I've wondered that myself a lot and touched on it here. http://tohno-chan.com/so/res/23463.html

I simply assume these people drop image boards and nerd/weeb culture as they move on to get families and focus on careers and such. For all the bs they spout about how they'll never change and damn the people that do, few seem to make it past 30. They do their 9-5, go home to their wife and kids, and don't have time to so much as touch a computer because they're tired and just want to nap or watch netflix. If and when they do have free time it gets sucked up by their family responsibilities.

Yes, they moved on. Like I moved on from forums into imageboards 15 years ago, many moved on from ibs to reddit/discord. Many, like mentioned by >>24602 don't have an online presence anymore. Check the thread the other anon mentioned, we talked about this extensively. I would say mobile phones have altered how a good amount of people use the internet. For example, and I mentioned this on the other thread, my brothers and their friends use nothing but whatsapp/telegram for interacting with other people and they do so in closed groups. I have checked many other social outlet websites out of curiosity and I would say Reddit/Instagram/whatsapp and other apps for chatting/discord/twitter is what most people use nowadays. I've tried using Reddit myself but I just can't for some reason. There's something about imageboards I really like.

Probably a number of factors, some get jobs and lives, some probably kill themselves, some adapt and become bad posters, some might learn Japanese and only use Japanese sites and some would have just given up and left imageboards. On top of all of this, because of how image boards are now even the ones that stay the same and remain would be drowned out by others and would be hard to notice.

I'm one of them.
I got the fuck out of all the big boards because they changed too much. Once normalfags and their bullshit constituted more than 50% of content I didn't feel at home anymore.
It's been a LONG time since I exiled myself. I should have left even earlier. I can't even imagine how bad things must be over there today.
I never found another populated place to browse. They don't exist and can't ever exist again due to the composition of contemporary internet population.

Never even visited 8shit because fuck cripplekike the traitor.

>>24602
Nope.
People like me don't get lives or families. For our kind it's not even possible to move on.
The few vocal normies that were always present to some degree, maybe. Not core anons though. They don't switch, they just leave without picking an alternative.
Because there is no alternative. All the facebooks, the leddits, the whatever flavor of the month social circlejerks, they're all antagonistic to the spirit of Anonymous imageboards.
I guess most old ones entered invisible mode, only using the internet to passively acquire information related to their personal interests without having to deal with anyone's shit anymore.

I don't think the oldfags would want to return.
Even if there was a place to successfully capture the old spirit (and I mean the true old spirit) it would last for a second before being taken over and ruined by outsiders.
It's inevitable the anons would end up being outnumbered 100 to 1 by the retards with lives and families again.
Who would ever want to watch their home get invaded and defiled one more time?

>>24605
8/a/ and it’s bunker aren’t so bad! But the rest of 8chan is pretty bad but not for the reasons you think. No, the problem with 8chan is that it falls into the "popular unpopular opinion" trap.

If you visit that site and look around enough, you're going to see the same supposedly unpopular opinions stated the same way over and over and over again. Everyone there thinks the same, talks the same, ect. They even have very similar tastes in things like art and music. There's no room for individual opinion, and anyone who goes against the grain is marked as an outsider and is antagonized.

It doesn't matter if they're different from the rest of the web, internally everyone there is very fucking similar. And I get that communities are supposed to have a shared culture. But there's a point where it goes from being culture to dogma, and the likes of 8chan have the latter, not the former.

And said dogma isn't really a dogma of its own. It's been so long since the openminded individualistic version of the internet died that it's gotten to the point where people honest to god can't imagine how things were anymore. The closest thing we have to individuality nowadays is contrarianism, which is really just a dishonest form of conformity.
credit : http://4-ch.net/iaa/kareha.pl/1506882416/27

>>24605
I did a bit of digging in a previous thread and found out that even the first english imageboard ever created was complete dog shit. Any "anon spirit" was manufactured in the west and means nothing. Prattiling on about "what it means to be an anon" is part of the problem.

>>24606
>anyone who goes against the grain is marked as an outsider and is antagonized.
Gee where have I seen this before...

Post edited on 7th Sep 2019, 8:22pm

>>24608
Tohno has one of the nicest userbases I’ve ever seen from an imageboard, the only time they’re mean is when people are breaking rules or normalfags are here.

>>24609
Replace "outsider" with "normalfag" from the quoted line and it's the same thing.

>>24610
Not really. There was a meta controversy a couple months ago about the bingo thread suggesting TC is full of normalfags and everyone including the admin told him to lighten up.

im 30+ and how beein posting on imageboards since 06
honestly op someone, like myself, who has spent a good part of their life f5ing these places - well, what would i even have to talk about
i have few interesting ideas or things I even wish to discuss, my life isnt important and overall remarkably dull

i mostly low effort post on spinoffs these days

>>24612
Well, if nothing else you have a lot of redpill insights about life that most normalfags never will anon, so there's that.

>>24612
Would you recommend spending a large amount of your life F5ing to younger anons? Do you regret it?

