>>5
First things first, a large, centralized community will always have more power than a bunch of tiny decentralized ones. It would've made much more sense to take down 4chan than 8ch because 4chan is a large community with preset boards.

The size of something like 4chan's /pol/ makes it very easy for them to conduct raids, and speed and high user count makes deleting the threads and banning the users ineffective because a new thread will pretty much instantly start up made by someone else.

8ch, on the other hand, on top of having a smaller userbase to begin with, has many different /pol/ derived boards, most of which hate eachother. None of these small groups really has the manpower to do anything beyond raiding eachother, which itself has no effect outside of a very small segment of 8ch.

The only way 8ch was able to actually get anything done was via outside assistance from people who spent most of their time on mainstream social media platforms like youtube and twitter. Most things that 8ch was supposedly responsible for were in fact mostly carried out on social media first and spread to 8ch afterwards. The only exception I can think of is qanon and even then most of the q people are from twitter.

8ch would've made the perfect boogeyman. It was big enough that the general public was aware of it, but small enough that it couldn't do any real harm. If such a conspiracy existed why would the government kill such a valuable asset?