We live in a time where 4chan and imageboards becoming "popular" is viewed as a good thing

Tbh 4Chan is the "too many rats having incest and blocking eachothers doorways in a cage" of websites. I've noticed, actually, a substantial drop in posting on most of the boards I had frequented prior to the last mass influx. It wasn't just a quality drop, the swell in retarded obnoxious offspring indeed drove people away.

Probably HWNDU
There are fairly hard limits on the feasibility of extended, in-depth discussion on image boards once posting volume exceeds a certain point. It gets harder to write a longer, thought-out and (most importantly) researched post without it getting lost in a sea of garbage or the thread pruning before you have a chance to reply. This incentivizes more people to reduce the length and quality of their own posts to save time, accelerating the race to the posting bottom.

Yeah. /jp/ has hemorrhaged a lot of users to other boards or to real life. Or to Gensokyo.
The incest part is too real though. I still remember when using greentext to summarize a paragraph in bullet point format got you called a filthy Holla Forumsirgin crossboarder. I'm convinced that historians will come to see Holla Forums as the Munich of Internet Culture, being the incubator to cancerous posting as Munich was to the Nazis.

No seriously.
That is an interesting concern, obviously you and I have different ideas of what an ideal discussion place could be. You seem to want long and deep posts while I want sincere discussion.

esoteric but 100% true
now how to convice the masses - or do we have to?

ironic it is that the Holla Forumstards who try to differentiate themselves from the "normies" are, in fact, the fucking normies who invaded halfchan and led it to it's current state

Well, I see two different spikes in traffic right at the end. One is in the first graph and corresponds with February-March 2017, which was at the height of HWNDU. There's a second spike in traffic towards the end of the year. You can see it in the bottom graph. My only guess would be that qanon conspiracy shit, but that's just a guess and I can't see how qanon alone would drive an increase of millions of page views.
Sadly it looks like the malware revelations didn't even make a dent in traffic.

I was asking about the alexa rank drop in 2018

...

The data only goes up to what looks like December 2017, assuming that the notch labeled 2018 marks the beginning of the year.

Old 4chan was a byproduct of early 2000s culture. Most every hobbyist site/fansite from that era is either dead or irrelevant now (case in point: Albinoblacksheep, Newgrounds, ED, Flashplayer, YTMND). 4chan has only maintained relevancy by selling out to much larger modern mainstream sites, killing off its own culture in the process. In my opinion Moot should have ended things sometime around 2008, 2013 at the absolute latest. It is nowhere near the site it used to be.

Pretty metaphysical, isn't it kind of beautiful how nothing in the entire universe is able to conceive and bestow meaning, yet we alone do exactly that.

To be able infuse spirit itself into that which cannot, an aether which comes of one thing and no other.
Wonderous responsibility do we bear.

One of the things at the root of dying imageboards is "imageboard culture."

Even Holla Forums is overrun with people who think they're only places to shitpost. Content creation is for fags and attention whores, so lets just post the same memes over and over and over and over again. Moderation is tyranny and vapidness is content. Is your post longer than a sentence? Lol tl;dr faggot.

What, you don't like it? Then gtfo back to tumblr you redditor gaiafag supernigger. lelz can't t8k da bantz m90? You just don't get imageboards.

The the 2018 drop is an error from alexa, what a bummer.

From what I understand the malware was mostly a panic, if you have an adblocker is enough to be safe but that isn't a long term solution

Holy shit those screencaps are old.
But what you're saying goes with some stuff I wrote about before. The problem is that we have a culture that is permissive towards shallow discussion and meme culture only rewards it even more. On lainchan there are the rules that you have to elaborate on your opinions and to argue in good faith and I think those two simple rules make a massive difference.

BO tried to do the same thing here and there was nothing but bitching about it.

There are a lot of faggots that try and blame BO exclusively for the state of Holla Forums, but he's not the one filling the board with shitposts and shitposters.

