It's an odd world where 4chan back in its worst days had a better community than fb, Twitter or reddit do today. And that's with the gore and other unmentionables.
Yep. It's incredible how you can have a reasonably intelligent discussion in 4chan, while in reddit and similar vote based sites, once the mob comes to visit the site, they take over and no one can have a good discussion anymore.
It's funny that 4chan has fallen victim to bad growth as well. The gamergate controversies and the 2016 election really brought out the worst of the people there. I remember years ago it wasn't nearly as toxic and you could sometimes have a good time there. Some boards are trying to cling on to those times
We definitely had different experiences, then! I would say most forums, even a lot of the mainstream ones, tolerated some level of 4channess. Facepunch forums ~2009 was the first time I thought "wait, are these guys actually Nazis or just think it's hilarious to act like they are?" Stickpage.com forums ~2005 taught me an important lesson in not clicking URLs from domains I don't trust -- ESPECIALLY if they end in 'hello.jpg'.
Like I said in my original post, that's the lens through which I viewed the internet. It could be different from yours.
I'm not trying to 'normalize' 4chan but, honestly, I've bounced from plenty of Discord servers that are indistinguishable from 4chan. I think it's OK to recognize that at least some part of the non-4chan web is still very 4channy.
It was a good time for the internet, back then. I do miss those days. I've tried to visit 4chan a few times in the last decade, but the community is... different now.
4chan is almost certainly less toxic than Twitter at the societal level. And due to its design (anonymity etc) it may also be less toxic to the average individual participant, in terms of emotional/psychological harm.
4chan mostly is an interesting place because of how extremely toxic everyone is to each other but how little their insults mean to you because everyone is anon. The problem is when they start targeting real individuals and posting their personal info. It goes from jokes to real harm very quickly.
But I'm not sure its really any worse than mainstream social media. Witch hunts start on all of the large platforms. WhatsApp and Facebook are responsible for countless literal witch hunts where the accused were killed or brutally beaten. 4chan seems tame in comparison.
Honestly I find 4chan much less toxic than Twitter in practice.
Like I can find some of the most horrible, infuriating and potentially illegal content on Twitter whereas on 4chan it's relatively rare depending on the board and the occasional shooting that gets posted on there first or whatever.
4chan circa 2004-2013 is very much not 4chan in 2023.
The site does not influence as much as it is influenced at this stage, you see memes cooked up on telegram and twitter which then filter back to 4chan, this backflow would've been unthinkable before — 4chan was faster, it was first. It is no longer that.
please continue to stay the course, moot. For better or worse, I love the site and its community. 4chan has been arguably more influential and relevant to the internet as a whole than many other similarly sized communities. It's managed to weather the influx of new users very well, which is something that has greatly degraded the quality other sites like reddit and tumblr.
When I paid any attention to 4chan, say 12 years or so ago, it always struck me as an odd place with some real creeps. But, I never imagined it'd become the hive of negativity and sadistic nihilism it seems to be today that's bleeding out all over the internet.
The internet feels a lot darker than it did when I was a kid.
4chan is mostly visited by gamers, otakus and adolescents. It's hardly any meaningful representation of society. Most people don't know what 4chan is.
Twitter is infinitely better than 4chan for what you're saying. On Twitter, even non-anons speak their mind freely. On 4chan only because of their anonymity do they speak freely, but in real life they probably don't have the guts.
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