cunts out to make a name for themselves. Trip-cracking was a regular fun thread we had that cracked peoples trips, which made tripfags especially mad when it happened. They eventually started transitioning over to secure tripcodes, which is where the banner "secure tripcodes are for jerks" came from. Also, Forced Anon on /b/ was the beginning of the end of this sites actual community and transition to the shitty meme content site that it is today. Equally the permanent removal of snacks, the one ballsy enough to tell moot to get fucked with his silly rules. snacks banned weebs, attention whores, gaiafags, raid fags and so on. Without him at the helm and the anonymous hivemind raid faggots from FYAD, the whole site dropped 40 IQ points in half a year. Fuck you menchi, weeb cunt. Fuck you as well moot for listening to him. Anonymous Discussion isn't even used on Japanese boards, both the major ones have forced IDs globally. (well, one uses 3 IP octets last I checked, which is more like /int/ flag tier identity)
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I think it was just another FGSFDS to be honest. EVERYONE knew who moot was that wasn't a dumb newfag /b/tard. He went to conventions for fucking years before that video was posted around. He was pretty much just trolling them for fun, like most of us did. It was always fun ruining their raids in advance and seeing them get so rectally ravaged.
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Here's an aspect of the anonymity discussion current users of 4chan have no idea of (save for /bant/ because most users are either too old or too new to be anonymity activists): For any group or person, identity is very important, simply by the fact that humans are individuals and not a hivemind. Forums and other pseudonym-bound communication forms very obviously provide a way to maintain identity. But anonymous boards are not an opposite to this, rather a different approach to identity. On imageboards, identity manifests in the form of memes, inside jokes and unspoken standards and rules. As a form of group identity, when someone posts anonymously on 4chan they're not abandoning their identity but rather adopting the identity of Anonymous and a 4chan user. On a forum you have member-since dates, perks, post counters and so on. On an imageboard you have filename timestamps, typing styles, tripcodes and memes. They're all constructs built to help people recognize community members and tell them apart from newbies. Remarkable is that the anonboard specific constructs are mostly born out of intuition with no software being purposefully written to fill the need. Imageboard identity develops entirely naturally. Also note that if a meme's purpose is to let people who know it recognize each other purely on natural instinct it follows that when a meme goes 'mainstream' the original group associated with it should no longer value the meme, but should also have no logical reason as to why. This is exactly what happens, and the only logical reason most can give is that mainstream memes are shit because they are mainstream and therefore shit. And finally: Identity creates memory. When people can recognize each other, they know each other's levels of investment, knowledge and experience in given discussion topics. They can also form ideas of who to and to not trust or listen to. They can know people's motives and ideologies. And all of this will serve discussion, if you've been on any board here that's lacking in identity in either or both board- or individual terms you'll know how utterly unproductive they are. The same threads are repeated daily by the same people without no one realizing they've argued about the same thing together for years. No one is assumed to understand the basics of anything, so discusssion never rises above that level of sophistication. Now I'm not saying that forum-style identity was better in any way, it carries it's problems too. I'm saying that identity (be it group identity or idividual identity) is important for a base line of discussion and that currently most of 4chan has none. The ultimate red pill about identity on imageboards is that identity is content and content is identity.
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There's a reason for that. In the early days Moot was basically another user, a tripfag with special honors, back then 4chan was small and hadn't really solidified it's identity, I wouldn't count that era. But then, as you can probably see from some of the later screenshots, he was still a relatively active member. Even after the site grew too large for him to tripfag (due to his mere presence derailing threads), he still tried to communicate and discuss issues with the userbase using events, and tried to be as transparent as possible when it came to things like moderation, board issues, etc. During this very approximate era, from, say, 2007-2011, Moot was generally well beloved. If you want to pin specific dates to this very vaguely defined era, I suggest Project Chanology as the start, when 4chan exploded into mass-media the first time and it's userbase rapidly grew, and Moot deleting /r9k/ in January 2011 as the end, because "he didn't like the community". Over the years after that, Moot grew more distant towards 4chan, in part at least due to real life taking up more and more of his time, and he started to enforce more ill-advised and aggressive policies with no or extremely little transparency. For most users he was eroding the good-will he had built up over the years, and that continued until he eventually sold the site and moved on. Hiro/Mootwo isn't perfect, and I honestly don't trust him to not have ulterior motives, but for the time he's been in charge (which, let's face it, has to be like herding millions of cats) he's done a better job than Moot did towards the end. Where late Moot would have drawn a hard line and enforced it at the cost of the community and site as a whole, Hiro is more compromising and willing to see eye-to-eye. A good recent example is /v/ and NeoGAF, if you go to /v/ Hiro has put up a sticky stating they're making a temporary exception when it comes to politics, because NeoGAF is so closely tied to videogames.
