It's entirely up to 4chan whether it decides to comply or not.

The UK is much like the US in that democratic processes are co-opted and undermined by special interests to the point that governments engage in suppression of free speech and mass surveillance against their populations. (What’s unique to the UK is that it’s government is largely subservient to the US in the international dragnet.) We are all human and share the same human rights regardless of our nationality.

> It could even be argued it's not involved in exporting it either.

It is providing content to IPs located in the UK, therefore, it's knowingly exporting content. If the user bypasses controls using VPNs or proxies, it's a different thing, but I would expect 4chan to make a reasonable effort on their side in order to prevent a sitewide block.

Alibaba has warehouses & hubs in Europe (and I assume the US), where it first imports to its own subsidiary here, so this is somewhat debateable.

Perhaps the terms import and export aren’t suitable for internet content? Perhaps new terms with legal implications are needed for internet age?

Hmmh. If some powerful law enforcement agency was coming after me to stop my website, I sure would hope they would first send me an email asking me to stop.

What “well established process” would apply here ?

They bend the knee for censorship requirement. (Not only that, they provided machine learning based filtering service for other Chinese search engine at the time)

According to Google, the China government tried to infiltrate Google's internal computer system. In response, Google stopped the censorship over night, and withdraw from China market shortly afterward.

I still remember night, when _all_ Chinese search engine stopped censoring because Google stopped their filtering service.

The China tech company have evolved much since those days, and they are now much better at censoring compare to what Google had in the early days of the internet.

I worked for a company that asked users for their gender, with language along the lines of "choose the gender that best matches your identity."

There was a special case for Middle Eastern countries that removed this language.

> though I thought Google left the market rather than bend the knee?

Not even close. They bent the knee first; they left afterwards.

That's the crucial part. Lots of people who do business in other countries either want to, or need to, visit the US from time to time. Whether for a "shopping trip to NYC", or for business reasons. That's why it's a big deal when the US wants somebody.

On the other hand, I'm not particularly concerned about some tyrannical regime on the other side of the world that doesn't like the kind of content I have on my site. I'll postpone the research until I actually need to fly over their airspace or something.

Where does the UK currently stand in the spectrum between "country that everyone wants to visit sometime" and "country that nobody gives a fuck about"? It used to be firmly on the former side, but it seems to be drifting away to the latter side every year.

It is a mass killing event which the Chinese government pretends never happened and/or suppresses the information of. Phrases will be banned/filtered from all digital services in China relating to it. From Wikipedia:

> The Tiananmen Square protests, known within China as the June Fourth Incident, were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, lasting from 15 April to 4 June 1989. After weeks of unsuccessful attempts between the demonstrators and the Chinese government to find a peaceful resolution, the Chinese government deployed troops to occupy the square on the night of 3 June in what is referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The events are sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement, the Tiananmen Square Incident, or the Tiananmen uprising.

> Between 200 and 10,000 civilians were killed. The Red Cross states that around 2,600 died and the official Chinese government figure is 241 dead with 7,000 wounded. Amnesty International's estimates puts the number of deaths at several hundred to close to 1,000. As many as 10,000 people were estimated to have been arrested during the protests.

Completely whitewashed, for all the good it does Google.

Mmmmmhhhhhhh…What if I buy some goods (say electronics) in the EU from a foreign firm (v.gr. China) using mail and these goods do not comply with the EU’s regulations? I really do not know the proper reply to this.

That's serving UK users while knowing that they aren't legally allowed to.

A darknet drug dealer could make the same argument, probably with little success.

I suspect that MI6 could find a US private company's directors names if they wanted to. We're not talking about nuclear launch codes here.

No, the older women are being arrested for protesting in the streets in support of an organisation our government has deemed to be aligned with terrorism. It’s entirely silly but not as silly as your example.

The were arrested for encouraging people to burn down hotels with people inside… they went to prison because they pleaded guilty to racial hatred offences

As an adult child in such a situation, it's actually worse than a toddler...

