I’m glad it’s dead.

I love the idea of imageboards. I love “anonymous” posting as a default. I love ephemeral threads.

I thought generals were pretty good. Board culture was real. People would make nontrivial 4chan optimized original content for what I assume was love of art.

There was something special about 4chan that I don’t think exists in forums, lemmy, tumblr, tiktok, or the other forms of social media we have now.

But the place was a shithole.

Split as it was by boards and threads, I could insulate myself from it to some extent but the culture on 4chan was getting worse year by year. The famous boards attracted a certain opinionated userbase and population had a large effect on what threads lived and died. I had so many threads hidden and yet I would still get a wave of revulsion looking at the catalog on my favorite board.

There are other imageboards. There are open source imageboard projects. Without 4chan’s shadow, I hope that imageboards and imageboard culture develop in different directions.