
Ask HN: What is your relationship with Imageboards? - lainon
4chan, 8chan etc.
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krapp
I think more sites, particularly forums and social media sites, should allow
for "anonymous by default" engagement and autokilling threads. I like that I
can just show up, participate and leave and not have to sell my soul for the
privilege.

Other than that... meh. The memes, piss-taking and toxicity make them all but
worthless for anyone who wants to have an intelligent conversation.

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rc-1140
Love 'em, hate 'em, miss 'em. 4chan was amazing for years, somewhere until
about 2011 where things started going downhill. 2012 was the last year where
the "good" content outweighed the bad. There were some cool/niche/offshoot
boards that were fun in their own ways, like 7chan, 420chan, Krautchan,
Fighting Amphibians. That's where I learned all sorts of power user and
computer stuff over the years. Even got to play in a site-famous tournament at
one point. I still keep in contact with the people I've met on some of those
imageboards. I lurk a few boards that are worth tolerating these days on
4chan, and use other ones merely as resource/content aggregation, like /mu/
for new music.

Places like 8chan, Lainchan, Postbox, etc. are awful. 8chan was cool for like
6 months because it had all of the tinges of old 4chan, but it got co-opted by
different groups until it became the alt-right hugbox. Lainchan is just filled
with a few different caricatures of previously-underage or mentally unsound
4chan /g/ posters. One thing they all seem to have in common is
pretentiousness and a burning need to constantly participate in actual - not
humorous - one-upsmanship; they must always be better than the "normies" (an
irony here being that they use the new-school "politically correct" version of
the parent word) and even the people they deem "worthy" of participating in
discussion. They often make spinoff after spinoff, IRC channel after IRC
channel, and then cry about having no place to discuss what they want despite
having a wasteland of dead spinoff boards and IRC channels. Point out that
they're free to discuss their topic on $theLatestSpinoff, and they'll cry
about whoever isn't part of their in-group "ruining" their space. It's
tiresome and they're not worth any nuggets of information they may hold.

There are one or two up-and-coming imageboards that actually have amicable
content and decent users, though.

~~~
potta_coffee
What are the up-and-coming boards? Lainchan seemed ok for a while but users
are exactly as you described. Also, it's pretty much dead.

~~~
lainon
Where can I msg you? There's one Imageboard which currently stands out

~~~
swah
Tell me about is as well? hugows@gmail.com

I miss the _feeling_ I had about the internet when discovering 4chan a decade
ago...

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Vaskivo
4chan is my guilty pleasure. I don't use social media. So 4chan is my
"scrolling while waiting for the bus".

I mostly lurk. And It's mostly for "the lulz". But once in a while you get big
nuggets of wisdom and insight. It's "a thousand monkeys in typewriters" in
practice.

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enkiv2
I was only ever a regular on the (small, now-defunct) irreality.me imageboard.
The most activity I ever performed on 4chan was that time I wrote a bot that
responded to every post on /pol/ with a random section of Society of the
Spectacle (in an arguably successful attempt to improve the quality of
discussion there).

I find imageboards to be interesting from a media-studies perspective, though.
They're a clear case (even clearer than twitter) of design influencing user
behavior in a way that eventually generalizes outside of the platform. Three
countries have shockingly similar & arguably totally distinct right-wing
authoritarian populist movements that sprung up from totally distinct popular
imageboards during the same period, & there are probably more that I'm simply
not aware of. So, serious study of the kinds of behaviors imageboards
encourage & highlight (and serious study of under what conditions those
behaviors generalize) is potentially really interesting. It's one of those
things that makes me wish I was a real social scientist instead of just a
programmer with hobbies.

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warent
Far in the rear-view mirror