If you honestly believe you can control what your two teens see and do on the internet, you've either got them chained up in a closet, or you're wrong.

It is not possible to censor the internet when VPNs are freely available. The more you try the more it backfires. By telling your kids they cant see a website they are sure to visit it, all they have to do is google for a free vpn.

The problem with relying on parents is that they're either reckless or simply unable to prevent the kids from smoking.

By the time they're teenagers, it's pretty easy for them to access anything on the internet regardless of the controls implemented.

4chan is a cesspool, and society is worse off letting it fester, but you arn't solving this problem by "personal responsibility" of parents.

Tough luck, if you don't like it, then you (or your government) should block those websites. It's not job of the US businesses nor US government to enforce another country's laws.

I've sympathy for what you're proposing - on-shoring our own tech - but the Online Safety Act is a terrible law and it should've been repealed yesterday. It will do nothing to advance those aims, and plenty to stifle innovation in the UK tech space. Ofcom can get fucked.

So ban those businesses from operating in your region. Don't pretend that Ofcom can regulate the content that is viewed around the world just because you're upset about things in your country.

If your countrymen want to use Uber, Air B&B, Oracle, and Facebook, should you try to stop them from doing it, even if you personally dislike those companies?

You are making the same argument that Trump is making with the tariffs. Personally, while I can see some good arguments for protectionism, I'd rather have the choice to decide whether or not I want to buy Chinese products, rather than the government making the choice for me.

> These slowly degrade societies, like it or not.

So, thought crimes?

No you’re right. Instead of a multi-billion dollar organization supporting the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people, serving directly their millions of customers, we would be better off running this with a team of Oxbridge literature and PPE alumni, armed with a hodgepodge of constituent letters accompanied by stiff emails by one or two members of parliament funded by god knows who, who otherwise have no skin in the game.

On the other hand, the limited size of the British market limits Parliament’s ability to pressure foreign companies.

China may be able to bully Apple into letting it snoop on its citizens’ icloud backups, but when the UK wants the same illiberal snooping powers, with 10% the population it’s 90% easier to walk away.

The Chevron doctrine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....

This concept in the U.S. is also evolving since 2024 decision reducing the strength of this legal protection.

Practically all countries have some version of this, few hundred lawmakers and their staff cannot reasonably set every single policy and micromanage its execution for every for government function.

Civil servants always have a lot of say in direction of governance even if not directly enshrined in law or recognized by the court.

The classic 80s satire Yes, Minister is good illustration of the parliamentary version of how it happens in say England even if not enshrined in law so to speak.

And what they're doing to TikTok now

Did the government ever moderate usenet?

4chan is well, moderated, but it's outlived Facebook with real names.

Frankly, LLMs with transparent prompts, as well as user-side filters based on LLM prompts (e.g. "Don't show me comment threads talking shit about Attack on Titan") could do a better and more "fair" job than meat-based moderators now.

They won't have personal biases, don't need to sleep (ending the infamous "mods are asleep, post xxx" waves), their prompts would be visible to everyone, and there could be ways for the users themselves to update the space's rules/prompts.

Until you get put in prison for reading out a headline wrong lol

I imagine you'll be saying this with tears flowing from your eyes after the UK blocks HN.

yes, them constantly locking threads about content they don’t agree with is stellar

Oh please. Vote-based social networks are way too vulnerable to burying the truth and boosting lies.

It just takes the first 3-4 viewers to downvote you to prevent the next 10000 people from seeing what you said. There's no downside to downvoting just because you don't like what someone says, even if it's true.

And usually no amount of corrections can outshout a lie/mistake with 100+ votes.

You vote for the moderation you like with your digital feet- see X vs BlueSky

> moderators in pretty much all online spaces are effectively dictators

This. How do 1-10 or 20 or even 100 people get the "right" to decide what millions of people talk about and see?

What's keeping them from burying/boosting opinions about shit they have strong personal feelings about?

