This place feels dead ;-;
There aren't any good 4chan alternatives that are active AFAIK
Also, anyone else think if /b/ never existed, 4chan would still be a decent imageboard rather than a place for children to make edgy posts just because they'd be afraid of doing it on their Facebooks?
I still post here quite often.
The problem isn't that there aren't any, it's that there are too many. It's kind of a shame the textboard community never coalesced around one board like the imageboard community did around 4chan. There's so many damn textboards and they're all only sort-of active, instead of having one actually active board.
As for whether 4chan would still be a decent image board, well, that's up in the air. IMO if they had focused more on enforcing the rules and let it be known that moderation was the rule instead of the exception it could have nipped a lot of problems in the bud. It still would be a place for children and teenagers to make edgy posts though, but maybe the blatant spamming of other boards would have been curtailed a bit.
That and if they encouraged people to crosspost instead of referring to any particular board as a "Containment Board" for posts people don't want elsewhere. Then you get tons of off-topic posts because people don't want to post in the appropriate board. Boards shouldn't have an antagonistic relationship towards one another, they're on the same website and tend to have the same posters. It just leads to shitposting and paranoid accusations.
Keepin' the Spirit alive, 1993--2016, 4-ch's not dead.
sure this place doesn't get much traffic.. but it's not dead.
I'd love a 4chan alternative too though, I had such high hopes for 8ch but they've all been destroyed. I've been doing nostalgia binges across various old chans, some gone and replaced with new.
I'm not sure what to think of what >>2 said about there needing to be one textboard. There's sageru and saovq which are basically single board DQN sites - but DQN is the busiest board on this site too. I don't feel they detract from here. Certainly there is no programming discussion on /prog/ (used to be 4chan, now superceded by progrider) taking away from programming discussion on our /code/ board.
One interesting modern thing is atob.xyz - it's actually pretty lively and it's a general purposes textboard. It's very 'web 2.0' maybe that's why it's sucessful?
I'm glad there are lots of little textboards but I do agree this place could use an new birth of life. maybe we should advertise it somehow? Or is there something about the site itself that needs update and fixed, or features added? (I feel this is unlikely)
>>3
I don't think there needs to be necessarily one textboard. I just mean that it would do a lot for the textboard community if there was one board which was "The Big Apple", so to speak. There's a lot of imageboards besides 4chan, even prior to 8chan. If someone says "Gee, what's the big deal about imageboards?" there's one they can get pointed to which is active and serves as a main hub of that community. The rest of them are still there, but are (usually) deliberately off-the-beaten-path. There isn't anything like that for textboards. We have over a dozen boards, most with the same sub-boards, and most with the same people posting between them.
Thanks for the atob link though, I've never heard of it before! It looks like a fun place to hang out.
>>4
I see what you mean and I think 4-ch is the best candidate for that , but what I'd like to know is: What is it missing to be that? just traffic or maybe an index pointing to other sites or..
>>5
That's a tough problem. I don't know. I think the biggest issue is just traffic. For all we know, 4-ch is the largest textboard, but there's not enough traffic in the community to make it visible that this is the case, and it's not like anyone tell the other boards that, hey, there's just not enough community to go around, so please shut down!!
Another issue might be our close link to 4chan, despite being pretty different in attitude and culture. If we tried to tell other people on the internet who aren't from 4chan about this place, they'd probably think "Isn't that just like that 4chan place? Why would I want to hang out there? Gross." If you tried to tell people who are from 4chan, well, then you get people from 4chan. As it is, it seems most of the community is people who were from 4chan at some point, but who no longer want to spend time with its community. Which is a fine niche.
>Also, anyone else think if /b/ never existed, 4chan would still be a decent imageboard
/b/ was the first 4chan board so I don't see what you mean.
Exploding vans was what really screwed up 4chan. After that everyone coming to the site thought it was a place for 1337 hax0rs and epic raids.
>>9
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128IR21ZQa0
4chan's first major coverage in the media.
4-ch will always be alive in my heart, no matter what.