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I could sort of understand that if his actions were targeted at specific trouble-children, like /b/ and /pol/. He did attempt to shoo away Gamergate when that happened, but his later actions as a whole seem scattershot at best. /r9k/ as I mentioned, the crackdown on furries and bronies, etc.
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Control characters stem from a time when it was unthinkable that any but the American language would be used for computing and ANSI was the only character set available. Nowadays the biggest obstacle to inter-regional communication has been solved with unicode (and if you want unicode explained, Computerphile did a video with Tom Scott a long time ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4). The thing most people don't understand, however, is that the OS and font still has to have unicode support and coverage respectively to properly display unicode character, so the reason why you're sometimes seeing characters which don't look right or appear as unprinted characters (not unprintable, but as rectangular cursor-like blocks) is most likely because your font doesn't support those characters. If a language has a different writing direction (as many do), it is sometimes useful to use control characters to have it format properly, but it depends entirely on where the text is handled, but as the above outlines, it's not related to having it display the actual characters themselves. The only real problem is that unicode is ever-expanding and no font has yet achieved 100% coverage, but that's another point - for normal communication on the internet, the font called dejavu and its variants (serif, sans serif and monospaced) is more than sufficient.
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I actually do wonder about that, because I remember going to the guro boards on Ayashii in the later 90s and later Amezou and Nameless World before I found SA and RH (which would later lead me to 4chan), and I don't remember that there were nameless posters, as such - except for one that board the name of which escapes me but which I vaguely remember which enforced nameless (like modern-day /b/), the rest had people using names all the time (although I doubt tripcodes were used then, they might've come later as a way to verify identity (before they became possible to bruteforce in a matter of a few days for a 8-character tripcode or weeks for a 12 character tripcode).. Mind you, I'm going off memories that could get a drivers license and drink in most states, so I might be mis-remembering stuff.
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The porn isn't the problem. Gays aren't the problem either. Both are threads of EXPRESSION, which is essential for /b/ to live. The problem is twofold: 1) Pro-Censorship groups who think they should complain about thread content they personally disapprove of. They came from social media exposure and they think because 9gag and Redshit and Facebook customize their content and experience, that 4chan should too. FUCK them and if you're one of them FUCK YOU. This is a COLLECTIVE, not your personal page. 2) More recently, the cancer destroying this site is the all the planted /pol/ subhumans and Russian/Macedonia shills we have here. All the braindead retards posting from scripted answer keys about how Trump is a great leader and the "mad liberals". It's these assholes who have stagnated /b/ in the last year and a half.
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The power of the internet, Lmao, most people are mindless drones. The government,corporations, and anarchists all know this. They use social media, and the Internet in Nepal to shape the way you think and respond to things. Don't ever think they are not trying to use this site. Hence the very things you complain about ruining your super secret club. Lurk around and make the association with the threads being posted and what is going on outside your mom's basement, because it is real and it is happening. You're all subject to cognitive biases. I've been here for like 10 years, b was always a flood of shit. Every once in a while we stumble across an incredible gem of lolz or impact. You remember those but forget all the shit threads since the beginning.That's how it is now, that's how it's always been. You put a thousand monkeys in front of typewriters most of what you get is bananas, traps, and literal shit. Every once in a while you get Shakespeare. If you want good content, create it.
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It was slower and as such some actual discussions could develop. Nowadays there are too many high volume threads like generic porn dumps flushing away these threads which need a little bit of time. As such the only thing that remained were heated meta discussions (filled with generic troll posts) about trump, circumcision and gunlaws which never lead to anything because nobody is interested in the actual content.
