/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16118631]

This board is so fucking terrible, what were the fabled golden years of /lit/ and when did they happen? Was the board any better back then? I'm going to quit this garbage and start browsing warosu archives instead

[Anonymous No.16118638]

>>16118631
Take a look at the archives and you’ll notice it’s always been like this.

[Anonymous No.16118643]

>>16118631
When the daily Italo Calvino threads stopped.

[Anonymous No.16118647]

>>16118631
Can you just effortpost in the better threads please, seriously /lit/ is only as good as you make it. NONE of you should complain unless you at least effortpost.

[Anonymous No.16118651]

lit was a slow board many years ago, then pol and his happened and now lit is the tv of the middle class

[Anonymous No.16118663]

>>16118647
I effortpost often in Nietzsche and Gnostic threads but it's so fucking pointless, Marx threads are the best illustration of the dumpsterfire /lit/ is

[Anonymous No.16118688]

>>16118631
/pol/ and /his(pol)/ tourists

[Anonymous No.16119179]

>>16118631
zoomers

[Anonymous No.16119210]

>>16118663
Oh so wait, YOU are the cancer killing this board then it's so clear why you're bitching now. Kys

[Anonymous No.16119224]

>>16118631
idk man I just migrated here last month from reddit and its always been like that. The golden past is a meme, just like all nations and peoples have one to cope with their miserable condition.

[Anonymous No.16119235]

>>16118663
>right wingers make Hitler, Culture of Critique, etc threads on and on
>nobody complains or cares because there's no point being triggered by that
>marx threads get made
>right wingers make meta complaint threads on and on
Why are you people like this? If any politics is bad politics all politics is bad politics. Just treat it all the same. Nobody cares about right wing threads that much, why do right wingers care so much about Marx threads and get so mad over it they end up making countless meta complaint threads? You guys are becoming more annoying than any politics thread, right wing or left wing, at this point. You guys are the ones ruining /lit/, for every pointless complaint thread made like this one, the good threads you want are getting pushed off into the archives. Good fucking job.

[Anonymous No.16119263]

left wing pondscum should dilate themselves into oblivion.
someone without the basic intelligence to see what is going on in the world has no business pretending to be an intellectual.

[Anonymous No.16119295]

>>16118631
It has its moments. At least it’s not mostly slide threads and agitprop

[Anonymous No.16119430]

>>16118631
It's because the overall site is more right-wing now so /lit/ (being the de facto pseud contrarian board) tries and becomes more and more left-wing, which results in a loss of humor and self-awareness.

[Anonymous No.16119444]

>>16119430
This statement is not only factually incorrect but also dismally banal. Demonstrative of the level of discourse on this board as a whole.

[Anonymous No.16119467]

>>16118651
>now lit is the tv of the middle class
Very true

[Anonymous No.16119472]

>>16119430
hello newfag

[Anonymous No.16119501]

>>16118638
This.
back in the day (2015) we accused everything we didn't like and even each other of being sp00ks then sometime in the past year or so an artfag made that drawing of Stirner so we do that now
but its always been the same shit

[Anonymous No.16119550]

>>16119224
I know you're baiting, but go back.
>>16119430
Most boards were and are apolitical, and even /pol/ knew that left vs right is bullshit. The idea that imageboards are political is new, it came with the "culture war".

[Anonymous No.16119555]

>>16119430
No it’s not.
The opinions you hear here aren’t even right wing, they’re certainly not fringe enough to be considered “alt-right”.
“I don’t like the idea of mass immigration”, “a woman bragging about her abortion is trashy” and “communism is bad” are the same kind of opinions held by Clinton-era Democrats.
It just feels alt-right to you because people on social media don’t feel like signaling them to the progressives that spend 12 hours a day there and the teenagers that make political decisions on a whim without real conviction.
The only actual deviation from middle America you see here is the Anti-Israel sentiment, which is more of a hardline leftist view than it is conservative dogma.

[Anonymous No.16119707]

>>16118651
Pretty much this. There's a new post on the board every few seconds now. This was unimaginable back in 2011.

[Anonymous No.16119708]

>>16118663
Gnostic threads are the worst offenders

[Anonymous No.16119766]

>>16118631
No.

>>16118638
Liar, liar, liar.

It was not like this. I started posting in 2014 and the only philosopher you guys memed back then was Stirner. There was no Marxism spam, no internet celebrity spam - maybe rarely, but much, much less than there is today. What we had were constant talks about Pynchon, Wallace, and others - back in the day when the average reader had actually read those books. Zizek was barely talked about at all (I was even surprised when I saw him being memed since the beginning of the last year, because I thought the man was probably dead or dying), Guenon was unheard-of, Evola was talked very rarely and no one cared about Mencius Moldbug or Nick Land.
The spam we used to have back then were art or film threads, which were very common, but the mods always deleted.

There was a very noticeable change in the board that some people, for some reason, keep trying to deny. The most important was was the Marxist spam, but even this happened in the context of an overall political turn, which might have begun to sprout in 2016.

Now there are threads here which are *100% about economics*, as if this had anything at all to do with literature... It's disgraceful. But the political spammers are not here for literature, they're here for politics, so they don't see the problem with spamming technical economics discussions in a board that should be primarily dedicated to the poem, the play, and the novel.

I made a thread about this issue a few days ago and it was, of course, deleted. As yours will be deleted too.

I am quite sure that the janitors are amongst the political spammers. There's no other explanation.

Our only option is to report the off-topic threads as much as we can. The problem is if you report too much they might ban you, so try to report three or four spam threads a day.

[Anonymous No.16119779]

>>16119766
>I am quite sure that the janitors are amongst the political spammers. There's no other explanation.
Butterfly and Horia Belcea are confirmed jannies, take that as you will.

[Anonymous No.16119781]

>>16119766
No it was literally always like this, I still have pics on my phone I saved off here in 2012

[Anonymous No.16119791]

>>16119550
What is this "culture war" you speak of, and when did this happen, who were the partisans, tell us more about it, O old one

[Anonymous No.16119797]

guenonfag antics were the peak of the board

[Anonymous No.16119809]

>>16119766
Sorry, I meant "yes" to OP's question. Yes, the board was better.

It was also much slower. To the degree it became faster, it also became worse.
Maybe this is why the mods don't care: faster board, more posts, more money.

And yet... I keep thinking that a "political theory" board, exclusively for political discussions (basic rules: one author or book or political idea - e.g. utilitarianism, minimum wage, Marxism - has to be mentioned in the OP) would have a good potential.

It's clear that political discussions can't be had on/pol/, and yet it's also clear that they have ruined /lit/.

Therefore, why not make /polit/, for educated political theory and debates?

Who else thinks this would be a good idea? It seems to me to be a fine solution that would satisfy both us and the spammers, while at the same time providing a new, fast-moving and popular board.

[Anonymous No.16119832]

>>16119550
Nobody on this board who claims to be “a-political” can explain why they don’t just go to reddit. It’s a much more active community and if you’re so damn high above getting triggered by progressive undercurrents it should be fine for you.

[Anonymous No.16119833]

>>16119708
>>16118663
I personally find Gnosticism and ancient Near East religion absolutely fascinating.

The problem is you get a handful of new age /x/ schizos attracted to these threads. That's not so bad itself, but then a giant crowd of pseuds descends for their chance to "btfo" schizos.

These people have no interest in the Gnosticism and have clearly only a very lose understanding of the religious movement labeled Gnosticism (it really is a bunch of diverse traditions that should be called Biblical Demiurge literature).

These are more numerous and shit up any discussion by assuming anyone talking about Gnosticism is new age (or anyone talking about Marx is a full Antifa commie) and derail threads with constant ad hominems to score points in an argument they are having in their minds about a topic they actually don't care about or understand.

I don't mind schizos because they generally go away if you don't respond to them, but simplistic ad hominem posters who are only interested in gratifying their ego by "btfoing" them endlessly take the bait and engage the schizos.

[Anonymous No.16119847]

https://www.strawpoll.me/20763904

[Anonymous No.16119871]

>>16119832
Why don't you?

You're the outsider here, not us. This board is for literature. Zizek and Jordan Peterson aren't literature.

History is a thousand times more literary than Marx and Evola, yet it's been sent away to /his/ while Marx and Evola, and Thomas Sowell and Noam Chomsky, remain here. Why?

Send Chomsky an email asking if he considers himself a literary writer and he'll say he doesn't. It's not literature. It's political theory, and deserves a board of its own.

[Anonymous No.16119885]

>>16119847
it would kill /lit/

[Anonymous No.16119888]

>>16119847
Okay, I know you’ve been reading reddit PR posts about how valuable community input is for years (though, its really not); but 4chan does not give a fuck about your requests for new boards. We go years at a time without new boards here.