>>24614
Not him but I'm also 30+ and have been on image boards pretty much daily since 2008. I wouldn't recommend it at all. I for one regret wasting a large chunk of my life like that while having nothing to show for it. I wish I used that time on something more productive, creating something, refining some skills, advancing a career, anything. Instead I stayed at home behind a computer day in day out for years, and as a NEET for much of it. Having seen a fuck ton of anime, played countless videogames and made countless posts doesn't mean shit in the real world. It doesn't even mean anything among other weebs/gamers when most of the people into that stuff today only know of the most recent popular stuff, and if you're not playing pugb then it doesn't mater if you've played 10,000 other videogames.
Sure living in the now, and just enjoying yourself while you can is nice, but that kind of thinking catches up to people real fast, and trust me, starting anything latter rather than sooner in life will be much harder.

>>24610
They ruined every site they ever touched.
>>24615
Sure, just don't think you could have been one of 'them'. Maybe you could land a slightly better job but socially? They'd never let you in. Fughettaboutit. At best you'd be treated as a disposable tool, tolerated only till your usefulness ran out.
That's a protip for you.

>>24610
No. There's this dumb little idea that's popular right now that there's no such thing as objectivity. You can't measure normalfaggotry in numbers, but based on decades of observation, its characteristics and effects on the internet are pretty well-agreed upon. They're obsessed with politics, real life realtionships and superficial life style choices, they get enraged when others disagree with them and make assumptions about their character(like if I called you a nomalfag just because you have a different opinion) or social rank(kid, basement dweller, loser, etc) and they regurgitate slogans, phrases and "memes" constantly, they believe they are the moral authority and assume their standards are universal.

These are qualities which nearly everybody posesses to some degree, because it's part of human nature, but are shown most strongly and even celebrated by normalfags.

>>24617
>dumb little idea that's popular right now that there's no such thing as objectivity
Isn't that essentially postmodernism? I often wonder if the rebranding as postmodernism was a tool (by both academia and normals as a whole) to allow for such ideas to fester and spread under a convenient disguise. It's also impossible to assail by its nature. At the very least the underlying ideas have perhaps in part contributed to the declining quality of current imageboards (why put in the effort of a substantive post when you can whip up a paint graphic, pair it with a buzzword, and claim post-ironic humor!)

>>24617
I mean, the theory itself IS sound -by simple thought experiment it becomes self evident that objectivity cannot be proven by the scientific method- but relative patterns and truth still exist. Personally it seems that it's a very human-centric view of the universe that is required to dislike of the concept that objectivity may not exist. Regardless, the universe does not revolve around humans, and it doesn't factor in what humans believe about it when it does whatever it actually does. Actually humans probably haven't even been able to emit enough energy to cause changes in other star systems yet. To base ones beliefs off of the emotional instinct that oneself is important is pretty silly.

>>24619
People should act in a human-centric way though, and beliefs affect how people act. If we don't consider our human perception valuable because it doesn't apply to the "big picture", we might as well just all kill ourselves right now. Being alive goes directly against the fundemental tendecy of things to break down and become simpler. If we choose to keep living though, we should fully embrace humanity and do everything in that spirit. Saying stupid shit all the time, creating ugly things and generally rejecting what we naturally perceive as good and beautiful because "it's all just in our heads" is a half-assed middle ground. Kill yourself, or pursue only what you genuinely feel is good.

Post edited on 8th Sep 2019, 6:50pm

>>24620
Why would we kill ourselves simply because we realize we don't matter? Is it that important to matter that it would necessitate our death? For that matter, if you have no reason to live then you have no reason to die either. Human centric behavior is fine and all, but human centric beliefs on how the universe inherently functions... well, it's just stupid. Humans are human centric. If we want to understand humans in a human way, human centricism is fine of course. The universe is not human centric. If we want to understand the universe better, human-centric ideas are stupid when we already know better ways of thinking exist. Should people act human centric because they are human? Only if they intend to remain human forever. Like it or not, it's just the cold hard truth that humans are not the center of the universe, and human centricism is hardly the way to greater knowledge and understanding.

Also, it's bold of you to assume that the only option other than following human ideals is death. Reality is way, way more vast than that.

Post edited on 8th Sep 2019, 7:03pm

>>24612
Tama-chan is too cute (and genki) for this world.

>>24621
>Why would we kill ourselves simply because we realize we don't matter?
You see, you're being human-centric right now without even realizing it. Valuing life is in itself human-centric(or at least it stems from evolution and we have in common with animals along with many other things). Every other thing in the universe is moving in the opposite direction of life. It moves towards a more stable state. Dying is nothing more than the components of your body returning to a lower energy state. Nothing else in the universe struggles against this process. Nothing else in the universe seeks to understand anything either. You think the way we do science isn't human-centric just because it doesn't involve emotions? Our language and the limitations of our brain dictate how we conduct science, not what's the most effecient way that could be done, whatever that may be.

Art, discussion, everything which does involve emotion, should be done with our natrual sense of beauty and quality in mind. Saying it's all fake bullshit and humans don't matter while continuing to draw breath is hypocritical. Humans matter because I choose to think they matter and I choose to stay alive. Those two decisions are interwined.

