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

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