The boards that do get split up, like /v/ are extremely high velocity ones where on-topic threads are liable to get pushed out of the catalogue in under an hour.
On topic or off-topic, a post on /lit/ will hang around for a full day, at least. There is no reason to split up this board as long as there’s so little activity.

It doesn’t even make sense for a website to actively arrange things to make sure they’re less populated. And no, nobody cares about your anecdotal shit about Digg or whatever else getting ruined by not listening to it’s userbase. As long as redditors keep migrating to 4chan it will be a win for the admins.

[Anonymous No.16119901]

>>16119885
>slow board =/= dead board
/po/ is one of the best boards on this constantly detoriating website.

[Anonymous No.16119916]

>>16119885
Let the board run slowly. What's the problem?

People who complain about slow boards are post-2016 Merdditors and spammers with low levels of concentration.

/lit/ was slower back in the day. It had the ideal speed. And if you wish to discuss Zizek and Peterson, just go to the other board instead.

[Anonymous No.16119924]

>>16119888
Why was /his/ created, imbecile?

[Anonymous No.16119929]

>>16119916
There’s literally zero advantage to having a literature discussion where people reply once a day. There’s plenty of forums that would do that sort of thing better than an imageboard.

[Anonymous No.16119948]

>>16119916
You’re literally describing an internet forum and not an imageboard. Do zoomers not realize that reddit and 4chan are the exceptions and that most web forums work exactly as you describe?
Threads stay up forever, literally, they don’t 404

[Anonymous No.16119969]

>>16119781
post them then

[Anonymous No.16119977]

>>16119969
Heres one

[Anonymous No.16119984]

>>16119929
>>16119948
You know very well that you are exaggerating immensely.

You don't read. You have no love for literature. You can't even properly recite a poem. Why do you not go back to /r/socialism and The Donald?

[Anonymous No.16119992]

>>16119977
a reaction image? do you have any screenshots of threads?

[Anonymous No.16119995]

>old good
>new bad
time to go to bed gramps

[Anonymous No.16120005]

>>16119766
>>16119809
Good posts, anon - I retract my previous statement >>16118638
Your posts are much more insightful than what I was talking about. I just found that a lot of what makes the current /lit/ shitty has already existed back then.

Also, I wish something like
>/polit/
as a containment board could work, but in order to achieve that, we’d need completely different mods on this board.

[Anonymous No.16120017]

>>16119995
>>16119977
>>16119948

these are the people that
>>16119766
was talking about, in case anyone had any doubts. wojak spamming, reaction images as proof of anything, "it was always like this", "the current state of the board is ideal" etc.

the board wasn't always like this, 2014 and 2016 just finished off whatever was left of this site unfortunately. i wouldn't be surprised at all if any place with relatively fruitful discussion was targeted for politicization at this point. it's too large of a recurring pattern. maybe in years to come advertisers, influencers and political organizations will chase people into a new medium of some kind.

[Anonymous No.16120019]

>>16119984
>You know very well that you are exaggerating immensely.
No i’m not? People’s recommendations are always: more generals, a slower board, sometimes people even claim that the board should not allow images in the OP.
They’re just describing a web forum. It’s not an exaggeration; most of what you have a problem with are just the basic mechanics of 4chan.
I really think the people making these complaints have never posted on a forum that was not reddit or 4channel.

[Anonymous No.16120023]

>>16120017
take your meds before bed gramps

[Anonymous No.16120031]

>>16120023
thank you for further proving my point
i'd encourage everyone to ctrl+f "take your meds", "schizo" etc in the archives some time.

[Anonymous No.16120037]

>>16119992
No? I save the images for reposting later, I don’t screenshot threads. There’s entire websites dedicated to archiving, go look at one of them.
I’m not gonna sit here all day trying to prove to you that 4chan was always a crass, politically incorrect place

[Anonymous No.16120044]

There’s definitely threads from 2008 that talked about how things have really been going downhill lately

[Anonymous No.16120046]

>>16120019
nah you're conflating two separate things. no one on /lit/ is calling for a ban on images or asking for more generals, just that political spam should be left off the board and that /lit/ functioned perfectly well for years as a slow board.

>>16120037
i read the archives regularly and you're wrong/outright lying. ive never met a person yet who claimed what you're claiming with any evidence. /lit/, while still having a definitive 4chan flavor, was ultimately a slow and thoughtful board with little to no political discussion.
>ask for proof
>uh no? you're just wrong
lmao

[Anonymous No.16120048]

>>16120031
meds take them

[Anonymous No.16120053]

>>16120037
also the discussion isn't that 4chan used to be crass, it obviously always has been, the subject is the state of /lit/, which rarely discusses literature anymore in favor of politics, ecelebs, twitter, etc. a single trip through the archives confirms this.

[Anonymous No.16120072]

>>16120046
Then feel free to post proof that 2014 /lit/ was a utopia of a-political literature discussion, never crossing over into sociology, economics or current events lol

[Anonymous No.16120088]

Judging from the thread you just made, i don't think you'll be able to enjoy an archive-chan without being able to commentate.

[Anonymous No.16120114]

About 5 or 6 years ago we used to have some legit bible threads where a lot of people asked questions and got some in depth answers, along with a lot of debating. I had one thread where I went through Genesis chapter by chapter explicating it. For some reason the mods started deleting the threads and the Catholic posters slowly faded away. Some of them were legit seminarians like Wolfshiem if I'm remembering the name correctly.

[Anonymous No.16120124]

>>16120072
anyone who isn't an intentional bad actor in this debate either knows it, remembers it, or can simply google it themselves. 2014 users regularly create these threads to discuss the declining state of the board, and you and your always jump in claiming "no, it was always like this" accompanied by cries of "take your meds" etc.

the burden of proof is firmly on you, hell you or another anon claimed to have proof ten posts back only to have a meme-generator tier reaction image and turned irate when asked for proof. anyone who has browsed pre-2016 knows this stuff. but for the record, you can literally (heh) just google 2014 waruso /lit/ "topic" and get a thread to analyze, just for starters. no screengrabs required.

2014+warosu+/lit/+marx = nothing to very little. sub marx for pynchon and you get this:

no ones claiming it was a utopia, just that the board is being intentionally demolished by off topic nonsense, where before there was an actual community. i don't understand why this upsets you so much.

[Anonymous No.16120139]

>>16118631
The Great /pol/tard Invasion of 2016. I personally prefer to keep to smaller, more selective forums nowadays, I just come here out of some vestigial sense of habit.

[Anonymous No.16120141]

>>16120114
ill be met with cries of schizoposting, but it's extremely obvious if you were a real contributor to /lit/ in the day that the mods intentionally deleted informative threads in favor of what we have now. for whatever reason, this change in /lit/ and the site at large is at least partially top-down and anyone who has lurked enough knows it. personally, i got what i needed out of 4chan, but ive legitimately learned so much, especially about Biblical topics like you mentioned that have been hugely influential to me, that it saddens me to think it's gone and barred from coming back. it will be a long time before a medium is able to recapture this level of discourse paired with the irreverence and ease of style that 4chan has.

[Anonymous No.16120159]

>>16120124
>i don't understand why this upsets you so much.
It doesn’t, i simply said that in 2014 there was plenty of off topic shit on the board, because there was
I still don’t believe the overall amount of literature discussion has declined.
The only really annoying thing on the board right now is the 2 meta threads running at any given time, and idiots going into threads with sincere questions and trying to redirect everyone into a general.
I’ve never even voted, I don’t post /pol/bait but I’m definitely gonna quit giving a shit about what I sage and what I don’t because the optimal browsing experience theorists are really annoying and that thread about Kamala Harris was actually pretty informative

[Anonymous No.16120162]

>>16120141
Mods definitely lean left. We have low effort /leftypol/ bait posts stay for hours on end while the bait posts from /pol/ almost never last more than 30 minutes at most.

[Anonymous No.16120165]

>>16120114
This sounds quite interesting, do you happen to have any links to some of them? I looked but couldn’t find the threads you’re talking about.

[Anonymous No.16120176]

>>16120114
God I hated Wolfsheim. He knew his shit but whenever he opened his mouth about anything but strict Biblical exegesis he was just insufferable.

>>16120141
>>16120162
It's probably related to the post Gookmoot purges. /fit/ isn't moderated by a ginger manlet anymore, and is run by literal trannies that don't lift. I've heard the trannies that run /a/ at least watch anime and ban wojacks, which is nice.

[Anonymous No.16120184]

>>16120165
You could probably find them search the archives for "bible general" or "catholic general". The one I did on Genesis was called the Torah/Pentateuch reading group" or something like that because I was planning on going through the whole thing.

