Quoted By:
Lurk more. If you don't want to lurk you can just stay on /pol/ and /b/ with the rest of the newfags. Despite being anonymous it is very easy for posters on this site (sans /b/ and /pol/) to spot outsiders from the way they type and the opinions they hold. On many of the topic-driven blue boards (/a/, /co/, /v/ etc) outsiders are not respected and their opinions are held in very low esteem. If you give away that you're new to the site nobody will take you seriously, at best they will simply ignore you, at worst they'll troll you relentlessly with misinformation or shock value content depending on the board you're on.
One thing you have to realize as a newfag, and in all likelihood a young person who grew up in the age of social media, is that 4chan is a product of the early web 2.0, where people did not explicitly trust information on the internet. You are going to have to learn skepticism very fast to survive here, because spreading misinformation to troll unwary newfags is one of 4chan's oldest and most cherished traditions. This might seem harmless, but it's not, in some cases it has hospitalized people or otherwise done actual harm to them because they naively believed what was written here. I have seen people destroy their own property, injure themselves, and even go to jail because they believed what somebody wrote on this site as a prank. I will tell you right now: you are not smart or observant enough to tell all the misinfo from genuine info, so do not try. Assume everything is a troll as a base line level of trust and you will fare much better. It takes a long time of lurking and seeing how these pranks work before you can spot them and the associated behavior reliably.
TL;DR version:
Lurk moar
/pol/ and /b/ are for newfags, don't copy their bad behavior
Don't believe anything you read here
