I always seen 4-ch as a loving tryhard western imitation of 2channel with its own brand of news4vip forum games, shitposting, kopipe, etc (DQN) as well as some legitimate discussion (the other boards), but most people who came to this site seemed to come from 4chan or iichan and so the posts have always had a thin veneer of western "chan culture". And that was fine. The end product was something intimately familiar yet always somewhat fresh - something I could leave for a year and come back to without feeling totally lost. I'd always find posters happy to indulge in discussion of needler hall or clonepa hijinks, but there'd be some new trends or discussions too.
However nowadays in tyool 1993 it feels like most of the active users are actively engaged in perpetuating this previously-minor "chan culture" and it feels a bit like what made 4-ch special is being whittled away. Like it's being reduced to just another imageboard-adjacent site. What do you guys think? Am I just viewing the past through rose-tinted specs? Maybe I missed the point and western imageboard culture is actually a lot more central to 4-ch than I thought? Maybe it's the same as it ever was?

The decadent decline of text boards is an age old story, but I’m more interested in what people think 4-ch is “about”. Apologies for the spam, friends.