Steve Huffman/Spez of Reddit literally edited users' comments, and they autoban anyone saying "Fuck Spez"

>While HN is fairly lenient

HN is NOT fairly lenient. HN has a very strict set of rules (applied with infinite discretion) and absolute bunches of tiny rules and quirks that are completely hidden and no real transparency of any kind.

HN has basically an official party line for heavens sake! This is a site for disseminating information about VC things and driving engagement about things that VCs want people to talk about and think, driving traffic to Paul Graham things, and advertising YC businesses and people and ideology.

And not politics unless it's positive towards the ideology of VCs

There aren't official punishment policies or official ways to appeal anything. There's no higher power to call out to. There's a semisecret clique of users.

HN, like most places that are actually good to participate in, is a strict, tyrannical dictatorship that usually uses it's powers to shape behavior towards "discussion", but what that means is entirely up to dang and now tomhow.

The internet requires such behavior because it's just too easy to participate in a non-genuine way and entirely escape any retaliation. You cannot shun a human in an internet setting like you can in real life. The social tools humans and other animals use to shape community behavior are impossible online.

This idea that if we just let people speak absolutely free on the internet things will work better is hilariously uninformed. Humans do not pick or latch on to narratives that are correct, they pick narratives that feel the best and in the modern world, that is almost never the "correct" one. Brains hate nuance, but reality is nuanced.

It's funny, the same exact people on here who insist they can't ride the bus or walk around cities because they freak out if a homeless person accosts them seem to be blind to the concept of how other people's free expression can have a chilling effect.

Aure, i also have vbrain damage that aligna and cherry pivkd what i like

What nonsense - Starmer and co are as neoliberal as they come…

Putin was doing just fine under Biden. In fact, if you take into account these last weeks, Trump is taking a much tougher stance on Putin than Biden did.

You're right, speech should not be limited... in fact I am telling everybody about the time you beat your wife and abused your kids. And I'm putting $100,000 in to advertising this all over the place and ensuring every forum is littered with this fact along with your name and address...

Hopefully you see simple solutions come with their own complex problems.

This is no solution. We as a society can define free speech as being absolute, and this is fine, I'm onboard. We still need to handle the consequences from this decision.

but it isn't absolute anywhere

It's not absolute in the US because the US constitution only protects from the governmental limiting it, which means there is a lot of potential to effectively and fully legally limit free speech. And even the government gave itself a lot of limitations where through excuses and loopholes it can limit free speech (e.g. from teachers in public schools).

Then there is the question of what even is "speech", in the us spending money can be an act of speech but wouldn't that make bribing an act of free speech even though it clearly shouldn't be legal?

Should systematically harassing/mobbing people with the intent to drive them into suicide be protected by free speech? It's speech, but you would need to be a very cold hearted person to think that this shouldn't be a crime.

Is leaking trade secrets free speech when you do it vocally? It would be strange if that where no crime but technically you do so by speech.

What if you systematically rail up people with deep fakes and all kind of misinformation? Is that free speech? Before WW2 many intellectual would probably have argued that people aren't that easy to mass rail up and as such it should be free speech. But after Hitler gained power in exactly that way the position is more one of "if people systematic rail up the population and spreed misinformation en mass with the intend to overthrow the government" then letting them do that is pretty dump thing to do.

So no "speech" not only is free speech not absolute, it's a pretty bad idea create absolute free speech protection. And both in small and large cases this has been proven again and again through history.

This doesn't mean that censorship is right either.

Like with everything in live "extremes" are close to never a good thing to peruse.

Anyway you know what is even more embarrassing then being a hall way monitor, it's to never question your believes and insisting they are right even when its repeatedly shown to you that there seems to be some problem with them. But seriously, why edit you response to add an insult against anyone who doesn't share your opinion??

You are saying that when US citizens engage in illegal gambling in other parts of the world, the US sues and threatens the foreign gambling venues? That South Korea sues marihuana dispensaries in the US when they sell to visiting Koreans?

