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I thought about it for a while and I know I may sound repetitive but this place rarely put out anything creative in these years.
There has been some stuff but most of them was either forgotten or just not controversial enough.

They've never been rainbows and roses sure but there was imagination,it was known as the hall of memes and so far now they did mostly the usual "unflattering depiction of someone I don't like crudely drawn with paint".

There was some curiosity of what else they're going to come up with but now it's all the same,all it changes is the premise.
There seems to be this costant seeking for an enemy or someone in particular to mock with the overuse of buzzwords.
And the fact that many use these unironically just doesn't help making this even more confusing,

The bait that tries so hard to get attention that's not even funny with lists where they label anything popular or classic=bad .

Even the dark humor,the edgy content they're known for dumbed down so hard in the last couple of years,
It's either nazi stuff or jokes about the latest tragedy.Things that an YT commenter would make.
The most basic as you can get.

And now we have another Wojak edit which mocks those addicted to porn,ironic considering that at least 70% of the users proven to be horny as hell and there are at least 4 board mainly about porn.

Do they seriously ran out of ideas? 4chan is not a single entity,far from an echo chamber but so far this is getting repetitive just like Twitter and Reddit when it comes to jokes,the same places they despise so much.

Btw,I've noticed I've made a typo,It's lose not lost.

"4chan" as it was, died years ago, it's diet tumblr now. They produce the same reskinned "memes" as everyone else nowadays. Which is to say yes, they're no longer creative.

My theory is that all the people who made those silly gifs of people chasing a guy in a basket or spinzaku just grew up and left to site to do their own thing. With 4chan having noteriety due to memes like the hacker known as 4Chan it attracted a lot of people, for better or worse.

Their image of 4Chan is the degenerate, bullying, hacker 4chan so they eventually added to it.

The worst thing is that most of the other channels are fairly tame, but a lot of people think /b/ and /pol/ is the entire site.

are you judging this based as an actual 4chan user, or just based on what kym articles get written?

That's putting it very lightly. They've somehow taken the "stop liking what I don't like" mentality to a whole new level. Any meaningful discussion – especially on boards dedicated to media such as /mu/, /v/ and /tv/ – will often always be drowned out in favor of name-calling and Wojak strawmen flinging.

As an actual user.
I've been in several threads and so many of them went downhill because of politics etc.,most of the time these flamewars were completely unrelated to topic of the thread itself.

It was inevitable for it to end this way, I feel. They like to preach the idea that likes/upvotes make comments and posts worse, but the site still counts replies to each comment. When the best way to stand out on a website with no likes is to get the most amount of replies, it is natural that the most frequent type of comments are those that get the most replies, and what gets the most replies anywhere on the internet is always controversial and/or provocative stuff. As a result, the entire site's ideology slowly drifted towards this mentality over the years, effectively attracting the kind of people who would be OK with that, and now we see the result of it.

Something similar happens on Twitter. The site has likes, but not DISlikes, therefore, what gets trending the most is just echoing ideas others agree with about controversial topics that get traction due to commetns and retweets. There is no fear to being disliked and getting ratio'd does nothing and, as such, we also see the result of that.

In the end, we have yet to see a better-working system than the classic upvotes and downvotes (but without a karma-saving system like Reddit has, since that gets exploited too). They are not perfect and they can still be exploited on some sites, but they are the closest we have gotten to a system where people just comment genuinely and, conversely, do not attract people for the wrong reasons like 4chan and others have.

I deactivated from here a while back due to the staleness of the content here so I found this thread interesting enough to rejoin and post. 4chan has been a site I've really appreciated for content as of late so I wanted to say a few words in its defense, namely:

Do they seriously ran out of ideas? 4chan is not a single entity,far from an echo chamber but so far this is getting repetitive just like Twitter and Reddit when it comes to jokes,the same places they despise so much.

The site not being a single entity is what you should remember. I know you're smart enough to know there are boards other than /pol/ but it's hard to remember the userbase consists of people other than baiting assholes spamming the same thread or people who derail actually interesting threads with off-topic nonsense. It's the double-edged sword of not having a karma system, you shift the communal response away from the upvote mentality of "more upvotes = correct" but you also make derailing posts easier to consume since they are not flagged by the community unless you digest every response to it.

There are days where the threads are mostly the same old shit day-in and day-out with "blah general", "shit x do", and "filename threads" but there are still the moments of genuine creativity I love. Homebrew games, at least tabletop ones anyway, have an abundance of creative threads that pop up intermittently. Story ideas with impressive collaborative worldbuilding efforts are still quite frequent. And more simply than that there's the occasional anon who posts a humorous "what if" scenario that everyone joins in to have a good larf at.

At least from my experience, in my tiny bubble of /tg/ threads I frequent, I still find it a very creative place to engage. Something about the creators there seem more genuine, more "daring" in their ideas, and more thoughtful in their execution of ideas than what I see on subreddits of similar topics.

Yeah, you can still find some interesting projects and other things on 4chan if you look hard enough. Hell, even /mlp/ is still doing projects. They are focusing on archiving almost everything related to MLP and it's fandom and a month ago or somewhere there they started a Pony Preservation Project.

http://boards.4channel.org/mlp/thread/34080783

"This project is the first part of the "Pony Preservation Project" dealing with the voice.
It's dedicated to save our beloved pony's voices by creating a neural network based Text To Speech for our favourite ponies.
Videos such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJKTodX1FA or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWK_iYBl8cA have proven that we now have the technology to generate convincing voices using machine learning algorithms "trained" on nothing but clean audio clips.
With roughtly 10 seasons (8 soon to be 9 seasons and 5 movies) worth of voice lines available, we have more than enough material to apply this tech for our deviant needs."

They could start creating their own episodes too if they wan't to and have enough time on hands but i feel like they are most likely going to use it on other things. I think it's interesting to see how all that goes.

Maybe? But it's like if you only look at the big shitshows in /v/, /tv/ and /pol/. Those boards have the highest traffic, so of course new Wojaks and Pepes are going to be forced by a handful of dedicated autistics from /int/, /bant/ and /pol/. Obviously you're going to get a lot of repetition because a lot of them are dirty crossposters or reddit tourists. Reposted, forcing everything down the shitter as people fuck off in the sidelines.

Those boards have a fucked culture such that quality and creativity is going down when we have eternal Sneedposting on /tv/ and 15 Smash Bros threads at all times on /v/. /pol/ crossposters seeping into the folds of the latest news of anything that could be politicized. That's the status quo if you only care about the big media boards.

On the flipside, the smaller boards still maintain a degree of integrity with their board culture, and while they don't have nearly as much reach, they are quality boards to compare. Tourists don't have the time to be assimilated into a /k/ommando, a /jp/sie or a /fit/izen. Those are still big boards, and still people barely oust themselves as crossposters. It's even better looking at the tiny non-NSFW boards. /pol/ isn't that omnipresent thank fuck.

More or less. 4Chan is no different from other sites in posting reskinned memes. Any creativity from the previous years was made by some individual and those people either moved on or stayed.

as someone who frequents things like /tg/ and /ic/ the most and i agree to an extent. tg still does produce some high quality content that's as good as any official trpgs and cool moments of worldbuilding. albeit i kinda like the worldbuilding subreddit more but due to how reddit works, there's a lot of stuff that ends up falling to obscurity..

4chan has never been "good."

Probably the best way to put the situation. 4chan/the internet in general used to be niche, tightnet, and overall fun, now it's commonplace and out in the open. It's no longer an escape, it's the norm.