[Anonymous No.16120217]

>>16120162
i assume they just encourage any political nonsense. i really don't care about the partisan aspect of it.

>It doesn’t, i simply said that in 2014 there was plenty of off topic shit on the board, because there was

your constant moving of the goalposts is exactly what i expect: your original post was that "it was always like this" in response to this anons first hand account of how /lit/ was circa 6~ years ago
>>16119766

and no, it hasn't always been like this. sure, there would have been shitposting because this is 4chan as you say, but looking through the archives i see
2 threads on AI
a thread on anarchism
a thread on veganism
popsci shit
a thread about marie kondo
"post a picture get a book"
"books that discuss the benefit of this dick"
tedposting
coomer wojak thread
a thread about writing smut
">he's a cultural christian"
etc
the kamela harris thread might be informative but it isn't literature and belongs elsewhere. no one cares whether you sage or not. im not theorizing about "the board experience", im contradicting your incorrect claim that the board was always like this. it wasn't.

if you just like how it is now, more power to you, but there genuinely was a real flower of discussion that got stomped out to make room for this algorithmic, googleadsense, off topic nonsense.

[Anonymous No.16120225]

>>16120217
meant to quote
>>16120159
after the first linebreak

time to shower and shit, im out

[Anonymous No.16120230]

>>16120217
>moving of the goalposts
Okay reddit

[Anonymous No.16120243]

>>16120225
And I’m still telling you there was always off topic shit on the board

[Anonymous No.16120244]

>>16120184
Thank you, I’ll see if I can find some!

[Anonymous No.16120325]

>>16119791
I'm new as fuck, and even I can tell that after American elections (2016) boards went from bad to worse.
>>16119832
Because reddit is shithole filled with normies and groupthink. Problem is redditors are coming here, and have taken root in /pol/.

[Anonymous No.16120388]

>>16119766
as a longtime warosu reader to escape from the /lit/ shit I can say that things used to be better, because shitposting was literature related (let's leave porn posting which got deleted aside). Take Laura Penny shitposting for example. The great enemy is the traffic increase in the last years (especially through phones), lower board traffic is absolutely important to discussion quality. Janitors need to clean /lit/ up, by enforcing the sticky and basic stuff like banning Twitter screencap OPs, which is also on the rise. Only jannies will fix it, but knowing that Butterfly, one of the more insidious forces of the board, chronic jezebel poster and none-contributor to literature discussion, has been a janny can't give much hope.

>>16120139
lit-related? do you have a name to pass on?

[Anonymous No.16120410]

2011-2012, maybe into 2013

[Anonymous No.16120433]

>>16118631
>what were the fabled golden years of /lit/
They don’t exist. It was never a big board like /b/ was
There was plenty of shit posting and only maybe one good thread a day

[Anonymous No.16120456]

>>16119833
>Biblical Demiurge literature).
I'm not sure this is enough. Gnosticism is not entirely biblical. Only some strains which are most popular now incorpirated it into their mythos to accommodate rhe popularity of Christ

[Anonymous No.16120546]

>>16119555
That's because the aut right is a bunch of retarded teenagers who dress up mainstream conservative ideology with eschatological hysteria and low brow irony then exact upon it the agenda that was set for them by the media apparatus which has deluded these idiots into believing they are independent from it. Then you have high level morons like you who have sunk so deep into this folly that you actually think there is some kind of vanguard on the fringes with dangerous ideas that you belong to when in reality you are exactly the same only more diseased. Kill yourself fag.

[Anonymous No.16120560]

>>16118631
/Lit/ is actually one of the few decent boards in terms of content/activity ratio. In fact it might the only one.

[Anonymous No.16120722]

>>16120546
>that you actually think there is some kind of vanguard on the fringes with dangerous ideas that you belong to

I think you must have gotten seriously btfo’ed by someone on this board earlier and are just rageposting without thinking because this is nothing like what I said at all

[Anonymous No.16120738]

that period of time where everyone was really into gaddis was my favorite era of /lit/ desu

[Anonymous No.16120747]

>>16118631
OP here, was browsing the archives from like 2013 and it is indeed a lot better than this horseshit. How much do I have to go back to experience peak /lit/?

[Anonymous No.16120790]

>>16120243
not to this degree there wasn't. saying "oh there was off topic posts then too" totally misses the point. there were shitposts but the board was overall fine. now it's pretty much all shitposting and the board is unusable. what do you gain being intentionally obtuse?

[Anonymous No.16120800]

>>16120433
this is not true. more threads than not were passable to good. you could spark decent discussion in 7/10 threads. one good thread a day is an obvious lie.

[Anonymous No.16120802]

>>16118631
I've been here only since something like 2017, but even then the board catalog was miles better than its current state. No amount of gaslighting is going to change this.

[Anonymous No.16120831]

I've been here since 2012 and I have to admit that /lit/ has taken a hard hit this year in particular but I can only chalk it up that the current board state is the result of the pandemic and presidential election causing an increase in traffic and /lit/ will return to normal once reality returns to normal.

[Anonymous No.16120832]

>>16120800
No its true. You don’t have to believe me but that doesn’t make it true. People have been complaining about summerfags and newfags for over a decade. It’s always people looking through rose-tinted glasses.
In this case it’s extra sad because people fantasizing about 2013 /lit/ (kek) apparently weren’t even here.

[Anonymous No.16120851]

Why is religion spamming so common here? The rules are clear, it belongs in /his/.

[Anonymous No.16120863]

>>16120832
I was there, and I don't believe you, so this works out. It wasn't a perfect board, we're still on 4chan after all but saying all but one thread a day is disingenuous.

[Anonymous No.16120870]

>>16120863
Nah that’s about the ratio for something as slow as /lit/ was
Even the sticky talks about how slow the board is/was

[Anonymous No.16120892]

>>16120832
also
>summerfags
>newfags
>kek
your lingo outs you as an election tourist. summerfags and newfags is scapegoat terminology i rarely ever saw on /lit/, and not on the site as a whole in quite a while. 2010 actually would be the last time i remember these terms being popular, they were passed over for phrases like "reddit" or "normie" or political shit since then.

>>16120870
the board was slow, but there was still a full catalog daily, and there were more often than not multiple good threads up. it wouldn't be uncommon to see quality dicsussion on two or three authors, a few philosophical works, a good critique thread, some decent religious debate etc during the same day. i don't understand how anyone could profit from insisting this tiny innocuous board was such a shithole. why are you even here then?

[Anonymous No.16120903]

>>16120851
/his/ is basically r/atheism and r/history combined

[Anonymous No.16120915]

>>16120892
Idk man, idk if you’re lying or delusional but /lit/ was not an active board and it was not one totally free of shitposting (and it’s low post frequency meant shitposts stayed around a lot longer).
Again I don’t really know what you’re angle is; if it’s bait or what but that’s how it was.

[Anonymous No.16120956]

>>16118631
/lit/ is the same as it always was but with a different flavor, that’s it. The only difference is the cointelpro 2.0 that started in 2016. It’s easy to spot glowies and discord trannies, though.

[Anonymous No.16120960]

>>16119809
>political theory" board, exclusively for political discussions (basic rules: one author or book or political idea - e.g. utilitarianism, minimum wage, Marxism - has to be mentioned in the OP) would have a good potential.
>Therefore, why not make /polit/, for educated political theory and debates?
No. Part of the reason we have those posts is because anons think this is a smart board, and when they post their OT thread which is retarded they believe they are just as smart. They also like to believe the people responding to them getting btfo as >>16119833 describes or agreeing with them are "smart book readers" when the people responding are just retards who also cannot tell what a book is or what makes a good argument. Creating /polit/ will encourage those posters more just as we got from /his/ only with a lower bar of entry to be on topic, which in turn will lead to their threads on /lit/ being even lower quality and more populated.
The problem is that currently the majority of the posters don't like reading. The way to fix that is not to make people assume they would be more at home on /lit/ for being smart.
One thing the old version of /lit/ did well was making "smart" threads about children's books for those learning to read. It stopped pseuds from thinking they were smart for knowing who Joyce was without reading him because the population was well read enough to know what a faux pas was and how they never wanted to be labelled a parvenu, which is a different set of motivators to those who want to be seen as smart but whose only reference for "smart" comes from social media posts and is measured in (you)s.

