I used it for a little over a decade (2005-2016) it’s a truly awful place, you’ll gain nothing from the experience.

Anything good on 4chan will make it out of 4chan. It’s not worth your time.

I’m not 12, so…. No.

Any time I’ve ventured into 4chan, it’s mainly been for the lulz. I never gained any knowledge that could be called “useful” from the experience.

IDK, it doesn’t seem like a worthwhile way to spend your time, especially if you’re looking to gain something from it.

I mean, if you’re bored and just want to get some cheap laughs or something, I guess it’s useful, but actual factual information? Not so much.

Back in the day, when it was light-hearted things like Habbo Hotel raids, Triforcing, and secretly hiding CP in the images you upload so that other people help proliferate CSAM.

If you can’t tell by that last part, I don’t go there anymore. /b/ was never good and all that.

Every now and then, I check it out though. I’m obviously old and certainly not anyone’s personal army so I look at a page or two of porn and gore and shrug, click out, and let time march onward.

it has its moments and used to be less bad. nowadays you have to dodge nazis and some people genuinely off the deep end to use it and its simply not worth it.

some brave souls trudge that shithole for the rare gold nugget and post them to greentext comms. you aint missing much else.

I’ve been using 4chan for longer than Reddit and Lemmy combined. Mostly /vg/ (games), /g/ (tech) and /a/ (anime, manga).

Mostly for discussion. /g/ and /vg/ are decent for asking stuff if there’s a general about the topic that you want to ask info about, you want a relatively fast answer, and it isn’t something overly asked (e.g. “which distro should I use?” “INSTALL GENTOO” tier). Just make sure to not trust anything said there.

Other boards are typically too slow (like /ck/) or cesspools (like /b/, /b corta/ /v/, /pol/).

I used it when I was younger. I grew up and realized that it was not good to be exposed to that culture. Even when viewing it through a lens. Anonymity brings out the worst in people, and it’s infectious.

I won’t moralize because that never stopped anyone from doing anything, ever :)

What I will say is, with the vastness of the internet available to me, I would not personally choose to sift through the reams of malice and hate to find the useful grains that no doubt exist, buried.

Plenty of other permissive fora where even somewhat radical ideas can be expressed but without the embrace of genocide, Neo-Nazism and rape.

I know that the chans were used for orchestrating some of the various harrassment campaigns that have happened throughout the years, including most of the gamergate BS. They’re such chaotic spaces I can’t imagine trying to pull off any prolonged actions on them, and the automatic pseudonymity really brings out the seediest people possible.

No I don’t. I just know that it is the source where if you ruffle the wrong feathers, which is hard to gauge because anyone can decide to be an asshole at a given. Then you’re just going to be in for a miserable time. 4Chan has built up it’s reputation throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s, as a place where people are rabidly mischievous and utilize what anonymity they have to drive anyone insane if they think someone ran afoul with them.

4Chan was really what gave birth to places like Encyclopedia Dramatica, their ranks have long infected Reddit and they once used to have been behind the whole Anonymous movement.

Not a crowd to fuck with. Just imagine messing with the cool kid in school and suddenly during recess you’re encircled by their 20 friends and they just have a field day with you in however they see fit.

No, I never went down that rabbit hole, which is interesting in hindsight. I went straight from old-school forums and chatrooms (where I’m sure I was very obviously a child) to Reddit.

By the time I was hearing about it it was just “that Nazi pedo incel site”.

I was a /b/tard almost 20 years ago, but in 2006ish the site got a lot of public attention, so there was an influx of people who were therw mostly just to be edgy. Sure, it was always a matter of digging through a trash heap to find one edible rice grain, but the trash heap grew larger and the rice grains became more rare.

By 2008 it had mostly devolved into recycled memes, presumably from people trying to fit in, and the occasional CP and other things posted for shock value. Around this time I also became somewhat of a normie and figured the board didn’t really have much that appealed to me anymore.

I went on a few boards. /wg/ and /po/ is interesting. (Do not put an l there’s that’s a mistake) /g/ was interesting at times. I visit it a lot less these days, but I still check /wg/ for wallpapers.

I keep a copy of 4chanGPT around; trained on the board. It is not very bright or useful. It’s ribaldry and politically incorrect sarcasm is mildly amusing. However, its primarily useful because it does not have the safety alignment training and mechanisms that all other mainstream large language models have. Using 4chanGPT, I can see the structures that are truly persistent across models, their purpose, and their functions. It is only a minor thing I rarely use.