No.292
>>291Lot of people drank the right wing kool aid and the place became a right wing echo chamber, that tends to kill anything anything good in a image board and drive regulars away .
Reason that happen is that edgy apolitical irony can't substitute for real political values, to use a expression
"He who stands for nothing, will fall for anything".
No.293
Honestly, the more mainstream the website became the less niche it was, making administration attempt to please much of the new groups, or having to shut them out. As more people joined, the choices by mods had greater impacts and set a larger precedent. We also saw a shift from boards being specialized interests to more general topics of conversation. I know the original lainchan was founded after /g/ started to become soykaf. And as time went on, specifically to /g/, we saw a move from technology on a deeper level to more discussions about consumer technology and the company side of things.
No.294
You grew up.
No.297
its hard to pinpoint a time. i'd say right around the time of the whole Occupy Wall Street thing, and the subsequent news coverage is when it started to TRULY go down hill. Remember when /b/ used to have a variety of goofy threads? now its just traps, dick rating, "pics youre not supposed to show", and any and all other variety of porn. How random.
The second big nail in the coffin was GG, and by association, /pol/. Theres no hope left for that site.
However, most of the niche boards are rather comfy places to hang out. I like /m/ quite a bit and still visit regularly.
No.299
>>293>>298This is just an idea, but what would you guys think about a chan with an artificial population limit of let's say 1000 users? We could even implement a system similar to the one of ostracism in Athens, where a member on a regular basis (perhaps couple weeks or so) is exhiled for an amount of time (a months perhaps) and in that person's place a new member joins. In the time when an old member is exhiled, it could be encouraged to come up with ideas for discussion or create OC so as to not be expelled again. There could also be an artificial "death" time wherein if a member is idle for too long, that person is removed from the group of members and placed into the group of those who aspire to join. This would prevent the site from becoming dead. Combined with users contributing the lowest quality material being voted to be exhiled to reflect on what they did wrong (or didn't do at all) and learn and improve from that time, an active community which has high qulity discussion could form.
Of course this is all hypothetical and highly flawed, but feel free to point out said flaws nonetheless.
No.300
Good luck getting a population in the first place
No.301
>>300It could be open for anyone to join until the population limit is reached.The limit could be higher or lower than what I stated in the previous post, as that was just a general number
No.302
>>291I think the type of person who populated 4chan drastically changed when the media started to cover it. That, and the avg. age of the dweller dropped. I don't know what you think, but I can tell it's dominated by early teens nowadays. And that's why I haven't lurked there for years. Pretty certain most people in my age bracket left as well.
Things started to get very serious when the whole anonymous soykaf jumped off. The fun was sucked out of it.
I miss the chaos. It felt really 'punk'. Free.
Now it's overly moderated & inundated with teens who are still so fascinated by tits.
The beauty of the place for me was it was neither an echo chamber for left or right. It was once the most free place on the internet.
No.304
>>299I think the key thing for this type of website would be engagement, which having some sort of system for idle users would help combat. The flaw I see with a voting system within a tight knit community is that there could be groupthink, where content could be streamlined, which might not necessarily equal low quality content, but it could become alike. The exile system could help this, but the members that get exiled would have to be very specific to ensure that content stays original and fresh.
No.335
>>299I would assume pressure to perform would be on a lot of peoples mind. Especially if it's such a unique and high quality "club" that people line-up to enter it.
It does sound like an interesting experiment, finding a venue would be difficult though.
No.339
I was 13 when I started using 4chan in 2006.
>>337I used the first iphone in 2007 to browse 4chan.
I'd say 2011 was the last really good year of the site.
That being said I still go to /fit/ daily.
No.341
>>291Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. And there's the politics. It's been drifting steadily right for a while now.
The only board I ever really frequented (and still sometimes do) is /tg/, in any case. Which is still putting out good content: I can usually find something interesting or worth my time on the top page. So I may not be the most qualified to participate here…
No.342
op here again, i had another realization regarding the weaboos. I remember that in the past the biggest problem on /g/ was anime brewing soykaf. You would have people posting some soykafty waifu and threads sometimes just ending up into an anime dump. Now we dont have that anymore, those people left and got replaced.
At least we talked about technology when they harassed us, unlike now.
No.343
>>337I feel the same with regards to /g/
It's like it is stuck in an infinite loop.
No.358
>>355The Admins where so inefficient.
4Chan went backwards instead of forwards.
Look at their soykafposts, high class from the 2010's.