[Anonymous No.16120961]

>>16120915
at this point im posting so other people can see the recurring trends in your posts. the argument isn't that /lit/ was active- it was obviously always slow, that's irrelevant. i also never claimed it was free from shitposting, every board on 4chan has shitposting.

the specific argument from the beginning of this thread is that /lit/ used to be a thoughtful board with good discussion at a high enough ratio to justify using it, and now, because of a massive increase in offtopic bullshit, spam, political posting, eceleb nonsense etc etc, it is no longer even borderline useable. you, and others, continue to jump in and say "it was always like this", and when i and others look the archives and our collective memories and come to the conclusion it wasn't, and say so in this thread, you backpedal into "well, it always had shitposting. it was slow before. so what?"

you're intentionally missing the point because your script only extends far enough to contradict and reset the argument by changing the goalpost to "well, but it was slow and had it's problems". yes, we all know this, but it's so much worse now that we're putting our heads together to find trends. is it possible that this bothers you and you wish to antagonize us?

also a third grader could see that you're mirroring my genuine confused disbelief for a vain grasp at credibility. you've repeated your script three times now. why not just leave the thread and let us reminisce?

[Anonymous No.16120965]

>>16120851
The mere fact that someone would want to discuss religion on a literature (fiction) board amazes me

[Anonymous No.16120966]

>>16120961
Sneed

[Anonymous No.16120967]

>>16119766
zoomers it's literally zoomers they ruined the internet

[Anonymous No.16120971]

>>16120966
>/tv/ memes
>in response to perfectly valid question
this string of posts functions as a perfect example of what i was talking about. it's almost a kind of art.

[Anonymous No.16120972]

>>16120892
>summerfags and newfags is scapegoat terminology i rarely ever saw on /lit/, and not on the site as a whole in quite a while. 2010 actually would be the last time i remember these terms being popular,
This board used post sumer is icumen in as a summerchild meme. There were regular reassurances during school holidays that the undergrads would go away and stop being stupid once term restarted. You didn't lurk enough.

[Anonymous No.16120983]

>>16120972
possibly. i stand by what ive been saying
>>16120961
here though.

[Anonymous No.16120986]

books for this feel?

[Anonymous No.16121009]

A few years ago I was too stupid and ill-read to enjoy browsing /lit/

Now I fit right in

Therefore I think this place has gone downhill, yes

[Anonymous No.16121023]

>>16120983
>possibly. i stand by what ive been saying
You made an argument that anon must be new because he didn't fit your fantasy of what the board once was. When you're told that what you're using as a tell for an electionfag doesn't work, you want to stand by it? Why?

[Anonymous No.16121033]

>>16118631
I remember it used to be about books (although I should add all the ones I read that were popular here, were pretty bad)
now it's just /pol/ spam

[Anonymous No.16121039]

>>16118631
in 2014/2015 our top 100 list got posted to reddit and we got a huge influx of users

then the 2016 election made /pol/ the most popular board ever and naturally some people wandered off to find this place.

>>16119766
is 100% correct

that being said, the creation of /his/ already did a bit of damage to /lit/. the creation of a political theory board, a philosophy board, a language learning board, etc would ruin the place

[Anonymous No.16121043]

>>16121023
i'm not entertaining a fantasy, i go and revisit it often via the archives. if you use "kek" unironically i know what category of poster you go under. what i stand by is the three paragraphs i wrote. im assenting to the possibility that people were using summerfag as a term against uni students. even in that case though, those uni students that anons may have been bitching about were far better posters than what we have now.

are you done samefagging in this thread yet?

[Anonymous No.16121047]

>>16120961
>at this point im posting so other people can see the recurring trends in your posts
> also a third grader could see that you're mirroring my genuine confused disbelief for a vain grasp at credibility.
Rest assured I have absolutely no idea what you’re on about, it’s not an act.
If i’m acting overly blasé it’s because I don’t want to sound like an asshole and have to feel guilty about it later.
The point you’re missing is that the total amount of good discussion hasn’t changed at all. There was never that much and increases in users definitely haven’t made it go down. If ten years ago there were 5 “good” threads in the catalogue at any time I think that number is still the same today. 2020’s brand of shitposts either stands out to you in the catalogue more than 2012’s or you’re just misremembering how irritating 2012 shitposts were at the time.
The actual offering of literature discussion hasn’t changed that much overall.
I’m not gonna be disingenuous and say you can’t identify trends and new variety of shitposts; but the only reason they’d be problematic is if someone was on a hare-trigger about that specific topic, not shitposts in general.
I hope I’ve articulated it well, it’s really not a mindgame

[Anonymous No.16121057]

>>16120960
>labelled a parvenu
>well read enough to know what a faux pas
lol I miss Monsieur posting and the other casual snobbery a board that actually reads books can muster.

[Anonymous No.16121110]

>>16121047
no, i have to disagree. the ratio is completely different now. thoughtful paragraphs of text in the philosophy threads have been stamped out. literature discussion is 50% shitposting when before it was maybe 20%. i can see your argument, the raw increase in traffic is simply diluting what was good, but there's a flaw to your reasoning: the catalog has always been a set number of threads, and i can compare the ratio of good to bad posts now vs then. back then, despite being slower, most of the threads were on topic etc. i'd personally say half the threads or even more at any given time were worth looking at. your "5 threads a day" number is your own and not what i observed. this ratio has been destroyed. this thread probably has the most on topic discussion right now and it's a fucking meta thread.

the shitposts are louder now, but they're also more, and obviously to the point where quality posters either got banned or driven off, meaning the quality has objectively declined. it's not a matter of misremembering anything. calling my memory into question doesn't change what we can observe. more "gaslighting" though you've at least changed gears into being less abrasive. in fact your posting style seems outright different.

[Anonymous No.16121122]

>>16118631
You're part of the problem, dumb frogposter

[Anonymous No.16121138]

>>16121043
>i'm not entertaining a fantasy, i go and revisit it often via the archives
But you missed events that happened as regularly as school terms? I call bullshit. Especially as that trend died with the election in the US in 2016 basically, so the people who hold that opinion of the board not normally marking those dates with wait for summer to be over are people who came after that trend stopped.
>>16121043
>if you use "kek" unironically i know what category of poster you go under
So you don't remember when this board was obsessed with s4s? You don't remember the tub raid? You don't remember the semiotics of 4chan threads? Those are a lot of oldfag memes to miss. It's like not knowing the spot the dog threads. If this is your standard of well read as it applies to 4chan your readings of canon should be expected to be equally shallow and skimmed.

>>16121043
>im assenting to the possibility that people were using summerfag as a term against uni students.
It's not a possibility, unless we view all history as only a possibility. Is it only a possibility that WW2 happened? Are we really going to have to get into a fart sniffing discussion about potential alternate histories not logged by the archives so that you can maintain the fantasy that didn't happen regularly on this board as more than a possibility?>>16121043
>even in that case though, those uni students that anons may have been bitching about were far better posters than what we have now.
How could you know if they're only possibly existent? Why such certainty on this when the contingency you're basing it on can only be a possibility to you?
>are you done samefagging in this thread yet?
I jumped in here >>16120972 You can see the quote chain I'm in as can any other anon. I'm not samefagging. More than one anon has a problem with your claims about the history of the board. You can see when the memes I mentioned were strongest from the archive and when they died off. You can't however, go back and make those only "possible" posts since most people like the idea that the past is rather immobile

[Anonymous No.16121143]

Holy fucking shit in the past one hour there have been 10 new threads that are just screenshots of tweets

Why are zoomers such awful posters?

[Anonymous No.16121184]

>>16121143
They legit don't understand books. They think they come on the same device as angry birds and Twitter do as a default app so they must be the same thing. It's why they confuse news outlets with books too. And their parents no longer lock them up in institutions for the irreparably retarded when they do, so overall standards have slipped

[Anonymous No.16121196]

>>16119885
>a slow board is a dead board
Only newfag dopamine addicts think this way

[Anonymous No.16121210]

>>16121138
>But you missed events that happened as regularly as school terms?
Go find me some shit in the archives if it bugs you so much, im looking through a 2014 thread on the KJV translation of the bible, a critique thread and a thread on moby dick. i haven't seen that term that i can recall in years.

>So you don't remember when this board was obsessed with s4s?
no, i was here for book recommendations and discussions. one of the things i liked about /lit/ was it's general insulation from this kind of thing. even if i remembered seeing it i would have ignored it. i didn't come to /lit/ to collect memes in my memory. post some funny shit if it bugs you so much.

>Are we really going to have to get into a fart sniffing discussion about potential alternate histories not logged by the archives so that you can maintain the fantasy that didn't happen regularly on this board as more than a possibility?

im not maintaining a fantasy you collossal faggot, im stating a plain fact that the board used to be better with more fruitful discussion more frequently. im not constructing any history of the board except this: it used to be better, and there is a reason why it tanked so badly.

you took five paragraphs to say, again, that the board has always been this bad.

[Anonymous No.16121219]

>>16121138
There’s literally no way anyone was ever browsing 4chan regularly without knowing what a newfag was. It’s not a tough term to dissemble

[Anonymous No.16121229]

>>16121210
It looks like you just wrote like 300 words all about how you selectively view things in the archives though. You’re not taking a balanced view at all.

