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Imageboards were founded upon, and worked well because of, a few very important tenants:
1) Totally free and unrestricted discussion. Talk about politics, talk about philosophy, talk about raping kids, or just shitpost; everything is fine. Use whatever language you want; nothing is disallowed, not slurs, not insults, not profanity, not hate speech, not political beliefs you disagree with.
2) The only judgement is in the court of public opinion. There ARE NO MODERATORS policing content. If people don't like something, they can argue against it; and if it becomes clear that the poster won't listen or is trolling, the GUIDING RULE is "hide and move on".
3) Boards are user-created and any and all subdivisions are allowed so discussion can have its own space. If someone wants to get away from the chaos that is a general board, they can make their own specific board. If someone wants to fragment away from an existing board and make a smaller board, they can do so. If someone wants to make a board for literally nothing but him and his three buddies discussing the theological implications of Mongolian Midget Scat Porn, THAT'S ALLOWED. This results in "containment" by its very nature.
The issue first came with policing illegal content as it appeared randomly. Retards like to think that if you don't immediately step on CP and ban the person who posted it, that the entire board will become flooded with it. But this ignores the power of Anonymous and the Court of Public Opinion. As it turns out, the vast majority of people don't like CP, so won't support it. If everyone just ignored it, hid the posts, and moved on, there would be no problem. It's just another type of trollpost or shitpost. But if you get into an uproar, delete it, and hand out ineffective bans, you're only giving attention to the script-kiddy that posted it, which makes the behavior continue. There aren't even going to be sub-boards of people sharing it, because as it turns out, imageboards aren't very efficient for file sharing, and they don't do that on the clearnet anyway.
All that happened is you started to create people who were given power, and then naturally they started to abuse that power. First they delete illegal content, then they delete borderline-illegal content, then they start moralizing about content that isn't remotely illegal but implies it (cartoon porn, animal porn, goreposting); and by the end they think they have a duty to just get rid of anything they think is bad, which conveniently lines up with their own personal beliefs.
In the "best" case, this will result in a userbase that are subservient bootlickers, who cow to mods and hope to get into their favor. In the WORST case (what happened to 8chan), the userbase starts believing that the mods are always right, and starts bending their own opinion to match whatever the mods believe, even if the mods are literal crusading fascists. This is how THE ENTIRE THING became a circlejerk of sheep, rather than it being contained on a few boards. It doesn't matter if a few boards are populated with mouth-frothing anti-semites who worship nazis and capitalism and hate democrats, liberals, communists, gays, blacks, women, and the color pink. It only became an issue when they took over the entire place (violating rule 3), started policing content to only conform to what they liked (violating rule 2) via politically-motivated bans, censoring, and word filters (violating rule 1).
An imageboard is supposed to be like a pure democracy. No politicians, no journalists, no celebrity opinions, no mass-media. Nobody is in charge, and nobody has more power than anyone else, even referred power. What we ended up with was a corrupt republic of "representatives" who started to believe their individual opinions had some kind of superior merit and who make all the decisions, and a population that got so brainwashed that they started to believe that those representatives were always right.
The curtain started to fall when the first ban was handed out.
(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)
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