>Sorry if this is off-topic. I'm just curious how 8chan and 8kun compare in terms of altchans and if there are any others you prefer.
Here's the thing, and I have a lot to say.
Personally, I have quite a complicated history with that site, and I think many of the people lurking here on 8chan.moe do as well.
I was around 16 when I started lurking on 4chan in 2012-2013. It was great; I had never felt more free anywhere else on the internet, so I really got into being an anon. I just couldn’t go back to other types of social media—they all felt restrictive in comparison. I mostly hung around /co/ because I’ve always been interested in animation, and it was just in time for the mini-renaissance American animation was going through at the time.
So, I was happy spending my days sperging out on 4chan, but then in 2014, the Fappening happened. Not long after that, /pol/ was temporarily taken down.And to boot, gamergate started. I was never really a /pol/lack, but the sudden censorship, combined with the hypocrisy during the Fappening—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, including conspiracy theorists. It wasn’t long before 8chan links started popping up.
which felt even more free, and that was cool. But there was a problem: due to the issues I mentioned earlier, a lot of /pol/lacks also moved to the site, and pretty quickly, they became the majority.
At the time, this wasn’t really an issue since we all generally agreed that the "woke mentality" was bad, especially as 8chan became a main discussion hub for Gamergate, two to three years before the cultural war became mainstream. Besides, if /pol/ was becoming a problem, I was slow to notice it, as I was mostly a /co/ user. I started to see it around 2016, though, as it became harder to discuss any topic without it turning into a political argument about whether whatever I liked had any hint of woke messaging, could be interpreted as woke, or worse, was "Jew-influenced." This was especially noticeable in /tv/, which had basically turned into a /pol/ satellite.
Time passed, and some boards resisted the /pol/ influence, like /co/, /lolcow/ (which would become important later), and infamously /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.
As for /b/, the place was constantly at war, intermittently dominated by one faction or another, and if it wasn’t /pol/, it was other factions—often even more unsavory. This, combined with /pol/ becoming the main source of traffic, led site owners to give them special privileges. Around this time, Hotwheels had stepped down as the site owner.
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.
At the same time, /lolcow/'s gossip was so fresh that it was being used by lolcows and YouTube drama channels, mixing with the political drama and turning everything into a mess. 8chan just started feeling like something that had real-world consequences. I guess I’m right, because around that time, the FBI began monitoring the site.
I was having the time of my life on /co/ and /lolcow/, so I wasn't very privy to the meta drama. I loved that board—the discussions we had, and I learned a lot from them. Some of my best memories come from the conversations I had with other anons there. But it was also kind of sad. You couldn’t step into /tv/, /v/, or other boards without them being infected by /pol/.
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.
Ultimately, someone did commit a shooting. Whether it was a genuine extremist or an FBI plant trying to use it to shut down a site that hosted dangerous anti-government ideologies is still debated. If I remember correctly, it was the second shooting that made Congress force Jim to close the site, and every news outlet reported on its closure, showing just how powerful and influential 8chan had become.
Frankly, ever since Hotwheels stepped down and during every /lefypol/ false flag, there were many attempts at altchans, there was a big scare at that moment and there were threads with full lists of altchans, all made and sustained by different anons, this was way before, at 2017 and probably contributed to make things worse as you could argue that every anon that wasn't a /pol/ extremist left, leaving the site more unbalanced. I wonder if there's somewhere some altchan islands lost in the seas of the internet completely disconnected from all.
When 8chan came back as 8kun, not only had lost all momentum, the threads were still there like we left them, but also it was completely softened. The rule list was long and under every post there was a content warning, it had become the complete opposite, /pol/lacks left and every person that loved the liberty to post also left.
8chan.moe is probably one of the biggest and more stable general-topic altchans. I came here and stayed because it carries the torch of the freedom and fun that 8chan had in its early days—just at a much slower pace. I do wish it were more active, but those years were hell. Ever since we adopted anons after the closing of Hispachan, it’s gotten a little better, though it's funny that the Hispachan refugee boards are the most populated and fastest-moving ones.
Some lessons were learned, so I guess it wasn’t all bad. No one lets /pol/ take over anymore—they can be around, but since their influence is tied to site-killing, people stand up to them more. As for the more extreme /pol/lacks? They moved to poa.st, a Fediverse Twitter clone that has nowhere near the same influence or power. I’m not sure what happened to the /leftypol/ users, though.
There were consequences, though. 8chan was memory-holed. People don’t really talk about the influence it had on internet culture anymore, and something broke—the divide between internet subculture and real life was permanently shattered.