A *chan site has many layers a user must go through to finally fing a decent discussion (or the epic lulz). You have an outdated confusing UI, the sheer amount of useless content, the lingo and the highly offensive content.
After you learn to process and filter all that, you start finding the really good stuff. Or, as I like to say, "Gold floats on shit. You just have to be brave and reach it"
Summary: 4 chan users identified a training site of ISIS and pinpointed it on google maps. One of the users knows a friend of the Russian Minister of Defense and sent him the information, resulting in an air strike.
Not that 4chan cares about these things. They just want to see people blown up.
You understand 4chan isn't a single hive mind right? Each board has its own culture, and even moreso: each general thread has it own subculture. /sg/ (Syria General) is one of the best place to get data on the Syrian civil war. The folks there aggregate data from a massive set of sources and include people who actually live in Syria or can speak arabic.
So you know, instead of parroting the same spam all around this thread. Maybe you should take two seconds to appreciate that you neither understand nor are willing to make an attempt at understanding what goes on there.
You can make a case that /sg/ is a good source of news, but it's part of 4chan. I'd rather follow individuals doing reporting on something more neutral like Twitter.
Astrodust, I think your understanding of politics and journalism is naive and one that deserves a thorough rehabilitation through a deep deep engagement with pol.
/sg/ teaches anyone who dare engages with it that information, collection, dissemination, acting upon it, appreciating it, comes from collective intentions (not attitudes, reddit cultivates attitudes; 4chan cultivates intentions, the dynamic of the whole raiding culture, the whole you must do to participate instead of merely like/solicit likes aspect) and, if you become acquainted with pol, you will learn viscerally what collective intentions look like, you will see it elsewhere.
Reddit is for the cuck, it is a circle jerk. the lack of identification, liking mechanism, and the culture of anonymity makes it less about affirming attitudes and more about intentions and the lack of moderation on chans is why/how intentions compete.
to repeat: intentions vs attitudes. narratives vs bias.
the differences between these concepts become incredibly illuminated if you engage with pol.
Plus, if you're going to play the "cuck" card, this conversation is over. I'm so tired of that shit.
ok big boi
There is a lot of shilling and a lot of trolling... It seems to me that /pol/ posts has become >50% shitposting from trolls and shills and less political discussion.
The real influx of users into pol started with the european refugee crisis, not the presidential elections.