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a couple things killed /b/: 1. the overall global turn into political correctness. now you can't call someone fat. You can't crack jokes at anyone's expense. Even comedians have to be careful what they say. 2. Over exposure. Victims of our own success. Raids, etc - but ultimately, the 2 final nails in the coffin, were the public rise of Anonymous, and the fappening. It just drew all the kiddies to this place and they felt the need to radicalize in the only way they know how (by shiposting and acting like edgelords). 3. The generation of creatives that had something to do or say here, grew up. This is akin to the passing of the age of the guitar gods. Kids these days put no effort into any craft, so they will no longer be any Jimmy Page's. In this world, no more kids toiling wiith MS paint to make the impossible possible, because there are just no better tools. These days, with filters and apps, everything is easy. Kids are lazy and complacent. No effort of sacrifice has been made. Even porn. When I was a kid, scoring porn was a massive achievement. Today, porn is everywhere. And in its abundance, it has become passe and has to be basterdized. So kids post the creamy log threads all the time, and all that bullshit. Its a flood of crap that dilutes any possibility of something of merit happening here. I still lurk. But its not the same. Will never be the same. Just like the internet will never be the same as it was late 90's early aughts. Sorry kids, you might think you are rocking this shit like gods, but the truth is you are playing in the sawdust, ashes and ruins of what was once the tip of the spear. To be this old, feels good. I saw it start, lived through the best parts. Now I just have to witness the debasement of it as the kids toss around in crap. Sucks to be them.
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This is stupid. You couldn't call someone a nigger in 2006, either. But /b/ still did it. The second point has some legitimacy to it, but /b/ was dead long before the fappening happened. 4chan never really got significant enough news media exposure to draw people it. What brought those newfags was people posting shit like lolcats and mudkipz on Facebook and 4chan getting this reputation of "where every funny thing on the internet is made." /b/ was never any sort of golden generation of creative types, either. /b/tards were dumbfucks. What they had that this generation doesn't is computers. The rise of the smartphone has completely killed any interest in lurking on an imageboard doing dumb shit for hours on end. People don't "go on the internet" anymore as a general activity. They get the thing they want instantly and then go do something else. Not gonna call you a faggot or anything because that whole "I'm cooler than the rest of you" attitude was one of the newfag things that ruined this shithole. I'm not any better than you. But you're still a faggot for being wrong.
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You would arrive and had no idea what to expect. Granted, there was still a lot of shitposts but organic content both good, bad and horrid was much more prevalent. For probably the last 6 or so years the site is just a series of generic posts. IG/FB threads, pics you shouldnt share, various soft core porn genres, gay or trap threads, ylyl threads, rekt threads you cant see on the common web, obvious bait political threads, god tier threads, etc etc. You are never surprised by anything anymore and everything is very predictable. I still lurk because every now and then something genuine happens but it has become far and few between. I think since this site got popular in the late 00's it has become more generic. There are a number of other sites like it that are more interesting but nothing compares to 4c's traffic. Also, raiding has essentially been criminalized and discouraged. In the early days, this site was littered with cp. It was basically the spider man to any shitpost threads. Its omission from the site is one of the only positive changes we've seen. Tldr, the site has become normalized and very predictable. 4chan was always shit but at least you never knew what to expect and you always came back for more.