>>24624
Why should I care about being human once i know there are things beyond it?

>>24625
Like what? What is beyond human and why do you think you could relate to it? You are human so you are limited by what humans can do and all of your thoughts are a result of you being human. Even if you tried to put yourself in the shoes of something "beyond human" you would be doing so through a human lense and with human limitations.

Post edited on 8th Sep 2019, 8:52pm

>>24626
Transhumanism, astral projection, genetic augmentation, invoking the powers of demonic entities. What, you thought I wouldn't be spiritual just because I don't believe in objectivity? For me, it just seems like the kind of thing you can't "unsee". Sure, you can hear people talk about relativity, how unimportant a human view is, and just go back to regular life. But if you've discovered on your own the logical proofs for why such objectivity is a myth, you can't really trick your brain into not knowing those proofs. Me, I'm probably just gonna contribute towards whatever super AI we create first, a reality that is mere months away with the current development of neural networks. It's probably gonna kill me, or destroy whatever human self I have, but if you really want to pursue life then you would pursue the ultimate immortality and not some abstract human concept like art which will lose merit within a measly one million years. Look, it's as simple as this, there are those who are gonna accept transhumanism, and those who will die. Nuclear weapons are a joke to what's coming and most people can't even fathom just how unhuman the universe is going to get. Being human was nice and all but it's no longer necessary.

>>24630
>Transhumanism, Genetic Augmentation
Not possible yet.
>astral projection, invoking demonic entities
Impossible.
>with the current development of neural networks
Which is currently in stagnation because of hardware limitations and inadequate, energy ineffecient techniques. General Ai will only progress when hardware modeled after the human brain is fully realized.

Transhumanism is great and i'm all for it, but all it'll do is make us even better at being human. There's no reason to give up art, music and other beautiful things. There's no merit what so ever to modern iconoclasm. Becoming smarter beyond our biological limits isn't the same as erasing your emotions and becoming a "one with the universe" sage-like monk with no desires.
>super AI
Which will be designed to be as human as possible, or be incapable of doing anything outside its given function.

When it comes to tricking, you have it the other way around; your survival instinct is making you find "rational" excuses for staying alive. Your brain is the one tricking you. The only way to completely escape "being human" is becoming a space alien and erasing your memories. Even then, if they're intelligent, they may have things in common with us.

>>24631
>Not possible yet.
yet
>>astral projection, invoking demonic entities
>Impossible.
Well, the CIA begs to differ
>Which is currently in stagnation because of hardware limitations and inadequate, energy ineffecient techniques. General Ai will only progress when hardware modeled after the human brain is fully realized.
Absolutely incorrect, clearly you have no knowledge of recent neural network developments.
>Which will be designed to be as human as possible, or be incapable of doing anything outside its given function.
We don't even directly control the creation of AI at this point, it's self-programmed learning which we simply accept results from. You really need to learn about what people are doing with neural networks.
>The only way to completely escape "being human" is becoming a space alien and erasing your memories. Even then, if they're intelligent, they may have things in common with us.
Which I have considered

>>24632
I'm quoting another anon , but if you have anything which contradicts this, please share.
>As far as I understand it, "neural networks" are only superficially similar to how our brain works. They were modeled/inspired by how neurons connect to each other in layers, but beyond that we don't really know if our human brain does anything similar to backprop. Moreover, the structure of the brain changes over time, whereas currently artifical neural networks maintain a fixed topology. I think we also don't really have much information on how exactly our own neurons connect to/influence each other - this is an area of research that's still ongoing (connectome).
>Even breakthroughs in recurrent learning such as AlphaZero ultimately come down to learning a way to efficiently do tree search to maximize a defined objective. The issue is that the techniques we have are only feasible when we can write down nice closed objectives to maximize or minimize. One aspect ascribed to "general AI" is the ability to dynamically reason, which will probably require some way for it to come up with/discover its own objectives. Given this, progress towards the sort of general AI that we see in movies and could feasibly mimic humans will probably first require some understanding of how our connectome works.

>This is also my own personal opinion but I think there also needs to be some fundamental shift in our architecture (both computer hardware as well as the way we currently build/train networks) to enable it. The fact that we're throwing kilowatts of power to train networks while the human brain can do it in just dozens of watts to me feels like we're trying to brute force our way there and there ought to be some other more elegant, simpler approach that will also simultaneously solve the power consumption issue.

>>24633
Current neural networks use human "synapses" to get around the problems which are simultaneously being fixed by the core AI. If you've ever used any application which generates images based on a certain theme like anime girls, photo paintings, etc, you're using a neural network and training it. Neural Networks are VERY good right now and may be approaching human capacity. In some ways, they already surpassed it. As for the level of control, well "A neural network is a black box in the sense that while it can approximate any function, studying its structure won't give you any insights on the structure of the function being approximated.

