I experienced 4chan at the tail end of the unmoderated era. Pedobear was a lot more than that. A good deal of the actual meme posts had openly sadist and rapist tendencies, but the vast majority of pedobear images I encountered were just the bear to advertise a thread of csam, the bear to shorthand calling someone a pedo, or the bear to shorthand pedophilic thoughts about someone else's post. On a rare occasion, there would be csam with pedobear images for censorship to advertise a seperate website. It's no wonder the darker parts could be missed or have been scrubbed from the internet.

As much as I relish the golden glow of the frontier internet, we can't let that glow hide the rot that was truely there.