>As a practical example, /out/ and /diy/ are two of the only places on the internet where you can get useful information about gear. Everything else is tainted

>As a practical example, /out/ and /diy/ are two of the only places on the internet where you can get useful information about gear. Everything else is tainted by ad money. Maybe /g/ is just more aware of the shills? I have a picture where one of the Windows Nokia phones had like 200+ threads made within a week all with the same image and very similar OP. There's a lot of shills and unfortunately it can take some effort to convince people "this is a shill thread". Sometimes a fake-advice question will get posted with fake answers meant to shill a product/service as the solution. >/fit/ ironically does not discuss actual fitness, but is more a social group for people into fitness to discuss seemingly everything except fitness related issues. Mostly just 'mirin each other. I feel like people who have a very negative outlook of 4chan (as a whole) either never ventured outside of /b/ or can't wade through the cruft to get to the actual good discussion. With the help of 2 friends of mine, we hosted a fun "learn interesting physics" thread for a while. There was also a guy who hosted Reverse Engineering threads (his job was to reverse engineer malware...). Both very informative and a lot of people took genuine interest. I also made a short (and now defunct, though I can rehost it) web-based puzzle for people on /g/ to learn a bit about encryption. Starting with a simple ROT13 and working up to audio stenography. It's a lot like Reddit with, I'd argue, a bit more extreme on the "bad" side - equivalent on the "good" side - but a lot more honest opinions due to anonymity. You'll get a lot of smart people who (wisely) value their public image self-censoring themselves on Reddit. Though on an anonymous board, they're more free to say what they want to say. In exchange for that honesty and freedom of opinion - you get a lot more of the "darker side" of humanity. (Ignoring it doesn't make it go away, as so many people seem to believe.) The level of honest opinions is something I enjoy - and is something that is increasingly being lost on an ever-connected web where one politically incorrect statement can lose you your job/career.