4chan is pretty niche these days, and for good reasons. It was never mainstream but it definitely lost a lot of its prestige and relevance.
But at least 4chan was always upfront about its policies: you could always basically post anything as long as it didn't put the site's existence in jeopardy, so effectively as long as the lawyers/cops/fbi didn't come knocking it was free for all.
Reddit is roughly the same thing except they hypocritically attempt to maintain a façade of being "the good guys". I remember in particular how, after having hosted "jail bait" and other very questionable content for years they finally decided to no longer allow it they felt the need to publish a heartfelt message about how "we thought about our daughters" and all that crap instead of saying the truth, which is that it just generated too much bad publicity and made the advertisers go away.
> how is Reddit as a platform different than a forum?
you can have meaningful on topic discussions on a forum spanning across months and even years, reddit has the priority and visibility on new threads same as HN. The style of writing seems to be different but that of course depends on the forum or subreddit (I have yet to find the good ones if there are any)
But at least 4chan was always upfront about its policies: you could always basically post anything as long as it didn't put the site's existence in jeopardy, so effectively as long as the lawyers/cops/fbi didn't come knocking it was free for all.
Reddit is roughly the same thing except they hypocritically attempt to maintain a façade of being "the good guys". I remember in particular how, after having hosted "jail bait" and other very questionable content for years they finally decided to no longer allow it they felt the need to publish a heartfelt message about how "we thought about our daughters" and all that crap instead of saying the truth, which is that it just generated too much bad publicity and made the advertisers go away.
Reddit is 4chan pretending to be Facebook.