If you were a channer before exploding vans, you're the type of user that would probably be hanging around on 4-ch in 2016. An "oldfag" if you prefer.
Don't despair, we exist, and we remember the good old days. Most of us just lurk now. There's really so little to say anymore!
4-ch is not dead. Well, some boards are dead, but DQN, Internet Addicts and General are very much alive. Other boards like Anime and Net Culture show signs of sparse, but still persistent habitation. What 4-ch needs is more traffic, but good luck convincing the administration of changing the parked domain look of the front page.
>>7
A random board, even if /b/ was Anime/Random in the beginning, is usually a bad idea.
>>10
ah hhaha i remember this but for some reason not the exploding vans part.
4chan ruined anonymous forums forever.
All people care about is lulz'' and OC'' and ``trolling'', not discussing and sharing pictures like 2ch and Futaba.
2chan worked because Japanese folks need an anonymous outlet. 4chan didn't because the few westerners who need that outlet tend to be pretty fucked up in the head.
PROVE ME WRONG
>>16
In my experience 2chan tends to be full of pretty fucked up heads. Japanese internet users in general.
I was on some anonymous chat-site and there was this one dude who really REALLY liked batteries. AA, AAA, Duracell, it didn't matter. I assume there is an community of battery users on the Japanese internet.
>>15
Doesn't help that 2ch and Futaba both are made for discussion.
4chan only started because moot needed some place to dump hentai (no joke).
Everybody has a theory about when 4chan started to go downhill, and it usually takes place not long after the poster joined. I've seen exploding van blamed, football blamed, g4 blamed, and chanology blamed.
Everybody also forgets how /b/tards acted during raids. Whether it was Habbo, GaiaOnline, Tom Green, Ghost, or Hal Turner, there was always a few people spamming that "we come from 4chan!"
The discussion presupposes that 4chan sucks now as opposed to before, but I'm not sure that has much merit. In the mid-2000s there was way more child porn, tons of bot spamming (anonib is the reason they first implemented captcha), several copycat threads guaranteed to be running (his name is grinman!), etc. Even then people lamented how /b/ was better only a year or two prior (hence the meme "/b/ was never good!").
What it comes down to, I think, is that 4chan is kind of like heroin in that users are always chasing that first hit. The culture is new and fun, and the memes feel new and fresh. Over time the old memes get stale and new ones aren't as comfy as he ones we first remember.
Quite honestly the only thing I truly miss are the text boards.
>oldfag
yeah im a newfag who just came here to see popular textboards
4-ch will have a revival soon, trust me lads
>>17
Haha, I used to be obsessed with batteries when I was in middle school.
Can't remember why exactly I found them so appealing though.
4chan ruined everything and attracted NEETS and shit to /b/. 4chan is destroying obscure imageboards and textboards everywhere. Even futaba channel is taking its toll recently. Feels bad man.
test
/b/ was never good but looking at it these days makes me want to kill myself
why did you sage?
also i hope 4chan gets nuked already, infinitychan is 10x better but is so much more autistic
they act super fucking serious all the time and the mods are authoritarian cunts
sometimes i think 4ch is the last bastillion for an anonymous platform with a good balance of discussion and funposting
>>25
8chan is a dying chan that more an more people are moving away from
there needs to be more good imageboards out there
>>27
if they're moving away from it then where are they going?
>>28
Western population decline. 8ch is populated mostly by children, so they get hit the most.
>>27
I sincerely hope for imageboards to ascend into the impenetrable jungle of social networks, never to be seen on the open internet again.
>>19,25,24,22
The decline of internet culture is not unique to unmoderated anonymous web forums, all bbses merely reflect the nature of average netizen.
You can appreciate the power of sep 1993 only after observing it for a while.
The nuclear blast does not progress at a constant rate, there are sudden, separate waves of disruption which bring the hordes of idiots - first it was dialup,then web/dotcom,online videogames,social networks,youtube/streaming,now mobile - each had abrupt and noticeable effect, worsening the overall signal to noise ratio.
The only hope there is that this effect is in fact cyclic, and the trend will naturally reverse somehow eventually.