4chan has gone steadily downhill since 2007 when it went mainstream thanks to Project Chanology. "General" threads, autistic janitors, and the culture of people who label things as being shitposting / "reddit spacing" are partially to blame

Also the mods nuking world4ch and even tinychan are partially to blame for removing serious discussion threads on the site. A lot of the problems they try to solve with "general threads" / heavy janitoring / etc etc were solved with the presence of alternative boards that were specially designed for sharing text over sharing images and videos

ITT bitch about neo4chan