Ah yes, another tourist.

4chan exists outside of /pol/, and the rest of the site actively resents it. Doxxes and raids are bannable offenses, and people that openly call for those activities are banned. Yes. Banned. That wasn't the case years ago. /b/ was also neutered multiple times to curb the harassment it generated. If you want, you can easily go on /pol/ and make dipshit posts about chuds and cumtown, and they will deride you for it, but they can't ban you. The problem stems from moderation, and with /pol/ now being the most active board it's gotten increasingly harder to moderate. If you actually bothered to go beyond /pol/, you'd see the open hostility that their usebase generates. But you probably only follow /pol/ because it enrages whatever semi-isolated comfortable community you came from.

>And it's also wrong that 4chan is a paragon of free speech. It used to be, but as the userbase started harboring more and more fascists, and as more and more of them became janitors, they started censoring leftist posters unless they refrained from, well, anything that makes a Chan a Chan.

Hardly. You are more than welcome to chat with the janitors and moderators on IRC, except they will probably ban you for trying to remove /pol/ because they get complaints like yours every single day, and most often than not its people triggered by fucking australians and canadians roleplaying as nazis interspaced between a few genuine fascists. Once again, having a thin skin on 4chan will give you a bad time, and it sounds like you had a bad time.

And 4chan has always been a toxic cesspool to outsiders. This has not changed. The counter-culture has shifted against liberalism, and that's probably an ideal you're not comfortable with. And yes, that includes literal nazi symbolism and fascism. Because this is the internet, and jokes and memes don't have limits and safe-spaces. And everything is part of the larger merchant driven jewish conspiracy, because once again, it is 4chan, and it's not 4chan's fault that almost every New York Times or Washington Post opinion editorial writer has a jewish sounding last name. :)

>It's not even that creative either. The main mascot of /pol/ was stolen from some random webcomic, the wojak came from Krautchan, and so on. It's just slight memes from someone else's art and a few puns. It's not a main creative force of the internet, far from it.

This is how I know you are actually a tourist. I'll list a few things that originated and got popular on 4chan which spread to the rest of the internet:

Advice Animals, Rage Comics, Pedobear, Xzibit's Yo Dawg, Rickrolling, Rules of the Internet, Exploitables, Copypasta and Creepypasta, LOLcats, R9k and its euphoric inceldom, Literally ANY reaction face, Redpill ideology, An Hero, TrollGuy. Of course Pepe and Wojack and their innumerable incantations (which you refuse to acknowledge got popular on the internet because of 4chan). Various creators were also regular 4chan posters, including Rebecca Sugar, Dan Harmon, Deadmau5, Markus Presson (who released alpha and beta versions of Minecraft on /v/ before the rest of the world even knew what Minecraft was)...and probably a lot of more who wish to remain anonymous.

>That poster is someone who was carried down the rabbit hole and can't realize just how extreme and wrong their opinions are, who can't realize what their values became, trying to convince themselves their worldview and website isn't as insane as it is.

Hardly. You make me out to be some sort of far right fascist extremist white supremacist, as if I'm easily manipulated and everything on 4chan is taken at face value. Yours are the kinds of opinions of people who are afraid to delve below the superficial externality of their lives. 4chan pokes fun at you, and it pokes fun at itself, because people are far more complex than the consumerist labelism of targeted advertising which strives to extract wealth from them, and that's at the apex of our current cultural revolution.