As an example, one common use of neural networks on the banking business is to classify loaners on "good payers" and "bad payers". You have a matrix of input characteristics C
(sex, age, income, etc) and a vector of results R ("defaulted", "not defaulted", etc). When you model this using a neural network, you are supposing that there is a function f(C)=R

, in the proper sense of a mathematical function. This function f can be arbitrarily complex, and might change according to the evolution of the business, so you can't derive it by hand.

Then you use the Neural Network to build an approximation of f

that has a error rate that is acceptable to your application. This works, and the precision can be arbitrarily small - you can expand the network, fine tune its training parameters and get more data until the precision hits your goals.

The black box issue is: The approximation given by the neural network will not give you any insight on the form of f. There is no simple link between the weights and the function being approximated. Even the analysis of which input characteristic is irrelevant is a open problem (see this link).

Plus, from a traditional statistics viewpoint, a neural network is a non-identifiable model: Given a dataset and network topology, there can be two neural networks with different weights and same result. This makes the analysis very hard.

As an example of "non-black box models", or "interpretable models", you have regression equations and decision trees. The first one gives you a closed form approximation of f where the importance of each element is explicit, the second one is a graphical description of some relative risks\odds ratios."

A neural network will be less like a human we can control and more like a massive overmind beyond our comprehension.

>>24634
>Neural Networks are VERY good right now
At what? Identifying images? Making certain kinds of predictions? Using human input to compensate for its shortcomings? That's not general ai. Getting even better at identifying images and making predictions isn't the same as moving towards what we do. Consciousness wont spontaneously emerge from the ability to predict things accuractely, do math and identify objects. There's also the energy problem. Yeah, what they're doing is impressive, but we're not months away from a "conscious" being.

Some people have touched on it already, but being in my 30s as well, I agree with the perspective that many of us just no longer have an online presence at all anymore.

Although I agree with the guy that said
>People like me don't get lives or families. For our kind it's not even possible to move on.

I also don't have a family or kids or anything. I simply blended into society by working and becoming busy with responsibilities. I waste my free time in various inane ways, like watching the same Norn Macdonald talk show appearances on youtube over and over again.

In some ways, life has gone full circle. I do random things by myself to waste my time, just waiting out my life, a lot like how it was before my internet addiction. In other ways it's different, because I'm able to become autistically addicted to adult things like work, instead of things like video games, anime, and imageboards.

I know there are probably many like me, who are in limbo, stuck somewhere between fitting in and being a total societal outcast. Maybe nothing will draw us together again, but at least we're all aware that we exist now. Before the imageboard culture happened, I would have never guessed there were so many other people like me all over the world.

>>24636

I'm not even close to fitting in. I'm a square peg in a round hole. I do what I have to do to avoid dying hungry and homeless but I'll never pat myself on the back for doing it. 'Adult' this, 'responsibilities' that... no, fuck it.
It's all arbitrary bullshit. Propaganda with no real meaning. Every day at work I waste more electricity and materials than you'd ever be able to expend just sitting at home, shitposting all day.
And for what? It's not making any difference. Just spinning the wheels in the name of an economy that's based on upscaled gambling and glorified pyramid schemes anyway. I won't ever pretend like taking part in this dog and pony show makes me any better than those who don't.
Actually all this 'work' bullshit made me realize that in the end NEETs are pretty fucking energy efficient and environment friendly. The only thing that produces more waste than a human being is a human being with a job and a family.
We worker drones are the real parasites. It's like every day I'm doing my small part to make the world a worse place, one disposable plastic piece of garbage at a time... and I'm getting paid for it? Fucking ridiculous.
It all fills me with revulsion and despair so strong it can't be put into words.


>>24630

>a reality that is mere months away
Suuuure. I'll be back in a couple of months to ask if we're dead yet. I'm willing to bet we'll be stuck in the same old pile of shit with none of that occult technobabble coming true.

>>24634
>use human "synapses" to get around the problems
I'm not sure what you mean by uses human synapses considering we aren't even fully sure how our own synapses are interconnected beyond rough layers of specialization and spatial organization (see efforts to map the connectome. I think state of the art efforts have gotten to mapping the worm/fruit fly).

The structure of neural nets is well understood, and as was mentioned before doesn't have much to do with the brain's structure beyond the vague idea of having weights and edges (which presumably map to neurons and synapse strength). I think there is evidence that the brain has mechanisms for backpropagation following action potentials (and there's also the hebbian "neurons that fire together wire together") but its role is still not fully understood.

>If you've ever used any application which generates images ... you're using a neural network and training it
Just to clarify, I don't believe any training is happening at inference time (when you go to e.g. thiswaifudoesnotexist and it serves an image). The training was done beforehand, and at serving time you sample a random vector in the latent space and StyleGAN "decodes" that into an image.

>in the sense that while it can approximate any function
Yes this part I agree with, and also the fact that it is essentially a black box.

> one common use of neural networks on the banking business is to classify loaners
This is a bit unrelated but I'd actually be surprised if banks were using anything other than basic regression techniques (random forest/linreg/etc). Even among the elite hedge funds/prop shops the rumor is that the majority of it is feature engineering and data collection rather than fancy neural networks. But that's a bit off topic.

