e: I’ll concede you can find different opinions there. Just, I wanna see a video feed of an unsuspecting person actually trying to go there to, like, learn.
Learning about opposing viewpoints doesn't count as learning?
Each board has its ridiculous bullshit, groupthink, absurd extremists, edgelords, etc. once you know how to parse that you can quickly navigate to quality posts.
Each board of course has different signal:noise though, somewhere like /lit/ is probably 1:20 whereas /pol/ is probably 1:500-1/1000. But the quality posts are totally different from what you'll find anywhere else. Different users and audience.
And this is ... a good thing?
False dichotomy.
Just because I don't like the same radio station you like - doesn't mean I want to live in a bubble, and only listen to my own music.
Not the portion of people in your immediate vicinity who happen to read/listen to it.
I don't think it's good, that's why I don't go there. But the discussion was never whether it was good.
It's not so much the voting that makes things lopsided but when posts are ordered or deemphasized based on those votes or if the actual moderators are opposed to free speech ideals. I can think of at least two low-moderation forums that do manage to host people of opposing opinions for the Ukraine war and other topics so it's not like 4chan is particularly unnique, just bigger and better known.
And say what you want about 4chan, but the most popular open source machine learning frontends come from /g/, that is, Automatic1111's stable diffusion, ComfyUI from Comfyanomyous, and oobabooga text-generation-ui for running LLMs locally. It's a place which is hostile to the lowest common denominator of the internet, which functions as a great filter for better or worse.
If you want a comfortable safe space that shields you from being offended, the popular social networks are great for you, but if you have thick skin and can handle unfiltered conversation, there is nothing more visceral and organic than 4chan, despite all its warts.