4chan (https://4chan.org/) is the most famous [image board](image_board.md), a website causing controversies by its low [censorship](censorship.md) and a place of great [fun](fun.md), [trolling](troll.md), toxicity and [memes](meme.md). As most image boards, 4chan has a nice, oldschool minimalist look, even though it contains shitty captchas for posting and the site's code is [proprietary](proprietary.md). The site tolerates a great amount of [free speech](free_speech.md) up to the point of being regularly labeled "right-wing extremist site" (although bans for stupid reasons such as harmless [pedo](pedophilia.md) [jokes](jokes.md) are very common, speaking from experience). Being a "rightist paradise" it is commonly seen as a rival to [reddit](reddit.md), aka the [pseudoleftist](pseudoleft.md) paradise -- both forums hate each other to death. The discussion style is pretty nice, there are many nice stories and memes (e.g. the famous [greentexts](greentext.md)) coming from 4chan but it can also be a hugely depressing place just due to the shear number of retards with incorrect opinions.
Just as reddit consists of subcommunities known as subreddits, 4chan consists of different boards (just as other image boards), each with given discussion topic and rules. The most (in)famous boards are likely *politically incorrect* AKA /pol/, where most of the american school shooters hang around, and *random* AKA /b/ which is just a shitton of [meme](meme.md) shitposting, [porn](porn.md), [toxicity](toxic.md), [fun](fun.md), [trolling](troll.md) and retardedness.
For us the most important part of 4chan is the technology board known as /g/ (for technoloGEE). Browsing /g/ can bring all kinds of emotion, it's a place of relative freedom and somewhat beautiful chaos where all people from absolute retards to geniuses argue about important and unimportant things, brands, tech news and memes, and constantly advise each other to kill themselves. Sometimes the place is pretty toxic and not good for mental health, actually it is more of a rule than an exception.
UPDATE: As of 2022 /g/ became literally unreadable, ABANDON SHIP. The board became flooded with [capitalists](capitalism.md), cryptofascists, proprietary [shills](shill.md), [productivity](productivity_cult.md) freaks and other uber retards, it's really not worth reading anymore. You can still read good old threads on archives such as https://desuarchive.org/g/page/280004/. Some other more relaxed boards such as /x/ may still be alright though.
**Alternatives to 4chan**: just check out other image boards like 8chan, 8kun, anon.cafe, leftychan.net, wizardchan, soyjak.party, 1436chan ([gopher](gopher.md)) etc. Also check out other types of forums than image boards such as saidit.net, voat or [encyclopedia dramatica](encyclopedia_dramatica.md) forums.
