>>4120
>most chans have a few pillars with some remoras
Yeah. It's an interesting/sad dichotomy, because as much as we'd all like to believe we're above the same types of behaviour as the unwashed masses, we still want people to actually talk to. 8chan's ignominious death left a lot of niche boards too splintered to continue, like /toy/ or /kemono/. The best case for these communities is to form general threads on larger boards like /tg/ or /animu/, which is a decent solution but far from perfect. Far less visible, in any case.
>Regarding how we would get others to visit here, I think it's retarded to "target youths."
I think the premise of targeting groups as though we were an organization with a recruitment campaign is an incorrect way to approach the issue. When the internet was younger, image boards didn't become popular by advertising themselves - people just heard about them because of the hijinks they got up to, like crashing that Second Life news interview or closing the pool in Habbo Hotel. That spirit of innocent, shitposting fun has been mostly extinguished on the wider internet, and information doesn't travel the same way it used to.
>srs bsns boards
The formality with which users behave depends on the subject matter. There are a lot of people on /v/ who just wanna play games, and their discussion or analysis of various titles reflects that. To play a game, you simply plug and play (not counting older or newer games with lots of bugs, config issues, etc.) so to discuss it, you just put down what you think and move on after getting a few replies. There are obviously exceptions to this, where people will write long-winded posts about particular games or mechanics, but they are exceptions. /v/'s eternal inability to resist bait doesn't help either, since threads can easily be derailed by dedicated shitstirrers especially if the mods don't do their jobs, which they haven't been for more than a week now.
But if you look at /tg/, a lot of the posts are more mature and thoughtful, and even their shitposts still have a lot of effort and craft in them. I believe that is due to tabletop games requiring some investment on the part of the GM and players, which attracts people who are naturally more inclined to put work into anything they do.
>new blood without newfags
The eternal dilemma. You may be exaggerating the degree to which new people are hated, though; someone asked who ROB was in the /v/ QTDDTOTT and he got a few explanations without being flamed for 1) not knowing, and 2) daring to ask about the identity of an e-celeb. Provided that the hypothetical new blood don't act like faggots ("cope seethe chud lmao cringe dilate") who just blew in from Twitter or cuckchan, I don't think anyone really cares. We'd probably be happy to have a greater variety of people to talk to.
The corollary to all this is that a sudden rise in popularity damages a site's culture and userbase, as famously happened 15 years ago in 2007 when the anonymous hacker known as 4chan was featured on MSM and the site was overrun with underageb& faggots. Paradoxically, I actually think there's less risk of that happening now: most subhuman phoneposters and social media wireheads are addicted to the instant, continuous flow of dopamine they get from uploading a pepe gif to a bluecheck tweet. You simply can't do that on a website like this, partially because there is no such thing as a bluecheck and partially because the slower posting rate means the cycle of narcissism that supports social media takes too long to occur. This is part of the reason cuckchan continues to be popular despite being indistinguishable from social media and bots in many ways: it has just enough anonymity to fool its users into thinking they're "not like those faggots on twitter" despite acting the exact same way with different words.
>how to get new users who aren't faggots and who actually stick around
Productive board pursuits, as ever, are the best way. If you build it, they will come. We don't need to be like cuckchan, which has boards that can produce MS Paint soyjak templates for every nobody who gets famous for 15 minutes but can't hold a conversation about the board's topic. Instead we should strive to make our own (metaphorical) brand of good stuff, which will naturally attract people who can recognize the superior quality and integrity necessary to produce such works.
The sleepy station project is probably the best thing zzz/v/ has collectively done, and it seems to have gained enough steam to continue despite Eden and crab bucket faggots attempting to detail it. This is also why I'm dedicated to finishing the Libbie VN, and why I have some more distant plans for a game with zzz-tan/zoey. Just having insightful conversations isn't enough: we need to produce some kind of beauty that will outlast any individual thread.
>>4121
>I've been lurking for two years
I think you're good to make some posts, dude.
>webm
Fucking Christ, I didn't need that today. Poor bird.
>>4133
>My opinion is that threads should try to be genuine firstly, because, like my friend here says, "There is a mix of gatekeeping and guidance."
Earnestness is hard to come by these days. Social media and the commodification of simple human experiences like talking about things and enjoying media has made everyone calcified into ironic detachment. The alternative - to create, to expose oneself, to genuinely believe something and be vulnerable - is absolutely unthinkable for most people. It's a sad state of affairs.