Maybe someone can list some positive internet culture we got from 4chan that I am overlooking.
Each chan sub category tended to their own niche community and rivalry was little.
/f/ in its hayday was a wonderful creative group for Flash animations and with existent of NewGrounds made the internet fun. It's how I learnt flash and how YTMND came to be.
The way I see it, I lost interest in 4chan because I grew up and became an adult, and so did most of the Internet. We can look back and appreciate our childhood overall while also cringing at the embarrassing parts. 4chan has a lot of both good and bad memories for me and I think the broader Internet as well.
For far too many people "I have a moral compass" seems to mean "I don't even have the self-awareness to realize what I'm doing is evil".
Early Web is before most netizens (remember that?) had ever heard or seen the term "blog", and much of the web was folks' "home pages" on whatever weird topic they were interested in (some were effectively "blogging", but that wasn't a term yet—"web log" might see limited use). This was the Nerd Web.
Mid-period is from the rise of "blog" to the rise of the smartphone, Google capitulating in the never-ending war on spammers and ruining itself instead, and Facebook coming about. Roughly '08 would be the end of this period. Call this the Macromedia Flash Web, perhaps.
Everything since that is the Late, or Hellscape, Web, an age dominated to an extreme degree by spam, scams, ads, astroturfing, and absolute insanity becoming normalized and spilling over into real life. This is the part that made it clear we'd have been better off never inventing any of this.
As I said it’s all arbitrary. I might pick the time around Google’s founding as the early Internet, others might pick Yahoo, others might pick anything before eternal September.
I've been involved in "internet culture" since the early to mid 90s.
The only thing that I heard about that ever came out of 4chan was toxicity.
