> This is such a weird lie to insert in the middle of this rant

Either I should have expanded on that or you're not recalling the same period of time I am.

The Obama years were when Millennials went to college. They're when broadband and smartphones proliferated.

This is when IRC and the indie web died. This is when platforms became predominant and when censorship became top-down mandated. This is when "app stores" over "unlimited web installs" won.

Everyone entering the internet during this period entered into a world where censorship was normalized. Where the algorithm started to take over.

Those of us who used the internet before the Obama years remember a vastly different internet.

It's not that it was Obama that did this. It's simply a marker in time to denote confluence of changes and generational coming of age that coincided with it.

What is interesting is that the Trump presidencies swung the pendulum of who was being censored in the opposite direction of the pop culture that had originally adopted the platforms and set the 2010's status quo.

> 4chan

I remember an internet before 4chan.

Their anonymity, ironically, became something of a protest to the platformization of the years that followed.

Wasn't there once a lot of pro-LGBT stuff on 4chan? I avoid it, but I've read that it's a melting pot? Just very extreme?

I'm more concerned about Kiwi Farms type places. I know friends of Near, and bullying is something that irks me.