Update

4chan.md

@@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ UPDATE: As of 2022 /g/ became literally unreadable, ABANDON SHIP. The board beca
 
 Do not despair however, there are still other fairly enjoyable boards offering a more comfy, [fun](fun.md) and politics-free experience, such as /an/ (animals), /out/ (outside), /vr/ (retro video games), /wg/ (wallpapers) and a bunch of 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 suffering isolation from the normie "safespace" [censornet](censorship.md) -- 4chan's utmost significance for the whole Internet [culture](culture.md) (and perhaps beyond) cannot be overstated, 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). Back when it still meant something, 4chan has even made it to the mainstream American TV news -- it was the unforgettable, precious segment aired in 2014 when the hosts debated the Fappening scandal and one of them asked: "But who is this 4chan?" This gave rise to the "[hacker](hacker.md) known as 4chan" meme. In the mainstream 4chan has always held this aura of extremism and lurking danger so much that most "normal" people feared even visiting it, thinking they would instantly get raided by FBI upon typing the URL, when in fact it's really nothing more than a silly little site. 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 return, 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 in completely unrestrained environment, anyone can try to spawn a new meme or download anyone else's posted meme, repost it or [modify](remix_culture.md) it, [copyright](copyright.md) 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](science.md) [interesting](interesting.md) stuff.
+Despite dwelling slightly [underground](underground.md) -- maybe better said suffering isolation from the normie "safespace" [censornet](censorship.md) -- 4chan's utmost significance for the whole Internet [culture](culture.md) (and perhaps beyond) cannot be overstated, 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). Back when it still meant something, 4chan has even made it to the mainstream American TV news -- it was the unforgettable, precious segment aired in 2014 when the hosts debated the Fappening scandal and one of them asked: "But who is this 4chan?" This gave rise to the "[hacker](hacker.md) known as 4chan" meme. In the mainstream 4chan has always held this aura of extremism and lurking danger so much that most "normal" people feared even visiting it, thinking they would instantly get raided by FBI upon typing the URL, when in fact it's really nothing more than a silly little site. 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. One post, for example, exclaimed 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. Once on the animal board an anon was seeking advice on how to name a kitten he had found and another anon's response was simply a screenshot of a captcha he got while posting, which read "Daggs" -- creative responses like this are really what makes 4chan what it is (or was anyway). 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 return, 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 in completely unrestrained environment, anyone can try to spawn a new meme or download anyone else's posted meme, repost it or [modify](remix_culture.md) it, [copyright](copyright.md) 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](science.md) [interesting](interesting.md) stuff.
 
 As of typing this https://4stats.io/ reports /pol/ as the most active board (~80 posts/min, ~150 threads/hour), followed by /v/, /tv/ and /b/.