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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Increasingly convinced that I made the right decision uninstalling the Reddit app from my phone. Just about the only sub I still enjoy any more is /r/4chan.

Quitting Heroin for Fentanyl is a bold strategy Cotton, lets see how it works out. ;-)

Why wouldn’t you just browse 4chan?

Reddit subs dedicated to 4chan posts are much, much better than going to 4chan because they typically filter out the porn(which is the vast majority of 4chan) and in practice they mostly highlight the better posts(which is definitely not the majority of even the non-porn posts on 4chan).

I strongly disagree with this extremely overbroad assertion.

In the first place, /r/4chan is not a substitute for 4chan. 4chan is a discussion platform that happens to be humorous on occasion, while /r/4chan is focused exclusively on finding humor (not necessarily "the better posts") on 4chan. If you want to read a non-humorous discussion of electric cars or urban planning or Big Yud, you won't find it on /r/4chan—you've got to go to 4chan itself.

In the second place, it is not reasonable to say that pornography "is the vast majority of 4chan". Even assuming for the sake of argument that the statement is technically true—i. e., that, of all posts made on 4chan, "the vast majority" are pornographic (and I do not necessarily accept that premise)—it is not actually possible for a user to browse the entire category of "all posts made on 4chan". In practice, it is extremely easy for a person who uses the catalog view to ignore (1) the obviously-pornographic boards and (2) the few obviously-pornographic threads that are tolerated by the jannies on the non-pornographic boards, and to focus only on threads that actually contain discussion.

I've tried once or twice but found the user interface impenetrable.

Some would argue that's a feature. The medium is the message.

Try using the catalog view instead of the default view. And, in the settings, enable the "Inline quote links" option, so that you can follow a conversation without having to bounce up and down the page.