Why hasn't there been another website that is just as popular if not more popular than 4chan while being similar to 4chan? Why do all the other western chans fail at being as influential and impactful as 4chan? There are thousands of people who use this site and I bet there are a lot of them who are capable of making a website similar to 4chan that is a whole lot better than 4chan. What's stopping them? Why are all the other chans inferior to 4chan?
>>537038
If there were, you'd be asking that question there.
Somebody has to be the biggest, Anon.
>>537040
It's been 13 years. The website hasn't really been that influential in a long time. Sure they've obviously have gotten popular, but that's mostly because of their reputation in past. You would have thought that other websites would have competed with 4chan in terms of popularity/influence by now.
For reference 2ch is still running and active yet was founded in 1999. I don't know if 4chan even is vulnerable at all to a Myspace-like moment; Facebook took off because it was a non-cringey way to do what Myspace did - people valued that because the place was all about your real self. Here, the anon nature absolves you of needing to try to look professional or rational hence you don't need a more serious alternate because you'll be an anon there or here and you can expect the pitfalls of anon posting (trolls being faggots) to show up anywhere the format is allowed.
Upstart sites also just don't have the near-legendary history this place does. Old 4chan had a really jovial silly allure to it that's been gone for a while; that magical old /b/ was unlike anything that exists on the site today and mods themselves were silly. moot was silly. The userbase reflected a combination of that + some underbelly of people who took advantage of the incompetence of the mods in order to do nefarious shit.
However got replaced by some amalgam of edgy wannabe hacktivist faggots and poser wannabes here to steal memes; things like chanology, rickroll, caturday etc were both our highlights and downfalls because they were watersheds of publicity which brought in far more boring people. Again no other clone site has that heritage to it. This basically extinguished glimmer of hope that there will be glorious fun again someday with proper guidance, along with our already being the biggest English-speaking chan, is I think what keeps people here. No other imageboards snowballed like this place did.
>>537038
A number of reasons off the top of my head:
-Network effects, more people posting means more people browsing which leads to more people posting, etc.
-4chan never really did anything that caused a large amount of people to leave, the "silent majority" was always here despite what certain groups of people might lead you to believe.
-Chans are still this spooky underground thing that are not widely recognized in the general public (at least in the western world), they have never left internet culture and become a part of general culture like the major social networks have. Someone who wants to start a thing would not start a chan, but would instead start a social network or a good ol' vBulletin forum.
-Imageboards in general are very hard to keep alive for long due to server costs and the fact that only bottom of the barrel advertisers would even think of advertising here. moot went real deep into debt just to keep this craphole alive through the recession.
There are probably more reasons, but those are probably the biggest imo.
>>537038
>Why are all the other chans inferior to 4chan?
Slower imageboards are considerably better than 4chan.
4chan is big, not good.
>>537703
>-4chan never really did anything that caused a large amount of people to leave, the "silent majority" was always here despite what certain groups of people might lead you to believe.
This is obviously false. They're a small minority now because the exponential growth of the user base. 4chan simply has many times more users than it used to. There's no old silent "majority". I don't know for what reason you think people don't leave 4chan either.
>>537710
Guess my wording was poor. What I meant was nothing really drove a large amount of people away that led to some other chan becoming bigger the same way digg users fled to reddit or myspace users fled to facebook. 8chen and gg came real close though
There's a fair amount of people that think that an imageboard (or anything else) must be large/fast/busy to be good. 4chan is the largest Western board so it must be the best at everything. They're wrong, of course, but they're not here to read this.
Similarly, some people have a really hard time realizing that MMORPGs can be successful without having 10 million subscribers like WoW. If those games were good then surely they would have more than 10 million subscribers, right? If other chans were good surely they would have more users than 4chan.
I generally prefer slow boards, personally, but many people seem bored to death on anything that moves slower than /v/ or /b/.
Its called Reddit
>>537717
This.
4chan is mcdonalds.
Reddit is fine dining.
4chan is good enough for most people and there's a shit ton of people here already. Other chans aren't going to upstage 4chan any more than Voat is going to upstage Reddit. They're both too big to fail at this point, unless they run out of money.
>>537906
You do realize 4chan's historical failures there caused by it being too big. I realize you're new and were not aware that 4chan has died multiple times.
>>537718
Reddit is the place that has snobby people, and the food is one meal made with different variations
4chan is like mcdonalds
9gag is the soup kitchen. Where the people only eat pizza hut pizza, or soup. They get angry if it's not that
>>537718
>reddit is fine dining
yeah, if you're dining on shit
>>537051
>the amount of butthurt people nowadays get whenever a mod does some non-serious shit
That fucking feel
>>537707
Not true btw
>>537907
I'm not new. You obviously are though since you're so quick to try to prove to everyone that you aren't new by randomly accusing another user of being new for no reason.
4chan's history has nothing to do with the present day and what I'm talking about. Stop pretending to be an oldfag.
>>537715
Yeah, like some people seriously call boards like /vp/ slow.
>>537038
The "market" really only needs one big chan and a few small side chans for even more niche interests.
>>537038
>similar to 4chan that is a whole lot better than 4chan
9/10 alternate chans are identical to 4chan except for "better mods" or just a different board lineup.
They don't even try to come up with some plan to ensure that their mods won't eventually become just as bad either.
It's like "Just trust us, we're cool". Who is honestly shocked that we don't mass migrate to them?
Everyone likes to complain, or take brash action.
I don't see a whole lot of people actually sitting down and spending time trying to identify and isolate major issues and then come up with unique features that improve the situation in a new site. Or at the very least they could come up with something new and fun. It's like they're not even trying.
>>537038
8ch came pretty close. I find it funny that in 2 weeks they went from literally who to exploding vans.
I think the mods here poison the well whenever there's an alternative by making it so the most cancerous people end up going there. It's really gay behavior.
>>538755
God I wish I could just kill everyone who can't take it easy. They make me so mad!