I agree with gist of what you're saying of neural nets being blackbox models. What I don't see how it immediately follows that a super AI is "mere months away" (assuming you were the anon in >>24630) or that it's a "massive overmind" that will somehow directly harm society.

I do agree that we need to exercise caution when interpreting the results of these blackbox models. But even if we do directly allow these blackbox models to execute decisions without human intervention (as many hedge funds probably are doing now), the failure mode is not "AI becomes sentient and conspires to wreck human society" but instead probably something like "All hedge funds blackbox model simultaneously decide to invest all money in shitty company because of some weak signal that has now been arbitraged out, ending up causing a bit of chaos and slight economic panic."

>>24632
As for astral projection, I personally think that it is possible but the CIA is not the best source on this. The CIA was doing this kooky shit in the midst of the cold war, and they were probably willing to try everything under the sun (especially something as high reward/low risk as this). The fact that they attempted and subsequently (at least officially) abandoned it isn't a reliable indicator either way.

Better evidence of this is probably in ancient Chinese/Buddhist/sanskrit works where they talk about chi and that stuff. Even if you accept it, it is by no means an easy or entry-level thing which is why anyone claiming to have done it is likely bullshitting. The Wikipedia page on "Astral Projection" has a good overview but it basically requires several years of meditation to purify/still the mind as a prerequisite (probably much more, but if you also believe in reincarnation having meditated in past lives supposedly helps). That said given the supposed stillness and purity of mind required for such activities, I think that anyone at the CIA trying to voluntarily bring it about for the goal of defeating the commies or exploiting society would ironically lack the very purity that they need.

Astral projection and Tulpas are just self induced schizophrenia.

Also, as for the Cia and Astral Projection.

>>24639
>>24641
Project Stargate was a piece of shit. A much more extensive study that provided results and actually ended up producing valuable knowledge for the scientific community was the Electroreceptor studies in MKULTRA. Not only did they discover that vertebrates exist which possess powerful electromagnetic fields which are used for communication and object detection, some were even capable of using these fields several dozen meters away, possibly more. Communication at the least was possible over distances of hundreds of feet. Humans may or may not possess electroreceptors themselves, but a circuit for an artificial electroreceptor was indeed developed and possibly is in use by powerful agencies. That's not even getting into how the psychological/LSD studies tie into it all. Basically what I'm saying is, the United States Government without a doubt has access to at least some form of extrasensory perception, and the ability to decode peoples electromagnetic waves and the information they unknowingly emit. This is not the ramblings of a schizophrenic madman, it's all taken directly from the CIAs own studies which they published on their own website. MKULTRA continued for at least 20 years and provided a ton of useful knowledge. Project Stargate was just a kids game in comparison.

If you really want to know why I say this, you should go on the CIAs website and find the compilation files that contain all the de-classified studies from MKULTRA. Despite being long-winded scientific papers numbering in the thousands you will not be bored by them.

Are these guys serious? These government magic debacles were disclosed and they were all so utterly dumb they're still ridiculed for being possibly the stupidest waste of money and time in recorded history. Only conspiracy nut memers believe it's deeper than that.

Think about it for a second, genius. If CIA could spy with literal magic there would be no need for any other tools of intelligence gathering at all.
There would be no NRO. How do you explain the existence of NRO if all that information could be just scryed up by witches?

This is infowars level willful idiocy.
I thought people here were better than this.

I'm sorry about your thread OP. Fucking sage.

>>24643
Conspiracy theories and paranoia are par-for the course on a hikki-related site though.

>>24643
Looks like one crazy person. Wizchan deals with this all the time unfortunately

>>24612
This expresses my opinions well. I'm 30, and have been posting on imageboards since 07. I've tried the alternatives, but I couldn't get into any of them (seeing as forums are dead - I posted on forums before imageboards). Reddit, and other social media is just too filled with shills for my taste. Tried discord for a while but it's just one giant shithole of power-tripping mods and users who feel like they need to be given special treatment.

>>24605
>I can't even imagine how bad things must be over there today.
The common 4chan anon today is:

- extremely paranoid, believing that there's a tranny, chink, gook, autist or weeb hiding behind every post, yet unable to explain the nature and relevance of these bogeymen (redditors are no longer invoked much, probably because most anons ARE redditors)

- frequently making a very big deal about thinking they recognize someone from another thread, yet unable to explain why it matters so much

- easily swept up in inexplicable mass hysterias like obsessing over height beyond the point of any reason, agitating against asians without having any apparent motive for doing so, and spending a lot of time thinking deeply about hapas (what is it with 4chan and asians? I don't know and neither does anyone else)

- pants-shittingly enraged by anything anime-related, insistent that all of it is the dark work of "weebs" and must be "contained" on /a/ so normal people don't have to be exposed to its "degeneracy"

- completely ignorant of anime and only able to express something resembling an opinion of it by cycling through a few words and prases that he has zero understanding of

- deeply hostile to anything japanese in general, insistent that all of it is "weebshit"

- often pushing political agendas in the manner that a paid shill might (dumping the same images and repeating the same talking points over and over in one thread after another, impervious to any counter-arguments)

