Why do people use 4chan

Not everyone is disgusting. But, compared to, say, imgur or something, you are far more likely to come out of 4chan with a terrible taste in your mouth I would say. You are also able to come out of it with a different perspective you'd never otherwise gain due to up and down voting being missing. A merit of 4chan is that you get exposed to content you don't like.

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.

KozmoNau7 on Feb 9, root parent next [—]. You can certainly post thoughtful comments, but they will invariably be shouted down by shitposts and outright abuse.

It's not worth it, because the 4chan hivemind doesn't want it. The boards are too hectic and posting moves too fast. Judge much? Care to elaborate? I was as much a member of the community as anyone else, I believe I'm allowed an opinion on it.

The romanticism comes from the fact that 4chan has been incredibly influential in internet history. Chaos is a ladder, as they say in GOT, and some of the best content out there has come from 4chan. The lack of identity and point system also brings out some of the most interesting conversation.

I find the point system on reddit lends itself much closer to a 'hivemind' where everyone ends up conforming to the same opinion, which makes things boring.

Same goes for HN. But perhaps most pathetically, even the moderators are brainwashed by it, as if the positivity trends of some mob are the smartest ruler to obey. Enjoy the vacuum of the echochamber. In space, no one can hear you scream. It's for making fun of a woman's OKCupid profile.

Here's a sampling of comments: "She's a pleb with a mental illness. This was all within about 90 seconds of opening the site. These communities are extremely toxic, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and more than anything, downright cruel.

You have to take the good with the bad in the case of 4chan. Yes, if you randomly go on the front page of any board, it is not exactly weird to see low quality threads that were either just recently made or have been freshly bumped. And you do not know why the thread was bumped without going into it. It may have been a poster who came in to complain, or to shitpost inside of it because it was a shit thread anyway. This is just part of imageboard culture unlike other sites which actively hide all the bad from you.

Unless a thread explicitly breaks rules, is completely unrelated to the respective board, or is cancerous in its own right, it won't be deleted right away unless it has some backlash either by live feedback from anons or reports. On 4chan, you see all the bad that comes along with the good.

Or no good at all sometimes. Depends on whoever's posting that day and how they feel. It's free as in freedom and pretty great usually. I used to spend a lot of time on these boards, for years when I was younger. I know how it works, and I am familiar enough with 4chan to know that this language is common and normalized calling people fs, ns, etc.

I'm familiar with the culture, the "irony" that justifies this kind of language, all of it. I was immersed in it for a long time, I "get" it. And it's not OK. But it is undeniable that the overall culture is one of hostility, aggression, and cruelty, especially towards marginalized groups not to mention the creepy sex stuff, which also pervades all boards. It's not a model for a healthy internet community by any means.

A hotbed for lawlessness where violence and extreme ideologies fester and have real world consequences, the worst of the mids web. I don't deny that 4chan is a cesspit, but like I said, you have to take the good with the bad.

From my experience, as a person who is of a minority race, as long as you do not mention your race, literally no one cares. You're perfectly welcome to join in on the shitposting. Back then and still today, it has been race and sexuality related bigotries, but 4chan would be happy to insult you in any other fashion as well if given the opportunity. But since those words still have power given to them by those who choose to be offended by those words, they are still by far the best weapon of choice for 4chan users to rally behind.

Do I endorse it? No, but I'm not against it either. While I don't think 4chan is a model for a healthy internet community, I believe the internet is healthier if 4chan exists than if it did not. Some say it is the last bastion of free speech on the internet and I would agree.

I can't name any other place I would go to see what I see on the chan. The whole site reminds me of teenagers who are trying too hard to act rebellious. The problem is that it apparently has a large enough audience that some adults find that kind of behavior acceptable. Incredibly influential in internet history? We were doing all those things before reddit and 4chan. Memes in the form they took on on 4chan definitely weren't a thing before.

The word meme itself was a sterile almost scientific term. I'm not sure how old are you, but if you were around at the time this happened early to mid 00s and active on imageboards you would surely have noticed just how different the experience was.

Surely the memes of 4chan fame came directly from SA and related forums? I think you're just noticing the more egregious examples which garner a lot of attention. The fact that 4chan has been called so many things suggests a feeble attempt to make sense of chaos. Many of the recruitment techniques of the so-called alt-right were piloted there; many white nationalists started out as 4channers. Consider Anonymous, the hacking collective that picks as its targets groups like Nazis and Scientologists.

Also: Remember lolcats? Have you been Rickrolled? The site traffics heavily in exploitables—funny images begging for manipulation. Give that Pikachu a face! Yet this cannot last. At 15 years old, 4chan has reached adolescence. Up till now, trolls—children—have been in control.

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