Yet when people mention that they visit 4chan, they talk about the 'very clever people posting there'. It's like mentioning that you regularly go paddling in your local river in order to collect tiny nuggets of gold, without mentioning that your local river is a flow of excrement, nuclear waste, and malignant psychopaths.
Post #1: Comment using the N word
Post #2: Someone using "fag" to insult people who, presumably, use Arch linux. (The term was Archfags)
Post #3: In response to something about headphones: "that deaf faggot [n-word]"
So it's funny. I've been browsing 4chan for 5 minutes and couldn't avoid racism & homophobia in the very first things I saw. Maybe you should actually visit the site instead of just spreading misinformation.
You mentioned /g/ -- there is a daily programming thread on that board with a very long history. I've seen some really interesting projects posted there. Some even made their way here eventually. SerenityOS for example.
it's offensive to outsiders....to keep them out lol
It's definitely there. Not in /pol/, but /pol/ is a subset of 4chan.
very clever people posting there
Nobody denies the extreme cesspool-like aspects of some corners of 4chan.
The one thing you can uncontroversially say is that 4chan is diverse. It's almost like reddit, where each subreddit has its own distinct culture, mods, etc.
I would say that overall, 4ch does attract... a pretty clever crowd. Almost everything there is layer upon layer upon layer of self-reference and iteration. Meta on top of meta on top of meta. Not saying you have to be a genius to "get it" but I don't see a dummy enjoying it.
I'm also saying this as somebody who doesn't particularly like the place. I grew out of that shock humor stuff about two decades ago.
Although I'm also not sure how clever a person really needs to be to understand multiple layers of meta: "Meta" is so ingrained in cultural DNA at this point that anyone born in the last 25 years will understand all of it on nearly an intuitive level, and anyone over that age will still have been bombarded by it for decades-- long enough to mostly still get it.
This is very strictly enforced in practice, one doesn't see any nudity or gore remain up on those boards for more than ten minutes before a janitor catches it.
Pornography is allowed on all boards that aren't designated “safe for work”, but gore is only allowed on a very select few.
In general I have much less of a problem with porn or gore than I do with raging hatred.