If you look at the remnants of the earlier chans (created between 1 and 3 years after 4chan) which never really gained much momentum, you'll see that they had a much different culture at the time. In a way I wish we could return to this idea of the "small chan", as a way of escaping the grinding politics and hate culture that's on some boards (like /pol/) which tends to leak over (jokingly or not) to the other boards.