Without it, there would be no such thing as "internet culture".
When the competition is 99% pimping and astroturfing for advertisers, being 10% useful and only 90% noise makes /out/ about ten times as information dense as any other place on the internet. This is why people who don't read or agree with /pol/ none the less welcome /pol/ as it keeps the advertisers away. Given the choice of ruining /out/ or making moot a billionaire, oddly enough the users of /out/ prefer having a nice clean place to hang out, sucks to be moot.
/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. On rare occasion /fit/ will actually talk about gear and then the advice is good AFAIK. There is unfortunately some bro-science on /fit/ mixed in with real science, then again asking ecological science questions in /out/ would get equally dumb answers, but the dumb answers on /out/ would be more self aware of their own ignorance, whereas on /fit/ its here's my anecdote, "anecdote" being latin fancy speak for "fact", or at least the guys on /fit/ like to think so.
/out/ has a bad fascination with gadgetry, there must always be a pointless eternal thread about giant rambo-style "survival" knives, as a containment thread to keep them out of the real discussions. The concept of the containment thread or containment board is possibly a 4chan innovation and a real advance in social media and online discussion?
/b/, which is almost yet not entirely a cesspool, has had better literary criticism of this site than /biz/, which is funny. The standard deviation of quality on /b/ is extremely high. The std deviation of quality on /out/ is much lower but the average quality on /out/ is much higher than /b/. If nothing else, as a lab of observations about anonymous discussion, its interesting. I'd propose a general rule that the more focused the board, its heights of brilliance will be lower and further between at the same time as the average level of discourse increases.
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.
Durrcada? If so, I found it very fun even though my attention span is too short for that sort of things.
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.
Absolutely true, and a great way of putting it.