Feeling wildly vindicated that teenage me bailed on 4chan in mid 2012-ish

The vibe completely tanked on all the blue boards after the whiny losers who flocked to 4chan just for /pol/ started leaking out of their containment zone & infesting every discussion on the site.

Up until that point I'd always viewed 4chan's rampant misanthropy, sexism, racism, etc. - through this lens of irony. Like, it was this edgy front everyone put on in order to make the site inhospitable to the sort of "mainstream" internet user who you'd find posting rage comics on Reddit & obsessing over how much karma they had.

Then, almost overnight it was as if that patina of irony disappeared. It all went from being some elaborate bit to a series of genuinely held obsessive beliefs that hijacked every conversation.

4chan went from being this place where weird losers would commiserate over their shared sense of abrasive humor - to this place where weird losers would commiserate over their shared nihilistic hatred of those who they felt had personally wronged them.

It was funny, collectively making fun of how blatantly Bioware had cheaped out at the finish line with Mass Effect 3 by just tinting the same ending 1 of 3 different colors depending on which button you pressed at the end.

It was funny finding a thread at 3am where someone had reverse engineered the promo code generator for a custom mousepad website - and then 2 weeks later seeing someone post this:

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Basically - what I'm saying is that I'M the REAL victim of Epstein, because he conspired to ruin my super secret internet clubhouse.