> South Korea (smoking cannabis abroad)

And gambling, too. Remember in 2013 when all those celebrities got busted for gambling in Macao?

> After getting caught gambling illegally, Shinhwa’s Andy, Boom and Yang Se Hyung received their punishments.

> On November 28, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced Andy, Boom, and Yang Se Hyung to monetary penalties. Andy and Boom must pay 5,000,000 won, while Yang Se Hyung will pay 3,000,000 won.

> The fines were dependent on how much money each person bet. Andy spent 44,000,000 won, Boom 33,000,000 won, and Yang Se Hyung 26,000,000 won.

> The three are all currently pulled out of all schedules and self-reflecting on their actions.

> Meanwhile, Lee Su Geun, Tak Jae Hoon, and Tony An are waiting for their first trial to take place on December 6. They bet more than several hundred million won.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140215040022/http://mwave.inte...

Sure, but those laws apply to US Citizens, and typically aren't enforced until the person returns to US soil.

Sovereignty is a big thing in international politics. Countries as a whole are loath to meddle in other countries domestic affairs, even in extreme cases like genocide/ethnic cleansing. Violating weird online protection laws are not the sort of thing a country is going to risk an international incident over.

Sure you can find some examples of countries that violate those norms, but they are the exception not the rule.

Good reminder that what happens on the server stays on the server, but what happens on the client happens wherever the client is.

Which doesn't sounds so absurd if you replace “tobacco” with “cocaine” and “Parisian” with “Colombian”.

Yes if the Parisian tabaconist sells in the UK. What happens in France is a French concern.

Blocking UK users from your service does not put you out of scope of OSA, according to Ofcom.

4 days ago:

> "Services who choose to restrict access rather than protect UK users remain on our watchlist "

Could you help a fellow out and translate what it actually means in plain language?

Remember that they're threatening a fine, and failing to pay fines can be a criminal matter. Simply blocking the site would be less of an issue, at least in terms of legal consequences.

But it doesn't seek to block 4chan, it seeks to impose penalties.

4chan does have very minor explicit support for UK users; on some boards it puts a UK flag on their post (as it does with all other countries and territories.) It could perhaps be argued that this constitutes the site being consciously designed with UK users in mind. Hardly matters though, there's nothing the UK can do about it. They aren't a superpower anymore and it's time for them to realize it.

I low key want to see official documents stating the name of some of those threads: all the "bongland" and" have you got a loicense" threads with some of their respective comments.

4chan.co.uk value decimated by this analysis

4chan gets money by selling (with crypto) "passes" to their users. These passes allow users to post using VPNs. Being banned in the UK will increase demand for these passes, probably increasing 4chan's revenue over all.

>Note, they don’t earn money from users. They earn money from advertisers.

It doesn’t matter. They loose the audience - they loose advertising revenue. The only difference is that UK cannot seize the money to collect the fine (the fine now is the price of the return ticket), but the fine wasn’t big anyway and complete loss of the market has bigger economic consequences. UK doesn’t have power over US corporation, but they have power over their distribution channel and they have full sovereign right to exercise that power.

Yes, sure, they can fight the law - in UK. It’s not what they are doing.

If you think foreign laws directly targeting you are stupid, not only do you have few ways of fighting them, trying to fight them might often be criminalized as well ("foreign interference" laws etc.)

Well, you’re allowed to try to fight them in some places, some of the time - with often severe consequences if you don’t win.

> Unless something dramatic changes

Dramatic things happen with regularity. Wars, viruses, economic calamities... there is no predicting any of it. For all you or I know 4 years from now the (D)s will own everything. Maybe then Ofcom gets a hearing. Maybe Ofcom doesn't exist any longer. This misses the point.

The point is that the hubris exhibited here, in this forum, and also by this lawyer, behaving as though there is some perpetual immunity in effect, is naïve. It is entirely plausible that some foreign regulator with intentions that happen to align well with the prerogatives of prevailing office holders right now or at any point in the future could have have powerful leverage in the US.

