[Lapha]

There's definitely smart people on 4chan, but accessibility only exists insofar as there's enough of a culture to punch through the noise floor. Mentally filtering posts only gets you so far, if there's any sort of counterculture then discussion becomes impossible as people actively attempt to derail the thread, see any thread about Rust in the past couple of years for an example.

If you're lucky there won't be a counterculture, but the culture of the board won't always be conductive to discussion. I stopped browsing /g/ years ago but I remember a distinct decline in the quality of discussion around Linux and FOSS topics as the board shifted to more towards more general consumer technology, FOSS threads naturally became lower effort and more memetic* as a result to compete with the influx of new users who didn't care about this subculture. When Linus Torvalds announced that he would try to be more polite it gave some ammo to the anti-Linux culture and things deteriorated more. There was a particularly pertinent post around the attitude of NixOS users on /g/ that reflects this period pretty well I think.

* This sort of trend isn't unique to 4chan of course, the quality of discussion on hobby subreddits tends to decline when mods start allowing memes and low effort posts. Even if discussion continues it's never the primary focus and becomes harder to find.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36274681

[Eisenstein]

> but the culture of the board won't always be conductive to discussion.

A friendly nitpick: the word 'conductive' is a physics term. The term which means 'tending to cause or bring something about' is conducive, with no t, and is pronounced 'cundoosiv'.