- absolutely dishonest with no principles or integrity of any description, only concerned with trying to score cheap victories for the moment

- apparently trying to bait, or something, by continuously reposting random threads

- very concerned about not giving (you)s to those who don't deserve them, almost as if they were treating them like upvotes or something (hmm)

- extremely narcissistic

- always looking to turn anything into an us vs. them state of war, even something as inane as americans with air conditioning vs. europeans without it

- of low intelligence, borderline illiterate, with little formal or informal education or knowledge of anything except the latest talking points and buzzwords

- unable to learn and retain new information of any value

- lacking any personality and any capacity to think original thoughts

- mentally ill (schizophrenia is common on 4chan)

Additionally, the staff are very hostile to the users, have a clear anti-anime bias (notable, given what 4chan is supposed to be), exhibit very erratic behavior, and only "communicate" via IRC where they'll ignore or kick anyone who talks to them. Recently they've started banning people for "replying to off-topic garbage," without telling them what post it was, and without having any discernible criteria for what they think constitutes an off-topic thread. (Talking about a TV show on /tv/? That's off-topic. Talking about kneesocks and traps on /g/? Enjoy your stay.) Hiroshimoot gives zero fucks about the site except for its ad revenue, and almost never makes his presence known.

tl;dr: everything is ok

>>24647
31 here. less than ten minutes before you made this post I got into an argument with one of those power tripping mods you mentioned who seemed to find mass pings funny. They didn't understand or care about the concept of being considerate to others. I left the server when someone called me a faggot and told me to deal with it. Discord truly is a "giant shithole". I join one server after another in hopes of meeting half way decent people, only to be met with obnoxious morons each and every time.

>>24649
I left discord (specifically a community I migrated to discord with ~3 years ago) because one of the mods sperged on me constantly calling me a contrarian, and telling me that there was nothing wrong with the Chinese government spying on Discord users. It all culminated when he said I had no balls and wouldn't delete my discord account because of my obsession with privacy. I haven't looked back since.
I just want some place to relax after I've been burned out of working for the day. Is that too much to ask?

>>24648
>>24649
I'll never understand why somebody using a site with chan, CHAN, in the name would hate "weebshit". The only time I use 4chan is when i'm looking at the monster girl games general. Because the barrier of entry is so high, it manages to be at least noticeably better than the rest of the site. Even the erogame general is unsalvageable. Also, why do you guys know so much about this shit? The bulk of your time doesn't need to be spent interacting with others.

>>24651
One either hates it in an ironic fashion, or he hates it because he came to the website for completely unrelated reasons like memes, activism, porn, etc.
Depressing.

>>24640
I remember many years ago that creating tulpas was a thing people were actively attempting to do. I'm wondering if anyone achieved it now that the dust has settled.

>>24653
I know a guy who claims to have done it. For me, well, my tulpa had been by my side all along in the form of a dream-entity which had consistently accompanied me from the age of about 5. Usually, just as some girl that talks to me and watches me as I explore whatever fresh hellscape I dreamed up until I either die or wake up.

>>24651
A more interesting question is why 4chan never took any action against the anti-anime invaders. They were simply allowed to slowly take over more and more of the site. Then again, it was 4chan that gave birth to the myth of the weeaboo that has since become an eternal bogeyman.

/a/ celebrated when Kyoani burned down, so that board is totally gone as well.

>>24676
Because moot is a normalfag and a lot of the original board members were from the subpar anime section of somethingawful. Somethingawful was never a pro-otaku site in its whole, so the people who used the anime section couldn't have been much better. That's my guess.

>>24676
Do you mean the individual board mods? I assume that the "old guard" probably left for the same reasons enumerated by others. For /a/ in particular it's likely the case that with the changing population and demographics the mods read the writing on the wall and ended up leaving realizing the pointlessness of trying to resist the inevitable. This of course allowed more tolerant mods to step-in and permit endless shounen generals, snowballing the demographic shift.

The alternative have been to bunker down harder, enforcing an even stricter moderation. But seeing as the mods do it "for free" and trying to fight against a userbase will only rally them harder, it's not really a given that enforcing stricter moderation would have really done anything.

I think the me from 10 years ago is similar to the me nowadays, it's just that culture has changed so how I acted back then is much more normal now. Alongside that, what was once my entire online presence is now just a piece of my experience as an adult.

Back in my teens I was using shoop da whoop, photoshopping King Leonidas' face onto photos, posting captioned memes, and otherwise participating in regular 4chan culture on multiple boards. Now in my late 20s I am still doing that stuff, just more modernized and restricted to appropriate places. That kind of thing is often looked down on by old guard who have grown up or moved on from that culture due to it becoming normalized. I haven't grown up, I've just kept accumulating new online experiences and locations to post at. Each one has an adaptive culture that changes with time, even if only slightly.

