I was "I'm twelve and what is this?" and saw some people commenting about what a cesspool 4chan was on a demotivational poster, being 12 I had to investigate. I don't know how I ended up on /b/, but I remember laughing my ass off at the "programmer describes public toilet adventure" greentext.

I used to use reddit and i heard about 4chan from there. i thought it was the deep web or something because of the anonymity and i was scared of it. then curiosity got the best of me and i started visiting 4chan and then started using it. the end

I used SA and there was a mass exodus to leave it because of political correctness in mods. I had avoided it before because back then there was a gore fetish board. When I came to 4chins it was pretty funny and weird. Huge focus on original content and inb4 was used to shut down unoriginal jokes and replies. First day I replied to something I was made fun of, so I lurked longer and eventually fit in just fine. Now I can't stand it and can't find a replacement of like minded folks in the internet. I'm not radical enough for either side, and I have a wife as well as kids so I don't fit in with the modern incel/neet crowds. That's pretty much all of the internet aside from marketing and porn.

>>651 >I'm not radical enough for either side FWIW I'm similarly "stuck in the middle" when it comes to online communities. I hate how politicized every aspect of our culture has become. I miss the days before the web was taken seriously, when most content on the internet was casual or humorous. I mean, I don't think if someone forget to call the local gender-fluid astro-kin by the newest pronoun she came up with this week that they're "literally hitler", but I also don't think that every problem in the world down to you stubbing your toe this morning could be explained with "it was the jews" as if reality is really that simple. If you're seen as not having one of the extreme views though, then as "weak willed". What a load of bullshit, but what can you do? It's exhausting.

>>652 I'm in a discord with some buds, we've been together for about 5 years but even in there there's a few zoomers who don't care about shit and shit on people for caring out having a life, bring up race or identity politics or actual politics. I'm with you. I like to discuss these things but I'm just smart enough to realize there's not a climate of discussion now. Just talking down to one another from a place of ignorance to a place of ignorance.

I learned about them from reddit I shit you not. Important to note though, that this was before Reddit became total garbage. It was never really great, but there was a time when it was good. A time, long gone.

Some random friend told me about The Game and I looked it up and followed it to old 4chan. I was probably 14. I lurked on /b/ here and there, mostly childish curiosity about what I was seeing. Anytime I tried to post people called me a newfag, every time without fail. A couple years later when Jessi Slaughter happened the first thing I thought was "what a dumb cunt, what a retarded father" but the news was treating them like genuine victims. Obviously 4chan wasn't looking at it that way, and I remember that was when I started browsing daily and posting sometimes. At first I tried to join in raids and silly shit like that, but over time I just liked having a place to talk about vidya without being surrounded by normalfags, and I liked that there was this local culture that people cared about enough to gatekeep. Growing up at the same time I was developing interests in politics, guns, and anime and there was always a place to shittalk with people who all "spoke the same language". It was a special thing that's long-gone. Fullchan exodus felt like a weird sequel that ended up being a great thing on its own, really the last flash of something that was dying. Now that it's turned into doublecuckchan I just kinda hang around on moe and sleepychan trying to convince myself that we're the legitimate remnants of whatever that special thing was. I think I should just accept that imageboards are shit now and the only decent ones are too dead to ever recapture what it used to be like. Thanks for reading my blogpost. Bonus blogpost: I was thinking about something recently that's sort of on-topic. Long time ago, must've been on 4/x/, there was a thread about finding spooky shit on google streetview. Somebody saw that thing in Paris or whatever that looks like a Halloween prop of an alien, standing up on a balcony. I opened the link in another tab and checked it out, left it open but forgot about it. Later in the same thread somebody says something like "holy shit look at the alien again", and posts a screenshot where it's blurred out. I'm about to call bullshit because I can still see it in the other tab, but I refresh and boom, it's blurred for me too. So maybe aliens are real and the men in black were lurking /x/ that day and censored it on the spot. Probably a more mundane explanation or a coincidence, but it's fun to think about.

