Do you speak Japanese? There are a lot of really small and okay-ish anime boards like good old futaba.

>>24546
Sadly, no. And not anytime soon. But I wouldn't mind the posting of links of the aforementioned sites, for the quality of this thread.

Post edited on 12th Jul 2014, 7:33pm

I don't have much experience because I've not been browsing Japanese boards actively for too long but here are some things I noticed.

二次元画像掲示板 - dat.2chan.net/img2/futaba.htm
Is my favorite futaba board, it features mostly discussion about anime and manga without porn and crap everywhere like in the 2D/random boards. The posting quality on this one dropped over the years and it's not the greatest but it is leagues above 4chan and the like because people tend to actually discuss shit without meme spouting and off-topic discussion.

フィギュア - dat.2chan.net/46/
I'm not really into collecting figures but it looks okay at first glance.

パソコン　- bbs17.meiwasuisan.com/pc/
PC board at MeiwaSuisan, I don't browse this one personally but still found it worth mentioning because there are quality posts.
MeiwaSuisan also has an anime board and stuff like that but I don't like the users, their posting behaviour is pretty normie-like.

I don't browse text boards but from what I've heard major 2channel boards are complete shit these days. I wouldn't be suprised if they're so popular, but there might be smaller invisible boards on there with better posts. I have no idea though, you'd have to look for yourself.

Most jap boards tend to be so dead that you can completely forget them. Often people then just dump images to their liking. Example: cap.nullgiko.net/2j-jikkyou/2j-jikkyou.htm

Here's also a (English) list with image boards if you're feeling adventurous: misc.dameib.net/boards/

>>24548
Oh wow. I was feeling adventurous and went ahead to explore some of those boards, and I must say it was a nice ride. Thank you for the links, although I hardly doubt I would ever frequent those.

http://pastebin.com/HNp6NuSA

>>24545
Samachan is another anime-centric imageboard that you might enjoy. But this thread is almost 2 years old, so it's unlikely that you care anymore.

>>28479
What? There's nothing wrong with giving recommendations and it should be clear that one has to lurk before posting so that he can get familiar with the culture and not be the obvious, "bad kind of crossie".

and so starts the exodus from TC...

To hell with it, i'm tired and today i'm feeling extremely generous. But first, an history lesson.

Things started gaining popularity mainly in comikes, then came 2ch and so futaba (2chan) as a backup only.
Around this time, our young hero moot then saw things he shouldn't in his teens 15yo on futaba and decided to grab the free code and edit it a bit, so 4chan was born as mainly an experimental project, like some of you are seeing here.
But he was smart, spreading word on animecons and gaining popularity fast amongst otaku communities, eventually things spiralled out of control and normalfags railed him from behind, "forcing" him to bail out.

Midway through here, hiroyuki, now the owner of yotsuba (4chan) was the owner of 2ch and things there already worked by dirty money, selling data from people dumb enough to buy custom tripcodes and even nanashis. Data farm.
Then he was ousted and so things got serious, many alternatives of 2ch were created like open2ch.net, 2ch.sc and many others, offering "security" by protecting users privacy.

However, there was no turning back, and even with the rise in popularity from smartphone apps centered on it, the community split too far apart to different places, something like we saw here in the west with numerous imageboards being created as alternatives for 4chan around the same time.

The popularity now is on sites we call　まとめ or 速報, which are a collection of best threads or news amongst other things. Something like newsnow.net, that i can think of in the west. These sites are eating the chan population and recently it was announced a steep decline in 2ch activity, which was mainly attributed to sites like these. There are many of those focused on different topics but lots of them are affiliated in some way, so they list the same exact things, this also includes news from sites like niconico, if you know some basic to medium japanese level then go ahead. I don't even care if normalfags read about this or decided to adventure there, you know, there's a limit these people can go and they'll reach it soon enough. But if you're curious, you can go very far.

http://matomeantena.com/
http://2ch-matome.net/

this might help http://www.bluethree.us/futaba/
although it hasn't been updated since the 1970s