The only positive thing I got out of that place was some great albums from /mu/, but even there the toxicity was so incredibly rampant. I wouldn’t shed a tear to see the whole site nuked.
/b/ took a big shit in summer 2007 and hasn’t been anywhere near as good since then, and it wasn’t even good before then. The rest of the site, especially the smaller SFW boards, has decent content if you know where to look. /po/ is one of the best places online for papercrafting and origami, for example
I first discovered /b/ in '09 so I can’t attest to anything prior, but it always met my expectations of what a free as in freedom social space would be like. It won’t be the idealistic pretty picture most people wish it was. It will be a mirror reflection of life and humanity. The good the bad the ugly no more no less. Don’t like what you see in the mirror? Take it up with the big man upstairs I guess.
I liked their tabletop RPG forum, there were fun posts there. Even /b/ had its moments: I remember one thread where everybody had superpowers and my guy turned everybody into a park bench. Another guy could heat up hotdogs with his hands. At the end of the story pretty much everyone somehow got turned into a park bench. Can’t remember the specifics now, I was kinda drunk.
/b/‘s downfall basically toxified the rest of the other boards over time. /fit/ for example is a shadow of the pre zyzz days. Although I can’t say I miss brapp posting. I do miss the avg Korean gf posting though
Acting like a tool was pretty well an inevitable when you have a platform that doesn’t even have a username much less any kind of account attached to anything. People are bad enough behind a screen on Facebook and such, strip away any form of tie to real life accountability and you end up with 4chan. Kind of a fascinating place in that unchained chaos way though.