[chez17]

>the lax rules, for better or worse, is what it really has going for it.

Better. 4chan was the most culturally influential website out there. I don't know how much that's true today but it shaped the humor and language of the internet in a way nothing else did. It's good to have places where there are no rules, no sacred cows, no need to be polite and politically correct. In a sea of bland derivatives, it at least had a personality. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad this site and others are not like that, but it's good to have that somewhere. There is no denying how influential that site was over the last 10 years. The stuff we joke about today was born in the depths of 4chan a long time ago.

[speeder]

One thing I noticed that is really interesting, is that MANY 4chan memes that leaked into internet at wide, started at 2chan...

4channers that also frequent 2chan frequently end posting 2chan memes in 4chan, 4chan then modifies them as needed (ie: "westernizes" them), and then those memes might one day become widespread on the english internet.

This has the interesting side effect of syncing many memes between the english and japanese internet, while some other countries are very isolated in general (Brazillian memes for example are usually only Brazillian)

[_delirium]

I think there's been quite a lot of interplay between these forum sites, in a way that is pretty hard to track. There's also a reasonable amount of 4chan's cultural/linguistic/meme output that is an adaptation of stuff from SomethingAwful's forums, especially in 4chan's earlier years.