[Anonymous No.16121241]

>>16121210
I've been here since 2012 or so and I definitely think the board has declined because of the increase in users since 2016, although it has also gotten better in certain ways because its culture has matured and become more self-conscious I think.

However it would have been possible to have that same maturation process without the influx of ADHD retard zoomers posting "Tony Hawk said on Youtube that Joe Rogan has AIDS, books for this feeling?"

[Anonymous No.16121242]

>>16119832
This is a literature board, not your political blog you fucking faggot.
>why they don’t just go to reddit
The people who think every single part of this site is dedicated to low iq left v right culture wars are all Redditor newfags who came here less than a decade ago, mostly less than 5 years ago.
Read the sticky retard:
> /lit/ is for the discussion of literature, specifically books (fiction & non-fiction), short stories, poetry, creative writing, etc. If you want to discuss history, religion, or the humanities, go to /his/. If you want to discuss politics, go to /pol/. Philosophical discussion can go on either /lit/ or /his/, but those discussions of philosophy that take place on /lit/ should be based around specific philosophical works to which posters can refer.
You don’t belong here, neither do the Marxists, is like you to have your own board because you should get to have your discussions, but those discussions don’t belong on /lit/.

[Anonymous No.16121261]

>>16118631
perhaps the real /lit/ was the frens we made along the way

[Anonymous No.16121268]

>>16121229
give me a balanced view then, i have what i observed, what i regularly read in the archives, screengrabs, etc. you've convincingly explained that there were some big memes i missed and not much else. im specifically here lamenting the ratio of shitposts to genuine discussion that has increased rapidly from what i and many other anons have observed. ive heard your take that it has always been this bad and don't agree. the archives as i and other anons see them tend to reflect a high quality of posting to the point where i don't particularly feel the need to even prove it. now im just bickering about what my original point was because the "discussion" gets dragged off into my unreliable memory, memes i missed, it being a matter of dilution not quality, and all these other tertiary things.

do you have a catalog screen grab or an example of a 300 post count off topic thread comparable to that kamala whoever eyesor from 2014 or anything like that? maybe that could spark some real discussion. as it stands you've effectively been saying "no the site has always been this way" with nothing else of substance from the get go. i understand what your position is, really.
what more do you want from me?

[Anonymous No.16121275]

>>16118631
When Jordan Peterson was less of a meme and his lectures had only just started to be posted on here. Things were better then and less politicized. A lot of good discussion and interesting threads back then. Not Bill Murray was posting back then too.

[Anonymous No.16121302]

>>16121210
>Go find me some shit in the archives if it bugs you so much, im looking through a 2014 thread on the KJV translation of the bible, a critique thread and a thread on moby dick. i haven't seen that term that i can recall in years.
Here is summerfag being used regularly for years since the age of the tripfags
>>/lit/?ghost=yes&task=search&search_text=Summerfag&offset=432
Which is much earlier than 2016 as you might notice and continued long past it. So no, I call utter fucking bullshit that it's a 2016 thing or died off at some point. You are lying through your teeth and didn't even bother to insulate your story from factchecking.
>no, i was here for book recommendations and discussions. one of the things i liked about /lit/ was it's general insulation from this kind of thing. even if i remembered seeing it i would have ignored it. i didn't come to /lit/ to collect memes in my memory. post some funny shit if it bugs you so much
This is implausible too. The tubs raid was so prolific that /lit/ had to post tubs to post about books. You could not discuss books without appeasing the raiders. It's like you don't remember what a raid even is. I am also highly suspicious o this because the age of tripfags lasted almost til the election you want to use as a cut off- if you had been here before then, it would be impossible to not know memes. Dave posting was an hourly thing on a board that otherwise kept its catalog up for weeks at a time. To have not seen major memes which dominated the board is basically impossible for the time line you are claiming.
>im not maintaining a fantasy you collossal faggot, im
Yes you are. You are demonstrably wrong about the history of the board and trying to gatekeep it based on this fantasy.
>>16121210
>you took five paragraphs to say, again, that the board has always been this bad.
I said no such thing. I pointed out regular memes that any user of the board pre 2016 would be very familiar with and you demonstrated zero familiarity, while trying to maintain a fantasy that summerfag is a newb tell. The fact you remember nothing about the memes on the board for the period you claim it was good places doubt on your reliability, not on whether the board was good or not. You trying to associate yourself with that time when you don't even have a surface level understanding of the board's tropes at that time if anything is more disparaging to the reputation of that time because it makes it seem like lying worms like you have some historical backing when they used get fucked up by archived posts back then too.
>five paragraphs
Are you seriously complaining about reading that much? Especially when you misplaced the point of my posts as "the board was always terrible" when the point of my posts is "you were not here for the period you are claiming as good".

[Anonymous No.16121329]

>>16121302
ill amend my statement about the memeterms to this:
newfag/summerfag is circa 2008 oldhat that i haven't seen in years until you/another anon (whoever it was) brought it up.

kek is definitely an election tourist tell as it's use as a slang/reference to some esoteric meme god was popularized on /pol/ in 2016.

the board used to be better than it is. i haven't changed my mind.

[Anonymous No.16121332]

>>16118651
Yeah, just two years ago it was sufficent to bump a thread every eight hours or so, not every two.

[Anonymous No.16121343]

>>16121332
You shouldn’t have to bump threads at all if there’s people that want to have discussions in them

[Anonymous No.16121346]

>>16121302
>you're not from the period you are claiming as good

oh if that's your only point then i don't care. i was a total infrequent casual from 2014-2017, ducked out for 2018-2019 and came back now under a self improvement binge after a stint with alcoholism and relationship trouble and became dismayed at the new state of the board. i literally do not care what you think about when i lurked. it's fine either way. if we're not talking about whether or not the quality of the board declined, i don't care. stay mad.

[Anonymous No.16121351]

I miss the old D&E and rapture’s bookshelf threads

[Anonymous No.16121369]

>>16121329
>newfag/summerfag is circa 2008 oldhat that i haven't seen in years until you/another anon (whoever it was) brought it up.
You can (or any anon that is interested) check the archives and see this isn't a reputable claim based in board culture. /lit/ never tired of it.
>>16121329
>kek is definitely an election tourist tell as it's use as a slang/reference to some esoteric meme god was popularized on /pol/ in 2016.
No. kek is a s4s meme. It was popularised in 2016, but the tell for whether someone came before the election or not is whether they believe it to be about frogs, like you the newwfag from 2016, or whether they believe it to be about cake, topkek hats, nice posting and other s4s memes that date from before the election co opted it. Your use of it as an election tell is evidence you learnt it from the election, when it was a meme long before (as was jej and see though those indicated different boards to s4s)

[Anonymous No.16121371]

>>16121241
>Tony Hawk said on Youtube that Joe Rogan has AIDS, books for this feeling?

[Anonymous No.16121375]

>>16121346
Oooh noooo! He’s too good to care about the board he’s been raging at 4 people over for an hour and a half! What are we gonna do bros!!!! He’s gonna improoove over all of us soon!

[Anonymous No.16121376]

I think /lit/ is great!

It's one big inside joke after the next.

You get gems like, "The leafing greens."

You can start a topic about literally anything as long as you mention a book about it, not even that most of the time.

It's like a smaller /b/ community, but tangentially related to shared info via words other people wrote. Or what you wrote.

/lit/ is best when anons post what they write themselves. Even if the writing isn't good. The point isn't being good. It's to add to the canon, something raw.

[Anonymous No.16121377]

>>16121346
>I came when the board started worrying about an influx of terrible people who couldn't keep a history straight or lurk for long enough to tell what memes are
I have no doubt.

[Anonymous No.16121383]

>>16121369
>jej and see
wew lad ofc

[Anonymous No.16121398]

>>16121375
no i still care about the board, i don't care about the status of my /lit/ lurker pedigree, which if you'd have asked me from the start i would have admitted is poor. i never formally studied english, i never contributed to the board and i was only mildly well read by entry level standards. the "secretly pynchon esoteric hints" threads or whatever went over my head until i was redirected to them in a nostalgia thread a couple months back. i openly don't know about the memes you're talking about.

what i was arguing in the thread was that the board has definitely gone downhill and people who argue otherwise are doing so in bad faith. i responded to the post that used "kek" under that MO.

you're also still using shitty memes (seriously the coomer variants are largely shit) and i still think you're an election tourist. umad.

[Anonymous No.16121407]

>>16121377
i never claimed i wasn't a relative newfag. like i said several times my MO has been that claiming the board has always been shitty is nonsense. even if i was in the wave that killed it, i caught enough of a glimpse of it to know otherwise.

i also came to 4chan in general in 2008, the year of the eternal newfag, so you're not telling me anything i didn't already accept about myself.

