4chan isn't a cesspool though, that's just an image they project to push away people who would respond to such pushing (approximately, the olds).
(There are certainly parts of it that are risky clicks though)
(There are certainly parts of it that are risky clicks though)
The reason 4chan has survived has been that it promotes anonymity and hence genuine expression. After dealing with it, for a while, you get to kind of know different types of people. You can go to a containment board and find people that are genuinely, for example, homophobic and antisemetic with complete seriousness. They compete for space with people that are just trolling, and both compete with some genuinely level-headed people. It's fascinating to watch.
Meanwhile, in other boards, you'll find people snarking over guns (/k/), bicycles (/n/), anime (/a/), otaku and general Hikikomori behavior (/jp/), making things (/diy/), and on and on.
Because everything is anonymous and the boards move so fast, there's no advantage to the sorts of politics and forking you see in Reddit or whatever--instead, you just develop a sort of hang-out culture and occasionally interact with invaders. It's fun.
Unlike other more oppressive moderation schemes (cough reddit hackernews cough), 4chan just accepts as cost of doing business that people are going to want to be shitheads.
So, you have boards specifically for people wanting to be shitheads. Over time, that becomes board culture, and often raises to a level of self-parody that they become easy to spot when they leak. Imagine, if you will, an island whose sole form of humor is hyperbolically racist, sexist, classist, or materialist. If you can contort yourself into that headspace and engage the art on its own terms, it is a never-ending source of creativity and amusement.
The best part is, if it shows up somewhere else, you can just tell them to "go back to <whatever>", and they don't get a persecution complex about it, because they're not being censored.
Maybe it's just me - but I think the irreverent self-aware toxicity has it's advantages.
4chan's /b/ is seen as "the cesspool" and nobody tries to make it better because nobody wants it to be better. It just needs to be that place where the EMT that spent his day dealing with life and death can relieve his stress and let go of what's plaguing his mind with "lol, tits or gtfo"[1].
Because in the end, it's all a big joke.
1: Can't find back the exact screenshot were a /b/ user was saying this, sorry.
Some of the very large subreddits such as /games and /askscience have actually retained very high quality. They just require very strict rules and heavy moderation.
Just compare the frontpage of http://reddit.com/r/gaming with http://reddit.com/r/games — granted one is about twice as big as the other in terms of active users, but /gaming has been full of low-quality submissions since before it became a default subreddit.
It just comes down to having proper rules and enforcing them.
Now, reddit and 4chan are very different in the regard of perceived quality. If you heavily moderate a subreddit the low-quality submissions will for the most part only be viewed by those that browse the queue of new submissions. This isn't really true with 4chan since the low-quality submissions that are buried will still be viewed by everyone (although this kind of depends on if you've configured the order of submissions).
As an interesting aside, you can actually significantly impact what submissions get buried in a subreddit with very few votes since there's not a lot of people that browse the new-queue.
The idea of individually singling someone out to make their lives miserable, for something stupid they've done, seems anathema to 4chan's culture. Or at least what makes 4chan's culture work. I see no problem with 4chan's mods removing dox.
You're an idiot, so are we all, but people don't forgive as easily as they should.
So have an upvote, make another post, and try again! Stick around Giorgi.