People always hype up 4chan nowadays like it's LiveLeak on steroids, but generally speaking any time I browse 4chan it's felt much more mundane. The only major culture shock that most people are in for is the degree of hatefulness and shamelessness that you encounter on 4chan, especially in the memes and vernacular. It's the one place left on the internet where truly Nothing is sacred, and the userbase is happy to make that clear whenever possible.

That said, it's absolutely not worth the time, unless you are bored and feel like most of the internet is too sanitized for your tastes. It's just, unquestionably a big waste of time at best.

I don't think it'll ruin your brain, but it probably won't expand it either.

Yeah, the legendary exploits led me to visit it a few times but the signal:noise was abysmal.

Visit 1: porn, porn, porn, funny creative joke, porn porn porn

Visit 2: porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn

Visit 3: porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn

Visit 4: porn, anti-muslim rant , porn, porn, porn, porn

Visit 5: porn, porn, porn, porn, porn, porn

You know that tech is not discussed on /gif/, right?

I thought I was on /b/. I tried a few, nothing inspired me. This was 15 years ago.

Well /b/ is mostly porn, along with few other boards. Relatively "normal" boards are hosted on 4channel.org domain. That said, 4chan is mostly "shitposting" and memes, don't expect serious discussions.

/b/ is practically a containment board. even the dedicated containment board, /trash/ is more browsable than /b/

/b/ hasn't been "/b/" for longer than /b/ ever was "/b/" to begin with. if that makes sense.

tbf people even post born on /biz/, they just eat the ban for it, and even when it isn't outright porn it's often very overtly sexual images. The only thing that makes it browsable is the Wingman browser plugin.

There is an extensive list of boards to choose from with very different types of people, but if porn is all you look for, porn is all you get. The site is like a mirror reflecting your desires and inclinations, reaffirming and reinforcing your fixations.

That's exactly right. You've been successfully filtered.

Who do you trust to be the filter?

that's nothing like that on biz or g, stop FUDing

>maybe not on /g/

weeeeeell, people did spam lolicon and gay furry porn in like 2011 for a couple months but the mods swooped in and it's been a well-enforced blue board since

the real problem with /g/ in the current age though is the thought-terminating memes. it's no longer really the bastion of oblique insight it once was. opinions on the board have ossified to the point you're not going to find out about anything cool from them first. this is common across most blue boards these days honestly; they are no longer really tastemakers

Perhaps /g/ is worse, but I feel that applies to most established forums on the internet. It's particularly noticeable if you've bounced around various subreddits that it's just the same 5 opinions rehashed endlessly, and anyone who disagrees has left the building. You just get a different set of 5 opinions when you jump to a new subreddit.

This is why I feel moderation, or perhaps curation is a better word, isn’t a bad thing. A hardcore 4channer might not think so, but I feel the lowest common denominator isn’t. That is to say it just produces a noise that isn’t beneficial at all unless you want to be tickled that way for the lulz.

r/askhistorians is a fantastic example where curation produces high quality insight and debate.

That's an odd example. askhistorians is meant to reflect current American historians' scholarly consensus, and rigidly moderated to stay that way. While this does sometimes produce insight it's one of the least debate-oriented places on the internet.

I mean it’s not called debate historians

I've seen plenty of posts in which people had conflicting accounts of historical events, including anti-Western, anti-Eurocentric, and anti-Imperialist ones, and as long as they are well-sourced they are fine.

The bigger issue is that r/askhistorians is an English-language subreddit, and English is the most widely-used language of the Western-Imperialist powers, so it makes sense that if you ask in their language, you are mostly going to get their answers. The people who would have equivalent expertise from other viewpoints are mostly not lurking that subreddit.

And yes, it's not meant to be a place to debate, it's meant to be a place to get access to historians' subject matter expertise. When 2 historians' accounts conflict with each other, they aren't supposed to start arguing about it, they're supposed to each make a separate reply to OP with their sources.

I’m lazily designing a Reddit replacement, can’t really build one while I’m still employed and may never build it.

If you’re not chasing infinite growth, or even if you are but want to set the right culture at the outset, I think the HN moderation model is ideal. Just delete low quality and blatantly offensive posts and ban repeat offenders.

4chan is filled with people asking easily googleable questions and the user base generally seems to be about 17. I know that’s the age when I visited the site the most (thank god it was before the 2016 election which irrevocably ruined the site). It has a very low bar for discussion and the signal/noise ratio is terrible unless you’re willing to wade through piles of shit to find a gem here and there.

4chan for sure has useful insights like a very low (captcha) barrier to use the site and a very low-ego culture. But the discussion quality is actually abysmal

I hope you get your chance to build one.

I think a central aggregator that is Reddit still produces the less friction. I haven’t felt compelled to sign up for any alternatives sofar. It’s an interesting field at the moment, and with Twitter in flux, a smart player might be able to take advantage of the unique opportunity.

I do too! It’s not just Reddit and Twitter I want to replace. I think Quora and Stack Overflow, even Wikipedia, had some good social ideas as well. Most of these were reunited by growth hacking (diluting out the good original user base) or trying to juice out as much revenue per user as possible. They’ve all been enshittified unnecessarily - even though not all are profitable, in most cases where they aren’t, it’s because of over hiring. Running a website isn’t that hard

Unfortunately I will need to switch to a non-pseudonymous account to launch and really talk about it, so can’t get into too much detail on this one.

I honestly think that, if these sites had been ok with measly 9 figure valuations and didn’t go chasing 11 figure valuations (or, a huge nonprofit treasure chest, or allowed petty busybodies to exert undue influence on the site), none of them would have gone to shit.

what the fuck kind of boards are you browsing to see that?

Looks like you're right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36301884

It's interesting how people go to a certain board specifically infamous for posting that kind of stuff then are shocked to see said stuff, then generalizing the entire site off that one interaction. It's as if I equate /r/AskHistorians, a heavily-modded academic sub, to /r/(insert raunchy sub here).

The users from one are going to be around on the other. This is true everywhere. When Reddit banned various hate speech subreddits you stopped seeing those guys "just asking questions" about the inherent inferiority of certain races in unrelated subreddits anywhere near as often.

Holy shit, in what world is /b/ not full of gore and porn today. Outsiders can't help but make confident sweeping statements about a site they don't even use. This comment tree is laden with cringe-inducing posts, you think using 4chan is so cool that you're willing to pretend that you know anything about it?

4chan from 2003 is not 4chan on 2023. If anything it's tamer than reddit was after the digg exodus.

That does not describe the average /g/ thread at all.

Most boards are rather tame.

Also, I think most avid 4chan users have their filters set up in a way to get rid of most garbage simply by excluding posts with certain keywords.