Unlike sites like Reddit where an overarching hivemind will dominate the entire site to the point where your cooking, gardening and Reality TV subs will all contain American politics for some ungodly reason, 4chan still seems to be siloed in to specifically focused communities.

Ignore /b/, /pol/, r9k and all the weeb stuff and you can find some properly good communities which remind me of the old internet. /sci/, /mu/, /biz/ and /fit/ can all have their moments from time to time.

Some of the content that pops up on /t/ are extremely interesting from a data hoarding/lost media perspective

I vaguely remember a poster having digitised his entire niche Serbian breakfast cartoon collection

A lot falls through the rather wide cracks in legal distribution methods

I can very confidently state /biz/ does not have its moments.

the rise of crypto broke that board

> Ignore the weeb stuff

Good luck doing that on 4chan

I'd ask the boring Israeli/US boycott Muppets get off my graphics card benchmark sub but alas, we dont all get want we want.

Until then you can use some 4chan boards if you ignore all the weeb shit.

The original intent for all the boards was for anime fans to talk about something within their group (ie with other anime fans) that wasn't /a/nime itself. There's a screencap from an old /g/ thread on the same topic (someone complaining about all the weebs shitting up their board; meanwhile the board is literally named that because of "gijitsu"). But over time many of the board cultures shifted to the extent that they have / want very little association with anime.

It's an anime website though.

How so? It's a very general-purpose image board and has a been for a long time.

The two aren't contradictory, it's more that due to historic traditions as an offshoot of 2chan and cross-board culture, "otaku" culture still exerts a strong influence on most of the boards.