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but some people seem to find it useful.Honestly, it filled a very specific hole for me that I found nowhere else. Everyone is talking about the “unfiltered content” and all those things but to me it was mostly just topical. It was really one of the few places where one could get a good discussion on the internet about Japanese female-oriented entertainment which I'm well aware isn't the first thing people think about with 4chan but pretty much every other forum about Japanese entertainment is completely dominated by male-oriented entertainment, except when they go out of their way to specifically make a board catered to female-oriented entertainment, but that has the side effect that people on those boards end up talking more about gender politics than about the entertainment itself and I just want to talk about my favorite television shows and comic books and really don't care about all the politics.
4chan by it's nature doesn't drown out minority tastes and voices. This really isn't just a “female-oriented entertainment” thing but really any minority taste that just gets drowned out on most boards to the point that it disappears. The only other place I know where one can do this is Tumblr, more or less, but it's a very different experience, not necessarily better or worse but there just isn't this kind of “live discussion” atmosphere and vibe going on on Tumblr about episodes that are currently airing where people post small comments as the episode is airing and they're watching it. It's more for long impressions after it was aired and it doesn't have the same degree of interaction, it's a blogging place, not a message board.
As said, it isn't just that but “obscure taste” in general. You can make a thread on 4chan about some really obscure piece of fiction that no one knows and get a discussion going, half with the people that do it know, in part because it's an imageboard so they're drawn in to an image they recognize and it stands out, and half with people that never heard of it before, see the images in the thread, see it looks interesting and try it out. The images are the key I feel, it lowers the barrier of entry for people to try out something obscure because they see the images which lures them in. It was one of the best places to get a discussion going about some obscure piece of fiction which Tumblr doesn't do either, the only things that are being discussed are the really big titles. There are so many relatively obscure titles I enjoy I will possibly never get to discuss with anyone in my life again if 4chan not come back. I know many of those titles from 4chan because people constantly promote and share fairly obscure things there and the images again sell it.