I will never understand how people voluntarily spend time wading through that sewer of a site only to find that single speck of gold that turns up once a month
Minecraft blew up when Survival mode finally came out. The TF2 team also blogged a glowing review of it out on the official TF2 blog, which probably helped since TF2 was one of the most popular games at the time. That's how I heard about survival mode in the first place. Before that, Minecraft was basically a proof of concept with fuck all to actually do.
4chan and 4channel are two completely different things. /b and obviously /Pol are fucked beyond repair but /t is alright for finding some (mostly porn) torrents. If we're talking about 4channel, then /x/ is hilarious and free entertainment and /o/ can have some good car discussion from time to time.