I don't remember that
but when a community has developed changing stuff like that is hard, we have to start from zero with those rules.

yeah no shit. its basically the opposite extreme of tumblr. you get max cool points on chans by being a colossal sociopathic cunt. there's plenty of valid criticism of tumblr and reddit culture but if given a choice of RL situations, i'd seriously rather hang with a group of hipstery social justice types than a group of elitist weeaboo commies that can barely conceal their misanthropy.

tbh "content creation" as ideal is it's own problem with the internet
in an ideal world where people were worth talking to imageboards would be places for discussion. OC arises incidentally from discussion, often tangentially (there are some images i've made that even i can't remember the context for, because they were just a cheap joke in a given thread.) rather than being created for it's own sake, but the focus on OC (as originally dropped) has resulted in a lot of putting the cart before the horse. I mean, Reddit makes tons of original content. Sure, 95% of it is shitposting with a variation on a theme (You call them themed hams, when they are obviously rehashed…) but it's still an original creation, by contrast to a repost.

[INCOHERENCE FOLLOWS]
i thought i had a tangent here about normalfags and how everyone wants to be cool, unique and different but i've forgotten my point. anyway, the problem is the userbase, not as some exogenous "other" that has come in and ruined everything (though that has undoubtedly happened), but also because the userbase in and of itself is bad. there are no "true" imageboard users, who are the good guys, to contrast to the "Imposters" who are actually just normalfags. There is a single collective entity, and it is horrible despite the good elements. The problem is that there's a continued desire to identify with the group, and also identify the group as good. we are the good imageboard posters, and those posters that we dislike are the normalfags. Despite the fact that those posters are just left open to interpretation, rather than spelled out - because actually the people I'm referring to as bad are Holla Forums, and the people Holla Forums are referring to as bad are posters like me, but since we're anonymous we can manufacture this consensus in wooly terms that someone bad is amongst us. This is the severe weakness of the format: On normal forums, you can recognize that a given poster is horrible and block him (if you're a loser) or ignore him, if you're cool like me because he has a username that lets you do this. You can conclude safely that you don't like certain posters and avoid them or (theoretically) go out and embarrass them because they've used the same username on their furaffinity account. You can't do any of this on imageboards, so the guy you're having a good laugh with in one thread is the guy you want to kill in another. Again, that sounds great in theory - but (and I'm going to jump the shark here) it's fascist. That's fascism, it's quietly paving over the contradictions of the system, the conflict between you and him, by dissolving the social relations involved. If someone is an irritating, bad poster I don't want to laugh at any of their jokes. I don't want to talk to them, they suck.* Imageboards render this impossible, and that's why anonymous discussion is terrible. Except, perhaps, if you can find some Stasi tier moderators with Elizabeth II tier taste.

*that sounds childish but really being a child is refusing to talk to someone because you dislike them, being a young adult is being polite and civil because you need social harmony, and being a real adult is realising there's no reason not to avoid them or call them a cunt to their cunt face because you're closer to birth than death.
[INCOHERENCE ENDS]
consider that a very preliminary draft of some thoughts, I'm not even going to proofread it. note also that when i refer to imageboards i largely mean 4chan or wider Holla Forums, Holla Forums is special for reasons.

the problem with requiring good faith discussion has the weakness that people still talk past one another. you simply cannot have a conversation about communism with anarcho capitalists, because you're not going to agree on very basic terms. (hell, even libertarians and ancaps might trip up over the definition of inflation which some Austrians take as "increase in the money supply" rather than "increase in the general price level", which is enough to cause chaos.)

though it's not just a cultural problem, but also one of formatting. (you)s are basically the points you get for making posts, that's the incentive problem - so there's an ideal post to get (you)s, theoretically. it's not necessarily a good post, but a quick reply, or a funny picture, or whatever. it's largely down to timing, or you can just make as many posts as possible. that's an incentive structure. as for how you fix that within the general imageboard format (which is actually quite nice, since it retains the basic time-structured posting of a regular forum rather than the hell that is comment trees, and resists "web 2.0"-ification) i haven't the slightest clue

the thing about shitposting is that there's a place for smart people playing stupid. Holla Forums shouldn't be /marx/
how you regulate it is a big problem and question. producing nonsense is easy, producing quality nonsense is hard.

That is truth but is something that should be held into account if we're talking politics.
That's a minor thing, we can take the (you)s off the site.

