I'm outing myself as a zoomer, but it's been 10 years now, so i guess i can confess that i started posting on 8chan when i was 13 (when it was 8chan.co) and that it was actually my first imageboard experience. I heard that 4chan was going to shit at the time and i liked the idea of starting with this relatively new site and growing along with it. Obviously it was a rough start, i would namefag and make some dumb and shitty threads and posts and i would rightfully get called a faggot and saged, and i'd cry piss and shit over it, but some months in as i lurked and learnt more posting here became relatively smooth sailing.
I have so many fond memories from the early days of 8chan. I posted plenty on waifu threads as the Vibrifag, i found out about her game from 8/v/ too , witnessed the ROB & GB threads, was on the "hmmm blocks" thread that started /clang/, joined plenty of Gamenights like GMOD, Ace of Spades, Joint Ops, and Sven Co-op and was there for plenty of happenings like TPP, paid mods, Liru, Nintendo Treehouse, Gawker and NeoGAF closing, and a lot more things that i must be missing. I kind of lost interest on the site around 2018 when some of my favorite generals like waifuthreads or R.O.B. started dying off, but i was also around when the original site was closed down.
Far from fucking me up, i really feel being on 8chan and imageboards in general that young actually gave me a bit of a leg up in my teens. I know it sounds schmaltzy to say for a chinese bronze engraving forum, but i think the unfiltered, shitposting, shittalking nature of imageboards really helped me learn how to stop being such a hothead and lighten up, get over my ego and learn how to take criticism or read the room, which were things i really struggled with a lot in real life, as a lonely kid with assburgers who was never allowed to go outside on his own and pretty much relied on the computer for any sort of meaningful human interaction. I'm not saying that 8ch saved my life or that it made me a social butterfly, but i was well on my way to becoming some sort of lolcow and posting here just made me a lot more self-aware and socially conscious in general.
And with anonymity and without any sort of permanent audience like "followers", it's not like saying something dumb or weird was the end of the world either. It sucks that outside of a bunch of imageboard remnants there aren't really any places left on the internet like that and how instead they're all built around developing an "audience" that scrutinizes everything you do 24/7, where one slip up or controversial opinion can turn you into a digital village idiot. I could unironically make the case that this is what makes social media is far more harmful for kids than adult imageboards ever were.
Thanks for grooming me, bros.