[Anonymous No.16121414]

>>16121398
>assuming every anon is the same anon
I'm not >>16121375 but I am >>16121302 You're treating this place like anon is a private account with one person behind it. Your name field should clear up why that isn't likely to be the case. lrn2 4chan, you are posting too much and too stupidly.

[Anonymous No.16121423]

>>16121414
in fairness you jumped into a ten post long back and forth.

[Anonymous No.16121424]

>>16118631
>make thread about how shit this board is and how no one talks about actual books or other bullshit
>130 replies
>make thread about an actual book
>2 replies
>>16120362
/lit/ is NOT for the discussion of books, it's for posting memes related to books. In reality most of /lit/ has only read 10 books that have a thread/day on here like Lolita, C&P, TBK, etc.

[Anonymous No.16121429]

>>16121424
Thx for the links
I’ll bring the soijacks lmao

[Anonymous No.16121432]

>>16121407
>i never claimed i wasn't a relative newfag
You claimed other fags were new because they don't have your Reddit influx newb view of kek. Kek was going years before the election, and your understanding of it comes from after the election memes. The fact you think that anons who are using it in the oldest sense, and not in the kekkistani newfag sense you know, are new is a sign you should not be posting because you have not lurked enough. You are hurting things by adding to the pointless post count that spews out illformed and poorly read nonsense. You are defeating your stated purpose.

[Anonymous No.16121445]

>>16121423
I didn't jump in a ten post long back and forth. I'm the one who was doing the back and forth with you from >>16120972
I'm telling you the anon you were talking to like he was in that back and forth is just jumping in. FFS learn to use a quote chain and stop assuming anon is all one person. Or please just stop posting until you know how to use the fucking website, because this is like day one shit.

[Anonymous No.16121453]

>>16121432
the state of a meta thread doesn't have much to do with what i was talking about. my longterm view is that /lit/ is effectively done as a useful resource. needing a meta thread at all is generally a really bad sign. kek has an older meaning than the election, true, but by common use i attach it to that. smileys were commonplace enough based on 2004-5 caps but their unironic use now would raise eyebrows.

>>16121445
i haven't really been using the quote chain after juggling roughly five seperate anon's replies. ive gotten screen groggy which is my bad. i know how to use 4chan well enough though, ive been in this dumpster fire for a dozen years.

[Anonymous No.16121479]

>>16121453
>the state of a meta thread doesn't have much to do with what i was talking about
Tell yourself the reasons this is retarded because you need to think of them. You cannot operate basic functions of the website and want to lead the return to a period you had no part in starting, while also seeing a word which is basically never used on this site outside /pol/ as purely /pol/ which to anyone concerned is going to tell them your view was shaped by Reddit more than this website. You are very blind to the harm you could control, which is you, while seeing harm in words that most anons who aren't even oldfags will have lurked long enough to understand as a "lol" in its traditional and most common use. Pleading common use of the word to be kekistanis just tells other people you hang out with Reddit and /pol/ and never lurked.

[Anonymous No.16121495]

>>16119832
Unrefutable

[Anonymous No.16121528]

2016 precipitated a change in the fabric of 4chan as a whole, and I'm sure /lit/ took a hit back then, but it wasn't from actors in bad faith. What you are noticing now began shortly after the coronavirus lockdown with a huge increase in posting from people who are evidently not here to discuss literature. It's a targeted attack on this board in particular with the aim of degrading the level of discussion here by any means possible. The main technique involves making lots and lots of shitty threads that are only superficially related to literature, and when they are ostensibly /lit/ related, they are trying to push the Overton window of '/lit/ opinion' trying to manipulate board culture e.g. booktubers, 'why does /lit/ hate X?' etc. This is control over the topic of discussion, so that even when real conversation comes about, it's not on real topics. There are quite literally almost no good faith posters left on this board, unfortunately, but the upshot is that it's easy to recognize their posts and easier to recognize their threads.

[Anonymous No.16121552]

>>16121528
What do you think of the role of jannies in all this?

[Anonymous No.16121553]

You can whine about /pol/ but where else can they go to talk to people who don't already agree with them? You can't even talk to people on Youtube anymore because so many comments get shadowbanned.

[Anonymous No.16121577]

>>16121528
I dont think anybody except leftypol cares to target this board. Its shitposters from /tv/ having fun
t. From /tv/

[Anonymous No.16121581]

>>16121552
Alfred Janny

[Anonymous No.16121586]

>>16121528
I see what you’re saying but I think you’re wrong in thinking its some kind of concentrated effort.
Basically, /tv/ was the new /b/ for a few years and in the last 6 months it, for whatever reason, took a total nosedive and the catalogue is all about social media stars or is other completely incoherent. You can’t even have off-topic discussions there anymore because janny does delete shit pretty regularly but everything comes and goes in like an hour.
So all these posters who never cared about movies and tv all that much either are looking for a new place to start discussions that eventually turn to life in general and the trappings of inceldom and Neetdom.
That’s what’s gonna kill the board, a deluge of vaguely lit related posts that are really just pop-culture.

[Anonymous No.16121657]

You're definitely right about the /tv/ posters, now that I think about it, but that can be explained as a board exodus caused by the very same bad-faith influx. That angle only covers the sneed-esque shitposting, which is in part a reference to this exodus, and not truly in bad faith because it's all they know. You can't deny the concentrated effort because it is clearly concentrated and the techniques of manipulation are self-evident. There is another strata of people posting and arguing truly in bad faith.

[Anonymous No.16121684]

>>16118631
>golden years of /lit/

[Anonymous No.16121690]

>still no link to effortposts
Opinion discarded.

[Anonymous No.16121795]

>>16118631
board has always been shit to be honest

[Anonymous No.16121816]

>>16121057
You still can do it faggot. Peopke will laugh at you but nothing else stops you.

[Anonymous No.16121859]

>>16119766
it's true. /lit/ accelerated, almost drowned in shitty spam, and has far too many tourists. but honestly, even though 2014 was a relatively good year for /lit/, I would not return. I would not change it for 2020. times they are a-changing. and it's so much more crazy shit going on, it's hilarious. I won't forget sharing this year with the few veteran /lit/izens left.

[Anonymous No.16121868]

>>16118631
I've been on and off this board since the beginning and what killed it is the changing of culture of 4chan. Back in the days from 2010-2013 or so (I would say the second age of 4chan), each board really had their own personality and culture. Most posters would stick to a few boards and each was unique and had their own sense of identity. A poster would personally identify as belonging to /lit/ or /sp/ or /mu/ et cetera, and all the boards were better off for it. /lit/ and /mu/ cared more about being patrician, /tv/ (although having much better discourse back in the day) was more about popular films and television, /sp/-- and in my mind, the /sp/ identity (e.g. /sp/ always finds a way) is the most perfect descriptor of this time, and the killing of /sp/ culture in 2013 was an interesting sign of what was to come--was all about bro culture, /fit/ was gay. Of course posters would move across boards, but even memes were marked by ownership of the board they originated from. Board culture was a mark of pride. I can even recall posters from other boards would come to /lit/ and ask us what our memes were and post their own memes in response as some sort of autistic cultural exchange, and I also recall /lit/ having a sort of rivalry with /mu/. The end came when the identity of posters stopped being that they belonged to a board, but rather the fact hat they posted on 4chan. This change directly correlates to the events of 2014 (not 2016 as many suggest, but the two are related). The site became the casualty of a culture war that was occurring across the internet that manifested in 2014. It was flooded by redditors who were pushed off reddit by reddit's retarded admins who saw 4chan as a symbol of their resistance to these cultural upheavals. These redditors also didn't really understand the dynamics of this place besides that you go to /v/ to fight SJW's and later /pol/ to fight liberals. With these newcomers, the board cultures slowly died off until what had been vibrant (albeit retarded) communities became a dull grey mess. moot fucked off basically around this time (I can't blame him), and in 2016, the exact same thing happened again because of the election. 4chan became the symbol of one side of the culture war and was flooded with hordes of new users who didn't care about any culture besides being a retard. That was four years ago, and now you can go to any board on 4chan and you will see the exact same images, meet the exact same posters, and have the exact same conversations.
All the boards died together, but I think of /lit/ in particular as being lost because I rather enjoyed the community that was here. Of course, this place has always been a bit retarded, but I recall when coming here felt like you were coming to your lit club after classes to talk shit and hang out, a place that you were a part of, rather than an annoying sideshow you visit to look at from the outside for reasons you don't even understand anymore.

