It is (was?) a place of free exchange of ideas, without ego. You have no updoots to collect, nobody can be downdooted for not conforming to groupthink. Anyone who tries to establish an identity on the site is lambasted for not respecting the anonymous nature of the discussion.
There will always be a place for truly anonymous discourse. For a time, that was 4chan.
A lot of wonderful, wonderful things. Anonymous has roots in 4chan. A lot of amazing political activism has sprung from 4chan. And it was the seed for the entire meme culture which permeates the internet.
At its peak, 4chan along with half a dozen other forums entirely contained the fountain of creativity from which the modern internet drew its inspiration.
I have been visiting 4chan since elementary school, now well in my twenties, so I have seen the changes over the years. What exists today is a shell of what once was. moot, the resident admin, left some years ago and placed the forum in the hands of a third party with conflicted interests and no interest in proper moderation.
It's also worth mentioning that /b/, the board everyone is most familiar with outside of 4chan, is the one where you hear about all the illegal racist stuff getting posted.
Before /pol/ was hijacked into a nazi version of /b/, it was actually a wonderful place for political discussion. And there are dozens of other topic-specific boards which harbor some very thought-provoking discussion.
That is positive, but it's hard to say if that positivity has outweighed the negativity that came after. It's also hard to say If one can preserve such positivity in the absence of stronger moderation. In fact, as you indicated, one of 4chan's failings was a lack of proper moderation after moot left.
History has indicated time and again that you cannot trust a "benevolent dictator" model for sustained positive outcomes, and the consequences when it breaks down can be terrible and tragic.
I'm not sure that's conflation. If everyone's anonymous, the only throttle / censorship / regulation / what have you is if the benevolent dictator decides to hit individual posts with the shut-up-stick (or ban IP addresses, which is ham-fisted but sure does temporarily silence someone).
A change in leadership has immediate effect on the discourse, and not all anonymous discourse has equal merit (trading pedophilia pornography being an obvious example of discourse that is more or less universally identified as negative merit). So a change in leadership changes the merit of the discourse that leadership wields a shut-up-stick over.
A change in leadership has immediate effect on the discourse
This is true for literally all online communities, anonymous communities are no different. Lack of leadership and failure to enforce rules always breaks a community down. So yes, you are indeed conflating these two separate issues.
