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Comment by seanw444 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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