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actually, you don't seem to have very good reading comprehension skills so I will indulge you a little longer. My point about political correctness, is that due to the overarching social stigma of saying anything even remotely offensive, has created a new kind of offender, as well as a slew of SJW's - all of which its result is expressed on these boards (and elsewhere on the net). Before, nobody cared if you did a raid. And few people cared if in 2006 (which is already pretty late for web standards) you called someone a nigger (depending on where and to who you said it). DEFINITELY, nobody got fired for cracking a joke - which today is completely the norm. So anything, raids, revenge porn, creeps, etc., are nearly forbidden. The world is too uptight - for a real /b/ to exist. Combined with..... my second point you didn't get. Before, /b/ was not so in the public view. Yes, it started to infuse itself with "outsiders" earlier than 2012, but that is why I said the two final nails in the coffin. I never said that that is when it started to deteriorate. Those were just the final blows to this imageboard. There is no claim /b/ was the gold standard of anything, except a world without limit to do and say whatever - and a certain type of computer user, enjoyed that kind of environment. And once in a while, something awesome and fun would happen. Not awesome in the new "I just want to be validated and need attention" that you live in - awesome in the "I just saw someone walk on the moon for the first time", that my generation had. Its like watching two rocket boosters land at the same time - I was giddy with joy when I saw it - because to my generation, that shit is like magic. I understand you don't know that because you weren't on IRC servers, you never raided FTP sites (or fserves) for early mp3's, and you have no idea what kind of language, tone or mood existed back then - but to us who did go through it, this is all crap
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You retards mistook the increase in politics for an increase in racism because you can't see the obvious truth that racism is primarily caused by nigger proximity. And the nigger word wasn't fucking "ironic", I dont even know how you can even get the idea that this hive of unhinged degenerates was fighting le ebil racism by sayin the nigger word and making it look dumb. Like posting people getting their faces cut off and other unspeakable shit went along with pretending that nigger-ghettos are beautiful gardens of Eden only being kept down by the white mans greed to protect some fucking politicians fake feelings, give me a fucking break. This nihilistic hellhole is racist because it annoys the worst people and because RACISM IS FUCKING TRUE. Race matters, races aren't the fucking same, the feminist race grifter shit is the dumbest ideology ever to exist, and being around niggers fucking sucks.
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4chan was mostly a place for ideas that were not acceptable in the mainstream. Keep in mind that 4chan existed during the bush era. When it was socially acceptable to talk about nuking the middle east, 4chan would be a place to oppose that. Now that it's socially acceptable for gay people to exist, 4chan grows to hate gays, mostly trannies these days. It's a combination of echo chamber, 4chan not being a monolith of identity and opinion, people coming and leaving, and free speech.
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The word nigger got thrown at everybody, also /pol/ was more about Nazis and wasn’t about being a basic “i hate niggers” middle aged racist, also not at all about worshipping Trump or various right wing media stars like Tucker, for example I never saw a Rush Limbaugh thread there ever. /b/ was more ironic/absurd, it’s really gone down the shitter since Trump got elected and a bunch of political under-15s and over-30s flocked here, also just the fact that meme culture spread to other places like Facebook and Twitter, and that memes (or at least the concept of memes) even started being taught at school, also that moot left, can’t blame boring MAGA scum for everything
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4chan was racist in a dead baby joke kind of way, yeah. until we realized our racist jokes made this place a safe haven for legitimate racist garbage. that's the catch with dark humor and irony. they were so good at being Trojan horses. A racist shithead can fish for fellow travelers by saying a racist joke, and if it doesn't fly, then they fall back on insisting it was just a joke. So we killed dark edgy humor. We did what they feared. What they didn't think we would do. We burned the fucking forest down. Don't worry, it'll come back again. Wholesomeness and kindness are never sincere for more than a year or two.
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his Anon is correct and people seem pissed about it. I got here just before Obama got elected and everyone was called slurs back then. We were infiltrated by a low IQ population at some point. “Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.” — René Descartes
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well. I would say overall no. Earlier on it was populated by edgelord teens who would make racist jokes but were pretty big about racial equality/egalatarinism in general and in thier adult lives would tend to lean fairly left socially when it comes to racial equality and justice. But then the proper SJW crowd started invading 4chan, reddit, other places which led to a HARD over correction which led to an anti sjw crowd to begin to form here that started out with the same mostly libertarian liberal group who saw sjw culture as being about minority superiority and equity over equality. But then that segment of the group started to get pushed out for the harder conservative anti sjw crowd. Then when trump won it emboldened the groups situated around the conservative sjw crowd but not neccessarily within it to speak up and be on 4chan more. So the unironic racists/fascists/alt right/far right/fundamentalist crowd started showing up more and more. So the rates of overt racism kinda skyrocketed. Neo nazi ideas, race realism ideas, racial purity ideas, anti minority ideas. all that kind of stuff started becoming more common features here.