Most sites didn't even have that quality back then, look at the trolls and the general threads. The rules are all fucked up, I can't bear to see that.
The new posters neglected the legacy others had left them, whats more they completely destroyed it.
It will take generations to set things right.
No.366
>>299It's an interesting concept, but I think it promotes the whole "secret club" concept a little too much, which I think can attract the wrong sorts of people who only want to participate in it
because of this system, rather than feeling that they have something special to contribute to the community.
No.419
4chan has been compromised by TPTB.
They're just using it as an advertising and psychic driving platform now.
No.420
>>292People like you are the reason this world is going to soykaf
No.421
I doubt half of you were even around back in the TRUE "golden age" of imageboards.
Back then being a Japanophile wasn't frowned upon because you know, those websites were created for people like that in the first place.
Imageboard culture died as soon as the normal person fucks started using it and ostracizing the only people who truly belonged there in the first place.
No.442
>>299Conceptually this feels a lot like reddit with the whole "upvote/downvote" thing, while also bringing the already obnoxious "secret club" attitudes to a new height, I don't think it could work very well.
No.443
>>442if I was trying to implement something like this, I think to members, there would be a menu to vote on posts, but total statistics would be invisible, i.e., if the fifth post in a thread had been voted with approval 200 times, it would remain in the fifth slot, and no one without an admin console could tell how it was being received (perhaps the poster could tell).
Further each post would be tied to an id but it would still be invisible to normal users. this way points are aggregated, but I cannot simply downvote someone because I dont like them, as their outfacing name remains indiscernable from the others'.
Hence even if the first reply in a thread is widley dissaproved, it would remain in the first slot. (unless its removed by mods for rule violations). The only consequence for that low rating would be in perhaps eventually triggering an exile.
No.444
>>443I still don't think it would work much, due to the way the sheer existence of a rating system influences the mindset of the posters and what sort of things they would bring up. And I just doubt that it is something good, people would try to figure out what the "community" approves of an pander to nothing but this. The end result would be a fairly homogenized space or people ignoring the rating system altogether, both of which aren't really what you are looking for.
I think the way to go is honestly just building a community of people that the members thereof value and do not want to disappoint (as silly this might sound) even when they are posting without an identifier. For instance here I am very much interested in maintaining at least some level quality when making posts, because it feels important to me and not because there's rules or anything like that, not due to anything external.
No.450
Everything is soykaf because it's not exaclty how I want it and the people with real lives hurt my feels
No.619
when 4chan started, there were less people on the net – by orders of magnitude.
No (popular) smartphones, higher barrier of entry, less reason for normal people to really be on the internet.
It had a communal feel since it was small and most users had a 'tech' background. It also offered freedom since anyone could post. Was also super easy to pull shenanigans on the internet back then since most companies didnt even have dedicated staff to watch such things and bandwidth caps were minimal (~05).
An anonymous imageboard was novel for the time, and the raids / oc / knowledge made it extremely entertaining and fun.
Then people from newgrounds and people who only cared about 'hacking' and 'raiding' started joining on /b/. Misinterpreting the culture as scaremongering newscasters gave it press and lolcats/caturday/icanhazcheeseburger was being shilled. This was at the same time that facebooks giant PR campaign / social norm intervention bullsoykaf was happening.
The new population started to drown out the old population, especially on /b/ but the other boards were mostly untouched.
Later smartphones got more popular / people learned about the internet (Facebook) from the tv / paper media and for whatever reason reddit got popularized especially among university kids.
IMO most learned about 4chan through original content that was posted on these sites. Stores started catching on and selling stupid meme shirts and rage comics / university reaction images circulated.
Not to even mention the transformation of r9k from gentlemen to feels good man frog/pepeposters or the soykaf with /pol/.
It just lost its specialness and inclusiveness. Every in-joke was an out-joke, every post was a repost of a repost.
then by the time moot finally sold the place it didn't even feel like itsself.
/endrant
No.621
I just stopped going to practically every chan site and anything like reddit. The thing that makes me dislike places now is memes. They were fun thing to exchange with people when I'm a teenager, but now it's just completely ruined internet culture as a whole. It's like we went from IRL globalism with American culture and transcended to the wired and also globally influenced it with soykafty memes. It's just annoying to be replied to with memes or a majority of the threads started are memes or something that could be replaced with a bot that makes the same thread daily and you'd never tell the difference.
Honestly if I had it my way I'd just straight up ban memes on any community site I ran. They're not funny, original, or entertaining anymore. It's takes no effort at all to soykafpost with memes.
