[ryukoposting]

As someone who was exposed to 4chan at far too young of an age, I don't buy this. There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been. Granted, I avoided that board like the plague, but cursory glances never showed me any novel ideas being formulated. Even if there is real conversation of various political ideologies, it's drowned out by a sea of kids who think it's cool to say the N word online.

4chan is unique because of its combination of scale, relative lack of moderation, and relatively high anonymity. By nature, it's a place where political radicals would be able to shitpost freely en masse. 4chan was absolutely a vehicle for platforming radical politics, but the word "shitpost" is key - the average discourse on 4chan isn't at a level where ideological formulation can happen at a meaningful scale.

Memes are the only exception. 4chan memes have, on multiple occasions, turned into widely-known (and sometimes widely-misunderstood) political imagery. That imagery routinely has no clear symbolism whatsoever, and is assigned all kinds of wacky meanings depending on you ask... which is what you'd expect from 4chan, I guess.

[filoleg]

> There's no political philisophy happening on /pol/, nor has there ever been.

Agreed, but to be fair, /pol/ was created with the officially stated goal of acting as a containment board. And tbh, that’s exactly what it still is to this day.

[Cthulhu_]

4chan is the infinite racists on infinite typewriters analogy; that said, some ideas converge and crystallize and escape out of the shitposts. Greentext screenshots and images that are distributed outside of the cesspool and get mainstream appeal though e.g. Reddit.

Survivorship bias, evolutionary somethings, and curation help the shit escape 4chan's confines. I can probably word that more eloquently when my brain isn't fried.

[causality0]

It's absolutely baffling to me that despite the sheer amount of garbage, people still choose to post non-garbage content there at all. You sort through a hundred neo-nazi and race-baiting posts and then you find news that happened less than thirty seconds ago and won't be on CNN for two hours. I wish these "insiders" would find a better place share their information.

[underlipton]

That was Twitter. Twitter was just 4chan For Everyone. But it was a company with investors and content with political ramifications, so they changed things to suit advertisers and politicians. They changed the timeline algo. And the reply algo. And the Trending algo. And they added "Verified" accounts. And then Musk bought it.

It can be made again. But whoever does it has to learn from past mistakes.

[ryukoposting]

There is no voting system by which to gauge one's popularity. There is no profile or personal brand to be crafted. There is no follower count to build. Post ranking is most-recent-reply first, and nothing more.

This model attracts all manner of idiocy and hatred, and it's much too easy for one provocateur to hijack the system. The result is that the site requires several containment zones like /b/ and /pol/.

However, the upshot of 4chan (or any imageboard, really) is the total lack of narcissistic incentive. If you stick to blue boards, consciously avoid the containment zones, and you ignore the provocateurs (big IFs, I know), 4chan hosts some remarkably eclectic discussion of the arts, science, and entertainment. It's really good at elevating things that are thought-provoking or avant garde, if only within the bounds of a polarizing and inaccessible platform.

[bombcar]

It's the very fact that it's unmoderated that it can be unfiltered.

If you happen to get footage of a "happening" and post it on 4chan, people will notice (and call you various slurs).

If you post it anywhere else it's liable to be deleted, or worse, ignored.