Yeah. I’m not sure if it’s as common now as it used to be, but there was a time when most of the racism/sexism/homophobia was legitimately ironic and for shock value, and generally 4channers were a lot nicer under the surface.

My experience having used 4chan from around 2012~2016ish was that you could kinda tell when someone was being legitimately bigoted and when they were doing it “for the lulz” or because slurs-as-generic-insults was normalized. Typically the bigots would use slurs as an insult that was focused on whatever community the slur typically referred to. The “”“normal”“” 4channers would just use them generically and would push obvious bigots towards /pol/ (literally called “politically incorrect”; it is/was the containment board for assholes).

The one exception is in green texts, where slurs would sometimes get used to refer to someone’s race, religion, gender and/or sexuality; however, the “good” greentext stories would typically reverse it on the writer, making the writer look like a fool while the person they’re denigrating looks good in comparison.

For the most part, 4chan users were actually kinda cool and could be really kind despite the crusty exterior. There were several times where a thread would take off in which they made it a goal to collectively donate $X to a charity or whatever, but I have no idea if they still do that stuff.

This changed around 2015~2017 (I was still occasionally visiting) during the trump election and got a lot worse after Stormfront was temporarily kicked off the internet. A lot of Stormfront users washed up on the shores of 4chan and proceeded to colonize it. Afaik most of them went back to Stormfront when the site found a new host, but there were a number who stuck around and just made 4chan a lot worse.

The different boards of 4chan have vastly different cultures. The tech board isn’t much different than what you’d find on Lemmy. It’s filled with Linux and Free Open Source Software geeks who love to interject argue over the finer points of operating systems.

There was a poster on 4chan’s math and science board who solved a previously unsolved math problem.

The video game board sometimes sings songs from games

A large scale protest against Scientology also started on 4chan.

The negative stuff you hear about 4chan almost always stems from the boards that have little to no moderation. The boards with moderation aren’t much different than Reddit or Twitter. Actually, Twitter might be worse nowadays.

I’m no 4chan historian but I’ve heard them sending care packages and cards once in awhile. Oddly wholesome some times.

/g/ is very tame in comparison to most other boards. IMO it’s one of the best and I go there from time to time for actual advice on niche stuff. I guess I share a lot of interests with their core audience.

Though I’d only recommend to follow any advice from there if you’re at least a bit technically proficient and are able to ignore the schizo-posters.

More often than you’d expect. /b/ is not representative of the whole

Honestly, /an/ is probably my favorite place on the whole internet. It’s all stoners and mycologists arguing about dinosaurs.

/g/ loves RMS. There’s no way he wouldn’t know about them. Tbh I wouldn’t be surprised if he occasionally shitposts on /g/ and judges people for their choice of Linux distro.