Terribleness is in the eye of the beholder. I would posit that 4chan's post quality is actually extremely high. People there don't complain afaik.
If you were to transfer the posts to the hep-th mailing list or something, it'd be very bad content, and vice-versa. As it stands, I imagine when people go to 4chan they tend to get exactly what they want.
I would also guess that the average 'smartness' level is a lot higher than you might think.
Whenever I've visited /prog on 4chan I'll see posts with some intelligent content then about 10 replies saying "your a fag" or something then maybe a couple of other genuinely witty replies and a few intelligent ones.
There are also entire threads started on seemingly legit topics that devolve into flamewars almost immediately plus a huge number of people who seem to just spam some meme everywhere regardless or relevance.
I'm quite surprised that the intelligent people there put up with all the other crap. I suppose it's possible there are a lot of intelligent people with the emotional maturity of a 10 year old.
>I suppose it's possible there are a lot of intelligent people with the emotional maturity of a 10 year old.
It's not necessarily a maturity thing. When I visit 4chan it's usually for a cheap laugh, not to engage in serious discussion. The Internet's big enough for all flavors of discussion, and 4chan fills its niche. It need not be considered childish for doing so. I can enjoy a rational foreign policy debate and also cackle maniacally while running down grannies in GTA. Neither exclusively defines my maturity level.
A few years ago, I used to browse /prog/ during down time in work. After a while you learn to block out all the crap posts and trolling and you realize there's actually a tiny tiny bit of top quality content. For example, I first heard about the Factor programming language there. Nowadays I don't have the patience to sift through 99.9% crap just to read something intelligent.
If you were to transfer the posts to the hep-th mailing list or something, it'd be very bad content, and vice-versa. As it stands, I imagine when people go to 4chan they tend to get exactly what they want.
I would also guess that the average 'smartness' level is a lot higher than you might think.