[JohnBooty]

    very clever people posting there

Cleverness is orthogonal to depravity, right?

Nobody denies the extreme cesspool-like aspects of some corners of 4chan.

The one thing you can uncontroversially say is that 4chan is diverse. It's almost like reddit, where each subreddit has its own distinct culture, mods, etc.

I would say that overall, 4ch does attract... a pretty clever crowd. Almost everything there is layer upon layer upon layer of self-reference and iteration. Meta on top of meta on top of meta. Not saying you have to be a genius to "get it" but I don't see a dummy enjoying it.

I'm also saying this as somebody who doesn't particularly like the place. I grew out of that shock humor stuff about two decades ago.

[ineedasername]

Cleverness is unfortunately not orthogonal to depravity or any number of other awful things. It would be a much better world if most hateful people or those who want to do bad things were also not very smart.

Although I'm also not sure how clever a person really needs to be to understand multiple layers of meta: "Meta" is so ingrained in cultural DNA at this point that anyone born in the last 25 years will understand all of it on nearly an intuitive level, and anyone over that age will still have been bombarded by it for decades-- long enough to mostly still get it.