I understand that the general audience may need an explanation of the relation between QAnon, the attempted coup, and 8kun, but it's not as if the people who tried to intervene with democracy were all on 8kun reading their "secret messages". Some people go to "the source" but many find the reprehensible behaviour tolerated on those websites to be off-putting. Instead, the rambling and keyboard mashing gets filtered and forwarded to Facebook and other general purpose social media.

Someone larping as a deep state agent isn't doing anything wrong necessarily, the QAnon folks are interpreting literal gibberish as a call to action. Like astrology or animal sacrifice, people are looking for patterns to confirm their preconceptions or to try to make sense of the world around them. 8kun didn't create the Qult, years of corruption, lack of education and a festering, though not necessarily misplaced, hatred for politicians did.

8kun is an easy target because it lets politicians and news agencies point at something bad. The claims of terrorist content, racism, and child porn are not necessarily wrong, but the same content is also posted all over other social media if you go looking for it. The biggest difference is the scale at which the websites operate and big tech's automated moderation (versus 8kun's human moderation). The Qultists gather in "normal" social media like Facebook but because normal people use that it's difficult to point at it and say "this is bad and should be banned".

It's funny how the USA so strongly enforces freedom of speech by law but at the same time drives away websites like 8kun because of the terrible things people say online when they're allowed to express themselves anonymously.