[Anonymous No.16121902]

>>16121868
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggPLZQl9lRs
>Pepperidge Farm remembers.jpg
I shed a little tear at the end, chronicle anon.

[Anonymous No.16121924]

>>16121868
>>16121902
Haha gaybois

[Anonymous No.16121926]

>>16118631
The best years were the first five. The average thread and average reply had more effort behind it, and there were older posters here contributing to discussions. No one really gave a fuck about social media yet either, so there were no Twitter screencap threads.

[Anonymous No.16121957]

Ban frogposters, ban animesfags, ban twitter posts, ban religion threads based on memes, ban spanish posters, ban indian posters. That's it

[Anonymous No.16122007]

>>16119430
Great! Now retards straight from Ben Shapiro videos are finding their way onto here.

[Anonymous No.16122015]

>>16121552
Not him but
They aren’t enforcing the sticky and it‘s what has allowed the board to deteriorate, every other board has over-zealous moderation, /lit/ has almost no moderation at all.
>>16121577
Please go back, I want to be able to discuss literature here again. Can’t you get your dopamine hit somewhere else? You’ll kill this board too and at least /tv/ shitposters watch television and movies, the shitposters here don’t just care less about literature than shitposting, they only care about shitposting because they’re too addled with adhd to read

[Anonymous No.16122022]

>>16121868
damn man, I even miss the retarded parts from those times. I remember Quentin used to be a retard here, D&E, the original actual 30 year old lesbian butters, calling each other plebs, huge orson welles

[Anonymous No.16122047]

>>16121479
nah i started on /b/ in 08, moved to /co/ then /mu/, the later dabbled in /lit/, /fit/ & /out/. ive been on reddit exactly one time to find directions to local trail in my area that wasn't on google maps. i can operate the site fine, my filter list is absurdly autistic.

i don't want to "lead" anything. this isn't a fantasy novel. i specifically was calling out anons who claim that /lit/ was as bad 2014-15 as it is now. i haven't lurked a lot on /lit/, but then lurking here from 2016 onward doesn't actually inform you about this specific board's history as, again, half the board is currently off topic garbage.

[Anonymous No.16122103]

>>16122015
Not him but you definitely don’t understand the wasteland that /tv/ is compared to even how it looked in January.
I know everyone has their own timeline for when any particular board turns the corner into shit; but in the last 4 months it’s become totally unbrowsable.
I’ve always used /lit/ and /fit/ too but I used to be able to kill whole work days on /tv/ because it was so much more populated. Now I never go there

[Anonymous No.16122138]

>>16122103
/tv/ back in the day (like 2015 and before) was magical, it was fun in a way that I've really rarely ever seen from something on the internet, it was retarded, but it was fun and now it's just bitterness

[Anonymous No.16122164]

>>16122138
And pre-2015 that board was /b/
It became /tv/ when /b/ was ruined and now it will be something else. Maybe /lit/ but maybe not idk

[Anonymous No.16122214]

I've always had the opinion of just ignore the obvious bait threads and post in/make good ones.

[Anonymous No.16122277]

>>16120903
It's a known fact that /leftypol/ unironically has people in /his/ constantly posting low effort threads. It annoys nearly everyone

[Anonymous No.16122400]

>>16118631
>>16120892
>>16120124
>>16120747
>>16121110
>>16121268
>>16121926
/lit/ in 2012-2014 has been more comfy than after 2016 for sure. But please show me the ominousfrquent 'high quality' threads from the 'golden age'. I found them to be pretty rare.
I have always asked the nostalgics to give me proofs but they haven't come up with links to warosu.

>>16119766
>Zizek was barely talked about at all
He was for a much slower board back then rather often talked about, check it for yourself on warosu. Set the youngest threads to 31st of July 2014 and see it for yourself.
Same goes for the others, Guenon wasn't unheard of.
>But the political spammers are not here for literature, they're here for politics
My impression is that they are mainly interested in the answers or the 'intellect' of the /lit/
posters, see >>16121376.
>What we had were constant talks about Pynchon, Wallace, and others - back in the day when the average reader had actually read those books.
The average reader hasn't read the meme triology anon back then. Furthermore at some point people are getting bored of the same topics. What do you miss about these threads? I'm glad people have moved on. Do you really wish to talk about these authors forver? Especially since books discussions aren't really the strong site of /lit/. Most of 4chan especially this board is for postdiscussion: memes, more memes, recommendations (which are usually good) and seeing how non-normies think about several topics. And in that latter part maybe seeking confirmation for one's own non-mainstream opinions.

>>16119809
>It was also much slower. To the degree it became faster, it also became worse.
Correct, thread rarely survive more than 3 days. I think that slower baords attract different people or at least they write different posts, since weak bait doesn't work that much and a community is not giving instant attention unlike a fast board.

[Anonymous No.16122438]

A lot of the goodposters are just leaving, recently an acquaintance of mine on discord quit visiting this board (and site completely)
>Inb4 you're here forever
Sadly he also quit discord, to focus on writing and reading more, I should do the same honestly.
It's nice having a few friends to share my poetry with, talk about books with too, but this place is just a timesink with nothing valuable to provide.
See you tomorrow, but hopefully not next week

[Anonymous No.16122506]

>>16122400
The political spammers aren’t up to what you think they are. Any increase in shitposting is really just because /tv/ collapsed and dispersed a bunch of migrants. They shitpost about off topic stuff because they’re interested in random conversation. It’s not like a concentrated effort by the alt-right to subvert a board or anything.
I know recommending boards is pointless but if there were a blue-board for /b/, sort of a sfw-random it would solve multiple issues on this site

[Anonymous No.16122521]

>>16118631
/lit/ is a reddit philosophy gamer board now.

[Anonymous No.16122529]

>>16122506
>because /tv/ collapsed
in what way?

[Anonymous No.16122608]

>>16122529
Like half the threads are about podcasts and youtubers, which Jannie doesn’t consider off topic and I think reddit might have actually banned a couple podcasts subreddits recently so you can probably figure out what happened there.
Unlike /lit/ though, /tv/ actually does have very active jannies. So all the off topic shit gets cleaned up really quick and it’s no longer much of an off-topic hangout the way it used to be.
It’s just social media star discussions and epic troll threads mocking the jannies, that’s pretty much the whole board.

[Anonymous No.16122699]

>>16122529
I Am Jazz discontinued

[Anonymous No.16122704]

>>16122015
>, /lit/ has almost no moderation at all
This was what made /lit/ great. It didn't need a nanny because the userbase was all interested in bullying people over books. The answer is not in moderation, since mods don't read, the answer is in the userbase.

[Anonymous No.16122718]

>>16122047
>I would like to help /lit/ culture become /pol/ culture of 2016. Or else /b/ during the eternal summer
Are you the faggot who wanted to claim kek was racist and that /lit/ never hated n00bs? If yes, you are two generations of cancer.

[Anonymous No.16122719]

Yes
>smaller userbase
>more intelligent and much better read
>actually about literature

>no masses of people from other platforms spamming their trite politicising and dogshit unrelated memes (this is also where eceleb and coomer threads come from)
end result is quality as low as the socialmedia platforms they obsessively frequent every hour of the day.

[Anonymous No.16122728]

>>16122400
>But please show me the ominousfrquent 'high quality' threads from the 'golden age'. I found them to be pretty rare.
After having posted that I was wondering whether I was mistaken by saying that it wasn't better in the past in other threads (>>16122400 was my first post in this thread btw) but I'am looking at the thread older than July 2013 that has War & Peace (one of my favourite novels) as a discussion and they are mostly shit.
>When does it get good
>Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?/ W&P or Anna Karenina
>Best translation?
> I just finished it, similiar books?
I mean that doesn't prevent the threads from having good posts and an interesting discussion but they are all so shallow.

>>16122529
>>16122608
Popular left-wing and right-wing subreddits got banned in June/July and these people came here + people being stuck at home due to Corona.

>>16122506
>if there were a blue-board for /b/, sort of a sfw-random it would solve multiple issues on this site
Probably, but I agree with this guy >>16122704
It depends on the users. They should start using the archives before asking the same mundane question every week.

[Anonymous No.16122741]

>>16122718
how did you get that i want /lit/, one of the best boards, to be like /pol/ in any way? or for that matter /b/? i just found /b/ first when i was 16 like many of the 08ers. not even excusing it, i've already admitted 08 is the year of the eternal newfag. kek wasn't racist either, just given it's current status by /pol/, despite it's innocuous origins.

i don't know why you would intentionally misread me this hard, but im assuming you're fucking with me at this point.

[Anonymous No.16122749]

Any board you're on you get tired of. It's not really /lit, it's your own gigantic brain always needing new pussy.

