I also visited 4chan regularly in my teenage years, and this is the thing that jumps out at me. In the past, 4chan was a place where nothing was sacred and peo

I also visited 4chan regularly in my teenage years, and this is the thing that jumps out at me. In the past, 4chan was a place where nothing was sacred and people who sincerely believed in anything were ruthlessly mocked. There were always the white nationalist types, but there were enough people making fun of them that it balanced out. That former group has disappeared, and 4chan has become the biggest echo chamber on the Internet. There are stretches of hours and thousands of posts where there isn't a single dissenting political opinion. The irreverence of 4chan was always the appeal. It has morphed into a lockstep belief system in a hero figure. What's the point of a website with anonymous posts and no rules if everyone is carefully agreeing with each other?