I visit 4chan several times a day, though I use Lemmy more.
Edit: I now only visit it a few times a month.
Never
Literally never in my life
I have successfully not visited it for, I think multiple decades now.
I haven't been on 4chan since like 2011
I'm not adding to any conversation really but this is pretty much my answer too
Zero times. If it’s worth looking at it’ll make its way eventually to another platform that’s less of an ass fissure
Like once a year or something.
Too much manipulation by racists, nazis, and russia. All they have to do is tell 4chan that doing x/y/z will offend people, and suddenly they are a willing personal army.
Back when stormfront said how easy it was to funnel chanfolk into their ideology, I honestly thought 4chan would break stormfront. I didn't expect such enthusiasm for an ideology that would outlaw 4chan if it got enough power.
Yeah I was a big channer many years ago I still don't understand how the fuck fascism won there. The only reason I go there now is to snoop on fascists since I know how to click around there. The only thing I can say is that it must be that most channers really were idiot loser NEETs with nothing to live for, instead of people pretending to be idiot loser NEETs with nothing to live for.
Pretend to be something long enough, and you slowly become that thing.
I pretend to be an elven paladin regularly. I'm not going to become an elven paladin.
Why would I want to lower my faith in humanity more?
rock bottom should be the default
I haven't been on 4chan in over 20 years since I saw a gif of a German shepherd being hit in the face with a shovel.
That place is a cesspool.
Oh I forgot about that one. I also saw that. Sickening.
4chan died about 2010. After that the ratio of idiots vs people role-playing as idiots tipped and it never tipped back.
I think this is it more or less.
It felt like fun freedom to have a communicative realm with no rules, guidelines, morals at all. But in hindsight I guess it was fine for me because I had a moral compass and intellect so mad-max-land allowed me to re-explore my limits and opinions on my own, like from point zero, without preexisting structure (wich is always present if there is any decency).
For some, apparently, that was not fine. Like they didn't catch themselves in the freefall of morals and epistemology that comes with the 4chan credo of "everything here fake and foolish...". Or maybe it's that some don't have a corrective social realm outside 4chan, able to get them back to the ground. And those ones overtook. (Maybe cause the other ones are done playing edge walk after a while).
Tl;dr: had fun, learned some, feel a bit bad now
Litterally me
Once every few days? And only very specific boards: /a/, /vg/ and /g/. Mostly /vg/, it's actually decent-ish to talk about games.
I used to be a fairly active 4chan user a decade or so ago. In fact I learned about Reddit from 4chan. However the place became a shadow of its former shelf once it allowed stormfront trash to join in. Picture related:
Couple that with the fact that 4chan ended infested with the same sort of assumptive trash as Reddit, that is also currently infesting Lemmy, and that I don't... really fit there any more. (That has political implications, but it is non-political and orthogonal to politics in nature.)
I used 4chan daily from 2005 to around 2013. It just doesn't have the vibe it used to, or maybe I'm just getting old.
Cuz it's not the same without mootykins
Moot? That newbie ruined 4chan forever since he joined it! :^)
Shitty jokes aside, I didn't notice too much of a change with the moot→hiro transition. Most negative changes in the "vibe" there predate hiro for me.
Never.
At this point I see pepe as a hate symbol.
I like pepe though there is one pic of him for most situation or you can make one easily and he is kinda funny ngl
I don't follow 4chan politics, but isn't Pepe a /pol/ thing or something like that? I mean, 4chan's got a number of different forums. That seems like saying that Reddit is X because of a particular subreddit, or the Fediverse is X because of a particular community/magazine.
I see your point: pepe can be used for anything.
But it's so strongly associated with hate in my experience that I cannot see its use in an unbiased way.
There’s a documentary about Pepe and his creator, Matt Furie, called “Feels Good Man”. It’s worth a watch!
Never have, never will.
0 times per year.
I don't recall ever visiting.