[Anonymous No.16122772]

For context, I am mainly a lurker, newish to /lit/ (2018), became my go-to board when I rediscovered a love for reading/writing that year.
Found 4chan through death grips and /mu/ in 2014. I was also doing sports in college so I split my time between them and /fit/.
Both those boards are dead now. /fit/ advice is useful for your first year of lifting, then you stay for the community which has degraded into off-topic whining/thot-posting from a majority that don’t lift.
/mu/ was killed by twitter, Fantano, Reddit. In the past you could get serious recommendations from poster, but the majority now listen to alt-popular artists like Tyler the Creator and think it’s the pinnacle of music.
From my short experience, /lit/ is going the same way. Since COVID it hasn’t been a slow board. The majority don’t read, and the amount of off-topic discussion is appalling. Thot posts, twitter screen caps and generals are all signs of a dying board, and I think I’ve osmosed enough literary recs and knowledge to leave /lit/ and 4chan, been cutting down on my time here over the last few weeks. I still read some great literature and philosophical discussions from knowledgeable anons but those conversation are getting suffocated under pure shit. Just look at the catalog.
I’d suggest you also leave. The end of lurking and increased normie traffic has destroyed most boards beyond repair

[Anonymous No.16122788]

>>16122741
lol you are the anon someone had to backtrack to realizing kek just means lel or jej. jej.
people aren't misreading you, they're taking what you claim your history and knowledge of 4chan is and using it to prove you aren't good at assessing the culture. you're providing proof to everyone that you learn shit from the culture that killed good /lit/.
you are double cancer, and if you weren't a spoiled dumb cancer who is oblivious to critique you would know why your arrival coincides with the death of more than one board. you are the cancer.

[Anonymous No.16122843]

>>16122788
kek=lel isn't hidden arcane knowledge, /pol/ just spammed their incarnation of it so far and wide that you had msm pundits talking about it, so i'd say it's more famous attribution is to /pol/. i got here for the beginning of the end, sure, but my only point is that it is measurably worse now. i don't understand the stick you have up your ass.

are you an 04-06er? ive talked with them before and they rarely use post 2010 lingo casually, and they generally aren't as big an asshole as you. that puts you in the same arrival time at this site as me, just more hours logged on /lit/. either way, you have no critique, just "2014 user bad" which ive already copped to. i never posted pre 2016 anyway, purely lurked so there's not much on the line for me.

[Anonymous No.16122908]

>>16122843
OMFG you're even bumping the thread.
>Noooooooo really /pol/ gets to own kek
lel, looks like the cancer is having a bout of retardation where it backtracks from being right after anon backtracked it from being retarded.
>are you an 04-06er? ive talked with them before and they rarely use post 2010 lingo casually, and they generally aren't as big an asshole as you
anon was right about you living in a fantasy world. i'm not going to ask you about your 4chan oldfag friends who you just made up but i'm sure you're gonna bump the thread to tell me anyways.
OP if you want your answer to why it's like this, >>16122843 this anon. there are more like him who think spoonfeeding and straying from canon are what builds nice threads because their idea of a nice thread is basically if their facebook was more active. but ofc their facebook isn't as active as they like, because everyone hates cancer. this nigger can't even work out that by bumping off topic he's drowning book threads which are few and far between. ya i know dftt and i'm sure he'll respond but i'm gonna read a book so you fucks have to deal with his metastatic cancerous self

[Anonymous No.16122971]

>>16122908
what book are you reading?

[Anonymous No.16123000]

>>16118631
Been coming here off and on since the beginning. My favorite years were 2013-2014. It got markedly worse during the last presidential race and never really recovered. Since then we've had the alt-right version of virtue signaling, which is proving how based and redpilled you are and reflexively dismissing any view that could be construed as liberal or left-leaning.

[Anonymous No.16123044]

/lit/ once ran a girl off YouTube because they’re pathetic.

[Anonymous No.16123193]

>>16123044
yes we know /co/

[Anonymous No.16123213]

>>16123044
Rowdiness has its downsides but it produces the content you come here to leech when your normie friends bore you once a week

[Anonymous No.16123248]

>>16118631
See you tomorrow buckaroo

[Anonymous No.16123985]

>>16121039

>>16119766
>is 100% correct

I would argue we had fewer relgionfags justifying their feelings as well. Religion is what it is, it's the proselytizing cope that's the problem. Key point anon missed, IMHO.

[Anonymous No.16124011]

>>16119444
>>16119472
>>16122007
I've been here almost as long as you have been alive.
This will astonish you, but you're actually the cancer killing /lit/
All of these self-important, pompous effort posts are the problem with the board.
Writing walls of 888 without any insight or humor.

[Anonymous No.16124172]

>>16118631
Share the good warosus then

[Anonymous No.16124192]

>>16124172
There are none dude, you would have seen them screencapped by now like >>16123044 is on here every other day

[Anonymous No.16124193]

>>16119779
>Butterfly janny
For real?

[Anonymous No.16124230]

>>16119847
>https://www.strawpoll.me/20763904
Isn't that the point of /pol/ already?

[Anonymous No.16124312]

>>16119263
this

[Anonymous No.16124573]

I think I know what the problem is.
I live in another part of the world, so when I wake up in the morning the Americans are still awake and posting. When I look at /lit/ in the evening, the Americans are all asleep. I don't think I need to explain the difference in quality between the two.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.16124790]

>>16118631
Tripfriends. Everywhere you looked.

4chan was like a school. Classrooms with various subjects, /b/ the bathroom where the bad kids hung out. /lit/ was like the library. Nice and slow. It’s not slow now.
Then management gave up on /news/ and it became /pol/. Not a place for politics, just asshole immigrants from stormfront. They started seeping in, demanding a variety of rightwing book charts, which anons gave.
Meh. Tired of talking about it. It’s never going back and you people wont listen to me.

[Anonymous No.16124883]

any recommendations on where we can go (besides the archives)?

[Anonymous No.16125076]

>>16124011
did you seriously just call a post that doesn't even have a second line an effort post

[Anonymous No.16125185]

>>16124790
You are literally the last person to be talking butterdyke. You are one of the worst posters in this board. Every thread you are in either devolves into a shitpostfest or was already one, not to mention how you are a dumb 40 year old attention seeking whore who didn't get love from her father, so you try to get it from 20 something men on the Internet. Even Guenonfag manages to be a better poster than you. Fuck off.

>>16124883
Unironically just make an 8kun board related to literature.

[Anonymous No.16125199]

>>16118631
I'm a newfag on this board (since 2018ish). This board has some pretty stellar suggestions if you for dig it. I've basically stopped watching TV and replaced it with reading thanks to you guys. Read some Dostoevsky, Plato, Aristotle and history of Rome. All worth it. I'll post occasionally but I try not to shit up the board too much. We're not all bad.

>but I'll still post boobies and there is nothing you can do about it.

[Anonymous No.16125212]

>>16125199
Wrong picture

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!oI3er5KKetj No.16125255]

>>16125185
“Last person”? I’ve been here for most of its history.
>attention seeking
Just stfu, cultist.

>>16124193
No. Never been. If I moderated the place, you’d notice.

>>16121957
Was with you till the last two. They can stay as long as it’s on topic.

[Anonymous No.16125290]

>>16119766
I admit there is some spam about Marx, but it's fuelled by users and rabid alt-right. So the janitors, in order to increase the activity of the board, only have to make a few daily post with a picture of Marx, and there will be hundreds of posts.
That said, Marx is literrature. And economics as well. Where are we supposed to talk about subject like the labor theory of value or alienation, if not here? /Biz has low tolerance on those subjects, and again, Marx is, whether you like it or not, one of the most important thinker of all time.
Technical economic discussions are way harder than discussing heroic fantasy and various novels. We don't do this because we want to spam, but because it is pretty important, in this Zeitgeist.
For me, fiction is useless. I read my lot of fiction, but i understood that, in order to understand the world, you have to read philosophy, economics and spirituality.
Differentiating between fiction and non fiction could be taken into consideration, but /lit is not such a high activity board, so you'll end up fragmenting the activity.

[Anonymous No.16125305]

>>16125290
/his/ is technically the board to talk about someone like Marx I think. Not that I care really. Also /lit/ is too fast, not so much in terms of posts but in terms of threads made, 4 hours for a thread to die in peak times is way too fast.

[Anonymous No.16125311]

>>16118643
>If On a Winter's Night a Nigger

[Anonymous No.16125347]

>>16118631
The thing that has brought board quality down is low effort philosophy and religion shitposting and depressed teens making reading philosophy into an aesthetic. Basically /fa/.

[Anonymous No.16125425]

>>16125199
You needed a literature board to tell you about Dostoevsky?

[Anonymous No.16125810]

He rapes his sister, Phoebe.