Sorry, been drinking and smoking. It was a really different time. The way people communicate on the internet is so fucked now and this place kind of reminds me of the way things used to be. . . if not for all the fucking twitter screenshots.
fuck twitter screenshots.
Yeah I spent a lot of time on it from 2005 to roughly 2011/12 and started to lose interest. I would leave for a while and then go back. I would only visit fewer and fewer boards. I just gave up on it completely a few years ago. I don't even look at it anymore, not even out of curiosity. I just assume it's all /pol/ now and half the users are paid to be there by thousand-aire right wingers who still think 4chan elected Trump.
Yeah, same. Things started to get weird around the time of the Scientology stuff, embedding the idea that proto-posting could change the world. I think that was the first step towards the absolute wasteland it turned into.
I mean hindsight and all. I was young and nowhere near ready for material analysis. At the time it was easy to think that this wild west internet concept was the future. That people will just go online and do cool stuff with it as long as they could do it anonymously. It's a failed experiment for sure, I just wish that was the lesson people took away from it. People still think that being anonymous makes people more truthful. But we all lie to ourselves, even when we have no reason to. That might be the biggest thing I've taken away from 4chan. People will continue to pretend and troll even when there's no stake to their identity or safety. What the fuck does that say about people? Or at least the chronically online people? I think that has a connection to spite politics that we see now. It's not that voting for Trump makes libtards mad (it does). It's that you think it makes them mad. People construct an alternate reality because of this same mentality. You have to keep trolling strangers online because you think it makes them mad.
I wish I had the words and writing ability to flesh out this idea and turn it into an essay. It's something I've never heard anyone touch on, even people like Felix who were there during that time.