Good point. I'm realizing just now how SJWs and right identitarians invest a lot of time in maintaining some semblance of internal group cohesion by constantly reaffirming and reassuring the doubts and opinions of their allies, especially newcomers.
We're supposedly leftists, and yet a lot of people here respond to people's problems and genuine questions made in good faith with "lmao kys fag." It's a holdover from chan culture and it has no place in leftist discussion.
tl;dr kill weird twitter

ftfy

it's not just (you)s that are the problem, though, it's the very nature of replies as a reward mechanism.
One hypothetical reason might be because threads run along single pages rather than moving forwards and backwards, making it much easier to cross-reference earlier or read entire threads, and so people keep providing money for old rope. that is, on a normal forum if someone quotes my joke on page 2 in a post on page 100, it's slightly bizarre and probably won't go anywhere, while here because it's all on one page there's a reasonable chance the last post before the bumplimit will be quoting a joke i made in the third post of the thread.

in some cases i think a no politics rule would be useful, but it's an irritatingly kludgy solution. particularly given that the line of what constitutes "Politics" is by necessity arbitrary. (Where do you move from thoughts on the structure of the economy in a videogame into discussing political economy?)

sometimes people are just stupid and should be told to go away tbh, though usually those people are from Holla Forums
(though this raises questions about insiders and outsiders that i'm not going to bore anyone by digging into, since that insider/outsider divide is the big thing on the internet at the moment. use the right shibboleths and you can fit in anywhere…)

That's quite a big leap there. I think the value of anonymous is the fact that it is so chaotic. You never know who you are replying to drops a barrier that doesn't happen in other forums which are non-anonymous (looking at you reddit). There is no other and there is no team, we are all just individuals hammering our opinions out into the virtual world. This means things like manners and reputation go straight out the window. It's pure anarchy that will perish with its' own reactionary contrarianism. Atheism is popular so fedora memes, SJWs are popular so we'll be nazis. The newer users are the people conforming to popular contra-opinions to feel part of the whole or hivemind when in reality that hivemind changes its collective mind every passing fad. Then those people call the other people faggots and when the opinion becomes popular, even pretends they never believed it in the first place. "x board isn't one person" is a common excuse thrown about to justify this case. Just because there are contradictions on imageboards doesn't make it fascist. Hell most things in the system can be considecommunist, from comic book hero movies to the prison-industrial complex. It's hard to pin down the ideology of the chans, but I have to put it as a mixture between post-left anarchy and reactionary libertarianism. That being I think you did have a point but you jumped the shark a little bit.The more users a site has the more of a clusterfuck the discussion starts to be, it's kinda like that in real life tbh. It's easier to have a meaningful conversation with a few people than it is to have one with a hundred or even thousands of individuals

Interesting, how about doing like in old forums and not having direct replays but giving the option to quote?

it's sort of intentionally jumping the shark, but there is an underlying thought. the linking part is basically how libertarianism tends to spiral into fascism quite naturally, which has come up in past discussions, along with (in the sentence itself) the sort of mediation of conflict that leads into a sort of metaphorical "class collaborationism", i.e. collaboration of those fundamentally opposed to one another. there's a thematic appeal in that jump because it ties to the appeal of things that can be good also being bad, i.e. socdem class collaboration is better than a class war that only the bourgeoisie fight (post-socdem world.), while fascist class collaboration is more offensively bad. which sort of ties into how the internet could've been a great thing but has turned out shit.
(i both apologise and make no apology for being incoherent. these are less thoughts, and more like the roots of thoughts, like electrical impulses or something similarly uncontrolled and uncommitted, that lead down strange directions and don't make sense because they've not really developed into thoughts that can be tested in that manner yet.)

I'm not sure I agree with that. On imageboards, people do come to identify with the board, and they do see others. i.e. a strident ☭TANKIE☭ might go off on a "Holla Forums is ruined" rant if a thread is highly critical of the USSR, because their prior identification with the board was as "being right" and "holding similar opinions to me" - and I mean, even I do this. I'm aware that Holla Forums holds different opinions, but there's an instinctual lie in there that people hold those same basic impulses - that even if we hold different specific ideas (i.e. socdem and ancom, socdem and leftcom, socdem and mutualist) we hold similar instincts, and in general terms are similar - which is highly unlikely. Then that illusion can be shattered when you get bogged down in some stupid argument, or more likely (elsewhere, haven't had it happen here) several people disagree with you and you get mobbed by the collective for having a different viewpoint, even though previously you assumed it was either widely shared, or within their scope of tolerance.

