Still wild to me how Q came from all of this, saving the children yelled out by pedophiles.

Careful, there's a sizable pocket of leftists online who'll accuse you of being a tyrannical purist for even daring to imply that drawn CSAM is fucked up.

"there should be no legal or moral barrier to what people draw"

Worth mentioning that drawing for the sake of personal, artistic, emotional expression is not the same as drawing porn. Not all nudity is sexual and also, not all depictions of sexuality are pornographic.

Porn differs significantly from other forms of art because its explicit, primary purpose is to sexually arouse the viewer. The difference between Game of Thrones and Sexy Step Sis Stuck In Dishwasher is that you can skip to any timestamp in the latter, get your rocks off to whatever your ape brain is looking at and get pretty much the full experience of what the artwork has to offer. In Game of Thrones, its part of a greater narrative and the things its trying to express are more complicated and require context.

There are things worth expressing through art that justify drawing naked minors, possibly even drawing naked minors in a sexual context. An artist who has themselves been abused as a child might draw something like that to process their trauma, for example.

But the sole message of pornography, the only thing being expressed and what the audience is supposed to feel here is "Don't you want to fuck this ~~child~~ 800-year-old vampire who just so happened stop to aging at the age of 8?"

There are valid, artistic reasons for why an artist would want to draw the sexual abuse of children, but that's not what lolicon art is. Lolicon art is pornographic in nature, its explicit purpose is to make the viewer horny for kids (or "child-like bodies" if you want to be extremely charitable). It tries to create feelings of sexual attraction, nothing else.

Go ahead, draw a manga about an 800-year-old vampire girl whose body stopped aging at the age of 8, show us how this affects her emotionally, how society treats her, how it affects her relationships with other people. Especially in regards to her romantic life there'd probably be some very interesting and emotionally intense internal and external conflicts to explore!

But that's not what the overwhelming amount of loli art is. Lolicon art is porn. You're not supposed to feel the struggle of the vampire girl, you're not supposed to feel her despair at the dissonance of how people perceive her versus how she perceives herself and her frustration that nobody takes her seriously even though she has literal centuries of life experience. You're supposed to feel "This child is sexy and I wanna fuck it."

Any place where someone can call me multiple slurs because i dont like the same video game as them is a bad place

Yes. One of the real fascinating things about 4chan to me is that despite being almost universally reviled, it is a huge meme exporter. Wojaks, pepes, rage comics... all stuff that is or was mainstream, that started on good ol 4channel dot org.

4chan used to be good, then the first post was made and it was all downhill from there.

The only appeal of an unmoderated, anonymous imageboard is to enable these same sorts of people.

Just like how the ideology of Elon Musk has infiltrated every part of X dot com (formerly known as twitter), it doesn't matter if a pocket of users use 4chan in a "responsible" way, the culture of the sites admins will always reflect om the culture of its users.

No part of a social media/forum site can exist in a vacuum. Not even communities around Mastodon and Lemmy avoid this.

Some people brought up 4chan during work. I said something like “yeah it’s terrible” and the girl I work with (who apparently didn’t know anything about it up to that point) asked “you used it?” I said “I used to when I was a kid.”

In hindsight, I should’ve feigned ignorance and just act surprised and disgusted when someone brings it up lol.

4chan, somethingawful, and early reddit. All just absolute fucking cesspits.

Closest I'll come to defending it is, having hung out on there (way) in the past, I still wound up here with you all. The rowdiness of the chapo sub tripped the same neuron 4chan used to.

I love 4chan because it keeps 4channers in their own corner of the Internet, one that’s well removed from spaces meant for normal people

The whole place can go in the toilet. I will curse Moot daily until the day I die.

I used to visit /tg/ (almost a decade ago now, wow) for the pdf sharing threads but even then would not have defended that board or 4chan as a whole. It's a hive of scum and bigotry, and no number of ttrpg pdfs can change that

Someone in my friend group got really defensive about Kiwifarms being denied service by an isp or something and it's definitely made me think less of them as a person.

I lurked a lot on 4chan back in the day. You could browse /b/ and it was ok, more fun and quirky stuff than genuinely vile stuff.

When that changed you could maybe use the more niche boards, like /mu/ or /tg/. I used /sp/ a lot before i just stopped visiting. Now it's just pure racism and white supremacy on all the boards.

Appropriating their memes and lingo can be cool and good. But defending 4chan is pointless and a red flag.