[krilly]

4chan partially solved this problem by using inside knowledge to identify 'newf*gs' and push them out. Triforce, fingerboxes, etc. The weirdly complex boardculture was self sustaining because new people couldn't even keep up with the conversation without lurking for a year or so.

And then of course, the newcomers started taking the abrasive and politically incorrect culture at face value.

[at_a_remove]

I agree with the first half but not the second.

4chan has largely been a place where people can express counter-culture views. Whoever and whatever could not be criticized in public, that was the place to do it it.

The left is currently unable to directly admit to themselves that they are in power (they teeter on awareness of it: where once they were concerned about tone-policing and voices being silenced they now say things like "deplatforming works") in the universities, the news, the entertainment media, and so on. And so 4chan (although largely /b/ and /pol/) is the place where you can tweak the noses of the left just as it was once the place to tweak the noses of the Scientologists, the right, and so on. Should the pendulum actually swing the other way, you would see the shift.

My archives of the chans dates from 2005 onward. You can see the expression of what was "naughty" shift one way or another tacking into any political or cultural wind.

In any case, 4chan's "solution" has been to simply embrace the idea of Eternal September and say, "it's up to YOU to ignore things you do not like." Having watched various communities succumb to stifling moderation like HOAs descending into controlling nightmares, I would say that there's a very crude wisdom to the approach.

[aepiepaey]

"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company."

[eirini1]

Clearly this failed massively, because these days its flooded by /r/The_Donald transplants.

[LaGrange]

4chan was started by people too awful for Something Awful, and I mean you're self-aware enough to recognise that they used slurs to scare people off, so you _know_ it was always a horrible place.

[jandrese]

My impression is that 4chan did a Mother Night on itself. They started with ironic Hitler memes and edgy teenage shit, but eventually people took that seriously and all that were left were edgelords and nazis.

[kick]

4chan still has a lot of good boards.

People have an impression that 4chan is exclusively /pol/ and /b/, but a lot of it's fantastic.

[krapp]

I know it's comforting to believe that there were never any real racists on 4chan until relatively recently, and that it was all naive shitposters and kids making edgy memes, but it's far more likely that actual racists have always hidden behind the pretense of 4chan's ironic culture and anonymity, and have always been active there.

[rozab]

The folklore was that the neo-nazi forum Stormfront saw an opportunity and started astroturfing legit Nazi views on boards like /new/, causing this transition (and thus changing the course of western politics for years to come).

I never looked deeply into it, but I don't think the transition happened entirely naturally.