i have to wonder if there's friction when it comes to "designated others" for imageboard users, which means even though everyone is contrarian things don't find an equilibrium. i.e. first we begin with fedora athiests, then we move onto hating SJWs - but male SJWs wear fedoras, so we still dislike them even if rational skeptic athiests are now our allies against transgender SJWs. Everyone who disagrees with us is a cuck, and we dislike the nintendo switch, but that's okay because the Switch fanbase are soyboys, but that all works out because soyboys are SJWs, who are also cuckolds, who also sometimes wear fedoras… (i accept that's a terrible oversimplified example, but still.)
as opposed to pure contrarianism where you could expect, for example, a constant move between people pretending to be athiests to annoy christians, and people pretending to be christians to annoy fedoras.

I'm not sure. Before the inline extension and so on, posts (to my memory) didn't show a list of their replies and you couldn't view quotes inline, which i guess might have helped to some extent (and also not shown how popular it was to reply to a post, preventing a cascade once you pass about ~10 replies that mean you've taken over the thread from OP.)
functionally it would probably be similar if you removed post numbers and only allowed quoting, you'd just have to scour things or remember your own points. i suppose it would forcibly slow down discussion.

4chan has been destroyed by all the news exposure and stories about how it's the "le hacker army" and "le meme factory".

I'd hang out with the elitist misanthrope commie weeabos, I feel I could help them with their misanthropy as I used to be a huge misanthrope

THIS!

Lets go with that, wish we could start a page for that now

Here's a post I think discusses what made 4chan good when it was good inb4 tumblr, its from an artist who used to post a bit on /tg/
kazerad.tumblr.com/post/96020280368/faceless-together

it gets worse

Sometimes I think they were infiltrated by people who pretend to be leftist but are actually no shit nazis doing their best to sabotage the left.

I refer to modern-day weird twitter as some hybrid of chan culture and goon culture. Chan culture itself is awful as well, but weird twitter is a much more ingrained cancer in the online left.

This.

This is an incredibly naive essay. The author basically glides over the group dynamics that, by 2015, were already entrenched in most boards and had turned most active threads into generals and most communities into echo chambers.

For every guy who gets a good response that blossoms into an excellent conversation on 4chan, he gets about 20-50 people calling him a faggot for not conforming to the group opinion. That's 4chan and it's been that way for years. It's nothing more than a glorified chat room and a recruiting ground for establishment conservatives.

More sensei titties because discussing this makes me feel frustrated.

Since I abandoned 4chan I been concerned about the way people communicates online, seems there is no place left were people can talk user to user beside 4chan and it is getting rotten as time goes on. In general there is no place left to talk to each other, as discussed before the only thing left is the creator/follower dynamic.
I really wish I was a web developer to start a new site to talk face to face and make it different from chans and reddit and I wish with that site save the communities I care about and nurture new ones and nurture a new culture online but that won't happen, internet has reached critical mass and no new site will overtake others.
I'm so heartbroken because the upcoming years are going to be very lonely, now my hobby isn't about talking to whatever saw the latest chapter of something but writing it down and maybe if somebody else like's it they'll contact me and become friends. That's so underwhelming.

My best advice is to just learn a language other than english and hang out with those people. Conversation tends to be a lot more chill when people make it their job to help you learn lmao.

Anons calling other anons faggots was never the problem. You can have a thriving board environment and still have people shoot shit at each other. Hell, I'll even go as far to say that this board was at its very best when it was at its most disagreeable and when you had leftists of every single stripe hounding each other for the tiniest minutia. No, the problem started when people started focusing on whoever was behind the keyboard rather then the ideas or things being presented. When it became less of "fuck that" and more of "fuck you". user was a faggot for thinking/posting X, now its user is a faggot and that's why he is thinking/posting X. Before you didn't really care about who was posting because everyone understood it was an ANONYMOUS image board, you couldn't prove shit and you didn't have to and if you did talk about yourself you were a huge fag for doing so (hence why namefags were universally despised). Now its "user must be a soyboy, user must be black, user must be an a jew, user must be whatever" and now that's what disqualifies the post /int/ doesn't really count in this discussion due to how foe a while the boards premise of international discussion in a way killed most circlejerks with everyone united in their lampooning of everyone else until Holla Forums leaked in and generals becoming a thing. No one understands or respects anonymity anymore, now its treated like any other site you could have a username on.
Flags were a mistake

What I was getting at was that too many people on 4chan now view it as their community, which must embody their ideals. An echo chamber.

