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Comment by finnthehuman | Hacker News Reader

>Loath as I am to give 4chan credit for anything positive

I love the fact we have somewhere unambiguously lowbrow on the internet. It's fun to watch how highbrow places talk about it.

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As the saying goes, most social media is stupid people pretending to be smart; 4chan is smart people pretending to be stupid.

I wouldn't say 4chan's smarter than other social media. I'd say "stupid people not pretending".

The median user definitely seems smarter on 4chan (at least that is how it felt 10-20 years ago).

I think median is the wrong term here. There are some absolute freak geniuses on 4chan, but it's not the norm. It's the exception. The median is just as fucking stupid as they present themselves to be.

You mean the place that has generated numerous mass shooters and the "boogaloo movement" which among other things tried to kidnap a governor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement

implying hacker news is highbrow

I tend to enjoy the banter on 4chan more than here. Everyone is expected to dish it and take it there. Peoples' biases are obvious, because they make it clear who they dislike fairly often. Nobody actually takes any real offense to it all. It's quite pleasant compared to the sanitized world of... literally anywhere else.

Of course, if seeing the N word makes you obsessively clutch pearls, then it's not the place for you. If you can let stuff roll right off you, it's fun, and there can be dialogue of interest here and there. /g/ being most similar to here, of course.

An issue I have with imageboards is that use of images invites low-effort posting because it makes it easy to be as annoying as possible, whereas with pure text making inflammatory remarks at least takes some forethought, and it invites unique forms of creative writing. Anonymous textboards I think have the best forms of banter, but they're dying out these days. Over here people have incentives to appease others by gathering upvotes, so they feign this type of altruism that keeps them from being too inflammatory and makes them resort to stupid shit like tone indicators instead of being clever enough to write it that way.

My experience is that 4chan is obscure and annoying enough to browse and participate that it keeps the lowest of low effort posts down. Like if you look at websites that are easy to participate, like Facebook or reddit, you're just gonna see the worst of the worst.

Not sure that I agree. There's plenty of very, very annoying people completely derailing threads on every board by spamming shitposts and the like on 4chan. I'd say the anonymous nature is actually an incentive since there's no real consequences.

The low-effort posting (AKA shitposting) is part of what makes it great. It's kind of an acquired taste, but there's a certain humor to it.

A shitpost doesn't have to be low effort, rather I'd argue the greatest ones are often quite high effort, and invoke a sense of poetry and lucidity that makes you question what could've gone on inside the head of the person that made it. That style of shitposting was part of the culture of 4chan's now-defunct textboards, and even back then it was markedly different from (and for the most part ignored by) the rest of the site.

For what it's worth, copypastas are the highest (and likely the oldest) form of meme.

"If you can ignore the rampant homophobia, misogyny, racism, organized harassment campaigns, doxxing, and high level state official kidnapping conspiracies, it's a great place to hang out!"

...or I can just participate in communities which are still plenty irreverent but doesn't have any of that?

Goddamn people - stop romanticizing 4chan or acting like it somehow gives us something special or unique.

You just described why it's unique, and then claimed it's not unique. It's clearly not your cup of tea.

does it still exist? this is an old story

You can literally type in the url mate. Just go and check for yourself instead of having to ask HN.

I mean, do people still use it in large amounts, is it popular, don't be so literal

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