Internet culture and more specifically chan culture is a reflection of the people using the site and society
in general at the time. It's just a mirror. It reflects whatever you show it back at you. Early 4chan was a synthesis of an extremely specific set of factors at a specific point in time that will probably never coalesce again.
A shitty economy, a general malaise of apathy among the youth, anime and gamer culture being obscure and ostracized, "The internet" having a barrier to entry, how fucked up and unmoderated the early internet was etc. Chances were, if you used the internet back then you had seen some shit. But anyway, people like to congregate with other people that have the same interests as they do. Where do you hang out if you're some loser living in a shit town with few or no friends and you spend your time playing Warcraft 3 custom games and watching Ego Proxy or whatever? you find the other social outcasts online because people in real life who have the same hobbies as you don't exist. The point being that there is an extremely specific kind of person who would waste the best years of their life on an anime website where there's a 9 out of 10 chance on any given day that you're going to see a picture of someone cutting their own dick off.
These people congregate together and a baseline of culture forms from their mutual interests, experiences and attitudes. The culture evolves over time as knowledge about the site spreads through word of mouth, or people discover the site after raids or fox news specials or whatever. Site culture gradually shifts as the demographics of the user base change. At the same time popular culture shifts as more people of all ages gain access to the internet, media corporations begin to target a wider demographic of casual consumers rather than a niche of hardcore fans. Subcultures are exploited by corporations and integrated into popular culture. Someone emails their friend a funny cat picture not realising where it came from, or that the person who made it probably also jacks off to lolicon tentacle rape doujuns. The internet begins leaking.
The universal measure of successful online content is likes or the equivalent. Upvotes, retweets, reacts, shares etc. On 4chan the success of a thread is measured by the number of replies it receives. Because of the ephemeral nature of imageboards, users do not have any way to accumulate a representation of authority or post quality. Inversely there's very little repurcussion for being banned because there's no account to lose. These dynamics incentivize the poster to create a thread/post that will generate as many replies as possible. In theory, this will produce good content. Interesting posts will attract replies while retarded faggotory will attract sages, moderators or nothing at all. People will of course game this system for one reason or another. Clickbait is prevalent on YouTube because people can make money from it. Posting pictures of your cat on fifteen different subreddits to farm karma works because Reddit rewards banal, kitsch, inoffensive content. Posting bait to 4chan works because the user base is fucking retarded.
People who get their kicks by pretending to be fools will soon find themselves surrounded by fools who think they are in good company. 4chan had a reputation for being le sekrit hacker club, so they naturally attracted every edgy 14 year old who could figure out how to download LoIC. Once external raids and harassment campaigns were cracked down on by the mods the user base seemed to turn inwards and begin eating itself. This came to a head in the post election years as more and more boards were saturated with low quality content. Why should anyone bother creating OC or contributing to a discussion if it will be immediately derailed or drowned out by the same repetitive bait or incomprehensible schizophrenic rambling?
For a long time 4chan had purpose. Originally this was discussing niche topics (pornography). Then it evolved into raids, harassment and the extraction of lulz. Then social causes and anons trying to find purpose and better themselves and then nothing. They began lashing out at everything. Anons went from sincerely enjoying things, to ironically liking things and then pure hatred. Except not, it became the default to be a contrarian asshole except when you were only pretending, and actually everyone else was retarded for not seeing that you were fucking with them the whole time. It's faster to call everyone a cuck soy drinker and move on than it is trying to decipher the 9000 layers of meta comedy and half winking irony that everything was covered in. Culture can not evolve in this environment. This is why board culture has stagnated in the years since the election. This is why we only see the same forced memes rehashed over and over again.
As other Kiwis have said, the arrival of easily accessible AI has killed imageboards. Without competent moderation, which the site no longer has, it is impossible prevent widespread manipulation of the discourse. This has accelerated the drop in post quality to the point where bot posts are indistinguishable from human posters. At which point, why even bother posting at all.
There was a time that anons were comrades in misery. You didn't end up on 4chan because you were successful or had your life together. You were more than likely an outsider, a loser, fucked up in one way or another. Unmotivated. Devoid of purpose or meaning - flotsam of the modern world - just drifting. But that thread, that shared understanding, connected you to other anons in a way that it didn't with normal people. There was shit like The Well-Cultured Anonymous, an earnest effort by anons to help other anons unfuck themselves. Anons encouraged other anons to find purpose and meaning in their lives. Years ago I tried to give anons help and advice the same way that other anons had helped me. I had hoped that they would, in turn, carry it forward and help the next generation of "weird kids" to better themselves. I no longer feel this way. The anger that anons feel doesn't dissipate or drive them. Rather it feels like it's compounding. Their rage is directed back in on itself and becomes magnified. They no longer seem to want to escape from their misery, or even try. The ones that do are crucified as "normies" or "chads". Now they are like crabs in a bucket. If one tries to escape the others drag him back down.
Assuming that the original wave of 4chan posters were somewhere between 15 to 25 years old then most would be somewhere in their late 30s if not 40s by now. By the same metric most anons from the "golden age" of 4chan (00s up to the early 10s) would now be in their late 20s. I wonder what became of them all. I wonder how many anons never made it. That one kid with the rainbow face mask who ate a shotgun in front of a blue tarpaulin. Lowtax went out the same way. Or the anon who set himself on fire in his dorm. Zyzz died of a heart attack. All the an hero threads, some of them had to have gone through with it, or were lost to drugs or alcohol or their own demons somewhere along the way. Inversely how many made it and did something with their lives? How many bought a home? got married or had children? Mandalore, SSeth, ExaminedLifeOfGaming/Hoplopfheil and shoe0nhead are confirmed former channers, as are ContraPoints and Shaun. Those are all the ones off the top of my head, but there are definitely others. Moot keeps a low profile these days and seems to be doing well. I hope that one day all anons will find happiness.
There are users on the site now that are younger than the site itself. They weren't alive during the dot com crash of the 90s, the new millennium or 9/11 either. They don't remember the GFC or the start of the Iraq or Afghanistan Wars. Their generation has never known a world without ubiquitous internet access. The internet that they were raised on is highly curated and sanitized. In a lot of ways i feel sorry for them. The world they're going to inherit from us is severely more fucked up than the one our parents left us.
Typing all of this shit out makes me feel like an old man yelling at a cloud. I'm definitely looking at this with rose tinted glasses. There was a lot of stupid bullshit, even back then. I don't regret the time that i wasted hanging out there. The site should die, it has long since lost any of its relevancy or usefulness. I would rather see it die than languish and as a shadow of its former self. It was fun while it lasted. Kiwi Farms carries on alone. Floating above an ocean of piss. Glory to Null. One thousand years life.
Autumn ends:
frogs settle down
into the earth
