Hiroyuki Nishimura, founder of 2channel, has taken ownership of 4chan

Raspberry Heaven was kind of a splinter from the semi-official SADCHUB. Lowtax never had any influence on either.

RH and ADTRW actually both had their own off-SA fora created to avoid the overall SA attitude, though neither was used much. When moot created 4chan it was more out of the general fascination with 2chan's image boards, particularly /a and /b, which were mostly random (but not 4chan /b random) artwork, without much commentary.

Maybe /g/ is just more aware of the shills? I have a picture where one of the Windows Nokia phones had like 200+ threads made within a week all with the same image and very similar OP. There's a lot of shills and unfortunately it can take some effort to convince people "this is a shill thread". Sometimes a fake-advice question will get posted with fake answers meant to shill a product/service as the solution.

>/fit/ ironically does not discuss actual fitness, but is more a social group for people into fitness to discuss seemingly everything except fitness related issues.

Mostly just 'mirin each other.

I feel like people who have a very negative outlook of 4chan (as a whole) either never ventured outside of /b/ or can't wade through the cruft to get to the actual good discussion.

With the help of 2 friends of mine, we hosted a fun "learn interesting physics" thread for a while. There was also a guy who hosted Reverse Engineering threads (his job was to reverse engineer malware...). Both very informative and a lot of people took genuine interest.

I also made a short (and now defunct, though I can rehost it) web-based puzzle for people on /g/ to learn a bit about encryption. Starting with a simple ROT13 and working up to audio stenography.

It's a lot like Reddit with, I'd argue, a bit more extreme on the "bad" side - equivalent on the "good" side - but a lot more honest opinions due to anonymity. You'll get a lot of smart people who (wisely) value their public image self-censoring themselves on Reddit. Though on an anonymous board, they're more free to say what they want to say.

In exchange for that honesty and freedom of opinion - you get a lot more of the "darker side" of humanity. (Ignoring it doesn't make it go away, as so many people seem to believe.)

The level of honest opinions is something I enjoy - and is something that is increasingly being lost on an ever-connected web where one politically incorrect statement can lose you your job/career.

It seems to me that there seem to be some ideal community sizes when it comes to creating interesting, novel, and useful content. Back when 4chan was much smaller, /b/ (random) seemed to be generating new memes more frequently and with a higher average quality. But as 4chan grew, /b/ has tended to slide into more lowest common denominator content (e.g. porn and gore).

I think there was something similar on /v/ (the video game board). At a certain point, the community grew too large to have a coherent collective consciousness. The solution in this case was to create an entire board of "containment threads" for the popular video games and subcultures. This freed /v/ up more to discussing what was trending in the video game world without having to deal with the pesky people playing games and talking about them.

Today, some smaller boards like /mu/ and /fit/ and /k/ seem to be at just the right level of activity to support a vibrant, evolving culture complete with "localised memes" which sometimes cross-pollinate to other boards or outward to the general internet.

Nowadays, I feel proud of it. Although Minecraft isn't "my kind of game", I feel like I made a difference in the game industry/panorama.

Do you see the problem?