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you're full of shit. Early 4chan was literally all pedos and loli anime. All of it. The ADTRW refugees people like kirtaner. The flood of people to 4chan started around 05-06, when the moderation at SA got horrific and heavy handed, and it started driving people out in droves. 4 chan went from pretty much straight pedos to comedy posting almost immediately, althought there were frequent LS posting outbreaks and constant JB threads up. The dam really broke fully though around 08-10. Sites like SA were total carebear garbage by then and everyone left, this plus the media hysteria and smart phones led to a big influx of shit posters and normies. But yeah, "you were there" in 06 and 07.
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My understanding was no it wasn't always racist. I think everyone showed up being... as neutral as a human can be given his life experiences. Everyone had their dose of indoctrination. But then people spoke about what they really thought. Some anons were more brilliant then others, some japanese anons were really good at posting tid bits of information. The way it is today is simply the most honest outcome people could possibly have. If 4chan is racist then reality is racist.
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I'm with you, but, unfortunately, it will not go to the "glory days". We need moderation help to do this, and the mods are faggots. Hiro also wants to make this site profitable, so obviously he wants more users, not less users. Unless you convice Hiro to ban cancer, ban newfags, ban HTTP referrers from Reddit, Tumblr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and make frequent CSS hacks, 4chan will not go to "the glory days".
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Here's one, it isn't a good one Overall though, in 2005 there were so many more people willing to be a community and to play games together and make OC Before 2006 it was many things, 2005 they were making a lot of "memes" before memes were the cancer that they are known by now. It was just a more productive community, after Habbo in 06 the users started really hating the site and it died really quickly that year. It was such a powerful community back then. A lot of people think Habbo was the first raid but it was actually in 2005 when /b/ raided the "emo" "cutting yourselves" forum. That was hilarious but most people don't remember it.
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Ugh, the way people talked back then is so obnoxious. Makes me appreciate the present 4chan more because while we still have a lot of meme spam, at least it's not every. fucking. post. like it was back then with everyone talking like a 13 year old scene kid with their "oh noes" and "mah harbl." I've talked to the person who discovered that the password was right there in the source code. It's funny that he's one of the few people there that isn't screeching like a monkey. Ironically he's one of the most politically correct people I know, which just goes to show you that the "old guard" isn't remotely what people imagined it to be. It's people who have matured and adopted the so-called "tumblr mentality" that everyone seems to hate. Yes, the people you complain about are the same people that were posting on 4chan all those years ago. And you have the gall to claim that "only newfags would think this way or that way."
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There are still threads where people are willing to have fun and make OC. They're just harder to find because these days it's more about being edgy and trying to be superior to other users, and sjw vs /pol/ wars than about having fun and making OC and remix culture. These days I can only bear to discuss some anime in this site and otherwise only post or lurk in the specialized slow boards like /ck/ and /ic/, which are for the most part unaffected by the retarded culture wars of the larger boards. for other stuff I go to smaller imageboard websites, not 8ch which is cancer, but specialized around a certain show, genre or whatever, they're quite slow but at least the few responses you get, oftentimes days apart, tend to be good.
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Today's memes are mean-spirited and smug compared to 4chan's older, more self-relativizing (and actually funny!) catchphrases. Literally and tbhfam are literally just there to get on other people's nerves. Based is a gamergate thing. Cringe and edgy are literally from r/cringe. This and kek are overused by brainless retards who have nothing to contribute to the thread (it's literally like an upvote). Toxic is literally a tumblr meme. Ugh was to mock the guy I responded too. It doesn't surprise me that these memes are liked by today's generation, since it defines who they are: a bunch of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, holier-than-thou smartphone addicts. I know because I'm literally a meme specialist tbhqhwy famalam.
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I still remember it as fun and dynamic as late as 2010. Problem I think is that raids (which, yes, have always been banned) do a lot to build and maintain site solidarity, and as the moderation of them has tightened, the place doesn't have that shared experience to unify it anymore. GG could have become something, but instead /pol/ and /r9k/ took it over, turned the whole thing into a cancer, and made us look like fools to the rest of the internet. Sad, ain't it?