>>652 Man, I've tried to unjade myself and join a discord so many times. They're all just like forums used to be, a circlejerk of trannies/furries/faggots who make up a bunch of rules so they have a place to circlejerk and an easy excuse to ban anyone who disrupts said circlejerk. Imageboard people are fucking autists, but at least they don't ban me for banter, or having wrong opinions.

>>708 discord might be even worse then reddit with how fucked up the censorship patrol is. last I checked its owned by Soyne and is getting integrated into the next big update to the gaystation 5 firmware.

>>711 Yeesh, news to me. We live in terrifying times.

>before the web was taken seriously Practice what you want to see. Wallowing in hopelessness because 1. >>652 you were called "weak-willed" by a stranger. 2. >>651 you claim to be too well-adjusted for places where you're supposed to be anonymous and can play make believe. 3. >>657 you denounce other opinions as ignorant because everyone is ignorant, but you. It all contradicts this fun environment you want when you take such things seriously.

>>713 >you were called "weak-willed" by a stranger It's not just a stranger. It's every stranger, on every website, all the time. There's no escape anymore, and there's only so long you can brush it off and keep trying to have a good time before you just get tired of everyone you wanted to get along with shutting you out and dismissing you as an enabler for not standing up against the tyranny of other tribe. >It all contradicts this fun environment you want when you take such things seriously. Well, almost every other thread here is mostly fun shitposting and light-hearted discussion. A vent thread thread is nice too though.

>>720 Lettuce restrict the scope to imageboards. You won't know who's behind every post. Likewise they won't know who you are. Unless you end every post with "I'm a fence-sitter btw".

I heard about 4chan from my older brother back in I think 2006, but he warned me not to go there because of stuff like gore posting, cheese pizza, and the incredibly dangerous papyrus virus, so I never touched the place. Then in 2011, I started watching MLP:FiM and was balls deep into ponyfaggotry for a few years. I was a lurker on Derpibooru's forums, and was following their GamerGate thread since it began, because I hated the idea of outside influencers being willfully ignorant and clumsily fucking with my hobbies. Then in 2015, when Law & Order: SVU did their GamerGate episode, I visited Redchannit, had a good laugh at all the fresh memes, and started browsing the rest of 8chan. Every forum I'd been on since 2005 had been either too rule-faggy to the point of stagnation, or too small to the point of starvation. I found more freedom, humor, and like-minded individuals on 8chan than I had on any forum in years. All my old hangouts felt like nothing but a step backwards, especially with how little I held in common with them anymore. After lurking /v/ and /co/ for a while, I started browsing /pol/ and learned all about globalhomo fucking with everything. I got really excited whenever it seemed like they were onto something, like the shemitah jew-pocalypse in 2015 and meme magic in 2016. Of course it never actually went anywhere, and /pol/ never recovered that momentum, but it was fun while it lasted. Nowadays I'm not very political, because anyone with the power to enact any meaningful change from either side/in any direction is quite comfortable where they are, and most will only side with something to grift it to death. I've still got opinions and ideals, but the most I can do is tell my sister's kids not to fall for the tranny meme my nephew is golden, but I'm worried about my slightly autistic niece, and eventually get into making videogames of my own. You can only unfuck so much by hand right now.

I first heard about 4chan from the news about "the hacker 4chan" but I didn't actually start using it until around 2011 when it came up in a search, but then after a while I realized it was shit and stopped using it. A few years later I discovered 8chan and it was less shit so I started using that.

Alright frens, I don't remember which it is but here goes: 1) When I was young, my father was told about Linux by a work colleague after our Mac died. This lead us down the rabbit hole of open source software which lead to me downloading the F-Droid store for my Android phone. I liked browsing the F-Droid store and eventually found some apps for browsing imageboards. I didn't know what those were so I didn't install any of them. 2) At some point, we ended up getting a magazine called 'Linux Format'. One issue of this magazine had an article about a web-based private messaging app where you could make 'channels' to talk. I joined one called 'chan' either because a) it was short for 'channel', b) I tried to type 'channel' and pressed enter too soon, or c) I remembered the word from the apps I found on F-Droid 3) I liked XKCD at the time and discovered imageboards from the list on their wiki. It was a combination of all three but I can't remember which exactly was the first.

>>707 >join in raids damn, those were the days