Love 'em, hate 'em, miss 'em. 4chan was amazing for years, somewhere until about 2011 where things started going downhill. 2012 was the last year where the "good" content outweighed the bad. There were some cool/niche/offshoot boards that were fun in their own ways, like 7chan, 420chan, Krautchan, Fighting Amphibians. That's where I learned all sorts of power user and computer stuff over the years. Even got to play in a site-famous tournament at one point. I still keep in contact with the people I've met on some of those imageboards. I lurk a few boards that are worth tolerating these days on 4chan, and use other ones merely as resource/content aggregation, like /mu/ for new music.<p>Places like 8chan, Lainchan, Postbox, etc. are awful. 8chan was cool for like 6 months because it had all of the tinges of old 4chan, but it got co-opted by different groups until it became the alt-right hugbox. Lainchan is just filled with a few different caricatures of previously-underage or mentally unsound 4chan /g/ posters. One thing they all seem to have in common is pretentiousness and a burning need to constantly participate in actual - not humorous - one-upsmanship; they must always be better than the "normies" (an irony here being that they use the new-school "politically correct" version of the parent word) and even the people they deem "worthy" of participating in discussion. They often make spinoff after spinoff, IRC channel after IRC channel, and then cry about having no place to discuss what they want despite having a wasteland of dead spinoff boards and IRC channels. Point out that they're free to discuss their topic on $theLatestSpinoff, and they'll cry about whoever isn't part of their in-group "ruining" their space. It's tiresome and they're not worth any nuggets of information they may hold.<p>There are one or two up-and-coming imageboards that actually have amicable content and decent users, though.