It's embodied in how so many /r9k/ and Holla Forums threads are good now if they're "comfy." As in nothing disagreeable is ever said to another poster, everyone just joins together to reinforce each other's ideas and post the same memes. Such an environment can be good in a handful of cases. But when mixed with chan culture it usually results in the prohibition of any substantial discussion. The regulars will react like howler monkeys to anyone who wanders in and acts like this is still the old 4chan, where you can say anything and have people engage your idea. No. People will just scream at you until you go away.

Actually try debating on Holla Forums these days. I've lost count of the number of people who, in all seriousness, asked me why I was even in Holla Forums in the first place since I had my own community at tumblr or Holla Forums. Think about that: it's pure r*ddit logic, that message boards are not a place for people to discuss ideas but for communities to come together to merge into hive minds.

What you said isn't incorrect, obviously, but I think it's a symptom of the shift in the perceived mission of 4chan and chan culture. Not to wrestle with new ideas, but to create gated communities where you get together with people just like yourself to think the same thoughts.

Tbh, if we're talking oldschool misanthropic chantards who also happen to be commies, they'd be cool as fuck to hang out with. Like that kind was just awkward dorks IRL. I actually think the worst aspects of their attitude were less likely to carry over into real life than those of the hipstery SJW types.

I agree, and having been on Holla Forums I've actually seen responses literally along the lines of "Lefties get out and just leave us alone, this is OUR place to talk". Your right about the community aspect too, and the most infuriating thing is 4/pol/ thinks it "saved" 4chan. To them, 4chan was terrible till they came along. archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/110837386/

I speak spanish and french beside english
the spanish internet is centred on facebook and spanish chans are pure cancer.
In french there is jeux video, a very large community but my domain of french isn't enough to show up there.

A thread laments the death of chan culture now actually desires the death of chan culture.

Such is the mind of leftism.

We're talking about current "chan culture", which isn't the chan culture we knew. Whatever you call "culture" now is a bastardization of its original organic form completely removed from the idea of what anonymity meant.

If you liked anonymity, nihilism, and weird random porn then you'll love identity-based worldviews, unironic nationalism, and a moralistic obsession with "degeneracy" and the evils of black dicks!

Holla Forums being a bunch of actual "degenerates" and identitarians obsessed with black cock does not equal liking anonymity and nihilism. Otherwise, every non-namefag nihilist who cropped porn on this board would be Holla Forums. Also, not every board on 4chan was Holla Forums you know.

What'd you think I said, tho?

It's like putting down a once loyal dog friend because he became rabid.

Sorry, I totally missed your sarcasm. I thought you were actually saying that if you liked those things, you would like Holla Forums. Its really early where I am.

...

I reject that notion, considering you are buttmad that someone is calling you names, I don't think you were a channer in the first place.

Implying and shiggy were WAY before 2011. I bet that image was made from someone who just found it in 2010 or some shit.

'no', it started with Costanza.

I literally just wrote a whole post talking about how namecalling wasn't the problem, what are you taling about.

You know what you need to show us Billy.

Bump

jesus christ

8ch has been shit for a while now. I used to come here just to annoy the nu/pol/ kids, but they've taken over every hobby board and they reply endlessly to any and all bait (until you get banned & your thread deleted, anyway). They've made everything their establishment torture chamber yet proudly cal themselves anti-establishment rebels, it's just absurd & I can't deal with it.

Bump

That post made me more depressed than it should have.
Look at how posturing and cocksure they are about "saving" 4chan, they can't even fucking remember (most of them were in elementary school when that happened) that theirs used to be a containment board because nobody tolerated their shit anywhere else, but that didn't stop them from swarming every other board to shill their ideology and shitpost away any opposition until they drove away nearly all the original posters and what is left now is the maggot-infested corpse of the site that moot envisioned. Yeah, 4chan basically died when moot left, and I don't blame him, the damage was already done by that point, but he should have seen this coming, he should never have reopened Holla Forums and enact a zero tolerance policy on their shit. But hey, hindsight's 20/20.