4chan has fallen

>What even is the appeal of 4chan?

anon posting , mostly. Sure you'll see a lot of bait and trolls, especially these days. But you'll also see people being truly authentic, which I find refreshing, since no one feels the need to self-censor in order to appeal to the crowd. Someone disagreeing with the consensus of the rest of the users in a thread has as much visibility as anyone else, unlike other social media platforms where you only see opinions that the majority agree with (which leads to fragmented echo chambers).

The main downside of this is that 4chan sucks at filtering low quality content. If you're scrolling through reddit for example and a post from /r/jokes pops up on your feed, it probably has a very high upvote to downvote ratio. Therefore you're statistically speaking likely to find it funny as well. Whereas on 4chan you're far more likely to see low-quality content or bait threads that generate a lot of replies.

so imo 4chan is better for discussion and having your views challenged, whereas other social media is better for "content".

It's very appealing when you can troll those idiots and collect (you)s.

Everywhere else feels fake since you can get banned for the slightest thing, I've been banned several times from reddit and twitter for jokingly telling people to kill themselves, even here I got a warning for making an slightly offensive joke about trans people. There's a lot of garbage on 4chan, but you can use filters, and pin your favorite generals to the top with 4chanX, so it's not as bad. Also it's nice to be able to post from any device without worrying about having to make an account.