> […] and potentially (via subcontract to Cloudflare) serves to UK customers from equipment located on UK soil.

Still, not quite.

Servers in the UK ≠ targeting the UK – courts on both sides of the pond will ask whether the operator directed activity at the forum. Merely serving content from UK edge nodes because a CDN optimises latency is usually incidental and does not, by itself, show a «manifest intent» to engage with UK users. There is an established precedent in the US[0].

If a UK-established CDN processes personal data at UK nodes, the CDN itself may be subject to UK GDPR. That does not automatically drag a non-UK website operator into UK GDPR unless it offers services to or monitors people in the UK. Accessibility or passive CDN caching alone is insufficient. And modern UK statutes mirror this; for example, the Online Safety Act bites where a service has a significant number of UK users or targets the UK – not simply because a CDN happens to serve from UK equipment. From the horse's mouth: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...

Then there is a nuance – explictly configured Cloudflare (1) vs automatic «nearest-edge» (2) selection:

1. Explicit UK-favouring config (for example, rules that prioritise UK-only promotions, UK-specific routing or features tailored for UK users) is a relevant signal of targeting, especially when combined with other indications such as UK currency, UK-specific T&C's, UK marketing or support. In EU/UK consumer cases the test is whether the site is directed to the state – a holistic, fact-sensitive enquiry where no single factor is decisive.

2. Automatic «nearest-edge» selection provided by a CDN by default is a weak signal. It shows global optimisation, not purposeful availment of the UK market. US targeting cases say much the same: you need directed electronic activity with intent to interact in the forum; mere accessibility and generic infrastructure choices are not enough.

[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/293...

Simply offering a service to UK citizens isn't enough to provide jurisdiction. If I run a lemonade stand, and a UK citizen walks up a pays a dollar for a glass of lemonade, then that doesn't give the UK jurisdiction over the lemonade stand.

That's what's happening here - a webserver is operating entirely out of the UK, with no nexus. UK citizens send requests to it - just like all other countries citizens do, so either the website would be covered by all laws or just the places where it has nexus.

This is especially true in the US, where speech is strongly protected - making Ofcom's assertion that its regulation overrides the first amendment especially egregious. The UK government's behavior here is a bit shameful.

Someone has to be willing to extradite. I'm sure China, Russia, and Iran would love to prosecute all those pesky political dissidents abroad.

I'll be pretty shocked if someone ever gets extradited out of the US for not showing a cookie banner.

They can’t possibly be breaking UK law because the service isn’t even being provided in the UK. UK users are accessing US servers to get service.

> I think you are confusing breaking a law, and enforceability.

I'm not. My comment and other replies to you are telling you that YOU are.

We're saying that your question doesn't make any sense.

nitpicking like this is asinine

The question is will France stand for arresting people for smoking in Paris if they travel to the UK. The gonernment of France can allow that or they can retaliate in various ways. Just a diplomatic message is likely enough to make the UK back down - but who knows maybe the two won't agree and go to war.

Like the US's bad habit of banning British musicians for the content of their songs? https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/30/uk/bob-vylan-uk-band-glas...

So when I see a tracking cookie dialog on a web site, either 1. the site collects more data than they need to in order to run the site or 2. they don't and the site's management is incompetent. Both are pretty good reasons to avoid that particular web site.

that seems like an issue with the website owner to me

There's no risk, they know what they are doing because the law doesn't just mandate the banner, it mandates you to know which third party service you're sharing the data to.

Check the banner next time, you'll see how many “partners” they do sell your data to.

My kids figured out disabling Wifi disabled the Pihole within hours, and that was when they were ~9. They are intelligent opponents and a very fast moving target.

