You misunderstand my point. Kind, considerate, thoughtful and well intentioned people can be found anywhere online. Bringing them up as an example of the unique nature and power of 4chan's community is disingenuous. 4chan is unique in its tolerance for hate speech, but with any other kind of speech, it's no more or less free than elsewhere.
As someone who only frequent one of the tamer niche interest board where there are seldom trolls posting slur/gore/porn, my view may be biased, but I would argue that the anonymity that allowed hate speech also enables people to be more candid in their posts and therefore leading to a sense of community.
As long as I don't put anything personally identifiable in each post, the chances of them being linked together to point back to my real identity is miniscule, so I can share stuff I would normally want to keep private.
I have bonded over deeply personal trauma with anons that I will never knowingly meet again but also know they are out there on the same board as me. I've commiserated over health concerns that I wouldn't share on social media in fear of seeming unprofessional nor with friends to avoid making them worry.
Hell, I made a throwaway just to post this since I don't want people to look at my profile and go "that guy is a 4chan user" since that could be an issue professionally, yet nothing I said here is a hate speech. That's an example of how anonymity allows for more honest speech in ways most sites elsewhere don't offer.
I personally disagree with the parent but you are misrepresenting their argument. The person you are responding to is referring to the thesis of the article which is 'as a community grows and strangers saturate the regular encounters, so declines the ability of that community to exist in a meaningful way'. They are using 4chan as an example of this thesis in action since the community of 4chan has a self-imposed growth limit due to the nature of its culture (most people couldn't handle it).
I beg to differ. There are genuine, profound, even Socratic conversations which freely happen on various threads that essentially can not occur elsewhere on the clearnet. No idea is invalid, no topic taboo, and each thread and each post must stand alone on their own merit. This is all on top of a large number of deep and wide recurring hobby generals that are both beginner friendly and highly technical.
It is more free than any website you can think of off the top of your head.
You're right that 4chan has a high level of tolerance for hatespeech, but that's a secondary, derived characteristic from the anonymity and free speech absolutism. There's a level of humanity enabled by that that you don't see elsewhere.
