Update

4chan.md

@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ UPDATE: As of 2022 /g/ became literally unreadable, ABANDON SHIP. The board beca
 
 However there are still other, quite nice boards for a more comfy, usually a very fun and politics-free experience, such as /an/ (animals), /out/ (outside), /vr/ (retro video games), /wg/ (wallpapers) and many others. A mistake most newcomers make is to just check out /b/ and /pol/ and swiftly quit in disgust. 4chan is actually designed this way on purpose, these so called "[cancer](cancer.md)" boards exist to filter out noobs. Only a few will proceed to explore other boards and indeed, there is a reward for doing so. One usually finds a nice niche board where people are quite mature and you no longer want to kill yourself when reading the threads.
 
-Despite dwelling slightly [underground](underground.md) -- maybe better said being isolated from the normie "safespace" [censornet](censorship.md) -- 4chan has really been very notably significant for the whole Internet [culture](culture.md), long [books](book.md) could be written about its [history](history.md), culture, unique, intricate social mechanism of its ways of communication and impact on the rest of the cyberspace; the "4chan experience" is one of the things that can't faithfully be described by words, it has to be lived. Just like reddit mixed some interesting concepts into a unique, yet more powerful combination that's more than a sum of its ingredients, so did 4chan -- yes, other boards are to be credited for this too, but 4chan is the flagship, the center of it all. Especially important seems to be the anonymity aspect, you never know who you are talking to, it's never clear if someone is [trolling](troll.md), serious, shilling, extremely dumb or something in between. There is no karma, no handles, no profile pictures, no upvotes (at best there are numbers of replies), no post history, no account age, you have to rely on judging people by unusual attributes, for example by the style of their talk, their knowledge of the [lore](lore.md) and latest [memes](meme.md), by how they format their posts (e.g. the infamously hated empty lines), what images they attach, as these are the only clues. A thread on 4chan isn't something with a clear goal, you don't know if someone is asking a question because he wants a genuine answer or because he's just bored and wants to see funny answers, or if he's posting a bait and is trying to trigger others, so each discussion is a bit of a game, you're trying to guess what's going on. A famous post, for example, had itself heard that the poster despises translations of books and always reads any book in its original language despite not understanding a word of it, and that he already read works such as Don Quixote and Les Miserables in their respective languages without knowing what they were about -- this stupidity combined with extreme determination and dedication (usually known as [autism](autism.md)) captures part of what makes 4chan what it is. Also everything is temporary, every thread and image is deleted in a short time, which is an important factor too, everything is constantly in motion, people have to react quickly, there is no turning back, reactions are quick and genuine, if you miss something it's gone. Also the image memes themselves show how [art](art.md) (who cares if low) evolves if completely unrestrained, anyone can try to spawn a new meme or download anyone else's posted meme, repost it or [modify](remix_culture.md) it, copyright mostly [de facto](de_facto.md) won't apply as the authors are unknown; bad works are filtered out while good ones remain simply by making others save them and keep reposting them, it's art without authors, separated from the people, evolving completely on its own, purely by its intrinsic attributes, unconstrained evolution at work right before our eyes -- this is a seriously scientifically [interesting](interesting.md) stuff.
+Despite dwelling slightly [underground](underground.md) -- maybe better said being isolated from the normie "safespace" [censornet](censorship.md) -- 4chan has really been very notably significant for the whole Internet [culture](culture.md), long [books](book.md) could be written about its [history](history.md), culture, unique, intricate social mechanism of its ways of communication and impact on the rest of the cyberspace. Although the golden age of 4chan is long over and many of the original 4channers say it's absolute shit now ([Ashley Jones](ashley_jones.md) being one of them for example), it still remains a great phenomenon at least in [history](history.md) [books](books.md). the "4chan experience" is one of the things that can't faithfully be described by words, it has to be lived. Just like reddit mixed some interesting concepts into a unique, yet more powerful combination that's more than a sum of its ingredients, so did 4chan -- yes, other boards are to be credited for this too, but 4chan is the flagship, the center of it all. Especially important seems to be the anonymity aspect, you never know who you are talking to, it's never clear if someone is [trolling](troll.md), serious, shilling, extremely dumb or something in between. There is no karma, no handles, no profile pictures, no upvotes (at best there are numbers of replies), no post history, no account age, you have to rely on judging people by unusual attributes, for example by the style of their talk, their knowledge of the [lore](lore.md) and latest [memes](meme.md), by how they format their posts (e.g. the infamously hated empty lines), what images they attach, as these are the only clues. A thread on 4chan isn't something with a clear goal, you don't know if someone is asking a question because he wants a genuine answer or because he's just bored and wants to see funny answers, or if he's posting a bait and is trying to trigger others, so each discussion is a bit of a game, you're trying to guess what's going on. A famous post, for example, had itself heard that the poster despises translations of books and always reads any book in its original language despite not understanding a word of it, and that he already read works such as Don Quixote and Les Miserables in their respective languages without knowing what they were about -- this stupidity combined with extreme determination and dedication (usually known as [autism](autism.md)) captures part of what makes 4chan what it is. Also everything is temporary, every thread and image is deleted in a short time, which is an important factor too, everything is constantly in motion, people have to react quickly, there is no turning back, reactions are quick and genuine, if you miss something it's gone. Also the image memes themselves show how [art](art.md) (who cares if low) evolves if completely unrestrained, anyone can try to spawn a new meme or download anyone else's posted meme, repost it or [modify](remix_culture.md) it, copyright mostly [de facto](de_facto.md) won't apply as the authors are unknown; bad works are filtered out while good ones remain simply by making others save them and keep reposting them, it's art without authors, separated from the people, evolving completely on its own, purely by its intrinsic attributes, unconstrained evolution at work right before our eyes -- this is a seriously scientifically [interesting](interesting.md) stuff.
 
 As of writing this https://4stats.io/ reports /pol as the most active board (~80 posts/min, ~150 threads/hour), followed by /v, /tv and /b.