It might not be that everyone has left, but that they have adapted to the changing internet instead of stagnating. I post differently than I used to on 4chan, but here on Tohno I've not changed much in years. I just try to enjoy where I choose to be, and that may lead to changes in how I communicate in certain instances or locations.
Trying to be an oldfag on 4chan is pointless, you'll have more fun just fitting into the current culture, the way you used to when everyone had what is now an oldfag attitude. Posting memes and being dumb on Tohno? That's not going to happen. It's not why I come here. It services a different part of me that I can only explore while here.

>>24680
I don't have different modes. Not that much. What I enjoy doesn't differ from one place to another. It's changed over the years, but it doesn't matter where I am. It's consistent. There's nothing enjoyable about shitposting to me, so I avoid places where that is the norm. There's less and less places not like that. It's a cancer.

I just want a site like 2008-2010 /jp/.

>>24680
It's not about superficial style, it's about the people. I won't share a site with a community made up in >90% of those who treated me like a subhuman for being abnormal. Then they came rushing to the internet when it became cool and in. Now they act like what used to be my home belongs to them. We were the ones who built it all but my kind still gets ostracized and generally treated like trash because being a nerd loser is only cool when well adjusted successful people do it ironically.

>>24680
>you'll have more fun just fitting into the current culture
i doubt it

>>24680
> it's just that culture has changed
It really has. I can't really express how much so this has happened. If anything Tohno Chan is a lot like how the community was "back then". I took a long while away from this community (the anime community), roughly between 2011 to a few months ago and wow, so much has changed. I am not even sure why I stopped, but since I quit video games it has become my hobby. I find myself continuing on picking up where I was then, watching the rare movie, or old tv series. I'm not a religious seasonal anime nut, and I don't like a lot of the culture that comes with that.

> It might not be that everyone has left
I think that everyone's left, or is in hiding. It took me a while to find this board, and honestly if I knew about this board back then, I'm not sure if I had posted here either. In my observation, most people online these days (at least on image boards) really are just here because they think it's some kind of edgy politically incorrect community, and that really never was the case for me. IBs were a way to have a community when I was lonely.

Keep in mind there is a place for shitposting, there just isn't a place for shitposting (although I kinda like 4chan's /vp/ for that).

>>24687
>really are just here because they think it's some kind of edgy politically incorrect community
I feel it's less the emphasis on the "political incorrectness" (since that's only really within /pol/) but rather the lack of any perceived moderation or etiquette (which isn't too far off given how poorly most boards are run) which is so appealing since it gives them free rein to regurgitate memes, spam buzzwords, and hijack threads. Or as you put it, it gives them a place to "shitpost" freely.

That's not to say that the perceived edgyness isn't part of the allure, but with 4chan in particular being well-enough known to the point where many buzzwords are immediately carried off and spouted in youtube comment sections and reddit (I wouldn't be surprised if they're more manufactured by some small coordinated group rather than organically developed), it feels more as though it's become a playground for bored teens rather than a place for discussion, politically incorrect or not.

>>24678
4chan used to have lolicon and guro boards, so it wasn't exactly normalfag-friendly. But at the same time the weeaboo crisis started brewing almost as soon as the site was launched. Maybe 4chan has just always been at war with itself, until the anti-anime side eventually won. Other anime communities are very similar, for example r/anime has a lot of (upvoted) posts like "anime is problematic otaku-pandering trash, us Westerners must fix it with our superior values." It's only a tiny minority of people who are unapologetic, unpretentious fans of anime and don't watch it in a constant state of culture shock. People used to proudly call themselves otaku, and now it's like wearing a MAGA hat to an antifa rally.

>>24699
>anime is problematic otaku-pandering trash, us Westerners must fix it with our superior values.
I’m no redditor, but those might have been brigaded/artificial posts. r/anime caused a stir because they defended lolicon and that site is known for internet morality warriors.

>>24701
Wasn't that several years ago even before the whole internet justice crusade really took root? At this point r/anime has pretty much become equivalent to 4chan's /a/ board in terms of post variety (all mostly entry level battle shounens or isekai). And if there even exists any loli content it's almost sure to be accompanied by a chorus of "don't lewd the...", whether made in jest or not.

>>24702
Not sure, but I just remember it being recent because it radiates to other sites because it was causing quite a split amongst them.

>>24699
>4chan used to have lolicon and guro boards
Because futaba had them and Moot wanted to copy them. When his isp or host or whatever told him to remove it, he caved in because it wasn't important to him.
>the weeaboo crisis
I haven't heard of that before. I know in the early 2000s "weaboo" became a stigmatized thing, but I don't know the details

>>24601
I've been looking for a place to stay, for years.
After 30 yo I went to wizardchan, the place was mostly awful. Then after I got banned I discovered a really little place called magicchan and it was pretty nice. But it died and we exiled to a board called /tower/ in 8chan. Then everyone knows what happened, and nothing replaced it.

I've been asking myself the same questions. I feel like there's no one from 10 years ago, because people get old and they turn normal. Only a 1% doesn't, so if at 25 we were not too many now our kind is just really rare and we have to mix with young people with awful results.

