>>463991
>I was around 16 when I started lurking on 4chan in 2012-2013. It was great;
No it wasn't. 4chan was complete dogshit by 2012. Oldfags had been trying to create a better home elsewhere for years by then.
>mainly how mods and LEA were slow to deal with CP but acted instantly to control the leaked nudes of adult celebrities—upset a lot of people
And moralfaggots who clutched their pearls over CP were a big reason why it was dogshit.
>a lot of /pol/lacks also moved to the site, and pretty quickly, they became the majority.
/pol/tards and /r9k/ virgins with rage were already a majority on 4chan, so that was no surprise.
>/leftypol/, which is its own can of worms, as it attempted several false flag attacks on the site to try and displace /pol/'s dominance.
Lel, I never saw that. All I saw was /pol/tards going postal IRL and then trying to blame everyone else for what they themselves did. Of course, /leftypol/ was mostly just a bunch of ex-/pol/tards who jumped ship, so who knows what they all actually got up to.
>Around this time, Hotwheels had stepped down as the site owner.
That was the end. We just didn't know it yet.
>Things really started to go downhill around 2018. Something changed, although I can't pinpoint exactly what. 8chan began to have more contact with the real world. It was growing too fast, gaining attention, and became the second biggest chan after 4chan. 8chan's talking points, memes, ideologies, etc., started appearing directly on mainstream social media. The emergence of QAnon was probably the worst part of it. A group of Trump supporters—the extremist kind who believed in such conspiracy theories—started arriving at the site and blended with the /pol/lacks, which was a bad combination.
They became activists in the Chanology sense, but instead of dressing in masks and acting silly for teh lulz they shot up a bunch of innocent randos to protect the white race.
>There were rumors that the FBI tried to incite shootings. There’s evidence of this in public court documents showing the FBI attempting to convince anons to start a shooting, and they messed it up because they didn’t understand that (you) appears in your posts, making it obvious it was staged.
Kek. /pol/ wanted so desperately to not admit that it was them who was killing people that they came up with the most outlandish goofball conspiracy theories and spread their own disinformation. Don't buy their bullshit. It was all them. What do you expect from a bunch of loonies who try to meme a chaos god into existence?
>I’m not sure what happened to the /leftypol/ users, though.
They dispersed. Some went to bunkerchan for a while, before the BO there went crazy (a common occurrence for site admins). No new site has filled the void.
>>464001
>Qtards didn't blend with shit.
There was a nasty rift in /pol/ when the Qtards tried to keep the Trump train running after he prayed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and made a bunch of Zionist statements that were impossible for the /pol/tards to reconcile.
>just like 8chan was a scapegoat for the Tarrant shooting.
LOL, scapegoat my ass.
>>464003
I remember reading a transcript of an interview that Hot Wheels gave after he left where he talked about being surprised that the supposed libertarians on /pol/ were so eager to use every dirty trick in the book to shut down any speech that they didn't agree with.
>>464006
>At the time most of the left was on board mostly with identity politics, and those who didn't buy into (((culture war))) bullshit basically had no home on the internet, being against idpol was /leftypol/'s unique feature.
"The new Old Left" they liked to call themselves. It was definitely something different--an odd amalgam of 4chan oldfags, labor organizers, anarchists, and a whole sea of ex-/pol/tards who originally went there to pwn da libs and got themselves converted instead.
>The admin of /leftypol/ was someone who used 4chan since 2004 so it's likely one of the main reasons for /leftypol/'s creation was that many leftists used imageboards and liked the culture/format.
What do you know. Bill O'Reilly was right about us the whole time.