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Well, the thing about 4chan when I was a regular user, was the churn. A meme would get posted, and everyone was falling over themselves to make it more potent. The cream would rise to the top, and then break out into the broader internet. It was an amazing incubator for incredibly potent memes. This was largely a product of the size of it's user base, it's anonymous posting, and it being an image board. There were no upvotes or downvotes, just people constantly reposting the best memes on a fast moving and low quality board.
This simply isn't possible anywhere else, either because of technical reasons (ui, account requirements, small user base) or policy reasons (moderation, 3rd party terms of service, etc). If 4chan lost it's place as the black beating heart of the internet, the closest successor seems to be twitter since effectively anonymous accounts just spam bullshit hoping to get picked up by the algorithm. In much the same way 4chan was fast moving and low quality with a huge user base, so is twitter. And the policy reasons twitter couldn't generate 4chan level memes have been removed.
4chan isn't fast moving any more either unless you're signed in (which defeats the entire purpose of being 'anonymous') and the site ultimately died in 2013 when moot picked the wrong side (Gamergate) for whatever reason.
The splinter sites are closer to Reddit where you can just splinter your own board if you don't like whatever moderation, which is a solution, but not necessarily a good one. 4chan's board structure was generally OK though it could have used some better indexing for general threads, which 4chan never evolved a solution to because it's ultimately permanently stuck in 2005 (and the splinter sites aren't better) and the network effect kept it alive.
4chan has survived exoduses before under similar conditions but, again, that was 12 years ago and things are different now.
Luggage Lad was tired of being a cuck and was hoping he could get some from the danger hair feminists in his social circle if he ruined his legacy for them.
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