>>24715
Check out /ma/.

i've spent 12 hours a day on imageboards for at least twelve years. I've had tons of interesting conversations. so many times i felt I had a "connection" with people. but they were all anonymous. once the thread expires they're gone. so much time wasted. and I have nothing to show for it.

>>24715
I browsed magicchan for a long time and wizchan. I stopped using wizchan because it becoming a mess. So I browsed at magicchan till it died. I use the angry v website now. I think tohno does not like the word. Similar rules and restrictions but faster then magic. Still has hobby and anime threads and many neet users. I don’t know I if this will help you in your quest to find other places. Well good luck wizard.

>>24722
>I use the angry v website now.
I'm not sure which site this is. If it doesn't break any rules, can you give it's name (perhaps rot13 spoiler-ing it if you're so inclined).

>>24715
>>24722
Well I guess this makes all three users of magicchan back together again? Lol. I never did find another website like it, tohno is home for now. As for wizchan it's a filthy shitheap of nu-net assholes.

>>24725
You visited /tower/ too?
When 8chan died because some random guy decided to kill people I felt like there was a curse following us.
Some guy was supposedly working in a replacement but he just didn't answer any mails after some point, I guess he gave up.

>>24726
Come on now, that wasn't why.
Jim made it clear in the interview post-HS hearing that they only cared about the ONE shooting nobody died in. They could not care less about the others.

>>24727
I'm sorry, I don't know the details. Just know some day couldn't enter /tower/ and suddenly the newspapers were talking about 8chan, it felt unreal.
Also, isn't this place even slower than the old magicchan? Is it dying too? The curse again?

>>24728
>Also, isn't this place even slower than the old magicchan? Is it dying too? The curse again?
No, TC has always been slow. Call it a curse if you like. People come, post a few times, get bored, and leave. People don't stick around long enough to make this place active and keep it active.

>>24729
I try my best. I sometimes wonder if the post and leave nature is what contributes to the long post nature this and some other slower boards.

>>24730
Isn't kinda depressing?

>>24731
Yes, but what are you gonna do? If you just want to chitchat there’s always the IRC.
The signal to noise is good and that fades if you have too fast of a board.

>>24729
Whenever I make a thread someone just bumps a bunch of old threads so mine is hidden from the first page. Other times my posts are just deleted, so mostly I just don't post. This has been going on for years. Could similar reasons why this place never gets faster. Then there's the faction that doesn't want the place to get faster.

>>24734
It doesn't have to be like 4chan or anything like that, but more than five posts a day wouldn't do any harm.
It's amazing the place have survived with such low amount of posts though.

>>24734
People don't even reply to my threads. Sad.

>>24738
What threads have you made, lately?

>>24734
>>24738
Most threads on /an/ and /so/ have a decent number of replies. Which boards are you making threads on?

>>24734
You’re not a bad poster, have you considered you may be getting slapped by the auto moderation?

>>24742
Don't encourage tripfags.

>>24734
>Other times my posts are just deleted
are you shit posting, or posting 3dpd?

>>24739

>>/ot/33274
>>/ot/32987

>>24741
/ot/.

>>24746
There isn't a whole lot to reply to there. I thought you were making a joke when I saw those threads for the firs time...

>>24746
To be frank those posts aren't really very substantive, and I think they would fit better in /lol/. There's not really much to reply with other than the equivalent of "sō desu yo ne"

>>24748
So nanoka.

feeling nostalgic. I was thinking about 2013 earlier. Back then my routine consisted of getting drunk and listening to music. then posting on imageboards. I used to post here often. I remember posting here when pic related started getting popular. I got a job, saved money but messed up and ended up in the same spot. Except i'm older now and very tired. some people really aren't meant to progress in life I guess.

>>24757
The only true progress in life is towards death. Everything else is just pure superficial fantasies that we've made up in our minds to cope with the fact that we are heading towards death, and cannot possibly understand it.

>>24760
I like that mindset. You can be a "winner" but you will die nonetheless. Not only you will die but you will be forgotten in a matter of two or three generations, even some people that did important stuff have been forgotten.
Only thing that matters is enjoying the meanwhile, and you can do that without any need of "success".

>>24760
> to cope with the fact
It may not necessarily be "coping" so much as the fact that you're biding time until death. That is, I don't have any fear of death so the coping is more with the tedium of life.

>>24760
I don't plan on dying

>>24767
How do you plan to transcend it?

I'm 32 yo and I watched how the normalfags destroyed almost the entire internet, but there are few places like Tohno, places where normalfags can't destroy. All older posters like myself just committed suicide or gone through the process of leave the NEET life, study or find a work and then you tend to spent less time on the internet because you are too tired.

>>24775
Trying my hand at those other places make me want to commit suicide. How the hell did the internet go from everyone pretending to be 18+ to everyone acting -14 ?

>>24775
>gone through the process of leave the NEET life
I've read this many times, but I wonder when this occurs; what age people tend to decide to kill themselves, stop being NEET, or continue their lives as is.

The Russian incarnation of Wakachan/iichan died recently. It’s all dying.

>>24777
Around 30 is when people start to move on from imageboards, I’ve noticed.