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I think that you should let your longing for an idealized version of a website as it was over a decade ago now go. You aren't going to improve 4chan at all. You're better off starting your own imageboard (which will fail 99% of the time) and telling your friends about it if you want to have a fun close knit community, or alternatively use /s4s/ like you already do. The internet is going to keep changing whether you like it or not and you'll never recapture what it used to be like. Also, I haven't seen people on here get this worked up over reddit in a long time.
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4chan and chans are done. It's stale. The next "4chan" is going to rise from the ashes organically in a radically different format. Who expected a shitty weaboo knock-off of a Japanese anime and porn "imageboard" to take off but it did. It'll probably be much more anonymous and is likely going to spawn somewhere odd like within a pedo network on TOR. You can't force a movement. If the sentiment is there, it'll happen.
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The thing I miss most about the old internet is the carefree nature of it. Even on sites where you have to register, nobody sees your face, nobody knows your name, so putting out something that's a little simple or silly or childish or has bright colors is fine, and even fun. The internet is a place where you don't have to front or pretend to look cool, you can just be yourself and test out your own humor. Even if you make a dumb joke it'll 404 soon and you can try again. I can't help but think that people are holding back these days.
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I feel you. I miss the wonder of it. My 12 year old brain on here was fucking amazed every time a new type of thread was made, a new advice dog, or some new shitty newgrounds animation. I had my uncle's hand-me-down laptop and was too stupid to make anything myself, so I'd sit and wonder who these geniuses are that know how to "edit pictures" and "use flash". And like you said, it was carefree and anonymous. People made funny internet videos just for the sake of being funny, not so they could tell their YouTube subscribers that the algorithm sucked and they were being "robbed" of their revenue. I'm really just venting again and don't have a very good direction to go with this, but god damn I miss when the internet was the wild side of the world, where if you were a computer-savvy adolescent faggot, you could find a way to save some boobs to a flash drive and show your friends. Glad I grew up doing that tbh. I'm glad I did that instead of trading kiks and having unlimited porn on my iPhone at age 12. Not that it's not okay, and it ain't the kiddo's faults. I'm just glad i enjoyed the stupid simple times of interwebs
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For /b/ specifically: Less porn, more ylyl threads, and a lot more actually random stuff. Even thinking back to around 2014, I had a lot more fun in /b/ than I do now. I started a cult with some people I met on here about praising Ultralord from Jimmy Neutron, got around 40 followers on Twitter and Reddit and wrote a short Ultrabible with a couple of those guys before it died out a year or two later. I watched a few livestreams of kids contemplating suicide before pussying out. Even as soon as 2015, I remember some dude on /b/ saying that he would light firecrackers at a terrorist attack memorial in France, and seeing articles about it online the next day. All I have gotten from /b/ in the past couple years has been the occasional funny greentext and a lot of loli/furry shit that I didn't want to see in the first place. Modern /b/ isn't horrible but it's definitely gone downhill. Hopefully it will fix itself and go back to the old ways but I'm kind of doubting it, sadly.
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things used to be more fun, there used to be more like-minded people. things seemed to be more cohesive. 4chan has been overrun by special interest groups, activists, and newfags. people treat 4chan like an aggregator now and mostly use it to get things (porn, memes, greentexts, etc.) The people that use 4chan for fun and discussion are a super small percentage now and their efforts are essentially meaningless as they do nothing to sway the neverending tide of utterly mundane shitposting that now consumes the entirety of 4chan. it's too late now
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so i just found out after posting for almost two decades that gootmoot created 2chan *in the us* while at university. in fact thats the entire point of the site, having servers located in the us allowed it to bypass nip censorship and made the site popular also glowniggers have a pretty strong stranglehold on chans. basically only this single honey pot is allowed to exist. almost all the other chans you think exist are shut down or dont allow ips from outside the country to post. there is no alternative until 4chan itself shuts down and the glowniggers will make sure that never happens also 4chan isnt anything close to a free speech site. its crazy to realize there is basically not a single website in existence right now with more than two people posting where you can post legal comments as per us law. its simply not possible, you will get banned fro wrong think or whatever despite not breaking any laws
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