Lets be honest: memes aren't high quality content when compared to the types of free content available on the net.

4chan has spawned a lot of memes because it was one of the earliest places people appreciated that sort of low-effort anyone-could-do-it content, but to say it drives high quality content is to decry any competently drawn stick figure as bourgeois.

Considering that one of internet's strength is the democratization of content creation, low-effort anyone-could-do-it contents are inherently high quality.

Besides memes and internet jokes, what are examples of high quality content created (or originating) from the "chan" culture?

/g/ makes useful software on occasion for example. after 4chan pioneered webm as looping gif replacement (long before imgur doing the gifv thing) they made webmcam and webm4retards for example. The latter by its mere existence also highlighted github's overzealous application of community policies.

A bunch of indie games started their life there too.

And then there are derivative and mashup works like fanart, translations.

I only visit a few boards, so i'm probably missing a lot.

But we could apply the reverse Sturgeon's law: in any sufficiently large community, 1% of content will not be crap. 4chan is not special, it's just large.

Facebook is my counter example. Its the biggest social media site on the internet. Produces nothing that gets reified in the form of internet culture.

magicman, academia should study why Facebook is a sterile wasteland

4chan, Reddit and HN are Internet natives.

Facebook and Twitter are fucking tourists.

Facebook is what mainstream compares 4chan to. A nice safe sterile place. Good for family values and advertising.

But it's size together with the temporary aspect of it's content greatly accelerates the iteration process, culling bad content and refining the good one.

Actually, 8chan had webm embeds before 4chan (and with a higher size limit). They were first AFAIK, but maybe some smaller chan did it sooner.

The visual novel (think "Choose your own adventure with graphics") Katawa Shoujo, while not made by anons, has its origins on 4chan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katawa_Shoujo#Creation

Adeptus Evangelion, Chapter Master, and Ruby Quest all came from 4chan's /tg/.

Most people don't know, but Tox (just posted here a few days ago [1]) started on /g/.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657891

There's the vidya gaem awards, an alternative to the mainstream awards ceremony.

I Ii

II I_

Pretty sure the Loss.jpg obsession started with Something Awful.

Despite vehement protestations on both sides, the population overlap is more than substantial.

There's clearly even some overlap with HN.