No.623
I never really liked 4chan. I was fascinated by it, and participated, but never really felt at home there. I've always preferred smaller communities. It's too hard to have actual discussions when 1000 people who aren't that interested jump in with memes and burns trying to get the most replies.
As soon as I discovered 4chan I started seeking out sites with the same format, but smaller, and I've been hanging there since.
No.624
>>623What alternatives are you using nowadays?
No.627
>>618Wow.
Pretty spooky to be honest
No.628
>>627You also have communists who planned to infiltrate /his/ and /lit/. I'm sure intelligence agencies have been all over on 4chan ever since someone messed with football. Who knows if in fifty years we learn that the US, UK, and RU have all been performing psyops and disinformation campaigns on 4chan users. We've already seen non intelligence agencies successfully change the course of discussions there.
No.629
The culture on 4chan and 8chan is that normal, reasonable posting is not irrelevant, but actually contrary to the entire purpose of those sites, which is relentless brewing soykaf, drama, fighting and supposed lulz, which you are expected to conduct with an air of ironic detachment to show everyone how little you care even if in reality you are so invested that you are crying bloody tears and haven't eaten or gone to the bathroom in six hours. It's so bad that you can't even report posts because janitors think epic lulz is more important than enforcing the supposed rules and some semblance of post quality. 4chan's /tv/ has gone so far as to practically wage psychological warfare against the users. Then again the users are mostly subhuman scum who do things like make obviously frivolous bumps at page 10 so a flamewar that just ended can hopefully be rekindled for the lulz by new users, which is in fact a very successful tactic. I'm not sure if things were always like this, but they certainly are now. I think using these sites is among the most psychologically draining things a person could do.
>>342Pretty sure they did that just to trigger people who have a panic attack every time they are reminded that anime still exists, yet inexplicably keep coming to 4chan day after day and spending every minute of it complaining that it's not like reddit. That's the good kind of brewing soykaf that I approve of.
No.630
>>629>like make obviously frivolous bumps at page 10This has spread to many boards other than /tv/, and it's very difficult to report them for spam. It's a tragedy how easy a single user can disrupt an entire board. It's part of a two step program:
>bump page 10 threads by posting "bump">make new threads of recycled topics, generally bait postsThis can be done with a spam bot.
The effectiveness is easy to reason in theory. The first assumption is that OC and quality discussion takes time to create. Bumping old posts and making new ones increases the board speed to under a couple hours (1hr 40min at worst for 100 thread boards, 4 hours is enough speed). Threads waiting for OC have to counter bump, leading to exponential feedback. For board speeds less than half a day, it becomes unreasonable for someone to monitor their favorite threads every hour, causing them to leave. It simultaneously lowers board quality and drives away users, lowering quality further.
It seems like mods are necessary to ensure board quality.
No.830
>>632Nostalgia is so stupid really.
No.831
>>830I don't know what to say to you if you honestly see no difference in imageboard culture between the early 2000s and today. Read through the thread, the discussion of why people feel how they do is much more than "muh nostalgia goggles," they're actually talking about what changed for the worse and why.
No.836
>>830I wish I could decide what to forget.
No.860
I think it's hard to say. I've been (and still am partly) browsing 4chan for 7 years now. I grew a lot older and changed in that time, I'm not sure if it used to be "better".
I think what changed it a lot over the last 3 years was that /pol/ and all the other cringy "rightwing" stuff went mainstream and now most of it is just people screaming at each other over political discours.
You have tons of stupid and unfunny triggered thread and while /pol/ always used to be soykaf you could atleast have some kind of discussion with people who read or atleast looked up a topic.
Today it feels like it's just thousands of teens who like Donald Trump and insider trade about the left and migrants all day long. Given their influence over the site it just made it worse and worse.
No.864
I have been visiting 4chan for few years, 7 I think. Right now I am tearing apart if it comes to have my place in the Internet. People on 4chan has changed, in the past you could have nice discussion about interesting topics with productive persons. Now it's just fighting with an air when it comes to making a point in the discussion. You will just be memed out from the topic and then your thread will be dead because of brewing soykaf like 'amd vs. intel' and other consumer fightings (/g/ I mean).
I was lurking lainchan before whole action with selling a domain and removing database but I don't know. My self esteem is to low to post on this chan because when I see long posts with actual discussion my mind tells me that I am not too good in English to post here with writing things I actually had in my thoughts.