I used to when I was in my teens, when 4chan wasn't as "well known" by so many people. It was definitely wild then. Now I don't really have the desire to browse there or anywhere else besides Lemmy
None. I will never touch anything *chan
2chan, 4chan, 5chan, and the other number I won't even mention cuz I actually saw something very traumatizing there.
as in?
A picture of a married heterosexual couple having sex in the missionary position
0 times a year. I used to lurk on Something Awful and Fark back in the day but I never liked 4chan.
Honestly, I’m kind of surprised 4chan is the one still around but I guess the non-religious kids who are the future of the Republican Party need somewhere to hang out.
Not really sure what it has to do with religion
The future Republican voter base is basically: white Evangelicals/homeschool kids, white dudes who own (or aspire to own) an ATV or Jet Ski dealership, and 4chan/Reddit/Discord users who are being ironically racist/sexist but will soon drop the comfort of irony and just be racist/sexist.
I just assumed the latter 2 weren’t necessarily religious like the Evangelical homeschool kids who go to Liberty University or wherever.
I haven't been there, I only see screenshots here and there, and the occasional YouTube video detailing their shenanigans
The interface sucks. Never
Sometimes I remember it exists and is vaguely legit to visit, and that there are other sections besides /b. I think maybe I go there for about an hour once a year.
Never. I only look at the funny greentext highlights and I don't want to hunt for those.
been decades around when moot left and 4chan was hentai pics.
Maybe once a year to remind myself I'm not a complete twat.
5 years ago? Some people have something funny to say but it's not worth groveling through the hundreds of bot comments to find it.
That was a year ago. I doubt anyone's still running that outdated 23gb model still on torrents.
Many of the comments on 4chan are not very insightful and mostly repeat the same classic mantra's. Now I'm not shy for dark humor but I do like it original.
1/lifetime
I have never visited the hacker known as 4chan, I hear he's a gross neckbeard who never showers.
I looked at it for the first time a few weeks ago to see what all the fuss is about. Terrible user interface and the content wasn’t very interesting. No reason to go back again.
official old fag right here. bet he can triforce and everything.
What does that mean?
"Oldfag": site veteran, old user. Social acceptability of the suffix -fag is at most disputable; someone would argue that, in that specific context, it conveys simply "person", while someone else could argue that its homophobic meaning is still there. Anyway, you see the same suffix being attached to other adjectives, specially in the coordinate term "newfag" (newbie, noob).
Triforce: a symbol from The Legend of Zelda. 4chan users, specially in /b/, liked to prove that they were veterans instead of newbies by posting the text version of that symbol, as
▲
▲ ▲
because, if you simply copied-and-pasted it (like a newbie would be assumed to), 4chan would automatically remove leading spaces, and you'd get
▲
▲ ▲
instead. (The trick was to insert a non-breaking space before the first triangle. In Linux I remember doing this with Ctrl+Shift+u, a, 0, Enter.)
Funnily enough nothing screams "NEWBIIIIE!" the loudest than trying to prove that you're a veteran of the site.
Guy was roleplaying as a 4chan user.
I've never visited 4chan. Everything I've read about it makes me think it's not the webforum for me.
Once before gamergate. I didn’t like the sort of people I found there. I wasn’t surprised about the following decade of newsworthy and leaking bad behavior
Maybe once a week. Their torrent board /t/ occasionally has some neat stuff but sporadically when browsing different boards like /v/ I'll hear some news about a niche topic I'm into.
For example last time it was that a Youtuber I follow named MittenSquad died. Had no idea.
Maybe once in the last 5-10 years to look up something specific... so basically never.
I mean a long time ago, like 15 years ago, before I really found reddit, I went on there pretty often.
Rarely. Not more than once a month, and then I remember why I outgrew it.
Not much anymore. /diy/ is still good for some of my weirder technical questions, but the rest of the boards are in the gutter. /b/, which used to be good for a Friday-night laugh, is nothing but transphobic-trans worship posts or loli threads.
/b/ was never good.
