In the middle of the wasteland there stands the crucified dried out corpse of 4chan: kept alive by corporate overlords through wires giving it energy, social media prosthesis that serve more durable than the decaying flesh, research agency tubes injecting enough ideology juices to keep its living functions operational - all so it would continue playing the role of useful idiot strawman for as long as needed to those that keep it active. The spinoffs have all died out from hunger, dysentery, or were gunned down by spies and agents before they could make any sort of significant impact - they were a drag and weren't needed. Violent bots and cybernetically enhanced tribesmen roam the wasteland in search of new flesh they can consume. Latest developments in mental opium have blurred the distinction between friend and foe. A landscape intentionally left in such a state as to serve a grim reminder: "stay in your safety shelter, you don't want to be here."
Amongst the wreckage, charred bones and poisonous waste walks the monk commonly known as 4-ch, collecting a list of names of all the deceased and departed.
4chan is kept alive not because of some looney conspiracy but because it's an extremely low maintenance site. Threads are automatically pruned and image and text limits prevent any thread from taking up too much space on the servers. The amount of content on 4chan at any given time is always guaranteed to be less than 1% that of a site like reddit. It also doesn't get anywhere near as much traffic as people think it does.
Hiro does some shady shit with the site, don't get me wrong, but it's less "4chan is a front for a government mind control program" and more, "4chan collects information to sell to porn companies without telling you".
Also, 8ch was a much bigger and much better strawman than 4chan. It had a much smaller userbase that said and did far worse things than 4chan, and was inaccessible via google, meaning normalfags couldn't look into it like they could 4chan. Why on earth would they eliminate such a perfect strawman in favor of a site that's biggest legacy is the large amount of weird porn it produces?
I'm not saying not to be distrustful. But you shouldn't have confidence in things you don't actually know that much about.
>PAY
Woah, neat.
>>2
Didn't 8chan's death produce a shitton of spinoffs and increase in traffic for other chans? By this reasoning 4chan being kept alive artificially is actually profitable for the powers that value control and centralization. 4chan does its job of serving a specific demographic that doesn't fit anywhere else and is also easier to control, manipulate and influence than any of the more niche sites of the same kind. Controlled opponents are a highly valuable commodity.
Also, moot works for google now. All the philosophies, ethics and knowledge possessed by the creator of the first western imageboard belong directly to the biggest internet company in the western world now.
Also also, consider that the biggest imageboard in Russia (dvach) is directly owned by a company with heavy ties to the Russian government (mail.ru). Their /pol/ equivalent hates their government and their country as hard as people this side of the cyberworld do. This at a time when fringe and independent critics of Russia and the Russian government within Russia are persecuted by law for their activities.
>>5
First things first, a large, centralized community will always have more power than a bunch of tiny decentralized ones. It would've made much more sense to take down 4chan than 8ch because 4chan is a large community with preset boards.
The size of something like 4chan's /pol/ makes it very easy for them to conduct raids, and speed and high user count makes deleting the threads and banning the users ineffective because a new thread will pretty much instantly start up made by someone else.
8ch, on the other hand, on top of having a smaller userbase to begin with, has many different /pol/ derived boards, most of which hate eachother. None of these small groups really has the manpower to do anything beyond raiding eachother, which itself has no effect outside of a very small segment of 8ch.
The only way 8ch was able to actually get anything done was via outside assistance from people who spent most of their time on mainstream social media platforms like youtube and twitter. Most things that 8ch was supposedly responsible for were in fact mostly carried out on social media first and spread to 8ch afterwards. The only exception I can think of is qanon and even then most of the q people are from twitter.
8ch would've made the perfect boogeyman. It was big enough that the general public was aware of it, but small enough that it couldn't do any real harm. If such a conspiracy existed why would the government kill such a valuable asset?
kusosure award
apply yourself
Maybe not the state of now, but I can see it happening in a few years down the line. 4-ch will definitely outlive everyone else.