i heard you were the admin of 8chan at some point. what was that like? does that contribute to your disinterest in imageboards?
I was briefly a global moderator but I was removed because I asked a board to dox someone who was tripfagging and advertising her (his) board across the entire site. My involvement with 8chan's administration continued for just under a year after, until the end of my development project.
The main lesson I learned with 8chan is that there is no barrier between lolicon/shotacon and pedophiles. When given the chance, pedophiles will actively participate in those boards. They will post lolicon, then post pictures of children on boards they've set up for that purpose. I was not convinced that lolicon was anything but a fetish for short/petite or a 'healthy outlet' for pedophiles, but no it's definitely not. I'm also inclined to believe lolicon is a gateway for people to develop sexual interests for children. The kind of person gooning to lolicon is eventually going to run out of things and pursue child porn, and those with child porn are not too far from the communities for lolicon, so it will be easily found.
I do not believe imageboards can exist in this decade. By 2030, no fully anonymous IBs will exist. In China, they actually do have anonymous websites that are very popular, but you post anonymously with an account that you register with KYC. So the administration plays nice with government and the people causing problems are rooted out.
Truly anonymous communication is flanked by two competing but cooperating interests: Government interests hoping to more efficiently control online discourse, and child pornographers. My opinion is that there are two kinds of CSAM spammers: literal glowniggers posting child porn straight from the FBI goon databank (literally the largest child porn storage in the entire world), and pedophiles who are salty everyone hates them and post child porn just to shock normies and kill communities they can't be a part of. There is a very obvious contempt held by pedos against normal society. They really believe they should just be accepted and tolerated on online communities and not being welcomed makes them angry, so they try to punish these easy pickings that can't effectively moderate them out. Posting child porn is a very, very assymetrical style of attack that causes harm in ways regular network attacks can't. Governments, of course, benefit from these attacks either way because they harm anonymous communities.
I will also say, and this is just part of my general disastisfaction with IBs, that IB communities are some of the least rewarding to work with. They are extremely demanding, want improvements but not change, are very autistic and will get angry over single-pixel changes in stylesheets, want endless customization because of aforementioned autism that complicates all developmnt and causes things to break continuously for people installing mods without knowing how they work. They're also just generally very combative and entitled people who want you to work for free, then make fun of you for working for free, then complain when you stop working for free because they deserve your work for free and they deserve to make fun of you for working for free. Every rule is too much censorship to someone (including anti-CSAM/Lolicon rules) and then at the same time they get angry about brigading and shilling.
There's also manufactured consensus. People can, and will, exploit the anonymou nature of IBs to rig polls, samefag in meta threads to popularize bad ideas, and generally disrupt any kind of serious discussion. That's why 4chan has no meta board. They do whatever they feel is right because there is literally zero reason to try and figure out what people want, and often times what people want is retarded and bad.
IBs are for young people, both in terms of userbase and management. At a certain age it stops being fun.