4chan today is nothing like 4chan a decade or more ago, and overall I think that's a good thing. What you're talking about gets saged to death very quickly these days, if it's not removed by moderators. That's been true since well before moot sold the site to Hiroshima; the sort of thing you describe here, one no longer really finds unless one goes looking for it.
The Web isn't the Wild West any more. It hasn't been for a long time now. What we have today is more like the sort of well-aged cyberpunk shithole you find in films like Blade Runner, translated from the physical to the virtual. That's an interesting world of its own, and it has its own challenges. It also has gatekeepers - many of them - and they mostly bounce old-style shock site content pretty fast.
Yep, I was curious and visited 4chan about 6 years ago and I've just revisited it now, it's much more tame compared to what I remember. I mean it's still rather misogynistic and not a great place to be but it's definitely not as bad as it was...
But GP acknowledged it was still out there, just harder to accidentally stumble upon for the average internet user. And I think it's right; even with safesearch off (because I don't want to lose anything I might want to false positives, and I trust Google's relvlecance algorithms more than their filtering ones) I stumble into orders of magnitude less extreme content today then I did around the turn of the millennium.
The Web isn't the Wild West any more. It hasn't been for a long time now. What we have today is more like the sort of well-aged cyberpunk shithole you find in films like Blade Runner, translated from the physical to the virtual. That's an interesting world of its own, and it has its own challenges. It also has gatekeepers - many of them - and they mostly bounce old-style shock site content pretty fast.