Eh, in retrospect I agree but as a socially awkward annoyingly atheistic teenager in the late oughts/ early 2010s there was some times that were fun in the moment. Definitely didn't do anything good for my development though
Never. Like, I've browsed around a few times. /LGBT/ (when it wasn't people from /pol/ trying to debate trans people) was the only board of value...I can't put it into words but, it's the only board I think really lives up to the romantic ideals of what 4chan is. It feels... weirdly neither irony poisoned like the rest of 4chan nor dead serious and moralistic like the rest of the internet. Maybe the rest used to live up, I'm young so I wouldn't know (though I do know people were moaning about "the old 4chan" in 08.) But I don't belong on /LGBT/, I'm moralism poisoned.
Culturally, 4chan is a spent force, I think that became clear when every new meme from there was a Soyjak variant. It's a shame some channers think they're still on the precipice of internet culture. I just wish the ghost of
/pol/'s influence would stop haunting my country.
Not since 2006 or 7, used to hit up the paper craft forum for Warhammer proxies.
Who is moot you all are talking about ?
I don't really anymore.
Only ever used it for piracy, it's been the most reliable source for finding niche TTRPG books. From the first time I used it to now it probably averages out to once or twice a year, though in practice it comes in bursts.
Piracy exists on 4chan?
Yeah, /tg/ has a share thread. It's kind of ephemeral and it's not straight forward to navigate but if something cant be found elsewhere it's your best bet.
My 4chan days was almost twenty years ago, I am no longer interested in it other than the occasional greentext repost.
Daily, watching the advances of ai porn generation techniques and tools. The deep fakes trend didn't spontaneously emerge from a vacuum, and ai generation of gif/videos from a single text prompt is in the 'dreaming' stage. I give it 6 months before you will be able to have a coherent scene of 10 seconds of ai gif or video based on a single prompt with minimal editing.
4chan is the best place I've found to watch this that isn't trying to sell me something or over sensationalize it.
Never
Literally never in my life
I have successfully not visited it for, I think multiple decades now.
I haven't been on 4chan since like 2011
I'm not adding to any conversation really but this is pretty much my answer too
Zero times. If it’s worth looking at it’ll make its way eventually to another platform that’s less of an ass fissure
Like once a year or something.
Too much manipulation by racists, nazis, and russia. All they have to do is tell 4chan that doing x/y/z will offend people, and suddenly they are a willing personal army.
Back when stormfront said how easy it was to funnel chanfolk into their ideology, I honestly thought 4chan would break stormfront. I didn't expect such enthusiasm for an ideology that would outlaw 4chan if it got enough power.
Yeah I was a big channer many years ago I still don't understand how the fuck fascism won there. The only reason I go there now is to snoop on fascists since I know how to click around there. The only thing I can say is that it must be that most channers really were idiot loser NEETs with nothing to live for, instead of people pretending to be idiot loser NEETs with nothing to live for.
Pretend to be something long enough, and you slowly become that thing.
I pretend to be an elven paladin regularly. I'm not going to become an elven paladin.
The alt right playbook is a great resource to understand how they won there if you’re curious.
Absolutely never.
Why would I want to lower my faith in humanity more?
rock bottom should be the default
I haven't been on 4chan in over 20 years since I saw a gif of a German shepherd being hit in the face with a shovel.
That place is a cesspool.
Oh I forgot about that one. I also saw that. Sickening.
4chan died about 2010. After that the ratio of idiots vs people role-playing as idiots tipped and it never tipped back.
I think this is it more or less.
It felt like fun freedom to have a communicative realm with no rules, guidelines, morals at all. But in hindsight I guess it was fine for me because I had a moral compass and intellect so mad-max-land allowed me to re-explore my limits and opinions on my own, like from point zero, without preexisting structure (wich is always present if there is any decency).
For some, apparently, that was not fine. Like they didn't catch themselves in the freefall of morals and epistemology that comes with the 4chan credo of "everything here fake and foolish...". Or maybe it's that some don't have a corrective social realm outside 4chan, able to get them back to the ground. And those ones overtook. (Maybe cause the other ones are done playing edge walk after a while).