Oh, its funnier than that. The most sophisticated data trackers don't even use cookies anymore. Anyone you would have to worry about getting that data hasn't used cookies in years. So the entire exercise punishes small companies that don't do anything with the data except pre-populate fields for you. But big tech companies that the law was targeting don't have to change a thing.

> All phones (the network account attached to the SIM actually, not the phone itself) comes with a content filter enabled by default in the UK, adult or not.

Neither resident nor frequent visitor to the UK, so I'm behind the times when I ask: I beg your fucking pardon?

Is there further reading on this inane nanny-state horror, ideally via a Wikipedia article on the law or gentleman's agreement amongst the carriers?

Furthermore, is this more common than I assume, and I simply don't notice because I don't stray too far from the mainstream?

Without laws forcing companies to properly declare which cookies are "necessary", this control you imagine does nothing, as every company simply sets their advertising cookies as "necessary"

One of the hundreds of reasons do_not_track failed. You cannot do something that trusts the website operators, because they are egregiously untrustworthy.

The cookie banner everyone keeps bitching about is a direct example of this. No website is required to have a cookie banner. They choose to, because they know most users click "Yes to all", and then complain about the regulators, instead of the assholes asking you to consent to sharing your data with nearly a thousand third parties

And "browser vendors" will never do anything, because 90% of the market is a literal advertising behemoth, the rest of the market is owned by a company that makes money only when you do things not through the web browser.

That "unlabelled whack-a-mole" problem is exactly what a system-level visual classifier would block.

I don't see how a content blocker would do that.

I mean a classifier to identify anything that looks sus.

Edit: also something like this needs deep OS integration.

Yes but to be clear, using wifi or a VPN can bypass that. It's not an on-device filter.

It's entirely up to 4chan to voluntarily comply and avoid any further consequences.

What about domestic entities running undercover propaganda campaigns - as we have seen e.g. with Cambridge Analytica? Should we maybe focus on the more fundamental problem of our democracies being vulnerable to propaganda campaigns rather than making sure that only "good" and "sovereign" propaganda campaigns are allowed?

Something needs to be done. The outcomes are manifestly bad. I can't take the pro-freedom intellectual argument seriously unless it's coupled with a suite of pragmatic solutions to the negative side effects I am observing with my own senses. The intellectual walls of text just aren't papering over that reality.

>I don't want the government to decide which thoughts I can access and which ones I can't

That would be an interesting discussion in itself, but even so - accessing material in isolation over the internet removes all of the benefits of cultural and community self-regulation.

>freely run undercover propaganda and/or destabilization campaigns

I'm of the opinion that WWW3 has already happened - it was a war for hearts and minds waged over the internet, and we've already lost.

And let's not forget governments all over the world will call in fake bomb threats to force planes to land to arrest passengers.

And with a bit of effort, the UK could call on friendly countries for extradition (such as Canada). They'll have to convince the judge that the crime is bad enough for extradition, but I'm sure they can come up with something.

It all depends on how much the UK really cares. In practice, this is probably just a big act by Ofcom so they can say "we've tried everything, we'll have to go for a full ISP-level block as a last resort".

Adults grooming children in chats is absolutely a thing, this is completely different from talking any way they feel like to their peers face to face.

Not exactly. Before smartphones, sure, you weren't able to police the kid 24/7. The kid gets out of the house, comes back in the evening, god knows what happened in the meantime. But nowadays parents actually do have the means to exercise absolute control over their kids. That's a huge game-changer. First, most of interaction happens online. If you ban the kid from the internet, your kid won't have friends, problem solved. And it's not like kids nowadays rush to gather outside.

That was originally going to be my plan - my kids can have a smartphone when they can afford to buy one themselves. I figured that by this point they would be old and experienced enough to deal with it. As I pointed out above, some of their peers at ages 5-7 already have parentally-supplied smartphones. It sucks that I'm probably going to have to talk to my currently 5-year-old girl very soon about what the internet has to offer.

You don't need a perfect fix.

I'm sorry, but if you're threat model is your kid getting a fucking burner phone, I don't know what to tell you.

