I was a teenager, so it's possible to a degree, but the things you're listing in my memory were there in significantly smaller degrees, and have since completely taken over the site. Back in the day, there was a hell of a lot more "Yellow van", "epic for the win" and the like. Now it's 'america is a far left cultureless “nation” and its tranny enabling (((mutts))) will never be white no matter how much they inbreed with other “whites” in their shithole trailer park'.

Yeah, the disgusting stuff today always was there, but it was a relatively small part of the site, and now it's the vast majority of it. I'm not going to pretend that it was ever "good", but you can't pretend that it hasn't changed at all.

I don't think the ratio of shit:lulz has changed.

I think your ability to tolerate shit to get to the lulz has changed.

You can look at some old archives: http://yotsubasociety.org/ and https://purl.stanford.edu/tf565pz4260

I'm downloading it now to look. I have a strong feeling that 2007 /v/ will look strikingly different from modern /v/.

I'm sure that it will be different. Dubs guy hadn't given way for Patrick Bateman worship yet.

I don't think that it would be any less hateful, though. It's just that most of the hate was ironic early on...

There's just this weird thing about how if you perform a ritual ironically, you're still performing the ritual.

That last line reminds me of the old refrain: "Ironic shitposting is still shitposting." Also that old fake Descartes quote: " Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."

I wholeheartedly agree with this analysis, and submit that those users condescendingly suggesting that it's we who've changed and not 4chan may never have actually experienced the kind of 4chan to which the parent refers. Things were, are, and presumably always will be done for "the lulz", but what those things are, at whom those things are targeted, and why those targets are chosen have changed dramatically. A bright, prescriptive mockery [0] has given way to a sullen, threatening white-supremacism dressed up like the historiography of the fall of Rome, complete with a would-be-kingmaker priesthood who half-ironically wield meme magic to (successfully!) sway real-world events [1]. And this transition is important, because much of the internet's "culture" is created on 4chan, only making its way into the wider world once it's been sufficiently, uh, digested [2] by successively more "normie" intermediaries.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20221128150706/https://www.mondo...

[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/memes-4chan-...

[2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-life-cycle-charts NB the presence of _digg_ in the lifecycle; 4chan has been accepted as the spawning-pool of memery for a long time

>much of the internet's "culture" is created on 4chan

And other lies 4chan users tell themselves to feel important.

It wasn't even true back in the day, a lot of stuff came from SomethingAwful and Newgrounds... Then came Twitter!

The categorical error is that none of it was a "come from", rather it was a "passing through". The sites were all popular waystations, but none of them owned the creativity of their users, they just happened to host the party, and once the party died down something new came up and the same users moved on to that thing. Thus the large number of Twitter users who will post things starting like "in my 4chan days" "in my SA days".

>> I read posts from a schizoid that claimed to have evidence that the government was influencing his life through the ratings of popular animes on My Anime List.

This was called trolling for the lulz, you fell for it, & seem to have not realized even 15 years later.

Schizoposting as a fun pasttime has been a thing for users of 4chan/online forums forever. Go watch some South Park episodes centered on Gerald Broflovski trolling. Can’t remember which season off the top of my head. It may help you to understand if things don’t click.

Anecdotally, actual schizophrenics tend to post endlessly into their own little void on traditional social media, often not slightly being aware of or caring that they have either absolutely zero engagement or anybody seeing their profiles at all.