Tl;dr: had fun, learned some, feel a bit bad now
Litterally me
Once every few days? And only very specific boards: /a/, /vg/ and /g/. Mostly /vg/, it's actually decent-ish to talk about games.
I used to be a fairly active 4chan user a decade or so ago. In fact I learned about Reddit from 4chan. However the place became a shadow of its former shelf once it allowed stormfront trash to join in. Picture related:
Couple that with the fact that 4chan ended infested with the same sort of assumptive trash as Reddit, that is also currently infesting Lemmy, and that I don't... really fit there any more. (That has political implications, but it is non-political and orthogonal to politics in nature.)
I used 4chan daily from 2005 to around 2013. It just doesn't have the vibe it used to, or maybe I'm just getting old.
Cuz it's not the same without mootykins
Moot? That newbie ruined 4chan forever since he joined it! :^)
Shitty jokes aside, I didn't notice too much of a change with the moot→hiro transition. Most negative changes in the "vibe" there predate hiro for me.
Never.
At this point I see pepe as a hate symbol.
I like pepe though there is one pic of him for most situation or you can make one easily and he is kinda funny ngl
I don't follow 4chan politics, but isn't Pepe a /pol/ thing or something like that? I mean, 4chan's got a number of different forums. That seems like saying that Reddit is X because of a particular subreddit, or the Fediverse is X because of a particular community/magazine.
I see your point: pepe can be used for anything.
But it's so strongly associated with hate in my experience that I cannot see its use in an unbiased way.
There’s a documentary about Pepe and his creator, Matt Furie, called “Feels Good Man”. It’s worth a watch!
Never have, never will.
0 times per year.
I don't recall ever visiting.
I used to when I was in my teens, when 4chan wasn't as "well known" by so many people. It was definitely wild then. Now I don't really have the desire to browse there or anywhere else besides Lemmy
None. I will never touch anything *chan
2chan, 4chan, 5chan, and the other number I won't even mention cuz I actually saw something very traumatizing there.
as in?
A picture of a married heterosexual couple having sex in the missionary position
0 times a year. I used to lurk on Something Awful and Fark back in the day but I never liked 4chan.
Honestly, I’m kind of surprised 4chan is the one still around but I guess the non-religious kids who are the future of the Republican Party need somewhere to hang out.
Not really sure what it has to do with religion
The future Republican voter base is basically: white Evangelicals/homeschool kids, white dudes who own (or aspire to own) an ATV or Jet Ski dealership, and 4chan/Reddit/Discord users who are being ironically racist/sexist but will soon drop the comfort of irony and just be racist/sexist.
I just assumed the latter 2 weren’t necessarily religious like the Evangelical homeschool kids who go to Liberty University or wherever.
I haven't been there, I only see screenshots here and there, and the occasional YouTube video detailing their shenanigans
The interface sucks. Never
Sometimes I remember it exists and is vaguely legit to visit, and that there are other sections besides /b. I think maybe I go there for about an hour once a year.
Never. I only look at the funny greentext highlights and I don't want to hunt for those.
been decades around when moot left and 4chan was hentai pics.
Maybe once a year to remind myself I'm not a complete twat.
5 years ago? Some people have something funny to say but it's not worth groveling through the hundreds of bot comments to find it.
Bot comments?
Here's a fun video https://youtu.be/efPrtcLdcdM?si=LWaMckxSwL2_lmKZ
That was a year ago. I doubt anyone's still running that outdated 23gb model still on torrents.
Many of the comments on 4chan are not very insightful and mostly repeat the same classic mantra's. Now I'm not shy for dark humor but I do like it original.
1/lifetime
I have never visited the hacker known as 4chan, I hear he's a gross neckbeard who never showers.
I looked at it for the first time a few weeks ago to see what all the fuss is about. Terrible user interface and the content wasn’t very interesting. No reason to go back again.
official old fag right here. bet he can triforce and everything.