Even this law won't fix it! Why, couldnt your kid just save up and buy a plane ticket to the US?? Oh no .. we need a global law don't we?

Or, maybe, we throw away that thinking and acknowledge that the problem is not that big and solving 99% of it is MORE than good enough.

Your kid is way more likely to die in a car wreck. Focus on that or something.

In which case there is no need for anything else.

> Because there is a lot, there is no shortage.

Yes, but the problem is, many (if not most) of those content or services were created by adults and dispised by kids.

pick one your kid's most interested topic, are there enough kid-friendly content/services that fulfills all the needs?

in terms of speech development, TV was found to be a massive benefit in increasing vocabulary - how are you so sure the internet (nebulously defined as that is) is detrimental to communication abilities, arent they on there talking to their friends?. And if we are talking about the internet in general and not just twitter/tiktok, then its largely NOT doomscrolling and ragebait. Hackernews (heck, every single news organisation EVER) has an "algorithm" for "increasing engagement", books are written to increase engagement, its been going on for centuries but only since social media appeared do we suddenly dislike it.

Great! If this is so, then you should be able to prove that UK citizens are using crypto to purchase their services and that 4chan is expressly aware of this fact. I'm sure this proof will be forthcoming presently...

Yeah don't get me wrong, once in a while something interesting is posted. Any time something is said in corporate media to be leaked that is the first ClearWeb site I check to see if someone has posted to a paste/git site.

4chan was funded by USAID? Is this an in-joke?

I never said that. USAID manipulate narratives on all popular multimedia and social media sites. Anyone may post on 4chan and anyone with a 4chan-pass may use proxies and VPN's.

I think the general curation by some mods is less pushing some agenda, more just enabling the shitposters they're friends with at the cost of genuine discussion.

Least thats what happened with a scene I'm rather involved in, the threads in recent years became nothing but a cesspool of negativity and most people knew who was behind the constant drama. What people didnt expect was the leak revealed one of the mods was among the group constantly causing it.

> Is there proof mods push general threads or curate content?

how does this relate to what i said? i get the "we're a free platform where everyone can do everything and no one is responsible for anything", just a cheap excuse from my POV considering the unhinged, doxxy culture on there. sure, there are cute boards, nice. i am talking about the inhumane, unhinged slurry of shit.

"Sure my neighbour has a couple of cadavres in his cellar, but have you seen the pretty flowers on his balcony?"

but per usual you can't criticize 4chan in the slightest without its warriors appearing to defend it. i get it. 4chan did and does cool stuff. it also does absolutely disgusting things, surprisingly this always gets dismissed as 'it's only the couple of rogue boards which are crazy'.

'Hate!? on 4chan!? That's absurd!' /s

> 4chan isn't all /b/ and /pol/

maybe this is my bias, could very well be. maybe i should give it a 10th chance and browse the more useful boards.

i guess /g/ would be a start, do you have other recommendations? i mean i'm open to change my mind. for me 4chan stands for alt-right pipelines, spreading far-right ideology online etc., so i just really have a sour taste in my mouth when thinking about it.

I agree on some notions, theres little original content or discussion, theres little creativity.

Most threads still get plagued by a circlejerk of wannabe neonazis repeating shibboleths and transphobia at each other ad infinitum, or if you're lucky enough you find a crumb of quality discussion, often generals, often around derivative content from other platforms or popular media.

There are the rare productive generals that do have people curating information in meaningful ways, or even rarer actually doing things themselves. Far more often generals are just toxic loosely held together "friend" circles who cant get along anywhere else due to a perpetual veil of irony that can only survive in anonymous spaces, often attacking each other for little more than to stir the pot and keep conversation going. They'll still hold a superiority complex over their use of the site even though every single bad thing they'll say about others can be said for 4chan times 10.

Its not 2006 anymore, 4chan isnt a creator of internet culture, 4chan is a dumpster of the web, where art goes to die.