I heard about 4chan from my older brother back in I think 2006, but he warned me not to go there because of stuff like gore posting, cheese pizza, and the incredibly dangerous papyrus virus, so I never touched the place. Then in 2011, I started watching MLP:FiM and was balls deep into ponyfaggotry for a few years. I was a lurker on Derpibooru's forums, and was following their GamerGate thread since it began, because I hated the idea of outside influencers being willfully ignorant and clumsily fucking with my hobbies. Then in 2015, when Law & Order: SVU did their GamerGate episode, I visited Redchannit, had a good laugh at all the fresh memes, and started browsing the rest of 8chan.
Every forum I'd been on since 2005 had been either too rule-faggy to the point of stagnation, or too small to the point of starvation. I found more freedom, humor, and like-minded individuals on 8chan than I had on any forum in years. All my old hangouts felt like nothing but a step backwards, especially with how little I held in common with them anymore. After lurking /v/ and /co/ for a while, I started browsing /pol/ and learned all about globalhomo fucking with everything. I got really excited whenever it seemed like they were onto something, like the shemitah jew-pocalypse in 2015 and meme magic in 2016. Of course it never actually went anywhere, and /pol/ never recovered that momentum, but it was fun while it lasted.
Nowadays I'm not very political, because anyone with the power to enact any meaningful change from either side/in any direction is quite comfortable where they are, and most will only side with something to grift it to death. I've still got opinions and ideals, but the most I can do is tell my sister's kids not to fall for the tranny meme my nephew is golden, but I'm worried about my slightly autistic niece, and eventually get into making videogames of my own. You can only unfuck so much by hand right now.