What does that mean?
"Oldfag": site veteran, old user. Social acceptability of the suffix -fag is at most disputable; someone would argue that, in that specific context, it conveys simply "person", while someone else could argue that its homophobic meaning is still there. Anyway, you see the same suffix being attached to other adjectives, specially in the coordinate term "newfag" (newbie, noob).
Triforce: a symbol from The Legend of Zelda. 4chan users, specially in /b/, liked to prove that they were veterans instead of newbies by posting the text version of that symbol, as
because, if you simply copied-and-pasted it (like a newbie would be assumed to), 4chan would automatically remove leading spaces, and you'd get
instead. (The trick was to insert a non-breaking space before the first triangle. In Linux I remember doing this with Ctrl+Shift+u, a, 0, Enter.)
Funnily enough nothing screams "NEWBIIIIE!" the loudest than trying to prove that you're a veteran of the site.
Guy was roleplaying as a 4chan user.
I've never visited 4chan. Everything I've read about it makes me think it's not the webforum for me.
Once before gamergate. I didn’t like the sort of people I found there. I wasn’t surprised about the following decade of newsworthy and leaking bad behavior
Maybe once a week. Their torrent board /t/ occasionally has some neat stuff but sporadically when browsing different boards like /v/ I'll hear some news about a niche topic I'm into.
For example last time it was that a Youtuber I follow named MittenSquad died. Had no idea.
Maybe once in the last 5-10 years to look up something specific... so basically never.
I mean a long time ago, like 15 years ago, before I really found reddit, I went on there pretty often.
Rarely. Not more than once a month, and then I remember why I outgrew it.
Not much anymore. /diy/ is still good for some of my weirder technical questions, but the rest of the boards are in the gutter. /b/, which used to be good for a Friday-night laugh, is nothing but transphobic-trans worship posts or loli threads.
/b/ was never good.
Eh, in retrospect I agree but as a socially awkward annoyingly atheistic teenager in the late oughts/ early 2010s there was some times that were fun in the moment. Definitely didn't do anything good for my development though
Never. Like, I've browsed around a few times. /LGBT/ (when it wasn't people from /pol/ trying to debate trans people) was the only board of value...I can't put it into words but, it's the only board I think really lives up to the romantic ideals of what 4chan is. It feels... weirdly neither irony poisoned like the rest of 4chan nor dead serious and moralistic like the rest of the internet. Maybe the rest used to live up, I'm young so I wouldn't know (though I do know people were moaning about "the old 4chan" in 08.) But I don't belong on /LGBT/, I'm moralism poisoned.
Culturally, 4chan is a spent force, I think that became clear when every new meme from there was a Soyjak variant. It's a shame some channers think they're still on the precipice of internet culture. I just wish the ghost of /pol/'s influence would stop haunting my country.
Not since 2006 or 7, used to hit up the paper craft forum for Warhammer proxies.
Who is moot you all are talking about ?
I don't really anymore.
Only ever used it for piracy, it's been the most reliable source for finding niche TTRPG books. From the first time I used it to now it probably averages out to once or twice a year, though in practice it comes in bursts.
Piracy exists on 4chan?
Yeah, /tg/ has a share thread. It's kind of ephemeral and it's not straight forward to navigate but if something cant be found elsewhere it's your best bet.
My 4chan days was almost twenty years ago, I am no longer interested in it other than the occasional greentext repost.
Daily, watching the advances of ai porn generation techniques and tools. The deep fakes trend didn't spontaneously emerge from a vacuum, and ai generation of gif/videos from a single text prompt is in the 'dreaming' stage. I give it 6 months before you will be able to have a coherent scene of 10 seconds of ai gif or video based on a single prompt with minimal editing.
4chan is the best place I've found to watch this that isn't trying to sell me something or over sensationalize it.
You're looking at AI porn every day?
Yes.
I'm on /v/all the time