I personally used it daily for years. There was more to the site than neo-nazi threads on /pol/. Anime, manga, kpop, and vtuber threads were some of the most popular and they were all highly moderated.

I enjoyed the lack of username/post history meaning no worshipping prolific posters or doxxing people by going through their history to find a post where they talked about their work.

No upvotes or ranking system meant good and bad posts weren’t labeled. You figured that out yourself without other people (or an algorithm) telling you how to feel about it.

Frequent thread deletion meant the site was constantly a snapshot in time. It’s like going to a bar. You’re not going to know the conversations people had in that bar yesterday. It might not even be the same crowd as yesterday. The vibe is created by the people there at that time and it’s constantly changing.

The site had barely changed how it functioned in 20 years. It was honestly one of the last bastions of the old internet before everything became about “engagement” metrics.