I just wanted to post some stuff I've been thinking about chans. There's no special point I'm arguing.
As far as I am concerned 8ch has been taken over and destroyed. I was just looking at some screenshots of some older 8ch stuff today: that whole story about the bank robber, people having fun with copypaste before racequeen, all the fan art about nomads travelling from 4chan and rebuilding. It was nice to remember back and think about what a good run we had. I feel like none of the new alt-alt chans have any hope of being close to what 8ch was and that's a shame.
More than that thought I'm starting to feel like the imageboard medium is a dead end. I asked myself what do you even get, today, out of an imageboard that you don't on reddit or something else. They're heavily censored these days, I find that the mods on these create-your-own-board sites really abuse their positions and remove far more than they should.
Maybe it's wrong to focus so much on the free speech aspect, the main purpose of chans is to free people by removing the assocation of their post from their identity. That is the key. What do we gain from that? Frustratingly a great deal of noise and incessant meme posts is one of the results. It's too easy to drag down the level of discussion.
The cultures are often based on paranoia and distrust to the point that spending too much time on a chan can leave you unable to interact and integrate with non-chan people. Not to ignore the enojable side of it: all kinds of chaos, fun. a place to learn about extremes thaht you would never normally see (gore, fetishes, horror stories, …). but I see the creation of OC drying up. Memes used to churn around pretty regularly, but now how long as pepe the frog been going? Also the weird meta-awareness and understanding of memes and propogation has created a weird new irony to everything. The innocent playfulness has been lost.
What would you like to see in the future? How can be change the medium itself to enable better more creative communities to form?
Some interesting articles on chan culture (got any more to share?)
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http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/96020280368/faceless-together-
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/new-man-4chan-nagle