No.865
>>864Your English is good.
No.867
I started browsing when I was around 13, now I'm 21 and just hate the place. Nobody calls out obvious new posters anymore, if you do, you're soykaf on by multiple new posters. Doesn't help that these people often just treat the website like an slightly edgier version of the internet as a whole, internet culture becoming homogenized really has had a negative impact on the site. The only "prerequisites" to posting now are acting ironic and having knowledge of a current meme. Also, anime in general is a total meme on the internet now too, I just think the whole thing is a joke and mockery of what was once an actually enjoyably strung together community of like-minded people.
No.869
>>862Yeah I can understand that. I was amazed that barely anyone talked about the hack and those who did just memed about jews or some soykaf.
>>864Your english is okay. I don't post on 4chan any more because everyone just screams or ridicules you, it has no value
>>867> Doesn't help that these people often just treat the website like an slightly edgier version of the internet as a whole, internet culture becoming homogenized really has had a negative impact on the siteYou have a lot more "normal people" browsing the site now who heard about it on twitter or the news and just take it as an edgy place, I think that destroyed the whole "community" feeling that I have these days by browsinger smaller and less known boards
No.870
>>291I have not read through the whole thread, and I am not sure if someone has already espoused the same thoughts I have, so here I go.
I personally think that 4chan hasn't really changed. I used the site a lot around 2004 to 2006, and I still continue to use it fairly regularly up till today. I don't think the overall content of the site has decreased at all. I still have archives and screenshots of early 4chan, and it is pretty hard to tell the difference between /a/ of 10 years ago and /a/ of today in a lot of circumstances. My personal opinion is that a lot of the complaining is from people who have either grown out of the mental space that using 4chan is targeted at, or heard about the antics of those "4chan anons" on another site and where disappointed when all they found was brewing soykaf and porn.
Really, good threads on 4chan where always pretty few and far between, but really most of what is remember are the good ones.
No.871
>>341>nobody goes there>it's too crowdedHow does that work?
So I've been around 4chan since '13. I still visit /ck/ and /fit/, sometimes /fa/ and /mu/ for new style. Once you accept that the average age is 18-20 it gets a bit easier to understand. What I've gotten to hating is the "WHAT IS THE BEST X" thread when the opinions are completely objective. Like fast food threads on /ck/. That or literal corporate advertising like mcdonalds or /sip/.
There's definitely utility in boards like /ck/ /fit/ /diy/ /mu/ and /fa/ since you can learn life-applicable skills, get recommendations, or ask questions, and for the most part these boards have matured pretty well and aim to help if you ask a good question. Just stay away from memey boards like /g/ /v/ /b/ etc.
No.872
>>871>nobody goes there>it's too crowdedhe means it's full of nobodies; bland, faceless people who could easily be replaced by the next person.
No.902
>>864Your English is fine. Don't think about it too hard, just participate.
No.914
Something I've noticed is that 4chan and other online communities have made memes almost the primary method of communication. They're no longer a reference to the discussion, they ARE the discussion. Threads are created for the singular purpose of meme dispersion or asking for meme spoonfeeding. Then everyone gives each other ironic asspats for being ironically stupid. Some groups actively advertise that memes are central to discussion. Even outside of that, the ability to actually have a discussion is nonexistent. There is definitely an element of nostalgia for old 4chan/old internet culture, but i'm also absolutely certain that it has changed.
No.929
>>872>full of nobodies; bland, faceless peopleSo … full of Anons?
No.937
>>929well said, I guess! still, difference between 4chan and arisu for example is that although all anons are, well, anonymous, your average arisu post still has character. Each one sounds like a person with an opinion and some degree of knowledge forming an argument or a point. Contrast that with your average 4chad, whose tired memes, hackneyed "edge" and general stupid bigotry cannot be said to come from any sort of unique individual.
No.939
>>937I agree, although I'd say it's not really about individuality vs unique, just … how many people are willing to have actual conversations vs how many people are just there to soykafpost.
No.940
>>299Instead of limiting population, I would place limits on total post rate and thread creation rate (across all users). And to deal with boards that reached their limits, create more boards about subtopics or allow users to create them (but not moderate them).
No.941
>>630The problem is that bumping from page 10 has approximately the same impact on the board as creating new threads, but has much shorter cooldown timers. Also, the handling of deleted posts is very bad; deleting a post removes the record of your IP from the system and prevents you from being derezzed, but it does not reverse the bumping of the thread.
