The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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4chan is back up! I'm so happy!
I... feel like that says something bad about me, that 4chan is basically the only place left on the internet where I feel at home. (this place is also good, but I do feel a bit out of place here). So many places these days are either enforced, toxic positivity (reddit) or worshipping a single influencer (most other social media). 4chan lets me speak my mind, and I feel like the people there actually get me. I'm a depressed, aging, alcoholic weeb so 4chan is very much "my people." But I can't help but feel like the people there are, weirdly, smarter than a lot of internet sites these days.
Nah it doesn't say anything bad about you. 4chan is great. An anon put it exactly right the day the site came back: "I feel like you guys are more spiritually pure than normies."
I love TheMotte, but it theoretically could be replaced. There are lots of smart people in the world who you can have smart people discussions with. But there's only one 4chan.
Wow, that is a fascinating take. Say more? How could I find worthwhile engagement with 4chan? I haven't tried almost at all in over a decade, but my experience with it was "garbage shit posts," whereas I find TheMotte to be a singular place on the internet. (Even the UI is very nearly ideal!)
It depends on what you're looking for and what your interests are.
I've been part of a lot of tight-knit communities in /vg/ over the years, where we play games together, watch streams together, etc. I've made actual friends based on our shared interests in certain games. Lots of very memorable anime watch-alongs on /a/.
/pol/ was a magical place during the 2016 election, and also during early 2020 at the start of covid, although it's declined a lot since then. But even then I still check the Ukraine threads there sometimes.
I agree that TheMotte is a very valuable and unique forum. Certainly the highest IQ general-purpose forum I've ever encountered on the internet. There's no other place where so many people are willing and able to speak eloquently and at length about politics/philosophy from an anti-woke perspective (you can discuss similar topics on 4chan's /lit/ and /his/ boards, but the level of discussion doesn't match what you get here). But I still feel that ultimately, TheMotte would be easier to replace and there are more alternative venues that serve similar functions for me. 4chan occupies a very unique place in internet culture that nothing else could ever fully replace. A lot of small indie projects that eventually got big, started out with just word of mouth on 4chan. It's the central communication network of the counter-culture; it's the last major online forum that isn't fully controlled by the mainstream narrative.
Basically, TheMotte is like a beloved local pub, whereas 4chan is Renaissance Florence. If I had to choose, I'd rather sacrifice the pub than the whole city.
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You have to pick a board and immerse yourself in its subculture. 4chan isn’t exactly monolithic. Engagement is more nebulous, you could try to tripfag but anons generally hate that and a small minority have scripts to block/mute trips.
/lit/erature was good, but I haven’t bothered reengaging with them in years. There is news, /int/ernational, and some more like /his/tory and humanities in which you might find something worthwhile.
Yeah, I'd agree with all of this. In general the larger boards are faster and more meme-ey, while the smaller boards are slower and more thoughtful. Don't expect long essays, but you can still get some thoughtful responses. Find a subject you like, find a thread you like (popular subjects have a regular thread that gets re-created over and over, with the same people and culture). Find one person you like and just talk to them. It's like a big, crazy party where everyone is talking at once, but that doesn't mean all the people there are the same.
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