From what I can see /pol/ in particular is extremely popular and massively influential in the promotion of shockingly vile politics of a sort that until recently I've never encountered anywhere even close to the mainstream.

It is my understanding that it was created as a containment board, but it's popularity and relative power has soured me on the whole site.

Here's the problem: /pol/ gets so much traffic that I can't imagine that its visitors do not cover a fairly broad subset of 4chan's entire user base. This means that if I contribute to any of the other boards I am contributing in some way to the intellectual capital pool drawn upon by the sorts of people who hang out in /pol/.

No thanks.

I'm not the only person who feels this way. I've heard others say this kind of thing too. There's a lot of people who once visited the site who no longer do so. Boards like /pol/ seem to be killing 4chan as anything other than a more Internet-cool satellite of Stormfront.

I used to visit /lit/ and /ck/ until a bit more than a year ago. I don't anymore because the /pol/ scum made it their mission to pollute the other boards with their vitriol. I visited those boards a couple of weeks back and /pol/ has basically succeeded in killing those boards' culture. Lots of people have left and you are not one or two threads away from a vile racist comment. /pol/ has basically destroyed 4chan culture in all of the boards and all that's left there now are a bunch of disgusting racists.

That was what I observed too. Never been a big user of the site but I used to stop by from time to time. A year or two ago it was brigaded by fascists and now it's dead. Can't stand it for more than 10 seconds.

No more so than you are contributing to the incredibly toxic subreddits like Redpill or the like by posting on any other reddit.

4chan is smaller and tighter. It's a different beast. Reddit is massive and those boards account for a small percentage of its activity.

2ch is similar, they have a very large Japanese nationalist/far right board that is popular. Doesn't stop people from using the rest of the site which is nothing like the racist political board.

>There are things called containment boards on 4chan for a reason.

I don't think there actually are, in practice.

How do you have any sort of "containment" on an anonymous forum? There's nothing at all stopping /b/ and /pol/ from stepping into any other board and either playing along or not. The only containment there is a state of mind.

They do work though. Typically a board like /g/ is on topic and containment boards are used to shame offtopic users. That might sound unconvincing and "a state of mind" but social dynamics do work. If there is 1 /pol// shitposter in a thread they will be called out as bait or told to go back to their containment board. It's a useful rhetorical tool on 4chan and it works better than any literal rule because it comes organically from the board's culture.