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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26192 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Ah, but 4chan predates reddit, and its community uses the n-word as a way to try (futilely) to keep its community within the bounds of people who don't take words too seriously. If you want, say, a community about biking that isn't a subreddit, you're likelier to end up with a community of people who love saying the n-word and sometimes, rarely, discusses biking. Compare to the subreddit which is going to be mostly about biking, except when progressive politics talking points seep through and you're not allowed to say anything else you'll be either piled on or modded. Normies either agree with the progressive politics, or they don't even notice them as we don't notice the air we breathe, but at least they're probably there to talk on-topic. The alternatives are selecting for people who do notice the air, and they'll be more interested in discussing that than the main topic.

4chan has a few other features, besides just its age and uh, forbidden words:

  • from the name, you know it's japanese influenced. so it will naturally attract people into anime and other japanese net culture stuff.
  • it's an image board. you have to post a picture to start a new thread there. Replies often have images too. That makes it a lot more sillier and meme-based than a text-board like reddit
  • they also allow porn and really gross, disgusting images. Which tends to filter out a lot of normies.
  • it has weird, quirky features that aren't really documented, like how "tbh" gets automatically turned into "desu." A lot of these are really annoying, but it does tend to create a more closed community of people motivated enough to learn how to use it, despite being fully open to the whole internet
  • threads disappear after a while, so there's still that "ephemeral" sense. You can't easily go back and search for old content. This creates a sort of "tribal knowledge" where only the "oldfags" fully know what's going on.
  • mods can and will ban you temporarily, but it's just a slap on the wrist. It can be hard to tell what the rules are, or why any post in particular triggered a ban.

All in all it's a weird, quirky little community. It would be interesting to try and create another community like that, without explicitly copying 4chan. Discord has some of that, but it's just too fast-moving for me or any other normal adult to keep up with.

No offense, but all the posts here seems like they're very touristy views of the site and completely ignore all the numerous downsides of the site.

You can search on 4chan's archives more easily than reddit's. Reddit's search function is worthless and requires you to use google to search site:reddit instead.

One of the worst parts about is that a few shitposters can ruin threads way more easily than anywhere else, like there are /vg/ threads that are unusable because a bot will find them and spam them, there's shitposters that can and will ruin entire boards. It is proof that no moderation, or more like light moderation will certainly not result in better places for discussion.

This is worsened still by the hivemind of 4chan where anything that goes against the common view of the site "Everything is shit" will generally be ignored and be shitposted about. Say you like a book and you wanna make a thread for it? I really doubt you'll find better discussion for it on 4chan vs other sites. Because most people will ignore thread, a few will shitpost, and maybe you'll get one or two replies that are actually relevant to what you want.

And that's not to say that there aren't good sides on it. 4chan/imageboards are really good for the small, niche communities for particular subjects. Like there's a tea thread that's very nice, but anything outside of those niches is generally worse than other sites.

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