To the guy asking how /r9k/ mutated into a shithole, here's my answer. I was here for it.
>>44884491Back in the day, every hi-pop wide-topic board (/a/, /v/, /tg/, etc.) had these things called "ronery threads".
Say you were depressed over something. You'd go to the board ronery thread, you'd post in it, maybe get some advice from like-minded people, just vent, whatever.
This worked fine up until like 2010, at which point something happened (think it was a forum on SA getting deleted, causing all the fucking goons to migrate over here, but I could be mistaken). Suddenly, all the shit that used to be cool or tolerable- ronery threads, memes, basically everything that falls under the now thoroughly smeared banner of "board culture"- became '/b/-tier', 'shitposting', and so forth. Even separated by an entire website, several years, and a totally different culture, our mods were not immune to the effects of Forum Consensus, and so they went along with it, banning everything the new crowd didn't like.
Having nowhere else to go, and /b/ being /b/, the sadposters had no choice but to migrate to the only (other) general board on the site... /r9k/. Instead of multiple individual ronery threads on different boards, each with steady poster turnover, including presumably people who either knew how to fix problems or at least had interests other than "chronic depression", we got the collective misery of 4chan, condensed into a black hole of suffering and isolated from the rest of the site so that nothing might disturb it. Except, of course, people who already have nothing to lose and nowhere else to go.
Inside the singularity, people began to relate to each other exclusively through their common traits of misery, rage, and alienation, discouraging anything BUT those traits. So proceeded the radicalization process.
How's that?
